Response to comments on kool-aid post

@Anon 12:59, As one friend of mine puts it, they don't pay you to go to school unless they are using you as slave labor and you'll never get a job afterwards.

Keep in mind, most of us who are postdocs now were told that getting a PhD would GUARANTEE us gainful employment when we finished. Boy was that a joke! Little did we know it would not guarantee us employment in the disciplines for which we trained.

Doctor Pion wrote: A postdoc is not required if you want to take a teaching position rather than one where hiring and tenure are impossible without major and continuing grant support and a track record of producing publications and students with a PhD. Ditto for taking a job in industry, where more academic experience is not necessarily a plus.

I wish I could agree with this, but I don't think it's true anymore. Maybe some teaching positions, but since most people have postdoc experience now it has become a de facto requirement. Especially in industry. At least in my field. Maybe not so for engineering/the other end of the spectrum. Yet.

re: healthcare, me too, but it really depends because there is no regulation or enforcement. Many places still don't give vision or dental; or support dependents. Many still take healthcare costs out of fellowships, even when it is illegal to do so.

re: reducing numbers, I agree.

re: salary, it depends on where you live. In much of the country, yes $40k is not bad. But most postdocs are concentrated in the most expensive metropolitan areas, where it's really not enough to afford to have a family, much less buy a house.

Americans are especialy penalized since we tend to have enormous college debt to pay off, which most European postdocs do not have.

It's also interesting to note that many of the Scandinavian and Swiss and German fellowships pay much more than NIH standard.

re: distractions - so you're saying you didn't have to write grants as a postdoc? Well I guess it was a different era.

@Grand Inquisitor, I don't want kids. I never said that I did. But I don't see why my personal preference should be forced on anyone else. I don't see that childlessness should be a requirement for being a scientist.

@Cleveland,

Here's my opinion, FWIW. I'm not saying this is what I did, but objectively it is what would work best if you were just concerned about your career and not about your personal happiness in other aspects of your life.

1. Ditch the boyfriend if you want a career in science. Long distance doesn't work. Inflexible men are incompatible with your having a successful scientific career.

2. Your thesis committee is wrong. They are either clueless and/or biased by a conflict of interest. Moving away is much better for your career. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you.

3. You have to have at least one Really Big paper, and ideally multiple good papers, to get a faculty position at an R1 university. This is not negotiable.

4. Ideally you want to go to the good lab with the nice boss and get multiple papers. But this will not be enough and you will probably have to get very lucky or do a second postdoc with Powerful A-hole Boss to get your Big Paper and R1 Job.

Good luck with whatever you decide. No matter what you choose, you will have to sacrifice.

@Anon 4:45, Thanks for sharing that stat. Interesting to note that it's easy to talk about postdoc salaries in the abstract and end up arguing without any facts. $75k is quite a bit more than $40k. Yay NSF, boo NIH.

@Jeanne- Yes. Completely agree. Thanks for writing that!

@Anon 8:28, there are several things that go into this.

re: money, consider

1. Payscale is grandfathered. Newer postdocs are actually paid more than older ones. My starting salary seemed high at the time, but 5+ years later and with incremental yearly increases, I'm making barely more than first year postdocs are getting. It's unfair but it's how it works everywhere I've ever heard of.

2. Postdoc length is limited in some places. So you might get kicked out before you reach the 7 year mark. The few lucky ones get faculty positions at that point.

3. Most places still do not have or enforce postdoc "programs" and salaries are negotiable. That means some postdocs can be paid more, but it's a function of whether and how they negotiated. And we all know that women tend to negotiate less and/or we are penalized when we try to negotiate. My advisor acted like I was INSANE to insist on NIH scale, which was more than my university offered at the time. And yet, I know he paid his male postdocs above NIH scale, and he paid one of them an extra supplement because the guy had kids. I mean, WHAT??? Does that seem fair? I went to a better school and had more publications coming out of my thesis lab than any of the guys did when they joined, btw.

re: suspicions, consider

The qualities that make for a successful postdoc are at odds with the qualities of an eventual group leader. To wit, successful postdocs in my current lab are those who look like the boss, agree with the boss, do what the boss says, might occasionally inject a smidgeon of insight but generally have no ideas of their own (at least not ones they would say out loud). And/or they are good at sneaking around the boss, and the boss doesn't know it (okay so that last one is probably useful no matter what, if you are good at being sneaky).

A good leader has ideas of her own, knows how to make them work, and often has trouble following a bad leader just because they are in the position of authority.

I think the problem is fundamentally one of personality type. I am not a follower. I am also female. This is a lethal combination in most of America, but especially in science.

I'm screwed if I speak up, and I'm screwed if I don't. If I say nothing, I'll never get what I need. But when I ask for what I need, I am being difficult or demanding. It's a lose-lose proposition.

I am also devoted to mentoring, obviously, and I'm good at time management, or I wouldn't have this blog. I value communication and I make an effort to communicate with my trainees and with my advisors, with varying success. I try to deal with conflicts immediately rather than letting them fester, and I've gone out of my way to try to learn how to work collaboratively with different personality types.

Seems to me that my advisors have failed in all of these ways. They have often failed to communicate and assumed I could read their minds. They mismanaged money and time, they were bad managers and absentee mentors.

I did not need them to micromanage my science, I needed them to run a functional lab. And they couldn't do that.

But I am a difficult woman for wanting it and I am "entitled" for thinking I've earned it by working hard to get a PhD.

I thought a postdoc was supposed to be a time to just work in the lab, free of distractions?

So how come I never got to do that?

Also, I don't understand why impostor syndrome would ever be seen as a good thing? Is that because it makes some people, but especially women, less threatening if they seem insecure?

Seems to me you want people who are realistic about their strengths and weaknesses, and who have made it their business to get the training they need to do the job they want.

Impostors are people, so far as I can tell, who are underprepared, and deep down they know it.

The other kind of impostor I've seen, and I do feel this sometimes, are people who have never had adequate role models, so we never pictured ourselves in certain roles. So then when we get there we suffer a kind of internal stereotype threat.

Again, not something anyone should want or look for - and so far as I can tell, its presence/absence has nothing to do with anyone's eventual success.

I think you're absolutely right that those who enjoyed their postdocs tend to overpopulate the faculty ranks. But it's not true that all faculty did, and it's probable that time has helped heal many old wounds. It's also well-known that people tend to rationalize what was "meant to be" based on the outcome of the events, not on how they felt about it at the time.

Apparently it's pretty unusual to be able to maintain an objective memory of of painful past. Supposedly it's more common among writers.

At any rate, I have not had the kind of luck you have had, and my luck does not seem to be improving.

I thank you for your thoughtful comments. I wish more PIs were able to discuss these concepts with an open mind.

Oh my fucking god.

Check out this post over at Drugmonkey.

First, Drugmonkey makes the admittedly accurate point that if being a postdoc was just about learning how to do science, then yes 2 years would be long enough.

Personally, I think I already knew how to do science when I finished my PhD, but hey not everyone gets that kind of training in grad school.

But then Drugmonkey goes on, and I'll start by saying this: I agree with Sol Rivkin.

There are three major assumptions that Drugmonkey puts forward, which I find completely offensive and stupid.

1. The idea that a long postdoc should be welcomed.

Fuck that. Crap pay and no real independence? And fuck you Drugmonkey and CPP for acting like we're supposed to be thankful for that bullshit.

2. The idea that 5 years should be long enough to be successful no matter what bad mentors, etc. you've had. Give me a fucking break. I have 2 manuscripts sitting in the Journal of my Asshole Advisor's Desk. Not because they're not good, or not finished, and not because I haven't worked long and hard for the data and the writing.

"Success" means getting your work past the asshole gatekeepers. It has nothing to do with whether your work is good or how hard you worked to make it that good.

I mean, it's one thing to deal with asshole reviewers. But when your own PI is sitting on your work for years??? That's just crazy-making bullshit.

3. The idea that a longer postdoc means you're getting more training in, what, how to run a lab? How to be a PI?

Give me a hole in the head.

Anything about academic politics I've learned I taught myself. For completely idiotic reasons. Like, my advisors were never ever around, and never helpful. And, my advisors can be real assholes. And, my colleagues can be sexist fuckers.

Was that training? NO. Does this count as part of the selection process? Maybe - if you believe that the best way to select people is by getting the smart people to quit. Then all we're left with are the stubborn, the weak, the lazy, the hopeless, and the naive.

I mean seriously. Why am I still here? Because I was too stupid to follow my instinct to quit years ago. And then I was too stubborn to give up on my project. And then I was too weak and hopeless to think I could live with giving up on my project. And I was so naive I really though I could make it work. And I was too lazy to go find another career.

Did I really need a certain number of years to learn all that? NO. Will it benefit me to have all this perspective and wisdom if I have my own lab? Hell yeah. But I could have just as easily learned these things on the fly as a junior professor, which is how most people learn them (or not at all).

So I had all this time to kill while my manuscripts were languishing in oblivion. So what do I do? Go volunteer to organize postdocs, be on committees for women in science, etc. Was that good training for academia? I really don't know. At least it made me feel like I was contributing something, when nobody would let me contribute my science.

Is any of this what search committees select for? Fuck no! They don't even know I exist, and there's no mechanism for them to find people like me with all this collect wisdom and insight into how to be an awesome mentor, do awesome research, and not be an asshole to your trainees.

Please go over there and give Drugmonkey and CPP an earful if you haven't already.

Fucking privileged white guys talking about how great the system is? What. The. Fuck. I guess nobody has yet hit them with an anvil large enough to pound in the point that the "selection" of which they are so fond is the reason we still have so few women and minorities in tenure-track positions. If "selection" worked fairly or via the right variables, that would be one thing. Instead it's just psychological torture for most of us. More years of it is NOT TRAINING YOU FUCKING ASSWIPES.

Help with a recurring people problem

One of the worst things about being a postdoc is what I call having pseudo-authority.

You have a PhD, yes. But you are a temporary employee, not staff. And everybody knows it.

This means there are often power struggles with staff-type people who are

a) not that into their job, just into the paycheck
b) paid better than you and working fewer hours
c) fully expecting you to fail and leave while they stay on and on and on forever

So, they treat you like dirt.

At least, this has been my experience. Not always- some staff have been very polite and helpful. Others, not so much.

In particular today I am talking about a certain kind of guy (because that is usually where I have problems).

This kind of guy does not have a PhD. He might be a student, a tech, or some other kind of staff. He has always been there longer than I have.

I should say here that I do not always have problems with people who fit this description. I can think of a few who were my best friends when we worked together, who always treated me as a peer and we helped each other out, and I really miss working with them.

Which is probably why I'm baffled when I meet one who treats me like dirt.

I might outrank this guy by two or 9 years, it doesn't matter. He looks at my boobs when I'm talking to him; he is late when we make an appointment; he does not do what I ask him to do, even when it fits word-for-word into his job description; he apologizes about his irresponsible behavior only if it is dire and too late to fix whatever he did or did not do that created enormous problems for me.

I should say here that not all of these qualities mean the guy is going to be a jerk to me forever. I have worked with ones who were disrespectful at first or irresponsible occasionally but mostly okay and I really did believe them when they apologized.

And then there are the ones who always stare at my boobs instead of my face when I am talking to them; who are always late and disregard my instructions as if I never gave any. As if my time is worthless and I might as well have been talking to thin air.

I'm blogging about this as a general concept because it has happened to me over and over again, in various jobs and situations, and I suspect it will continue to happen and I will continue to be upset about it every single time until I figure out what to do about it.

The problem is that I never have any real authority over these guys. In theory they are working for me or with me; they may even report to me. But usually when I finally work up the nerve to complain to my/our boss, invariably it is a guy and he looks at me like I am from Mars.

But That Guy is a great guy, he says incredulously when I try to explain that I feel I am being harassed, and disrespected, and can't get my job done.

At this point, I pause and make a choice. I have tried both the

a) explaining my case just fact-by-fact, as in "here is what happened" with no judgments, just my point of view of what happened when and whose job it was and how an objective person might expect things to work instead of the way they are not working right now

and the

b) explaining my case from the "try to put yourself in my place"* point of view, which would work with a normal person** who might be capable of, I don't know, empathy (even for something he has never experienced himself).

Neither has ever worked. This has happened with multiple bosses, every few years or so, there is always one of these guys who simply cannot treat me like any other colleague, but has to make a big deal about my gender.

So I have tried various approaches to to pointing out how uncomfortable I am and how difficult it is to get my work done.

Always, the man in charge will, instead of apologizing or offering to speak to That Guy, he will give me a speech about how maybe I am difficult to work with, how I need to lighten up or be more patient or ask more nicely, etc.

I should point out that these are the less-sexist bosses. These are the guys who think they are enlightened. And they still do this.

So invariably, I give up, and I simply cannot get my work done. Eventually, I hate going to work, until I can find a way to drop that project or do it myself while avoiding That Guy.

It definitely slows me down.

In fact, if I have to be really honest about what has hurt my career the most, the one people problem I still can't solve is this one.

I have figured out, more or less, how to avoid and/or extract myself from the crappy outright-harassing boss situations. I have figured out how to power down insubordinate students. But it's these in-between pseudo-peers who still manage to completely trip me up. And I still don't know what to do about it.

Of course part of me lives in terror of someday actually supervising, on my own, this kind of woman-hating jerk. I would certainly hope that, if I'm ever in the position to hire anyone, I would have the knowledge of how to NOT hire someone who would disrespect me this much. Men or women.

But in the meantime, I am stuck having people assigned to me whom I did not choose. And I really don't know how to deal with these situations, because they are just subtle enough that everyone just tries to sweep them under the rug.

Eventually, That Guy will get kicked out or leave. It always happens if I just wait long enough.

But I can't wait forever, and in the meantime, I am always miserable and left wondering if it's better to make a formal complaint, and risk the backlash (which inevitably comes, along with whatever hit my recommendation letters must take), or to just sit tight, or to quit.

Because I don't have forever to wait for everyone else to wise up. And I'm just really sick of it. Lately I am so sick of it that I'd say this is one of my two biggest complaints about being a woman in science (the other one will be the next blog post).






*or my bra
**read: non-scientist type of human being

Dear FSP, you are still my hero

Check out This post from FSP. I had a good laugh.

I also like the one after it, although I am not reading the comments on either one. I can only guess what kind of (possibly deleted or unblogged-about) comments led to the inspiration for these posts this week.

As they say, some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant.

Big girls don't cry

A couple of weeks ago, my best friend and I got into a disagreement. I won't say it was an argument- we almost never argue about anything. But I think this really caught her off-guard, because my own reaction caught me a little bit off-guard.

You may recall, because I think I blogged about it, that once upon a time I was accused of being a crier. You know, someone who cries a lot at work.

Ironically, at the time I did not cry much at all, and I have never been the sort who cries to try to get her way (or to get an A).

I thought my friend recalled this too, and that she would understand my feelings on the matter, partly because she's one of those people who has always made me feel loved unconditionally. I've always thought of her as a very understanding person.

So today when I ran across this link to the Society of Women Engineers magazine I happened to flip through it and found this article on pages 66-67 under the heading Career Toolbox.

And here is what reminded me of the disagreement with my friend:

Under a paragraph that begins, "is it okay to show emotion?" The authors say that tears are understandable when there has been a death in the family. But tears are not appropriate, they say, when an insult is directed at you, when a performance evaluation doesn't go well, etc (I'm paraphrasing but that's the gist of it).

My conversation with my friend revolved about her boss, who apparently has been bursting into tears a lot at work. My friend, uncharacteristically I thought, had neither patience nor respect for this behavior, and said as much.

I said, well, I think you're being a little unfair. Your company has been doing layoffs, morale is bad in general, but also you never know what else is going on in her life.

And then I told her I've been finding myself unable to not cry at work lately.

A lot.

There was dead silence when I said this.

Eventually, she said, Well, the thing is that I can see how you might get blindsided by something really awful and not be able to control your reaction...

...and she trailed off. I said yeah, that's the thing. There are things every day... and I'm trying not to but it's just so unbelievably awful. And I can't leave yet... I'm just trying to get through the day without crying most days until I can leave. And I don't think I want to go on medication because I'm fine when I'm home. I'm fine when I'm anywhere else. I just can't leave yet. So I can imagine if your boss feels like that, I said.

And then I said something that I guess must have shocked her, which was that I don't really see the point in having a workplace where crying is forbidden, anyway.

Dead silence. This is not a good sign, when she's saying absolutely nothing at all.

Now I didn't mention this, but my friend is from a military family. I think this is part of why she believes it is, as the SWE women apparently do, inappropriate to display any kind of emotion in public. Unseemly.

But it was actually one of my male "mentors" who said he thought it should be fine to have emotions, even in science, and that you shouldn't have to bottle it up because it's not really healthy for anyone to do that.

Huh, I thought, at the time. In fact, I thought he was nuts.

But after I thought about it a while, I realized what he was getting at.

Because in a way, at the end of the day, it is just a rule that everybody agrees to follow.

I'm not sure it's a rule with a lot of functional purpose, or much data to back it up. Is it really better for productivity in the long run? Or morale? Isn't it just another way of preventing everyone from communicating about the issue of job satisfaction (or complete lack thereof)? Isn't it just another way of making sure that workplace behavior is mostly inauthentic posturing? And is that really the best way to be? Pretending all day that everything is okay?

Meanwhile, I've seen posts from some of my fellow bloggers, e.g. complaining about students who cry.

What do you think? Is crying in professional settings bad for everyone? Or is this just more of that cultural baggage that comes from a long tradition of male-domination in the workplace?

To the website formerly known as Change.gov

Dear President Obama and VP Biden,

On your website, you wrote:

Promoting Women in Math and Science: Women constitute 45 percent of the workforce in the U.S., but hold just 12 percent of science and engineering jobs in business and industry. Women also make up just 9 percent of the recipients of engineering-related bachelor's degrees. President Obama and Vice President Biden believe that every student should have equal access to education in math, science, and technology in order to compete on a global scale.

I'm writing to ask what you're planning to DO about this. Your website talks about "promoting" but I don't see any plan of action?

Actions speak louder than words.

Right now, I'm looking at being UNEMPLOYED as a woman with a PhD in Science and >5 years of Post-doctoral research experience.

Where's my promotion?

I'm looking at grants and and university policies.

Here's what needs to change.


1. NIH should allow ANYONE AND EVERYONE with a PhD to apply for ALL GRANTS.

Grant review should be done WITHOUT regard to past performance, depending ONLY on innovation and, if necessary, preliminary data (which, by the way, I have in spades!).

Just in case you don't understand why I'm telling you this, it's because the current funding mechanisms are:

a) Hierarchical
b) Archaic
c) Terribly biased (both with regards to gender and, dare I say it, ethnicity)
d) Exclusive of young people

Don't you like the support of the youth? Well, "young" investigator in science-land is anyone under the age of 40 (or maybe 42, when you get your first real grant in the current system?).

The current system COMPLETELY EXCLUDES YOUNG PEOPLE FROM DOING INDEPENDENT RESEARCH.

Where do you think the innovation comes from? Those 60-year old tenured professors?

Come on, really?

2. Universities should allow ANYONE AND EVERYONE with a PhD to apply for GRANTS AND LAB SPACE.

Currently, universities are blocking everyone post-PhD and pre-faculty from applying for independent funding. They do this because lab space is tied up with teaching responsibilities, which when you think about it.... really makes no sense.

To put it simply, at universities all over this country, we have faculty who don't teach anything, and researchers with no lab space of their own.

We have thousands of young, hardworking, trained researchers who are all going to quit science if you don't do something about it PRONTO.

Even better, YOU paid to train us. You, the government. The taxpayer. You paid to train us, and now you're going to have to start over from scratch. You know all those articles about how there's a dearth of scientists? There's two things you need to know about those.

1. They're TOTALLY FALSE. There are PLENTY of scientists, we just don't have the resources we need.

2. The fears about having a shortage of actual scientists are about to become true, if you don't act now and do something about it, you'll lose a whole generation (or two) of young people who wouldn't touch science as a career. Wouldn't even consider it when they see the job prospects. And they'd be totally justified, too.

My point being, this problem should be totally avoidable, but NIH and university policies make no sense. Put them together, and the "system", such as it is, was never designed to work as a a system, and instead it works against any kind of national research progress (especially health research, which you claim to care about!) .

You may be wondering why I'm writing this now, when it's maybe too late.

I'm writing this now because I'm hearing two rumors.

Rumor 1. That the Stimulus Plan (the name of which frankly sounds like the economic version of a pornographic fluffer).. wait, I lost my train of thought. Oh, right. That the Stimulus Plan has, in the current (recent?) version, money for >1000 2-year grants.

Rumor 2. That the NIH part of the Stimulus Plan is on the chopping block (thank you, Republiscum who would rather cut taxes, like that's really going to help anything).


If Rumor 1 is right, then you have to make sure these grants are AVAILABLE and ACCESSIBLE to researchers at ALL LEVELS (even women! even non-faculty!).

If Rumor 2 is correct, none of this matters, and you've got your work cut out for you.

Uh, good luck. Have fun running the country

Sincerely,

MsPhD


p.s.

Thank you for your inspiring speeches, they're great. But actions still speak louder than words.

p.p.s.

If this isn't sufficiently clear, feel free to contact me via this blog and I will happily explain it to you and your support staff.

Arrogant wannabe.

Several commenters said it's typical of women to be the 'silent fixer.'

I've heard that, too.

I'm pretty sure that is NOT my problem.

These same commenters asked if I had made my ambitions known and/or asked to be promoted.

Yes, yes I have.

No, no it has not helped.

In fact, it got me branded Arrogant. And got me nowhere.

Apparently, my ambitions exceed my perceived (Note the qualifier!) abilities/achievements, and that means Arrogant.

At least for women.

I think there is some magical formula whereby if women are:

Extremely Nice + Sufficiently Self-Promoting + Gently Express Ambition = Success!

Maybe. Maybe it's not that simple. But I've seen a lot more success from women who fit the stereotype, at least outwardly, of being soft-spoken and shy, who suddenly learn to stand up for themselves and then everyone is impressed ==> Maybe she had it in her all along but we're so proud for bringing it out of her! She gets a JOB!

I think my problem is that my personality is not sufficiently Feminine:

Nice When I Can Muster It + Inconsistently Self-Promoting + Openly Ambitious = Arrogant.

Also, if anyone ever actually TOOK my advice, I'd be The Fixer.

Instead, I am just the wacko in the corner who makes suggestions everyone ignores. And that often includes PI.

Yesterday I reminded PI of something I had suggested a long time ago. THIS time it was a GOOD idea, apparently, but I actually got in TROUBLE because PI couldn't REMEMBER my having suggested it before!

I love it when I get blamed for not nagging often enough, to make up for other people's cluelessness & senility.

When I nag too often, I'm told I'm being Very Pushy.

Dr. J, that company job is sounding pretty darn good.

Punishment and reward.

Today, I am gearing up to do some painful science stuff.

It is going to suck, but I am going to make myself do it, because I can't put it off any longer.

It's not repetitive stress injury painful, it's mentally and emotionally painful.

It's philosophically, morally painful to be forced to slog through some incredibly horrible science and document everything that's wrong with it.

I didn't make it to the gym last night, but tonight I am going to need it because I will be royally pissed off by the time today is over.

Despite my best efforts, I will have a very hard time not noticing how much money and time has been wasted on this horrible example of how not to do science.

However, with the goal of good-attitude-yields-good-karma, I am trying to take a merciful approach.

I will choose to assume that these people just didn't know any better, and not just at the beginning when they clearly screwed up. I will also choose to assume that they didn't deliberately go out of their way to try to hide their screwup. They just really didn't know any better. Right?

Yes, I am trying to give them the benefit of the stupid-is-as-stupid-does kind of doubt.

Hmph.

I am ignoring that these people have labs, and grants, and faculty positions. I am ignoring that they probably should have none of those things if the system worked the way it should.

Ignoring is bliss.

***

In better news, I am really enjoying this book and will be rewarding myself later by reading some more of it.

In some ways, I find this book a lot more uplifting and empowering than some of the more angry books I've been reading lately on bias and how it holds us back.

Reading those other books was helpful in arming me with the studies showing that indeed, bias is a factor and we have to account for it and figure out how to work around it.

This book is different because it is FUNNY and the author gives some very specific advice on how to change your attitude, not in a pollyanna way but in a practical New Yorker no-bullshit kinda way.

Yup, this author is my kind of person. I would like to meet her someday.

Gender Discrimination (GD) Discussion Continued

Anon 9:51,

I don't think any of that is the problem here.

If anything, I've been told that when I highlight my achievements it's perceived as 'arrogant', not 'impressive' so it's a very fine line to walk.

And if anything, the male professors are much more fixated on formatting than the women professors I've had look at my CV.

And in my field, there is absolutely no such thing as 'positive discrimination.' I strongly suspect that Fermilab is more like my field than it is like yours.

Again, I need to read the paper.

Okham,

I am not a statistician, so in a way it won't matter what I say about the paper. So maybe I should just refrain from addressing it.

I think DrugMonkey picked up on my main point re: your post.

The point was that conference presentations, while perhaps not well supported by the data in the Towers' manuscript, are in fact quite likely playing a role. And that this issue is definitely deserving of further study if, as you say, you would only be convinced by more numbers. FSP and I have both blogged repeatedly about the dearth of women conference speakers. It's not like it's a hard phenomenon to witness.

Beyond that, what I'm saying is, this is an issue I care about deeply because I have firsthand experience with it. I've read some of the Absinthe blog so I know some of the story without needing to read the paper.

I think you should consider how you write about these topics, since you sounded doubtful of the existence of GD because of the way you criticized the arguments in the paper.

You actually sounded like this is the first you've really heard of it, and even worse, as if this is the only evidence or report on it. Perhaps none of that is what you intended but that's how your post reads, aside from one or two comments that seem painfully PC. I don't really care if you don't doubt that it "could" be occurring. What I'm saying is that IT IS. But you think that's some kinda religion-speak.

I don't think it's fair to say it's religion just because there aren't sufficient numbers.

The whole point of lack of representation is that there weren't many women to begin with, so how could she have large numbers of data points. HOW.

You're like those reviewers who say "this could be better" but don't actually have any ideas for experiments. What's the experiment? Ruin more female postdocs' careers and then see how they like it? I mean, seriously.

And in a way I'm saying that the point is it doesn't matter how many. That even one example is horrifying and needs to be brought to the light of day.

The allegation that it was systematic is not surprising to most of us. We're also not surprised that the documentation is somewhat spotty.

What's surprising is that it could be documented at all.

But perhaps she went about it the wrong way, trying to quantify it at all?

GD is anecdotal by its very nature. Ever hear of little fields of study like
Cultural Anthropology?

Do you know how Cultural Anthropology works? They interview people and watch them work, play, live. Do you know how they document their observations? By writing down stories describing what happened.

Written observations in a narrative form.

It's much like a blog, in a way, if you assume that most bloggers aren't lying about what they're describing.

Or a Supreme Court decision. Or the notes taken by a clinical psychologist.

Many important things go on in the world, and believe it or not, they can be described accurately and completely without numbers.

To me, description is important and still a form of science, even if it's not as quantitative as you would like.

Still, I think the arguments about lack of numbers belie a certain naivete about how insidious these things are. Here are a couple more things for you to mull over.

1. Nobody likes backlash. So most women don't complain about GD. They just leave. That's going to limit your numbers right there.

2. Settlements include gag orders.Yep, that's right. Most of the time when someone complains about GD (or medical malpractice for that matter), the solution is to settle and that usually includes a promise not to ever mention it again. That's going to limit your pool of witnesses, too.

Again, I didn't read the paper so I don't know if these issues are mentioned in the article. But it's a negative result- unless she knew these women before they left, why they left and where they went, she can't track them down and find out if there were, perhaps, more cases than the 9 she reported.

But let's go back even further. Lots of the women who would have worked at Fermilab probably never got there. They probably quit science back when they were discriminated against in math class. There's lots of numbers on that, too. Maybe you should go look those up and think about whether that's not also a form of institutional GD.

Insidious, hard to quantify, Gender Discrimination

This post is in response to Okham's post, on which I would have loved to log a comment but won't for reasons of maintaining anonymity.

I'm not going to comment on the paper, you can read Okham's post and get to the paper (it was sent to me in a comment on one of my posts).

Because I haven't read it yet.

However I am going to comment on a couple of interesting points raised by Okham's blog.

And yes, I read Okham's post first because it was easy and it pissed me off rather than reading the article because I had to download a file and I knew it would depress me whether it was convincing or not.

Either way, it's bad news for me that either Sherry Towers is right (probably) but nobody believes her or will do anything about it (likely) or she's wrong and making the rest of us look bad and actually weakening our case.

See? Either way, depressing. I swear I'll read it when I'm in a better mood.

Regardless, I think Okham does us a disservice, or needs to get a little of enlightenment on this one issue in particular. I'm going to excerpt this part of the post here since the original post is very long and this is just one small section:

"Conference presentations
What about speaking invitations ? Have women been reserved fewer slots than they would have deserved ?

Before we address this issue, it need be stressed that conference presentations, in and of themselves, are only a modest "reward" for one's scientific accomplishments. It is commonly accepted that the main objective of a postdoctoral researcher, is not that of speaking at conferences, but rather landing a university faculty position. Towers' case of GD is ultimately about jobs, not invited talks. Thus, the importance of any imbalance in the allocation among researchers of conference presentations, depends on the (real or perceived) impact of presentations on the main professional aspiration of a postdoctoral scientist. If only a tenuous connection with career advancement can be established, a charge of GD based on conference presentations alone is not likely to be seen of much interest, nor substance.

Towers' data seem to indicate that speaking invitations were mostly granted to male researchers, although the validity of this contention is difficult to assess independently, as no raw numbers of speaking invitations for female and male researchers are provided, and Towers' "conference reward ratio" gives disproportionate weight to talks given by "unproductive" researchers.

The most striking result, however, is that the correlation between speaking invitations and faculty appointments is weak, virtually non-existent for male researchers (Table 1). In other words, the lion's share of conference presentations may have gone to male researchers, but they derived no measurable benefit from that. Towers herself seems at a loss explaining this. Wouldn't you expect speaking invitations to be especially important for "unproductive" (i.e., male) researchers ? After all, by delivering an effective presentation, an "unproductive" individual (whose CV is presumably weak) may impress the audience and partly compensate for his productivity gap with respect to his competitors.

The observed little impact on career advancement clearly raises doubts about the real importance of conference presentations; one cannot help wondering what the perception may have been, among researchers in the sample, how many of them may have regarded presentations as a "chore", rather than a "reward", and to what extent they have actively sought to obtain speaking invitations in the first place...

Generally speaking, it is clear that any action (deliberate or not) whose effect is that of depriving a researcher of the proper recognition for the work accomplished (including a chance to showcase in public his/her speaking ability) is unacceptable, and should therefore be prevented and remedied. At the same time, given that the impact of conference presentations on career advancement is unclear (to say the least), serious allegations such as "gender discrimination" and/or possible violation of Title IX regulations seem unwarranted, if solely or primarily based on conference presentations.

At a minimum, more information on, and greater understanding of the process by which conference slots are allocated is required. It is conceivable, for example, that productive researchers may simply not be interested in, nor place too much weight on presentations, which they may perceive as scarcely useful in bolstering their hiring bids (rightfully so, apparently)."

Okham raises a good point here that is easily refuted.

Q: Do conference presentations correlate with job offers?
A: Only if you give good ones.

The point here is that more study is needed. Here's how I think about this in a nutshell:


data 1. Women are invited as speakers less often than men.
data 2. Women are a smaller part of the applicant pool.

Hypothesis: Face time is more important for women than it is for men.

The kinds of gender-biased decisions pointed out in one of the comments illustrate this point nicely:

"...qualified women routinely get ranked lower than men for the following reasons.

Many of the confidential letters of recommendation for qualified women dwell on personality and degree of assertiveness (either too much or too little), rather than scientific accomplishments. This personality rating is then used to either say they will not be leaders in the field (not assertive enough) or they may be difficult to work with (too assertive). Being "just right" is an extremely narrow window. The letter for male applicants match potential leadership qualities with their work, instead of their personality.

I have watched faculty meetings which drop qualified women to the bottom of the list due to vague comments about not fitting in, or doesn't act like a physicist. Such comments might have merit, if they refer to experimental style, teaching, or thinking. However, these comments upon later elucidation, refer to her clothes, her persona, her... femaleness.

Once low in the ranking, the woman candidate is packaged up as a "member of the minority pool, who was interviewed, but didn't make the cut", and this satisfies the University rules about affirmative action (or whatever they call it these days)." -- Anonymous

Now, I only have one good anecdote on this point, but I'm used to use it because this is a blog.

A couple of years ago I went to meet with some collaborators, and they wanted me to give a seminar so they asked for my CV.

After my talk, one of the PIs said to me, "Wow, you're really MUCH more impressive in person than you are on paper."

So there are two points to my logic here.

1. Women appear less productive on paper than we really are.
One of the reasons we appear less productive is because we often get bumped down the author list, or our papers get downgraded to 'lesser' journals because of the catch-22.

You know the catch-22, I blog about it a lot. If you self-promote, you're being arrogant and/or bitchy. If you don't, you're screwed. It's a lose-lose.

So we often get less of a byline than we deserve.

In other words, our publications systematically under-represent our productivity.

But I don't have to support that with evidence- other people already have. It's the middle of the night so I'm not going to hunt for the references, but I'll do it if you're too lazy to go look for them. (I don't get the impression that Okham is in any way lazy.)

2. The chance to change people's minds by meeting them in person is priceless. Maybe Sherry Towers tried to make this point, I don't know. But it needs to be made vehemently.

My impression is that many of my problems at work have been because of one simple thing.

Assumption based on observation: Men are terrified of women crying.

(I hope you're laughing because I think this is a hilarious topic, but bear with me because I do have a point.)

Because men are terrified of women crying, they tend to avoid confronting us even more than they avoid confronting their male colleagues and advisees (passive aggressive types that we get in science, especially).

Since there is no direct communication with us, assumptions are made. Men confer with each other about what they think is going on with us.

Erroneous assumptions are always made in the absence of actual data.

Assumption based on observation: Men who don't have much contact with women besides their family members (i.e. especially in fields where women are in the tiny minority) DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT WOMEN.

Ahh, that reminds me of a great song from a Broadway show....

And so, dear folks, this brings us back to the Great Divide. At the end of the day, here is the take-home message from Okham's post:

"I cannot really say that I have ever witnessed a blatant case of gender discrimination (GD) on the job" -- Okham.

Dear Okham, I have. And so have most of us women bloggers. One reason Sherry has only 9 people in her study? BLATANT GENDER BIAS AT ALL LEVELS LIMITS THE NUMBER OF WOMEN.

In other words, YES, IT'S THAT BLATANT, BUT ONLY IF IT'S HAPPENING TO YOU PERSONALLY.

Baffled: confident vs. arrogant?

I've noticed this is an ongoing theme. A commenter on FSP's latest post said she finds comfort in knowing that even insecure people can do well in science.

I would argue that many insecure people are successful in science, but unfortunately most of them have developed coping skills that are damaging to everyone around them.

One common defense mechanism is the tendency to lash out when feeling threatened. Since confident people don't often feel threatened, I've learned that usually when people are defensive or playing dirty, it's because they lack confidence.

In support of this hypothesis, some commenters on this blog accuse me of being arrogant.

In my experience in real life, when people I thought were arrogant revealed their insecurities to me, I realized I was just jealous because they seemed so confident or otherwise successful when I am not.

In some ways, this is an issue that has long hurt women in the workplace.

Confident women are labeled as aggressive or bitchy.

To help clarify this discussion, I will paraphrase a couple of definitions of Confident from the free dictionary I found via Google:

Confident =

"Marked by assurance, as of success."
"Very bold; presumptuous."

Vs.

Arrogant =

"Having or diplaying overbearing self-worth or self-assurance."
"Assumption of one's superiority over others."

So I have to wonder, is Arrogant the new Bitchy?

I was thinking about this because a friend was telling me how she realized her boss thinks she's a knowitall, and she has to fix this.

She's not a knowitall. At all.

I know this because she frequently calls me to confirm her ideas. Most of the time she's on the right track and doesn't need any help from me, but she does need that validation, that little boost of confidence. If she were a knowitall, would she need that?

But somehow her boss is threatened by her, I think, and so she has to make a point to reveal her doubts and sources more often to help alleviate this misimpression (I just made that word up, does it sound Bushy enough?).

In my experience, I can't win either way. If I give credit to my colleagues, I'm told not to because it undermines my Authority as an Expert.

But I get labeled "arrogant" or "knowitall" when I want to present my original ideas in papers or talks.

I have to assume this is partly because I'm female (oh yes, and "young"). I can only think of one female colleague who is outspoken about her original ideas, so I don't have enough data points for comparison. She is exactly the type who could be considered "arrogant" if you don't know her personally vs. "confident" (in a good way) if you do.

But being confident doesn't mean you never doubt yourself. Or does it?

What really baffles me is that my male colleagues who are similarly outspoken about their ideas are definitely arrogant. And even if they are not, they seem arrogant, which is effectively all that matters.

But contrary to the negative effects for women, appearing arrogant earns men more respect, not less.

This may not be true everywhere, but it is how I perceive the situation where I work.

Is this yet another thing that is worse in academia, I wonder?

Big News.

Hey! Look at this!

A Bill to eliminate gender bias in science, technology, engineering and math has been introduced in the House!

Will wonders never cease!

Write to your representatives and tell them to vote for it!

That's all for now!

Departments supportive of 'difficult' women?

This article illustrates quite nicely the folly of ranking schools based on quantitative measures like number of articles published in Science and Nature. And that there is no such thing as "a good school." It always depends on what department you're in, which campus, etc.

Obviously these rankings are meant for students trying to decide where to apply to college, but I'm curious as a potential applicant for faculty positions.

Is anyone else curious to know what would happen if we could rank departments based on their sexism? Would something like that actually put pressure on the old boys to clean up their act?

Anyone care to post some anonymous (you anonymous, the school by name) rankings of their own departments? Where would you say yours rates on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most egalitarian and synergistic even with conflicting opinions from strong personality types (probably doesn't exist), 1 being the most sexist, demeaning, lawsuit-deserving place in the world?

Obviously I can't say where I've been, but I'd say the department where I did my undergrad deserved a pretty low rating, somewhere in the 2-4 range. In fact, come to think of it, everywhere I've been has been about that bad...

And you?

Women: Be More Professional Than Men.

I've been busy of late. Some of it is good busy. Much of it is overwhelmed exhausted thankless busy.

One theme I've been hearing is with regards to the job market, which I'm not really on, but I am still taking notes for future reference. I gather little tidbits and write them here, since I think it's ridiculous that we're all expected to rediscover the wheel.

Today I learned: men can have cute websites, women can't.

Similarly, men can have cute CVs that show their enthusiasm and personality: women can't.

I've always hated this mentality, that we have to Sound Professional in order to be, you know, good at what we do.

We have to pretend like the research was done by a robot instead of a person.

Or perhaps it should be said, there is the perception that research must be done by a man or a sexless robot, but god help us all, not by a living breathing woman.

Women, says the Voice of Authority, you don't have The Unwritten Rule Book, so you better adhere strictly to all the rules.

I get this advice from both women and men, but I think the truly un-sexist men are most likely to steer me wrong. They don't realize that what men can and do get away with, or even benefit from (e.g. showing personality), in my case won't fly, and will only get me in trouble.

I'm sure it's no help that I have such a troublesome personality.

Stem Cells as a Woman's Issue.

I have thus far stayed out of the fray, I think. But this morning I was reading an article- a very inaccurate article- about stem cells and it got me pretty pissed off.

For me, there are really two sticky issues.

First, it's an abortion rights issue. Yes, it is. Why (you ask and scratch your head, puzzled)?

Here's the logic used by the Bush administration:

sperm + egg = person. Immediately. Do not pass go, do not develop into an embryo and then incubate IN A WOMAN. Do not admit that we don't have any other way, to date, of growing people.

So they are refusing to allow researchers to 'destroy embryos' by studying what some states (like the one I was reading about this morning) consider 'fetuses' from the moment of conception.

The WOMAN never enters into the equation.

Nevermind the reality that, without women both willing and able to be implanted with someone else's embryo, the embryos are worthless, anyway.

Have I said this before? I say it again.


Second, it's a Your Body Is Your Own Business issue.

I have a friend who went through a really hellish set of infertility treatments before finally having children (not without complications). Having done that, she's so bitter she doesn't want to donate her leftover eggs or frozen embryos to research. I get that. Why help fertility doctors, or other doctors, or PhD doctors, if they're a bunch of jerks?

And she has a point. What scares me the most about embryonic stem cell research is the need for human eggs. From women, of course. And lots of 'em.

I've heard a little about the consent forms and issues with whether it's better or worse to pay women to donate for research, and so on. But the whole concept makes me squirm. Money aside, what we're really talking about are women's body parts.

This is not breast milk, which pregnant women mostly generate whether they want to or not, and may or may not use. This is something that requires lengthy, expensive and painful injections of hormones at doses with mostly unknown side-effects.

If we were talking about men donating not just sperm, but their actual testicles, would that ever be legal? Would men ever say about that, "hey if they want to, that's their business"?

I'm thinking probably not.

What do you think? Are we being asked to sign petitions for things we're not sure we agree with, or is it just me? Would legalizing stem cell research at the federal level actually lead to fewer women's reproductive and healthcare rights?

Up... and then down.

Yesterday was a Pretty Good Day (PGD). I don't have a lot of those. I set up an experiment, helped a student, went to an interesting seminar, emailed some people about reagents and they REPLIED RIGHT AWAY, and I read some papers. All around, it was a good balance of thinking and doing, alone-time and interaction-time, faith in ideas and faith that there are some people who actually are willing to share both ideas and tools, so we can actually get some work done.

Sigh. Why can't they all be PGD?

Today started out as a PGD and went downhill. I managed to do almost everything I needed to do before a meeting, managed a non-rushed lunch and actually found some people to eat with!

After lunch things got a little hairy. I had to do some running around looking for stuff I didn't have at the last minute (e.g. in the middle of the experiment)- poor planning on my part, mostly. Okay, fine. Disaster averted.

But I got interrupted by someone needing help, and didn't have the heart to just say NO when I should have... am still working on that skill.

Then at the end of the day, a couple of guys in our lab were sitting around talking. Every once in a while I would say something and notice that the one guy was rolling his eyes at the other one, like "When will she shut up?"

Maybe I'm just being hypersensitive. Maybe the guy had something in his contact lens, I don't know. But I could really do without that crap. hint: If you don't want to talk to me, don't have your conversation right next to my bench.

And I was struck by how typical it was: the guys are sitting around chatting, while the only female in sight is working her tail off.

Again with the math: we literally have to be 10 times better than our male peers to get the same job.

I was thinking about this today, how we get hit with bullshit stereotypes all the time. You know how they claim that women have fewer publications because we tend to collaborate more and have lots of middle-author papers? There was an article in Science recently (sometime in August, I think) about how women, on average, have fewer patents than their male peers. The explanation? Women collaborate LESS.

How can we both collaborate TOO MUCH and TOO LITTLE??

Oh, they always find a way to screw us over.

Anyway so at the end of the day, I heard from a PI friend that his wife, a postdoc, has some job offers. He was telling me this since they will probably move. Now, here is what my little brain thought when I heard that:

Now his position will be open, right?

Is she getting offers because he helped her shop her CV around to a bunch of schools (and they get him as part of the bargain)?

Who the hell is getting job offers? This woman better walk on water, or I'm going to be PISSED.

Lately I've been going to a lot of seminars by senior-ish postdocs, and it's quite clear to me that I'm among the top postdocs who have similar levels of experience. So I'm left with trying to logic my way out of a very illogical, very black box:

Assumption 1: My CV does not suck.
Assumption 2: I deserve a job.
Assumption 3: There are no jobs.

Observation 1: I'm not getting offers.
Observation 2: Other people are getting offers.

Conclusion 1: I must suck.
Conclusion 2: There are no jobs for people like me.

I'm either working in the wrong field, not supported by politics (which I knew), and/or it's just that nobody can picture having me as a colleague. I'm not likeable enough.

Goody. Not much I can do about any of that. Despite my efforts to meet people in positions of power, I think my un-likeability prevents them from, you know, bending over backwards to help. So it all comes back to the cult of personality.

I've read the body language books, the communication books, the management books, the managing-up books. I've mellowed considerably, believe it or not, since I started grad school, and I've made a serious effort to learn how to be more patient and give people the benefit of the doubt.

But there's only so much you can change about yourself.

So I'm a bit of an arrogant bitch.

Let's say I can't get a job in science that I would actually like, because people find me unbearably opinionated. Is there any kind of job where that isn't considered a liability?