If you could take a pill that completely eliminates your periods, would you?

Turns out the answer is rather emotional for many people. I say people because some men seem to have strong feelings about it too (as they do about many things that affect only women).

Most contraceptive pills entail 21 days of hormones, followed by 7 days of placebo. What follows is a period only in name, since women don’t actually ovulate while taking the pill. This fake period was designed into the pill when it was first introduced in 1960 so as not to freak women out too much.

This month, the FDA is evaluating Wyeth’s Lybrel, with which women would take hormones for a full year or longer (Women taking Seasonale, available now, still have 4 periods a year), remaining period-free throughout. And this is getting many experts riled up: those who think it might be unsafe, yes, but also those who argue that it is culturally dangerous—as in, it redefines femininity! Ahem.

Last year, I summarized the pros and cons of pills like Lybrel for the mainstream magazine Women’s Health, but briefly: the new pill could be healthier, because it cuts down on the hundreds of periods women now have on average as compared with about 50 or so not too long ago. On the other hand, we don’t really know what the long-term consequences might be.

So, what would you choose?

The Israeli health ministry released a rather sobering study yesterday: apparently, women who work in a lab are at a 26% higher risk of developing certain cancers.

The scientists are careful to avoid saying anything about cause and effect — they didn’t discover links to any particular chemicals that might be the trigger, for example. But there is a convincing correlation. The study took into account 9,000 hospital, health fund and university lab workers who had worked in the labs for 20 years or more, according to this news article.

Depending on the kind of lab they worked in, the women seemed to be at higher risk of breast cancer, melanoma, lip cancer (that one I find a bit strange, I must admit) and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but at lower risk of lung cancer (which also I find strange).

Because of the findings, the health ministry began organizing courses on lab safety. Good news is, the researchers say, the study was conducted over the 80s and 90s, when conditions were much worse than they are today, so women working in labs today are probably safer.

Do you buy that?

Last week, the Office of Women’s Careers at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that with a little bit of financial help, young women scientists who temporarily leave the lab can successfully reclaim their careers when they come back.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the biochemistry department had 30 faculty members — and only 2 were women.

The situation seems to have improved somewhat and 8 of the 37 principal investigators are women. The graduate student pool, in contrast, was half women when I was there and is at least that now.

You know where this is heading. Women are overwhelmingly the majority among biology majors in college, many make it to graduate school but then drop out along the way to the top. There are a hundred opinions — some, like Larry Summers’, quite controversial — about why that happens. And we’d like to hear your views about that too.

But one indisputable factor is that when women scientists leave the lab to have a baby, it’s very difficult for them to maintain research productivity. There are a scattered few programs to help women at this vulnerable point in their careers, which we wrote about in 2004 in the news feature, A lab of her own.

The MGH program, described in a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, gives two-year “bridge grants” of up to $50,000 to junior researchers who also care for young children. In the first nine years of the program, 90% of the recipients have remained at the MGH and more than half have received academic promotions at Harvard Medical School.

The amount is modest to be sure, but it helps the recipients — 40 so far — find practical solutions to their quandary. For example, Karen K. Miller, a 1999 recipient, applied her grant toward hiring a research assistant who continued Miller’s work on anorexia nervosa while she was away. It also shows an institution’s commitment to helping them with their careers — something many women scientists say is sorely needed.

Good news is that Harvard University, which recently found itself a woman president, is already exploring a similar model to help women at the university.

So Harvard has gone and elected itself a woman president, the first in the university’s 370-year history. That means half of all Ivy league universities now have women at the helm, which is a remarkable statistic.

A few weeks ago, scientists got a little excited that Nobel Laureate Tom Cech and neurobiologist Steven Hyman were being considered for Harvard president. But Drew Gilpin Faust, a historian, became the odds-on favorite after Cech withdrew his name from the race, saying he was choosing to stay on as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And who can blame him? The Harvard job, as Larry Summers knows well, is no cake walk.

I’m a bit wary that Faust’s appointment will be bandied about as proof that Harvard has addressed its problems with creating equal opportunities for women. But perhaps scientists still have reason to rejoice. The New York Times reports today that:

Asked Sunday whether her appointment signified the end of sex inequities at the university, Dr. Faust said: “Of course not. There is a lot of work still to be done, especially in the sciences.”

Will Drew Gilpin Faust take Harvard’s gender inequities to task?

It’s been a while since I last posted—holiday parties, you know, and the stupor that usually follows. But some news that’s being widely reported today jolted me right out of that. Newspapers everywhere are saying that doing housework can reduce a woman’s chance of breast cancer more than playing sports or jogging or whatever. Housework! If you could see me now, you’d know I was spluttering.

What really gets me is that none of the articles I read looked beyond the basics to ask whether the study might be flawed in some way. Only one pointed out that the number of women who were doing job-related activities might have been too low to show a decrease in breast cancer risk. I know being retro is in right now, but surely this kind of study should raise at least some eyebrows—and some hard-hitting questions about the methodology?

Call me paranoid, but this sounds to me like an awfully convenient study for men: “I would mop the floor, honey, but you know how you need it for your health.” Please!

The researchers are speculating that the moderate level of activity doing housework could be more useful than the bursts women experience with more vigorous exercise. Apparently, the women who showed this benefit did at least 16-17 hours a week of housework.

Well, that probably explains it then: the poor things were probably so busy cooking and cleaning that they never got a chance to go out and drink alcohol, eat unhealthy or skip going to the gym because that new Daniel Craig movie opened and they just had to see it. Seems to me that being a hardworking housewife may go along with some other good habits that just might explain the extra benefit.

The big news last week was that breast cancer rates are down. Apparently, after years of a steady climb, diagnoses of breast cancer went down by 7% in 2003. That’s great news, undoubtedly.

The papers have been making much of the fact that the dip is probably a result of women turning away from hormone replacement after a 2002 study linked the therapy to breast cancer. But there’s a lot more to this story. Yes, hormone replacement can be harmful—but only in women who take the hormones more than a decade after hitting menopause. In fact, as I reported last year, scientists say estrogen is good for women between the ages of 50 and 59 or those who’ve recently gone through menopause, and only increases breast cancer risk in older women.

That’s complicated—but isn’t that what these articles should do? Parse out the complicated news for their readers? Sadly, the results of the original study were so grossly misreported that it triggered panic among women, many of whom stopped taking hormones even when they needn’t have. The fact is that, apart from these hormones, there are no effective remedies for menopause symptoms. Case in point, a year-long study released today showed that the popular herbal supplement black cohosh did not relieve hot flashes and night sweats.

You know what did? Hormones.