Even Difficult for Nobel Prize Winners

In a speech in Stockholm, Elizabeth Blackburn said that scientific institutions could have more flexible work arrangements that would allow more women to gain leadership roles, reports the Wall Street Journal Health Blog. "The career structure is very much a career structure that has worked for men," she says. "But many women, at the stage when they have done their training really want to think about family ... and they just are very daunted by the career structure. Not by the science, in which they are doing really well." The Health Blog also posts an excerpt from a 2008 Journal of Cell Biology in which Blackburn describes a postdoc who was able to work from 8 to 4 and be quite productive and successful. "To me, it was like, 'Oh, there is another way to do science and be very successful. It doesn't have to be this non-family-oriented model,'" she says.