Zatera Ul

About once a month, there’s a free pizza lunch at the University for female graduate students in engineering and science. They bring in women that work in academia and industry to speak about their experiences as professional women. Basically, the program is to encourage us (the students) to go for those kinds of careers. Being the University, there’s a strong liberal undercurrent to it; one of the lunches last year was spent digging on poor Larry Summers. It’s implied that having one or two kids is ok, as long as you stick them into day care, or leave them at home with your stay-at-home husband. I made a request once for a speaker that had taken time out from her career to raise children, but no luck so far.

Last time, the speaker was a retired 3M executive. A bit different from the usual speaker–much older, for one thing. She told us that women who complained a lot about sexual harassment seemed to be “porcupines” that no one wanted to work with, and that she hadn’t really had any problems with sexism holding her back. The crowd seemed a little taken aback at that, but I thought she was great.

Anyway, there was one of these lunches today, and I was planning to go, but then I had an attack of morning sickness, and pizza just didn’t sound good. I had a grilled cheese sandwich and cottage cheese instead. Cottage cheese is my new favorite food–I didn’t realize that I was craving it until I saw it in the store.