We recently had a fence installed at our house. The company arrived at 7:30 a.m. and worked until 5:30 p.m. But they were unable to finish the job, so they had to come back late on a Friday night to finish up. It was the only other time they had available.

My husband and I are both busy scientists, one tenured and one not, with two small children. Yet, one of the fence installers commented on how lucky we are to have a schedule flexible enough to be at home at a certain time to meet up with workers, to take children to appointments, or to do whatever it is we need to do. He was right.

In my 10 or so years in a science career, I have heard and participated in many discussions about the difficulties scientists face in pursuing careers while raising families???difficulties that, regrettably, lead many talented women to leave the profession. I have heard talented young women state, as though it were an incontestable fact, that children and science do not mix, so women must choose one or the other or delay having families until their careers are established.

Tracy Ainsworth

No wonder talented women are seeking futures elsewhere; We're scaring them away before they have a chance to try science for themselves.

Yes, serious problems remain. At many institutions, the science career track is stuck in the past, bogged down in old-fashioned dogma about sacrifice and suffering even as the scientific establishment fails to hold up its end of the old bargain: There are only a handful of those old-fashioned careers around anymore, far too few to employ everyone who earns a science Ph.D.

I know some of the horror stories are true, but they paint an incomplete picture. Too few stories mention the advantages that science careers offer families, including:

??? Flexible working hours. The hours are long, but we can be at home, the doctor, or daycare when we need to.

??? Travel. We get to choose how much or how little we travel, where to go, and when to take our families along. My daughter has accompanied me on field research and conference trips. In her 3 short years, she has seen beautiful places, enjoyed zoos, and terrorized museums. She bats her eyelids while explaining photosynthesis and is passionate about seagulls not eating baby turtles. That's not a bad start to life, and it's because of my career that I have been able to offer her such experiences, with more to come.

??? Great people. This career is full of passionate, amazing, excited, talented, driven, and???importantly???happy people. They are easy to find and eager to be a part of our communities. My life and work are greatly enriched by working with them, and so are my children's lives.

We need to tell women who are considering science careers about the women who are already succeeding in them while raising families, carving out careers on their own terms. Here in Australia, that group includes Rebecca Tolentino of James Cook University, Townsville, an award-winning Ph.D. student and mother of five. It also includes Jenny Beck of the University of Wollongong, a chemistry professor who leads her field despite a 7-year career hiatus for rearing children. It includes Tanya Monro of the University of Adelaide, a multitalented research institute director and mother of twins. In terms of science, Australia isn't such a large place, yet I have been lucky to meet many inspiring, successful female scientists who are leading the way for other women. There are many more such women in Australia, and more still beyond this country's borders.

Furthermore, here in Australia???and elsewhere???things are changing for the better. Here are some local examples:

??? Research fellowships provide maternity leave for 6 months at full pay (12 months at half pay) and a 6-month, full-pay extension to the fellowship end date.

??? Postdoctoral positions/fellowships can be taken at half- or three-quarter-time and extended to cover the same amount of working time (and total compensation) as a standard 3-year full-time position. Importantly, these are evaluated as standard 3-year fellowships even if they last longer.

??? When accounting for a researcher's track record, funding agencies subtract 1 year from the number of post-Ph.D. years for each child a researcher has under school age to account for the impact of parenthood on productivity.

??? Reentry and research-support fellowships are available to women returning to science after career breaks.

??? Professional development courses provide training in leadership and research management and raise awareness of issues related to career retention.

I was often told that there is no best time for a scientist to have kids. In raising two young children, I have found that the inverse is also true: There is no worst time, either. Women who are set to enter the field need to see us trying and succeeding so that they, too, will seriously consider choosing a career that can enrich their lives and allow them to make a difference in ways that few other careers allow. It isn't easy, but neither is working a 60-hour week building fences.

In Person Guidelines

Your essay should be about 800 words long and personal in tone. Please send us your submission as an editable text document attachment in an e-mail addressed to snweditor@aaas.org (Subject: In Person submission); Microsoft Word format is preferred, but OpenOffice format is acceptable. Please do NOT include photographs or other attachments with the original submission.

We will give each manuscript we receive careful consideration and contact you within 6 weeks if we decide to publish your essay. Most essays will be edited prior to publication. If you do not hear from us in 6 weeks, feel free to submit your work elsewhere.

In the spring of 2009, Anat Shahar, a geochemist, had just finished interviewing for tenure track jobs and was weighing two offers. Evgenya Shkolnik and Hannah Jang-Condell, both astronomers, were bracing for a competitive application and interview process in a tight economy. Alexandra Surcel, a cell biologist, was in the early part of her postdoc, applying for fellowships and developing her research while strategizing on how to secure two academic positions in one city, one for her and one her husband. All four of us were striving to succeed in our workplace while remaining active and engaged in our lives at home with young children. The effort to achieve a balance between work and home was difficult, and, in the absence of a cohort, isolating.

We were not looking for new friends. What we lacked were fellow-scientist moms with career ambitions such as our own.

And so we formed the first GPS group. GPS stands for "Goals and Problem-Solving for Scientists." At the time, we did not know how much we all needed such a group or how much we would benefit. We modeled our group and structured our meetings after a women???s group described in Ellen Daniell???s book, Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists.

We met every other week for 2 years. We discussed imposter syndrome and unearthed myriad ways it was negatively affecting our work. We identified ways to improve our scientific productivity and implemented strategies for effective goal setting. We learned how to navigate job interviews, negotiations, and the two-body problem of having a spouse in academia. We drafted plans for how to approach professional bias, discriminatory or condescending comments from colleagues, and maternity leave issues. There was no end to the professional topics we covered and the strategies we cultivated and implemented.

GPS changed our lives:

From left: Alexandra Surcel, Anat Shahar, Hannah Jang-Condell, and Evgenya Shkolnik.

??? Three of us are now in tenure-track academic positions in our fields of choice. One is preparing to go on the job market using the tools developed in our group.

??? Three of us have had second or third children while continuing to progress our research.

??? All of us have learned to routinely apply the problem-solving skills we acquired in the group to our personal and professional relationships.

??? GPS has pushed all of us to apply for fellowships, jobs, and conferences that we might not have been motivated or confident enough to apply for in the past.

Everyone has seen the numbers: Women leave the academic pipeline at much higher rates than men do. The numbers are just as discouraging for other underrepresented minority (URM) groups. This is unfortunate, since data show that diversity among STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) researchers means a better scientific labor force. The problem isn't just pipeline leakage: Women who stay on the academic track often report workplace bias and feelings of isolation, coupled with low expectations about their performance, leading to low opinions of their own scientific ability.

Mentoring has been held up as an effective solution for the leaky pipeline in STEM fields. Traditional mentoring relationships are valuable, but they are one-directional. Peer-mentorships offer a more complete alternative in that each person both gives and receives critical advice, serving as mentor and prot??g?? simultaneously. Staking out a position and being able to contribute positively to a peer's goal-setting and problem-solving skills builds confidence, expands experience, and diminishes self-doubt.

The outcome has been so positive that we felt compelled to share and expand our peer-mentorship model. As Hannah once said, ???GPS came through for me at the time when my career prospects were the bleakest. At one point, I seriously considered leaving academia and even went so far as to apply and interview for a non-academic job. The group forced me to question why I was thinking about leaving academia in the first place. In the end, I gave academia one more try, and because I had thought long and hard about non-academic paths, I approached the search with a lot more confidence and a lot less desperation than before. I know this played a large role in landing my current tenure-track job.???

Convinced? Start your own group.

While a GPS group can be beneficial to anyone at any career stage, it is likely to be most valuable in early and transitional career stages. That's when the largest drops in URM representation in STEM fields occur.

Here are some guidelines for starting your own GPS group:

1. Member selection. The ideal group, we found, has four to six people at similar career stages who coalesce around similar goals and challenges. We were all early-career female scientists with children, facing sexism, harassment, and/or work-life balance pressures. Picking friends from within your department might seem like an easy choice, but we found that it is best to choose people from other fields. This limits competition among members who may be applying for the same fellowships, grants, and jobs -- a problem we struggled with, since two group members and a spouse were astronomers on the job market at the same time.

Sometimes all it takes is making an initial contact. Evgenya contacted Hannah and then approached Anat. Hannah suggested Alexandra. If you cannot find enough like-minded people to set up a group, organize a large, informal get-together with people across disciplines and career stages. Such meetings, which we have held at our homes with 20 to 40 attendees, also serve as excellent networking opportunities.

2. A commitment to meet often. We met every other week and treated GPS meetings as a top priority, showing up even on the eve of proposal deadlines and job interviews, sometimes with newborns in tow. We found that frequent meetings -- and a real commitment -- engendered a feeling of mutual respect among the members and ensured the group's viability. Several times, one of us felt too busy to go to a meeting. But we quickly learned that our meetings ultimately liberated more time than they consumed. And even when they didn't, we decided, they were too valuable to miss. There will be meetings when someone in your group doesn???t have an issue to discuss. She should attend anyway, in order to fulfill her mentorship responsibilities to the other group members.

3. A commitment to confidentiality. This creates an open and comfortable environment where group members can ask questions, show weaknesses, test ideas, and be critical. It???s valuable to have a place to discuss research ideas without the fear of being scooped, or express self-doubt without being judged. We found we were more comfortable expressing (and then combatting) doubt among our peers than among more traditional mentors.

4. Restricted times. We kept each meeting to about 2 hours. Meetings started with 30-second ???check-ins??? during which we stated our points for discussion and requested time. The "check-in" set the agenda for the meeting. When Hannah needed to decide whether to attend another conference, weighing the pros and cons took 10 minutes. But we spent nearly an hour getting Evgenya ready for a faculty job interview, going over potential interview questions and critiquing her job talk.

5. Choosing topics. GPS meetings are not venting sessions. Valuable time should be spent seeking active resolution to professional problems. In the 2 years we met, each of us experienced a dry spell, when experiments weren???t working or writing was slow and it was difficult to get motivated. When the issue came up in a second meeting, we called each other out: It was time to stop venting and develop a strategy to get out of the slump.

6. Honest feedback. The ability of members to both give and receive honest, exacting feedback is critical. The hardest but most rewarding part of GPS was pinpointing personal challenges and then having the support of a close-knit group to work through them.

Our GPS group was one of the most important commitments we???ve ever made. No matter what happened in our lives, we knew there was a dedicated time when three other female scientists would focus 110% on our concerns. We left each conversation with a slate of solutions to put into practice in the coming weeks. In a world driven by competition and plagued by overt and unconscious biases, that was HUGE.

As word of mouth spreads, new GPS chapters are sprouting around the globe. If you???d like to find out more information, or reach other people interested in forming a group, visit GPSGroups.com.

In Person Guidelines

Your essay should be about 800 words long and personal in tone. Please send us your submission as an editable text document attachment in an e-mail message, addressed to snweditor@aaas.org (Subject: In Person submission); Microsoft Word format is preferred, but OpenOffice format is acceptable. Please do NOT include photographs or other attachments with the original submission.

We will give each manuscript we receive careful consideration and contact you within 6 weeks if we decide to publish your essay. Most essays will be edited prior to publication. If you do not hear from us in 6 weeks, feel free to submit your work elsewhere.

As a child growing up in the city of Cotonou in Benin, West Africa, Aude Alapini-Odunlade ???used to look at the night sky all the time??? from her bedroom window, she recalls. She says she was fascinated by ???the vastness of the universe, the flickering lights from the stars, the silver shine of the moon, and the exotic nature of space,???. When she was 10, she asked for a science encyclopedia for Christmas so she could learn about astronomy. By 11, she had decided to become an astronaut.

When, a year later, she learned that her eyesight wasn't good enough to become a space shuttle pilot, she decided to pursue astrophysics. A love of science outreach, and personal circumstances, caused her to shift gears again, leading Alapini-Odunlade, 28, to go into teacher training.

Learning astronomy

A ???great??? physics teacher at Alapini-Odunlade???s French private school in Cotonou, who ran after-school astronomy clubs, consolidated this early passion. Alapini-Odunlade received the highest grade in her year for her baccalaur??at, in 2001, and obtained funding from the French government???s Bourses Excellence-Major program to study physics and chemistry at the Universit?? Paris-Sud 11.

In 2004, she started a master???s degree program in physics at Paris-Sud. She spent her first year at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom via the European Union???s ERASMUS educational exchange program. Learning new science and integrating fully with her fellow students in a new language was tough at first, she says, but ???I knew that as a scientist, English was very important.???

Giving back to her country

Back in France for her second year, Alapini-Odunlade specialized in astronomy and astrophysics, taking courses at the Observatoire de Paris. One of her professors, Didier Pelat, suggested she return to Benin to observe the March 2006 solar eclipse; Benin was one of the sites where the eclipse would be total.

The trip became a pilgrimage: All 16 students in her master???s degree course, five lecturers, and four support staff members spent a week in Benin. The Observatoire de Paris covered most of the expenses and Alapini-Odunlade and her family assisted with the logistics.

Along with their telescopes, the group packed donated science textbooks and several hundred pairs of special glasses for viewing the solar eclipse. ???We realized we were going to attract a lot of attention from the local community, and wanted to provide them with the tools to observe [the eclipse] safely,??? Alapini-Odunlade says. Alongside her fellow students, she visited local schools to discuss the eclipse. ???It was the first time I???d had the responsibility of having to be scientifically correct, and making it clear when I was guessing rather than saying actual facts. It was really good skills to learn.???

Alapini-Odunlade and the Observatoire de Paris maintained contact with the schools they visited in Benin, as well as with the local authorities. They returned in March 2007 for a total lunar eclipse, and again in April 2009 for the International Year of Astronomy. On each visit, they gave astronomy talks and ran telescope observation sessions at schools and cultural centers. ???You have so much impact when you go to remote places where they???ve never talked about such science before,??? Alapini-Odunlade says.

What started as the impersonal pursuit of good works became more personal when Alapini-Odunlade saw the opportunities her outreach work was opening up for people in Benin. Following one talk she gave at a high school, she says, a few students told her they wanted to become scientists. ???The fact that they know they can do it opens up so many more opportunities. It will give them the will to learn science at a higher level, which they would likely not have even thought about, and branch into areas in science which are relevant to their everyday lives and will help develop Benin.???

An international career

Alapini-Odunlade traveled widely during her undergraduate and graduate degree studies. A contact made during an internship at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris led to a 2005 summer internship searching for planets in other solar systems at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

During that internship Alapini-Odunlade met a researcher from the Instituto de Astrof??sica de Canarias (IAC), which led to a second-year master???s research project at IAC, investigating the temperatures of sun-like stars. She also met Suzanne Aigrain, a Cambridge postdoctoral fellow. In 2006, Alapini-Odunlade joined Aigrain at the University of Exeter, where the latter accepted a lecturer position, to begin a Ph.D. searching for and characterizing planets outside our solar system. During her doctorate, Alapini-Odunlade visited and used large telescopes in France, Chile, and the Canary Islands.

Local outreach

Alapani-Odunlade continued her outreach activities while pursuing her Ph.D. As well as returning to Benin, she produced solar system factsheets and planet models for the astronomy open evenings she instigated at the University of Exeter. She gave science demonstrations at local schools, a science club, and a local agricultural show. She also blogged about life as an astronomer for the Cosmic Diary, one of 12 projects supporting the International Year of Astronomy.

Alapini-Odunlade says she would encourage other young researchers to get involved in outreach. The work helped her develop communication skills and caused her to consider how her research impacted society, she says. Aigrain, who has since moved to the University of Oxford, agrees that outreach helps students. ???It gives them a sense of responsibility and confidence,??? she tells Science Careers in an e-mail. Aigrain supported Alapini-Odunlade???s outreach efforts. ???What I particularly liked about it was that it was different, and reached people who probably don't get a chance to hear about astronomy very often,??? she says.

Alapini-Odunlade got an early taste for outreach activities.

Time to settle

However much she enjoys traveling, Alapini-Odunlade decided it was time to settle in Exeter after she got married in 2009 to a chemical engineer based at a local pharmaceutical company, whom she met during her time at the University of Manchester. ???If you travel a lot, at some point you start losing a bit of your identity because you become a mix of so many different cultures,??? she says. ???That???s a good time to stop traveling and to settle and remember who you are.??? After obtaining her Ph.D., in spring 2010, Alapini-Odunlade stayed on in her research group for a 1-year postdoc position, continuing research in her doctoral subject. She turned down a 2-year postdoc position in France and decided to leave academia.

Alapini-Odunlade took a part-time job last May presenting planetarium and science shows at Bristol-based science center At-Bristol. Although she found professional science outreach ???really exciting,??? she is keen to learn how to make the information she imparts stick in people???s minds. So in September 2011, she embarked on a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) program in secondary science with a physics specialization at the University of Exeter. ???When I was doing science communication, it was great to enthuse people about science but I didn???t know how much they were taking from the message I had passed onto them. The skills I???m trying to get from this teacher training are how to make people learn and remember things,??? she says. Her focus is on becoming a teacher, but she plans to continue her outreach work. Alapini-Odunlade also hopes to train teachers in Benin to use basic telescopes, and to set up science exchange programs between schools in Benin and European countries.

Last month, the Institute of Physics awarded Alapini-Odunlade a Very Early Career Physics Communicator Award for her outreach work, which she shared with engineer Rhys Phillips. Averil Macdonald, a professor of science communication at the University of Reading, who was on the judging panel, says that Alapini-Odunlade has in abundance a key quality of good science communicators: visible enthusiasm, for both their subject and for working with other people. ???But I think what sets her apart is she wants what she tells people to benefit them. If you look at some of her work in Benin, it is to enable the youngsters to have opportunities they wouldn???t otherwise have.???