News blog

Physicist settles discrimination claim

A physicist who filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit over maternity leave has reached a settlement with her former employer.

Sherry Towers says that she was the victim of sexual discrimination while at a postdoctoral position at the State University of New York at Stony Brooke. According to her complaint, filed in the US District Court Eastern District of New York, Towers faced retribution after asking a supervisor for time off following the birth of her second child.

Towers also got some ink in our pages last year, after she published a paper on the popular preprint server ArXiv.org, which claimed that female high-energy physicists did more grunt work and got less recognition than their male counterparts.

Although the terms of the settlement are confidential, Towers says via e-mail that both SUNY and she are “mutually satisfied with the agreement.” She says that she’s now going to start a new career teaching science at public school. “I’ve been substitute teaching this year, and have found that I quite enjoy it,” she says.

Comments

Comments are closed.