Valerie Jarrett serves as a senior adviser to President Obama and chairs the White House Council on Women and Girls. Tina Tchen is executive director of that council and chief of staff to the first lady. Their 26 September Washington Post op-ed (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/helping-women-reach-their-economic-potential/2011/09/25/gIQA1dODxK_story.html) says that “the Obama administration is taking steps to create economic opportunities for women and girls” through new policies at the National Science Foundation “to make it easier for women to pursue careers in engineering and the sciences.”
Here’s the key passage:
[I]f a researcher needs to delay the start of a funded project for a family-related reason, such as taking care of a young child or an aging parent, the NSF will work with her to make that possible without causing her to lose her grant. If she needs to interrupt research to have a baby, there will be options to add the lost time onto the end of her funding period without penalty. In many cases, NSF will even pay for technicians who can keep labs and research projects running during a period of parental leave.
The op-ed goes on to argue as well that workplace flexibility policies boost the nation’s economic competitiveness. It cites a coalition that includes the Association for Women in Science, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Association of American Universities.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in 'Science and the media.' He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
