Summary
Five colleagues discuss the importance of peer support developed through an annual dinner at the American Society of Human Genetics meetings. This simple networking event provided critical advising and counseling on their careers and life passages as women in academic medicine.
Main text
Annual scientific meetings are greeted with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety. For the five of us, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) annual meeting, which is held in the fall, typically somewhere in North America, is such a meeting. In the 1990’s, we all crossed paths in the medical genetics fellowship training program at the University of Washington, which was one of the first medical genetics training programs in the United States. True legends in the world of medical genetics have trained at the University of Washington, an auspicious and daunting standard for us to maintain.
For women in medicine, part of meeting-associated anxiety stems from the logistics of leaving home with pages of instructions and daily schedules for career-competent husbands left in charge of our children. Another aspect of the anxiety is scientific: how has my work measured up in the last year? Am I being scooped by colleagues? Is my research fundable? Am I going in the right direction in my research? There has been no area in medicine or science that has undergone a boom of scientific discovery comparable to that of human genetics in the last 30 years, facilitated by sequencing of the human genome and the rapidly decreasing cost of this technology. You have to be both a sprinter and a marathon runner in this field, incorporating new information and technology yet keeping sight of the big prize of unraveling the underlying genetic basis of complex disease processes.
So, when traveling to the annual meeting, there are individuals you want to avoid, individuals that you want to be certain to see (either as a friend or to pay your respects), and individuals that you are desperate to talk with to improve your research or establish collaborations. And then there are the five of us. Our demographics are as follows: we are all women. We all are MD’s. Three of the five also have a PhD. Four were born and raised in the United States and one in Israel. We are all married to men who are also physicians. We are all mothers, each having two or three children, a total of seven daughters and four sons among us. We are now department heads, professors, chiefs, clinicians, and organizers of ASHG’s meeting; one of us is even a president of ASHG. And we are each other’s best friends in science.
When we were fellows at the University of Washington, we began to integrate our lives by celebrating many of life’s milestones together. As fellows, the head of our medical genetics training program referred to us individually and collectively as “young ladies.” There were wedding showers, weddings, baby showers, babies, infertility, and personal and family medical issues. We were by each other’s side through these moments. We have been able to continue to celebrate good times and acknowledge bad times at the annual dinner, first born some 30 years ago when we attended ASHG as fellows and decided to go to a nice restaurant for dinner one evening.
After fellowship ended, each of us moved into different career paths: two remained in Seattle, two joined the scientific powerhouses in Houston, and our fellow from Israel returned to her homeland. But we have gathered every year for these three decades for one dinner.
The dinner is a commitment. The first step is to find one evening in the four days of the annual meeting when we have no other obligations that we cannot miss. The next step is to identify one of the best restaurants in town and get a reservation. We typically gather at a central meeting point in the convention center, and this step is the most difficult—extracting all five of us from the meeting simultaneously so that we get to our dinner on time.
These dinners have become one of the touch stones of our lives. While we truly appreciate the good fortune of our education and training and the gift of doing work we love, we are also aware that it can set us apart. Saying “I’m a geneticist” can be a conversation stopper in many everyday settings, particularly for a woman. We all have close friends in our individual lives, but the dinner reflects a unique peer group that has been indispensable as both a mirror and a sounding board. It is one place where the different parts of our lives, which can seem disparate, become a natural whole. We are supportive of each other but also brutally honest when appropriate.
We have a whole cryptic vocabulary, including verbal and sign language, as we discuss our scientific work. We have collaborated in science both formally and informally and helped each other in both measurable and immeasurable ways. But beyond the science, there hasn’t been a non-work-related topic not discussed at our annual meal. We have cried together and laughed so hard that red wine was sprayed across white linen table clothes. Like a family, one word can now evoke long stories. We have witnessed many more milestones: watching our children come of age and going off to college and beyond; sharing with each other how we have talked to our own daughters about sex, birth control, and finding one’s path in life; how to live with an empty nest, facing the infirmity of and loss of our parents and loved ones and our own aging. We have mourned together when life has given us disappointments and challenges. But we have been fortunate to celebrate many personal and professional successes.
Why were the dinners so important? And did these interactions contribute to our success? All career women confront the difficulty of pairing a career with the primary responsibility for the family. In science, there are the additional hurdles in a “non-feminine” science field, including the lack of role models, being the only women or the minority in committee meetings, and the tight timeline of academic advancement. While we can reflect on the challenges of being a woman in this field in years past, we can also serve as witness that these challenges are not gone. Fellow travelers can provide both a mirror and a guiding light on this path, and there are often insufficient women to form such a group locally. The dinner provided such a community (Figure 1). We were able to confirm on an annual basis that we were not alone in feeling frustrated at the many roles we have to juggle and the difficulty for us to get resources and recognition to the same extent as our male colleagues. Knowing that we were not the only one with these struggles is a source of strength. We can also truly appreciate and celebrate each other’s scientific successes that may be less meaningful to our every-day friends and or families. Likewise, we can commiserate and provide support and advice when things were not going well. We know that this women peer-mentoring event was crucial for both our sanity and success, and it continues to be a gift to all of us. Now that we “young ladies” are in the mentoring phase of our careers, we hope others will consider this simple way to build their own community.
Figure 1.
The authors at their annual ASHG dinner in 2014
From left to right: Dianna Milewicz, Kathy Leppig, Gail Jarvik, Sharon Plon, and Ephrat Levy-Lahad.