I'd like to recommend that you borrow a video produced by the University of Western Ontario's Caucus on Women's Issues called "The Chilly Climate for Women in Universities and Colleges." In this video, academic women relate the pain they have felt at being excluded and undermined in their working and learning situations within colleges and universities.

-- Tara Baillargeon

I am a male graduate student in the physical sciences. My research partner is a woman who grew up in East Germany. She is a very talented mathematician and I asked her about gender and science. She told me that after the Berlin Wall fell her family moved to Austria. She was surprised to suddenly be one of a few women in her advanced math and science courses. She said that in East Germany it was drilled into her and everyone else's head that the genders were equal. Consequently, her math classes were approximately equally populated with men and women.

I think two things are needed to reach numerical equality in the sciences. First, we need to treat young children the same regardless of gender. I can't imagine what I would be like if my parents had bought me nothing but Barbie dolls and tea party sets. It seems to me that most of my "maleness" stems from the fact that I and every other boy in the city were raised on squirt guns and video games. Second, if we want more women in science we need to make it more prestigious. I am not surprised that the gap in gender has decreased more rapidly in law and medicine. People respect lawyers and doctors. They understand how a doctor or lawyer can serve his/her community. They also see that there is the potential for a big paycheck.

What does science offer? A low-paying job with low community prestige that you can't explain to your friends. Plus, if you're a woman you are outnumbered by men. And since we have been told that girls are different from boys, I see how that could be intimidating and at times maybe even lonely.

-- Kenneth Brown

Read "Ode to Frances" by Kate Moses.

I read your piece about Frances, the character created by my parents, with a mixture of delight and doubt.

Frances, like all classic characters, has a much more complicated -- and at the same time much simpler -- history than the one you created for her.

She was based on an amalgam of the Hoban children and their friends. Her bedtime fears, for instance, derived from my brother Brom, who was convinced a tiger lived under the bed; her obsessive love of bread and jam, from the child of friends of the family.

Frances was the third children's book my father wrote -- before that he did two he illustrated himself. He was a well-known commercial illustrator who did, among other things, covers for Time magazine. My mother, Lillian, who met my father in art school, had wanted to illustrate the Frances books from the start, but Garth Williams already had a name, and Ursula Nordstrom, the legendary Harper & Row editor, paired him with my father for the first book.

After his initial foray, my mother won Harper & Row's approval to do the subsequent Frances books, and became the official illustrator not only of the Frances books but of all my father's children's books for the time that they were married, including his young-adult novel, "The Mouse and His Child." She went on to have a long and successful children's book writing and illustrating career of her own, creating, among other memorable characters, Arthur the chimp and his proto-feminist sister, Violet.

Without getting into too much family history, let's just say that Frances was also very much stamped after her creators' own characters. My father used to share with the family his manuscripts in progress and my mother in particular had a pitch-perfect ear for the character's voice.

Frances' little songs to this day resonate with my father's wit, love of wordplay and pleasure in the joys of the quotidian -- including Lorna Doone cookies.

Take it from me. Frances does not necessarily have a graduate degree or talk to her sibling(s) every day. But she is alive and well and kicking. And thanks to my parents' enduring art, she's not a day older than she was the first day she materialized on the page.

-- Phoebe Hoban

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.