Women in Science

Photo: Irina Matusevich

How have you managed to combine your family and professional life since 1990, when you had a small daughter and you and your husband (Jan Šmarda) took the opportunity to go to the USA? Your husband had a job at the State University of New York; did you also get to do scientific work in the laboratory?

I went to the U.S. with the idea that I would spend my parental leave there and stay at home, just as if I were at home here. But as it happens, I ended up working. At my interview for Paula Enrietto’s laboratory, I was completely open with my future boss and told her I had a two-year-old daughter. She also had a child of about five, so she understood me completely. She also had positive experience with “people from the East”, as she called it, which proved to be very useful. She gave me confidence, encouragement and understanding, both personally and professionally. I told her honestly what I could and could not do. She said if I had the knowledge, I would learn the techniques in the laboratory and in three months I would be back teaching new people. And that’s exactly what happened. The focus of my work led me to study the eukaryotic cell and its cancerous transformation, a topic that I continue to work on.

How did you manage taking care of your child and working in the laboratory?

It was a tremendous challenge. My husband worked from day-to-day, which was impossible for me. I had a precisely set time for work, between bringing and picking up my daughter from kindergarten. My daughter was two years and three months old when she started kindergarten, which was perfect. Though I gave more or less everything I earned to the kindergarten, my daughter was very happy there, and that was the main thing for me.

Did you ever have doubts about whether you could do it?

Sometimes, I felt inferior in the laboratory because I saw everyone else spending more time there than I did. When my work ‘failed’, I talked to my supervisor about it and offer to leave my job so she could choose someone who would spend more time there. But she explained to me that in contrast to me, she could see me from the outside and that she saw that I was organised and hard-working, and just as good as the others. I realised that it was probably true. Every time I left work, I had cleaned up my bench, labelled the test tubes, and prepared everything for the next day with the protocols written, so that, when I arrived in the morning, I had everything ready to go. I could immediately work at a fast pace, and I did not waste any time. During my experiments, I was already planning the next day. It was then that I began to realise that it was possible to get a lot of work done even in a limited time.

When we left Czechoslovakia, the possibilities to work were quite limited, including laboratory equipment. When we came to the U.S., it was as if we entered another world; we were ‘blown away’ by the opportunities, it was so easy to work hard because we were intoxicated by the work. In the Czech Republic, everything has developed very quickly, and now we have facilities that are completely comparable to those abroad.

Currently, there is a lot of talk about the need to successfully combine a career with family life. How do you personally perceive this topic?

For me, combining a family and professional life is a big issue, but I’m not sure I’m a good example of how to do it. Family and children have always been a priority for me, and I have never prioritised work over them. On the other hand, for many years I was plagued by the feeling that I was not fulfilling my potential. For years, I depressed myself, dreaming of ever greater professional challenges; but, even though I didn’t have children to care for or a family to raise, I never followed through.

It was at a conference, where a ‘Women in Science’ section was announced by organizers, and I rushed there because I was really interested. There was a long discussion about the supply and quality of nurseries for very young children so that parents could drop their children off and go to work, but I didn’t see it that way. I want it to be understood that part of my life, time and energy stays with the family, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be talented, capable, and focused during the rest of my time. I felt that the grants for female scientists should by be adapted to the fact that their work-progress might be slower due to motherhood and parental responsibilities. Or how about the “young investigator” grant category, which is designed for young scientists under the age of 35. Why this category couldn’t be available also to older women or parents in general, who have to care for young children for several years?

What do you think needs to be changed in this area, especially in relation to women in science?

I’m not sure the situation in the U.S. can be considered as a victory, where it is common for women to have a babysitter for the baby from six weeks, work full time, and only run away from work to pump milk. Yet, they boast that they are now professionally equal to men and no longer disadvantaged in the labour market. I think things will start to straighten out when we as a society give enough weight and value to children and their upbringing, family and relationships; and that will be important for everyone, women and men. It also has to do with the fast pace of work and the idea that, you either work around the clock in science or you shouldn’t be in science. This fast pace of work not only crushes women, but often crushes men as well. If we don’t change this, no one will have a satisfying life, until we have a sense of appreciation for women who take good care of children. Society needs to recognise that a well-behaved child means work and that those who take care of people in need deserve recognition. Nowadays, we tend to forget this and idolise performance and achievement instead.

How do you perceive the position of women in science? Do you see any progress in the faculty in recent years?

I see a lot of very successful and very capable women here, and that’s great, especially when I compare it to the situation in the end the late 1980s. I remember an interview in my first year at the Institute of Microbiology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science where my boss put me down, and discouraged me from postgraduate studies. He told me to show him at least one truly successful woman at the Institute. I think it was a difficult time, and there weren’t even many truly successful men at the Institute at that time. But there were smart and successful women there too, just nobody called them that way. We have come, a long way and today no one doubts that women can be successful.

You can read the entire interview here.

prof. RNDr. Jana Šmardová, CSc.
Professor, Section of Genetics and Molecular Biology
Department of Experimental Biology