Unfortunately, the career paths or the professions that we have chosen are not very forgiving, and they're not the kinds of careers that allow you to step back, take off six months, eight months, nine months, a year, and then come back and feel like nothing has happened. There's a lot of jobs where you can do that, and there's a lot of professions where you can do that.

Science is not one of those. Science is one in which it requires 24 hours, 7 days a week, every day of the year. Obviously, not every hour at the same intensity, but there's an enormous gap that forms when you withdraw yourself from that environment.

There's a lot that the system will do to allow you to take time off to be a mom, and we have all these laws now that FMLA or whatever. And that takes care of an aspect of it, but it really doesn't take care of how do you stay engaged in a world that is so competitive? How do you stay involved in an environment where everybody's going while you're home? I mean, everybody's efforts continue and everybody's moving up while you're home. And when you come back, nobody says, "Okay, let me step out of the way so you can move in."

So I think a lot of women don't recognize that. And also a lot of women don't recognize the resentment that the male force has when they see women go home early because they have to pick up their kids. As much as we would like to feel that there is that support there, it really isn't.

That was very hard for me to accept and to recognize and to live with. But it's something that I have made an effort of trying to instill in my students. And I'm very understanding, and I try to make them feel like, "You are the only one who knows what activities are really important for you." I cannot come and tell you, "Oh, you know, going to that thing is," I can't make that decision for you. That's something that it's in your heart, it's in your mind: this is something critical.

But what I do tell them is, "You have to look around and you have to see, okay, what is really important for me? What things I do not want to miss? And, then, fight for those. But let the other little ones go by."