First before I say anything else about this blog, please do not post a comment from a Fermilab email account (or other national lab account) on this blog. If you are working at a national lab, and would like to leave a comment, go to hotmail.com (or some such place) and get a free e-mail account that maintains your anonymity. The lab has fired women for using lab computing resources to do things a lot more innocuous than posting comments on a blog like this one. Thus I would suggest that you do not use a Fermilab computer even if you are just reading this blog (ie; not posting comments). If you think the lab doesn't notice this blog, think again.
On to why I blog...
I find myself spending more and more time in the past year adding comments to the blogs of others, and it too often seems like my nuggets of wisdom probably belong in my own blog for all to share. So today I started my own blog.
I choose to blog mostly because I am a female academic currently suing my former employers. Three years have passed and the lawsuit still slowly crawls its way through the courts. I've noticed that precious little first hand information is available on the web from people who have sued their former employers (probably because they are too exhausted once it is all over to do anything else other than nurse their nervous breakdown).
Thus, as a potential service to all other female academics out there, I will be writing a series of posts on what it is like to go through the lawsuit process, tips for finding a lawyer, etc, etc, etc. Stay tuned. More than anything else, I mean for this blog to become a tool that empowers female academics with the knowledge and tools to effectively fight against discrimination in their workplace.
Editorial note 07/19/06: Radio Userland has a utility that allows me to see where the hits to this site are coming from, and I've noted that around 50% or so come from people using Google to try to find information about various topics in discrimination law. I hope those of you who found this site that way find some useful information here (it is why I developed the site, after all). If you didn't find what you were looking for, and you think more needs to be added to this site, please send me a mail by clicking on the little envelope icon in the left hand navigation bar.
In addition to the above topics, I will probably provide a potpourri of posts on more mundane topics, like what is going on in my day-to-day life. I'll no doubt occassionally post pictures of, for instance, my knitting projects (see below for a stunningly accurate portrait of Absinthe knitting), and other similar things.
A word about the knitting; just because I knit does not make me any less of an intellectual academic (you'd be surprised the comments I get...I mean really...people see me with my needles and from their attitudes it's obvious they have just knocked 50 points off of their assessment of my IQ). I have knit since the age of four, and I swear that knitting is probably one of the few things that has kept me sane the past three years. If you are stressed out, perhaps knitting is for you.
Stay tuned.
And special thanks to Debra Rolison for the byline to this blog.
And extra special thanks to Suzanne Franks, of Thus Spake Zuska fame, who is one of my biggest inspirations. As I get older I seem to get more and more outspoken. Zuska showed me through the many posts on her blog that it is OK to be angry and outspoken in a public setting, especially if you mix it with humor.
