Special Victims: the "she had an affair with him" accusation

The other night, I caught up with a friend whom I hadn't seen since before the holiday. Let's call her Mariah. Mariah is married, has a child, and likes her job. She generally seems in good spirits when I see her. So I was surprised when she needed to unload a story of frustration.

Mariah was complaining about some mutual acquaintances, and saying how she heard that ThisOtherGirl "had an affair" with OlderGuy (who is sort of a mentor figure in this situation).

Which just sounded like nasty, unfounded gossip to me.

Not to defend ThisOtherGirl, since I don't know her very well, but I tried to explain that I think this is something people often say about women they don't like.

Mariah said, "Oh, I didn't think of it that way. And now that you mention it, I'm not sure I trust the source."

When Mariah said that, I suddenly realized I knew exactly who the source was, and I knew he wasn't reliable. So it was probably just gossip.

But Mariah is really struggling. She wants more mentorship than she is getting, and she is looking for a reason why.

It reminded me a lot of the favoritism I witnessed in academia, and the office politics I've seen since I left.

Because what if OtherGirl is actually being harassed by OlderGuy, but everyone else is misreading the situation? It's so much easier to choose the default option of blaming the woman, like she was asking for it. Or trying to sleep her way up the ladder.

----

I was still thinking about this today when I watched this new episode of Law and Order: SVU .

SPOILER ALERT: I can't really say what I want to say without ruining it a little bit for you, so if you watch the show, go watch it first, and then come back. We'll still be here. 

----


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Oh, nevermind me.

I have a couple of short stories to relate about men making me feel invisible.

1. My friend's husband who won't speak to me

Recently, we had dinner with a friend of mine, at her house. I like her a lot, but I had never met her husband. They are both here from Faraway country.

She had never said anything bad about her husband, just that he worked a lot.

I got the vague impression that maybe he should have helped more with the kids, but only because I wanted my friend to be able to go back to work. One thing she had mentioned specifically was needing more intellectual stimulation. But she felt she couldn't look for a job at all until they figured out their work visas (she assumed she had to get her work status through his application for a green card, rather than applying for a job and a visa on her own). And they needed to arrange for childcare.

So I had some trepidation about meeting the husband. I wasn't at all sure what to expect.

He wasn't there yet when we arrived. When he came in, he seemed nice enough, made eye contact and some small conversation.

I was relieved.
You really don't want to know if your friend is married to a jerk.

But pretty quickly it became clear that he wanted to talk to my boyfriend, not to me.

This was obvious to the point where he would ask a question, and I would have something to say when my boyfriend did not, but as I began to speak he would turn and look at my boyfriend and say something like, "You haven't?"

It was as if I wasn't even there.

Afterwards, my boyfriend commented that it was noticeable, even to him, that this guy was not comfortable talking to women, or something.

Or something, indeed.

It was all I could do to try to describe (I can't even come close to describing), what it is like to have to work with guys like that. Or interview with guys like that. Or network with guys like that. How many of them there are. What the consequences are for your career.

Afterwards, we talked a little about how we might hope that there are enough guys who are not like that, to tip the balance. How some of these guys don't realize they're doing it (but some do).

How it's hard to know what to do about it.

Hard for me, sure, but also very hard for my friend. No wonder she's nervous about trying to look for work.


2. The dismissive colleague

This is a particular example of something that has happened to me over, and over, and over, and over again.

The scene:

I'm working on something new, temporarily, with people I don't know. This might be a different lab or a different office than where I've worked previously. I have a specific set of tasks I need to accomplish. I do not have all the information I need. Someone says Dude is the guy to ask about this thing I need to do. 

Me: Hey, you've done Y before? Can you help me?

Dude: That depends, what do you need.

Me: Well I'm trying to do X, and I have a couple of ideas. I was thinking about doing Y or Z. Do you have any experience with these?

Dude: What? Why are you even asking about Z? Use Y. I don't even know what Z is.

Me: Um... Ok, thanks.



Later, someone else says: Hey, that Dude can give you Stuff to help you get started.

Me: I asked him already. He didn't give me anything.

Them: That's strange, he's done Y. He didn't give you Stuff? Why didn't he give you Stuff?

Me: I don't know. I didn't know that Stuff existed. He didn't mention it.




Later, after banging my head for a day or two, I try again. 

Me (to the Dude): Hey, I heard a rumor that you have Stuff related to Y, that maybe I could use?

Dude: Oh yeah, I have that. Why are you asking about that? What are you doing?

Me (for the second time): I'm doing X. That's why I was asking about Y.

Dude: Nobody told me you were doing that.


Um... I did. I told you. It was the first thing I said to you. 



I'll admit I didn't always ask the best, most specific question the first time, but at first I never knew what to ask. And Dude is usually the type who never volunteers any information.

Mostly I get annoyed at having to repeat myself, because invariably Dude didn't listen to me at all.

And it always turned out that my manager (this happened more than once, with different managers), who was supposed to have arranged things for me ahead of time, had not said anything to anyone about what I was doing or what I would need.

So when I showed up and started asking for Stuff, it was the first anyone had heard about it.

Harsh reality

I'm having one of those weeks. And it's only Wednesday.

A well-meaning former colleague sent me an ad for a faculty position in another city, at a school where I don't know anyone.

Sigh.

I said thank you. What's the point in explaining that I'm not going to waste my time and energy applying? I took it as a compliment that she seems to think I deserve a faculty position.

Okay, if that were the worst thing that happened all week, that would be fine. But it's death by a thousand pinpricks, so of course it wasn't the only thing.

Also, a evil former colleague has a paper coming out soon in Nature.

I knew this was coming, but it still pissed me off. Because it's the definition of incremental. Still, somehow the evil boys club got it accepted for publication in a top journal. I'm pretty sure some kind of voodoo sacrifices were involved.

There's also this hullabaloo going on about women in tech, which is just kind of pissing me off because somehow computer science gets to make a big deal about it, as if they invented the concept, while scientific workforce imbalances continue to languish in obscurity??

Thanks to people like this guy bitching about how women get more attention in tech, from the media and for funding.

Read a little about this, and you'll be smacked in the face with offensive accusations that women just "aren't interested" and the idea that it's too late to do anything about it with adult women coming from other careers. Instead, some women are proposing we have to go to the source and make sure little girls aren't playing with Barbies?

Which isn't exactly going to help those of us who did in fact choose other tech-related careers, only to find there are no jobs for us womenfolk once we're done giving ourselves concussions on the thick glass ceiling between postdoc and faculty position.

Anyway, that Techcrunch article ignited some backlash, which opened the discussion again, although nobody seems to have any new solutions. Echoes of Larry Summers, sort of.

Personally, I think this whole discussion is just a sign that tech is starting to suffer from the same thing academia has had for a long time: a bad case of too many wannabes and too little funding.

My compsci friends have been telling me for years that my field is unusually bad, that compsci doesn't see any of these kinds of backstabbing maneuvers, or discrimination, etc. And I wondered for a while if it was because compsci is newer, or because they don't need much money to do what they do.

I thought maybe it will take another couple hundred years for the tech sector to evolve to a higher level of backstabbiness?

But now I think they might be well on their way.

I don't know which is worse. The guys saying it's not their fault, or the women saying it's not a problem and nobody should rush to fix it.

Meanwhile, this post and several comments over at FSP further confirm that so-called "subtle" discrimination continues to hold back women at the faculty level by overwhelming them with heavy teaching loads, while limiting their access to influential committees.

FSP is nothing short of disappointing in her response that in FSP's case, everything turned out to be fine, as if that makes it okay that these kinds of occurrences are still rampant now . Or something.

I think this just illustrates that nobody who is content with their situation is going to be really active in changing the system. FSP seems to be the picture of peaceably complacent.

I've seen this same attitude all the time in lab. It's a kind of protectionist, "not in my backyard" denial. Like it's fine to have a radioactive spill... as long as it's not near my bench. It's fine that your experiments with the shared reagents are failing, as long as mine are still working (or I have my own stock! hahahaha!).

I think what we're going to need are a few good martyrs. Because there's no kindness in complacency.

In which I met the press, and started reading a new book

Yeah, I did it again. I watched David Gregory.

I've decided he's pretty good at interviewing. He just sucks at moderating. Last week's was a fiasco with people talking over each other, arguing, and he couldn't get a word in edgewise to control them or the direction of the conversation.

This week's was more watchable. (Probably because half of it was pre-recorded and edited!)

..............

So I was surprised to find that I actually agreed with some of what pastor Rick Warren had to say. Much of it, actually.

Of course this post is not just about agreeing - that would be dull. The two things he said that I didn't like were about a) gay marriage and b) abortion rights.

He said he's more sympathetic to gays now that he's doing more AIDS outreach, even though he has these Biblical views on homosexuality. That's just... yuck. Condescending, righteous. But okay. Sympathy is better than hatred or violence.

But then he went on to say how he believes there are 46 million unborn Americans who don't get to vote because they were aborted.

Now that's just ridiculous.

He quoted Peggy Noonan as saying that any 16-year-old boy who uses a condom knows when life begins.

So now 16-year-old boys are the experts.

Of course! What were we thinking? Let's elect them to run everything! Oh and Peggy Noonan! She's my new hero!

(???!!!)

He also said something about the economy that got my attention. He said that with unemployment at around 10% in this country, that's equivalent to the entire country of Canada being out of work.

Wheew. Is that even right?

The US census puts the US population at 308,046,671. (I'd love to know who that last person is, wouldn't you? Ha ha ha, no seriously there are let's say 8 babies born per minute in the US).

So ~10% of the steady-state (ish) US population then is about 30 million people. Okay yeah, that sounds about right from what I've been hearing on the news (give or take for people who are able to work). Of course, some states are worse than the average (Michigan is at 15%).

So what's the population of Canada (I know it's low)?

Apparently Rick Warren is more or less correct. It's 33,859,000, at least according to wikipedia.

Of course, I disagreed with what he said next, but not very strongly. He said we need to get people back to work first, and worry about healthcare after that. Personally, I think we need to solve healthcare first, since then it's not literally a life-and-death question of whether we're all working in traditional careers or not.

And then he said something interesting when David asked him about what happened at Ft. Hood. And he gave the standard speech about how, and I'm paraphrasing now, there are nutjobs in every religion. But he said they are fundamentalists. And he said yeah, it's a term that has changed in meaning. Fundamentalist used to refer to people who took the Bible too literally (I think that's what he said). But now he said it means anyone who believes in a religion but refuses to listen.

And I thought, hey, that's my problem. I'm a scientific fundamentalist. I don't subscribe to what the scientific church is saying.

I want to go back to why we believed in this stuff in the first place. So that makes me a fringe lunatic. Not that I'm going to physically attack anyone. But it's another way to describe feeling marginalized and abandoned by something you really tried to have faith in.

.............

In a strange kind of irony, the other guests on today's episode were Bill and Melinda Gates.

This issue of the Gates Foundation is interesting to me, and I was curious to hear what they had to say.

They said what they were talking about is only 0.25% of the entire US budget (I think they're referring to NIH funding, but they didn't say the word "NIH"). They said the most important part of the US economy is innovation, and especially in health research and at universities, and that it had not been cut.

Um, really Bill? You DROPPED OUT OF COLLEGE and you have the nerve to say that
a) universities are the most important source of innovation
b) research has not been cut

???? He said the "best" scientists are doing all this great stuff.... As usual, I'm afraid it's not the horse's mouth that's talking. How is Bill Gates qualified to say anything about the "best" science, especially health research? Because he has a lot of money?

Sigh.

Meanwhile I'm still unresolved on whether I really support the Gates foundation's efforts. Okay yes, I agree that getting vaccines to sick kids everywhere is good and worth doing. But do I agree that our priorities should be to help save the rest of the world when the US is not doing nearly as well as they want us to believe?

Yeah, this might be news to you - it was news to me. And it kind of made me laugh.

I started reading Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. And immediately felt like, oh my god, I really liked what I had read of her previous work, but now I may have to write her a fan letter.

Right up front, she gives you the cold, hard facts.

Allow me to quote:

Surprisingly, when psychologists undertake to measure the relative happiness of nations, they routinely find that Americans are not, even in prosperous times and despite our vaunted positivity, very happy at all. A recent meta-analysis of over a hundred studies of self-reported happiness worldwide found Americans ranking only twenty-third

And then she goes on to explain:

How can we be so surpassingly "positive" in self-image and stereotype without being the world's happiest and best-off people? The answer, I think, is that positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology

And then she strips it down to the bare bones:

If the generic "positive thought" is correct and things are really getting better, if the arc of the universe tends toward happiness and abundance, then why bother with the mental effort of positive thinking? Obviously, because we do not fully believe that things will get better on their own.

Well, that's exactly it, isn't it.

She's nothing if not opinionated:

The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts. Positive thinking may be a quintessentially American activity, associated in our minds with both individual and national success, but it is driven by a terrible insecurity.

To which I say, AMEN.

And I think this underlines exactly what has been driving me nuts about the attitude of scientists in this country. It makes me see how to have more sympathy for them.

Maybe it's not a conscious choice to be in denial about what is happening. Maybe it's cultural. They can't help being blindly optimistic and positive to a fault. It permeates everything about this country.

Thanks, Barbara. You made my week.

And then she goes on to explain some more of what has been baffling me about the mentality of scientists (and apparently, everyone) in this country:

The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must be because you didn't try hard enough, didn't believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success. As the economy has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly emphasized this negative judgment: to be disappointed, resentful, or downcast is to be a "victim" and a "whiner."

Wow, I couldn't say it better than that.

Essentially her point is, if we put half as much effort into ACTUALLY FIXING THINGS as we do into our carefully built and protected denial and arrogance, our country would be a lot better off. And ultimately, we'd all be a lot happier.

...........

I'm thankful that I'm in a country where we're allowed to access any and all websites we want to, and we can talk about these things (even if it requires a pseudonym!).

From sea to shining sea.

Back to the Sixties.

Next time you're looking for inspiration, watch the Obamas' graduation day speeches. These two could have been very successful as televangelists for education if we hadn't given them their current jobs.

Michelle Obama spoke at University of California at Merced and you can read the text of her speech online.

I thought it was interesting to note, too, that Michelle's speech was mostly about other people. She mentioned a lot of names of students, those who apparently pushed hard for her to visit there. I thought that was interesting, especially given that our President uses his own experiences as examples, and he talks about his mother quite frequently in his speeches.

The text of the President's speech at Notre Dame is here and I watched it live on, of all places, Fox. I really enjoyed learning about how the civil rights negotiations almost broke down. I never learned the history of the 1960's in school.

Of course as soon as the speech ended, despite the standing ovation, Fox brought out our favorite chump, Michael Steele, who immediately started criticizing the President. If you don't know who Michael Steele is (and I was surprised to learn recently that some of my friends had never heard of him), go to Rachel Maddow's show online and type his name in the search box. I particularly like the way she highlights what a joke he is. So I turned the tv off when he started saying the same old things he always says.

Overall, I was hugely impressed with the Notre Dame speech, with only perhaps a very minor quibble over a point at the end- the last analogy to "fishermen." It's stupid that semantics matters, but I think it would have been better to say "they discovered that they all enjoyed fishing." Why re-emphasize that no women were included on the original civil rights commission? In the same speech where you want to make a claim for women's equal rights? Come on, who edited that?

(And I'm not even going to mention what some of my hippie-ish vegan, animal-rights activist friends say about fishing.)

In the end, we're not all fishermen. The point is supposed to be that we're all human beings.

Speaking of human beings, I guess I was thinking about these "little" slights we all take for granted, because like a lot of geeks I saw the new Star Trek movie.

I liked it well enough, but one thing stood out to me. By keeping basically the same characters as the original show, and the same miniskirts, the people who made this movie are helping (inadvertently or otherwise ) to perpetuate some of the same old stereotypes.

The original show had almost no women, and the new movie was the same in that regard.

Why? Just a total lack of originality? Because of Pepsi throwback, we have to be all nostalgic for the 1960s?

Perhaps the blackest humor of these filmmakers' choices is that the story is set a couple hundred years into the future, and yet childbirth still appears to be the same medical mystery (just like in the Star Wars movies). How depressing is that. Here's hoping that in the future, someone will at least have figured out some better solutions for PMS.

I always liked how the Star Trek franchise promoted technology, the spirit of exploration, and diversity: celebrating the differences and commonalities among races, and (at least among the imaginary space varieties) species.

I can only wonder how much watching these shows as a child must have influenced me to want a career as a scientist. They were some of the only shows I remember watching that promoted women in roles other than the traditional mom, girlfriend, daughter or housekeeper (unlike watching reruns of The Brady Bunch from the same era).

And although it was too late to help me choose a major, I rejoiced when they created a woman character who excelled at engineering.

Yet here we are, more than 40 years later (the original show first aired in 1966), and girls are only recently starting to be allowed to command space missions, both on tv and in real life. While some shows are attempting to put women in other interesting science-related careers, like CSI, what still gets the most attention? Their cleavage.

So I can't help feeling like the uproar over Obama's speech with regard to the abortion debate highlights how in the real-life year 2009, women are still pretty far from "equal".

Even our President doesn't have a solution to bridge that particular divide, but I like that he wants to try.

More jobs... for men.

Watched the podcast of Meet the Press this morning over breakfast, trying to get up the energy to leave the house.

It did not inspire much optimism to hear, at the end of his interview, the little anecdote from Obama's spokesman, David Axelrod, about a woman whose husband lost his job and how heartbreaking that was.

Uh.... what about HER job? What is she doing, besides writing to the President to complain???

So my question is simple. For the job creation statistics, are they based on assuming that EVERYONE above a certain age needs a full-time job, or are they based on assuming that only the MEN need the jobs?

Because my guess is that there are whole swaths of the country where it's assumed that, as long as the husband has a decent-paying job, everything is hunky-dory.

Then I was looking at readthestimulus.org, and particularly at this little graphic linked from the washington post, which illustrates quite nicely by the size of the bubbles, exactly how much money is being spent on what. Except, it's not exactly the part I care about.

I would really like to see something equivalent for the NIH budget, and particularly for the part of the NIH budget that is going to be helped by the stimulus.

And then I'd like to see how it's going to be distributed. My guess is that it's all going to go to senior people who are over 60 and have already had a career.

oh and ps.

FYI, to the people who were offended by my comment about the 80-year-old PI who just got 2 R01s renewed, here's a couple of tidbits for you, just to clarify:

1. It's a SHE. Those of you who complained ASSUMED it was a man. That says more about you than it does about me.

2. I'm not bothered that she got the grants, so much as that this was on her 3rd revision, she still has a faculty position despite being more than 15 years beyond the eligible age for receiving social security, and she just effectively bought herself 5 more years of full-time employment.

My point is, there is something culturally fucked up about a career where

1. If you just wait in line long enough, your grants will get funded even if you didn't revise them at all

2. Everyone refuses to retire because they're, what, terrified of being bored? Too poor?

3. Everyone else refuses to make it desirable (or god forbid, required) to retire...

... and yet we have this massive job shortage because the people in control of everything are sitting pretty in jobs they've had for over 50 years.

Just think about that for a minute. 50 years is a long fucking time. These 80-year-olds have had their jobs since they were younger than we are now. Their generation was hired as faculty when they were less than 30 years old.

But hey, more power to her. If she left now, there would be 50% fewer female faculty in my department. And we have a hiring freeze. hahahahahaha

Happy President's Day, everybody.

Control needs to control.

So there I was, sitting on the toilet, reading an article in TIME magazine (accidentally delivered to our house, we don't subscribe).

The article was by someone named Lev Grossman, for whose name I apologize. What a sad name.

The article was about Candace Bushnell's latest book, which I had no intention of ever reading (and still don't).

What caught my eye was this section about the book:

It has an actual Weltanschauung-- it gets at the deep truth of shallow people. Women control men with sex. Men control women with money.

I have read and re-read those sentences over and over, trying to figure out what to make of them.

I can't tell if Lev Grossman thinks this description of the battle of the sexes applies to all people? Or only shallow people? Or only the people in the book?

Or, assuming it's not just bad writing but the fact that I live in an elitist academic bubble, what if it's not just that Lev Grossman who thinks this explains real life, but everybody?

Is this what most people really think? Is this how the world actually works, and I just missed the memo?

Coincidentally, while I was thinking about this, a friend sent me this other article in TIME about a recent study on how much gender actually matters for things like salary.

And that kind of blew my mind. In a nutshell: if you could change just one variable, and that variable happened to be gender, it would explain an awful lot of shit that women deal with in the workplace.

It's a flawed study, yes, but it's a very interesting concept. Doing an actual controlled experiment. Amazing.

Particularly with regard to the question about men controlling women with money, this seems to be true. Being of the fairer gender is sufficient to incur all kinds of hell upon you.

And all this talk about jobs and the economy has me thinking, more than ever, about who has money and who controls it.

But back to this question about women controlling men with sex.

Are we living in a rerun of some earlier time, some Pleasantville where women wear only dresses, spend all day cooking dinner, and are never anything more than mothers and wives?

Maybe even worse than that, am I failing to exert the one power I do have? Should I be flirting with my advisors and recommendation letter writers in order to get what I want? Should I harass my male students?

Clearly, that's not going to happen. I would rather be the wife at home than the secretary who has to sleep with her boss to stay employed.

But hey, that's just me.

But the point is, one of our major problems is that men fear us, because they don't understand us. And by doing that, they imagine differences where there aren't any. So in order to deal with that fear of the unknown, men try to control us. With money.

And for the most part, it seems, they are succeeding.

It's a man's world, they say. It certainly feels that way.

So speaking of reruns, let's see, where were we when this all happened before?

1868 15th Constitutional amendment makes it a federal law that black men have the right to vote; women are not allowed.

1920 19th Constitutional amendment gives women the federal right to vote.

So if that's at all predictive, assuming Obama wins, it will still be another 50+ years before we have a woman president?

Woman = (man) - (50 years of my life wasted waiting for men to get a clue)

Yeah, that feels about right. So by that math, my career will be picking up speed in another 2 decades or so.

Unless McCain is elected and dies the first week in office. Then we'll have a nutjob creationist woman president for a week, before she is assassinated.

And then all hell will break loose. Won't that be fun?

Or am I just being optimistic.

Winning your battles vs. Losing yourself

On to the next self-help book, which is a woman's guide for negotiating.

There is an important topic. But I really don't like the book.

Keep in mind, this is not a book of Feminist-Friendly Negotiating Skills. Quite the opposite. I realized this when I read the beginning, which was a while ago, and at the time I was pretty busy. So I stopped.

I stopped because pretty early in the book, they said that rather than confronting men at work, women would do better to remind them gently and repeatedly until they come around.

In other words, they said we should nag. Nag, nag, nag.

I've tried nagging. Sometimes it works. But it really wears me out. If that's what I'm supposed to do to succeed at work, I'll never make it.

But since I've read almost everything in my house, I thought I would pick up this book again and just see what else they said. Much as I don't like the content, I find it interesting how they spell it out. For example, they never actually use the word "nag", but that is exactly what they're telling us to do.

So I just got to a part in the book where they give an example of a woman getting what she wants.

This woman wanted to go to a professional school. Her father wanted her to get married and have children.

Instead of confronting him on the issue of whether she wanted to ever have children vs. wanting to have a career, she persuaded him that going to school would help her make a living until she found a husband.

She got what she wanted, and her father never knew that he was being a sexist bastard.

Oops. That's not exactly how the book tells it. They just say, look this woman got to go to school even though her father said no.

I was discussing this with a friend who said, well that's just picking your battles.

I have problems using tactics like this. I might win the battle, but then I find I haven't done anything to stop the war. In other words, if you let people go on making assumptions about what you want, you're going to end up fighting the same battles over and over.

Maybe you can't really ever change anyone's beliefs. If this woman's father really believes the place of women is to have children, maybe it's impossible for her to change his mind.

But if you don't even try? And you let him go on thinking he's right-?

This book consistently tells women to use tactics of manipulation.

Another approach they espouse is to get men to think your idea was their idea, and therefore approve it when they would otherwise say no.

And here again, I think this is a very dangerous strategy to use in the workplace.

You might win the immediate battle, but you'll never move up. You're guaranteeing that this guy will take credit for your ideas, and in my experience, chances are very good that he'll never make sure you get the credit you deserve.

For example, I have a friend who works in a lab with a really sexist PI. He is the worst kind, because he thinks he's not sexist. Most people who know him outside the lab would say he was not sexist. He doesn't make ridiculous comments about how women should just stay home and have babies. He's a modern sexist: he just doesn't want to work with women unless he feels that he has complete control.

My friend figured out that, if she wants anything, she has to ask a guy in her lab to propose it to the PI. And then the answer is always yes. It doesn't matter what it is. The pattern is consistent: if she proposes it herself, the answer is always no.

I totally understand that she has to do this to get her work done, or get out of that lab.

She went to the office that handles sexual discrimination on her campus, and they said it was too subtle, there was nothing they could do unless she wanted to file a formal complaint, but they discouraged that since it would be very hard to prove.

The only solution I can see is for the men in the lab to tell the PI that his behavior is inappropriate. They are the only witnesses. She has tried approaching other PIs in the department, but they are totally unreceptive (against university discrimination policy, of course, but what can you do).

Although the men in her lab are helping her win the daily battles, and they like to say they're feminists, they're really not.

They're perpetuating the sexism when they're in the perfect position to effect a change. Instead of helping her be treated equally, they're indirectly getting credit for her ideas.

Meanwhile, my friend is stuck using these un-feminist tactics to win these little battles on a daily basis, which is making her hate herself.

Now, the authors of the negotiation book argue that these approaches work well for women because we can't use the same methods that work for men.

Confronting this PI with this pattern of decision-making would not work. It would be impossible to document it effectively and demonstrate it in a way he would have to accept.

Although we have joked about how she should set up a webcam.

Worst of all, this PI is up for a promotion. We are wishing there were a way to send an un-recommendation letter. Unfortunately this is not a department that includes grad students and postdocs as representatives on their hiring committees.

Women can't argue.

(This post was inspired by the book Women Don't Ask, among other things.)

Lately I find myself forced to attend seminars where I disagree with the speaker... and most of the people asking questions.

Once upon a time, I might have tried to 'ask' a 'question' in such a format as to argue with the overriding opinion of the Group. You know, a criticism cloaked as a pseudo-question.

Lately, for a variety of reasons but mainly because I'm Tired, I don't ask anything.

I don't want to argue.

Somewhere along the line I decided that maybe because of my personality, and at least partly because I'm female, it doesn't usually help my case or my mood to bring up alternative viewpoints. At least, not unless I have at least one other person in the room to back me up.

Sure, I might reach one or two not-yet-biased students in the room, who might be curious enough to ask about it afterwards or even go back to their lab and look it up.

But it that enough to make it worthwhile? Usually not.

I realize that Scientific Discourse is supposed to include Discussion Of Alternatives, and the other day I got a strange look from somebody whom I think was expecting me to pipe up about something when I chose to say nothing at all.

Of course maybe I was imagining that, but I'm wondering if this man has any concept of why someone like me might choose to keep her mouth shut in certain situations.

I hate that some people only respect you when you're constantly arguing with them. I find that bizarre.

I also hate that when I'm going to argue for something Different, I'm forced to be extraordinarily articulate... or else written off as Crazy/Stupid.

Maybe I'm just out of practice, but I just don't enjoy the part of communication where I have to spell out the most basic of concepts in order to make a point about something a bit bigger. I really don't enjoy having to condescend to people who choose to be deliberately obtuse.

Or maybe they're really that stupid? I can't say for sure.

Maybe worst of all, I really hate that I'm supposed to care what they think, or worse- try to change their minds when I know I can't (at least not from the vantage point of asking a pseudo-question at someone else's seminar).

It's these kinds of things that really make me question whether I would enjoy academia in the long run, or any kind of research much longer.

That, and talking to an incredibly successful friend who is up for tenure and telling me not to apply for jobs because I'd just be signing up for more of the same stuff I hate now.

I realize that he's upset right now because he got screwed by one of these typical funding snafus (got scored in the 8th percentile with a high priority, they funded down to 14th percentile, but they didn't fund him and said he should resubmit next time around).

But this is also one of the people who told me not to go to grad school. And boy do I wish I had been listening to him then.

Young women voting for men (Obama).

Someone wrote that I should be cheered up by Obama winning Iowa's democratic primary.

I'm not.

Here are the three reasons why I'm not:

1. First off, let me say this: people put way too much stock into a totally unrepresentative sampling, and then it influences all the other primaries. I hate that.

2. Young women in Iowa voted for Obama, rather than Hilary.

3. More white people in Iowa voted for Obama (~ 70%) than black people - less than 50% of black voters in the Iowa primary chose Obama.

Yesterday I watched the (all white, on this occasion) commentators talking about why this is.

Apparently people can easily understand why black Americans wouldn't vote for a black man (the main reason among black women, they say, is fear that he would get shot).

What I don't like is that young women didn't vote for Hilary.

I agree that Hilary's campaign has not made a point to 'reach out' to younger voters, and that this was probably a mistake.

I also think, although no one has talked about it much, that younger women are mostly sheltered from the sexist realities of grown-up life. I know I was. I really didn't experience anything consistently disruptive to my success until after grad school.

It doesn't really help that organizations like NOW devote most of the pages of Ms. magazine to international abuses of women's rights. They also do things like putting out anniversary issues patting themselves on the back for all the progress they've made. It sends the erroneous message that most of the work is already done, that sexism in the U.S. is mostly gone, been taken care of.

I beg to disagree.

David Gregory said on Tim Russert's show that he thinks Hilary has transcended the whole gender issue.

I think he's wrong.

Let me say again that I think Hilary is great. I respect her more and more as a strong role model, the kind I'm sorely lacking for in life in general. And I think she'd be a great leader.

But in talking about Hilary, I've seen a subconscious sexism among my friends, the same thing I've seen when talking about female professors.

They don't say she's incompetent, stupid, lazy, or that she would do a bad job.

They say they don't like her.

What nobody seems to be able to articulate too well is why they don't like her.

Here's what I think: this is a classic example of subconscious sexism. There's plenty of evidence that we expect women to play certain kinds of gender roles, and that being liked is more important for women's career success than being competent.

In short, I think people are harder on Hilary because she's a woman. What's most insidious about this is that no one makes the gender connection in these kinds of judgments. That's the thing about prejudice: if you're not aware of it, you're probably influenced by it.

All of that said, I like Obama just fine. I'd be happy to have any of the democratic candidates, truth be told, and I'm terrified of all the republiscum.

But it's interesting. The more I see Hilary trying to 'soften' her image, and doing more interviews, the better I like her.

I feel the reverse about Obama. He's a bit too polished. I don't like his tendency toward overblown rhetoric. I don't trust it. I don't like how it's beginning to sound like unrealistic, evangelistic, pulpit-talk. And it seems to be getting worse the longer he's on the campaign trail. He's playing to young voters because he's preying on young people's idealism, and while I see what he's trying to do and I would love to buy into it- I don't. I know from personal experience that Hilary's battle-hardened pragmatic approach is where Obama will end up, whether in the White House after learning the hard way, or later on when he's a bit older.

So no, I'm not really happy that Obama won in Iowa. I'm just a little bit disappointed that minorities are being kept down by their own prejudices- against themselves.

Monday Inertia.

I have plans for things to do today.

I mean, I had plans. So far I'm not doing them.

Lately I notice that when I run into a friend and they ask me how I'm doing, it depresses me more to stop and talk to them than to just mumble something about being busy, give the fake sucking-it-up smile, nod in a friendly way, and keep going wherever I'm going.

This doesn't mean I don't wish I had more friends or that I didn't get to talk to them more. But talking about how work is going, especially while I'm at work, seems to be de-motivating.

I'm really feeling a lot of "damned if I do and damned if I don't" lately. I'm doing a lot of things for show that I know are a waste of time, scientifically, because they're supposed to help me politically. But there's no guarantee that they will.

I was talking to a grad student this weekend who is depressed by the lack of guarantees. She said if things were more finite, if her advisor were capable of devising a project that had a practical chance of working and of helping her when she got stuck, she would be more likely to want to stay. But the lack of job prospects afterwards makes her think it's not worth it.

Amusingly, there is a seminar series here designed to raise awareness of 'alternative careers.' This sounds like a great idea in theory, but she said every single speaker seemed miserable in their job. The patent lawyers, the people from industry, the science journalists, all of them. So none of the alternative uses for a PhD makes it seem useful to finish getting a PhD.

So she wants to quit. She's already been here long enough that she should have a paper, if not at least a good start on one, and she has nothing. She's been frustrated for a long time, and things haven't been getting better.

Her advisor is one of those, you know the type.

Gradstudent: "My ___ isn't working."

MsPhD: "How are you doing it?"

Gradstudent:"I'm using the A-B."

MsPhD:"Why are you doing it that way? That will never work."

Gradstudent:"I know. It wasn't working using the X-Y, so I told my advisor, and he said I should use the A-B. But I know the A-B won't work, and I tried to tell him why, but he doesn't believe me. So now I have to do it just to show him it won't work."

MsPhD:"Well, here's my protocol. Do it this way, I promise it will work. Then it's up to you whether you want to tell your advisor what you ended up doing. You can still pretend you're doing it his way if you have to."

Gradstudent:"Thanks, yeah, I think I will."

MsPhD:"Will what?"

Gradstudent:"Do it your way, but pretend I did it using his."

So at this point her options are to a) switch labs, b) suffer through, c) quit. Sad to say but she's so miserable, I told her that if she wants to quit now, she should quit.

I couldn't honestly tell her that it gets better. I told her that it doesn't, and that the reasons for it sucking won't change anytime soon.

The irony of all this is that one of the most important things to me is to be a role model, to boost up my female colleagues when they're down, and set a good example. However, as I've mentioned here before, on at least one occasion I was rebuked for being 'too honest' with some of the younger women about how hard it is and how you shouldn't do it if you're not sure you love research. It was a male professor who told me that I shouldn't discourage these poor girls, but I found out later that his behavior toward me is more discouraging toward the women around here than anything I've said about my frustrations.

As much as my failures depress me because I'm not meeting my goals and because much of it is out of my control, it's even more depressing to see these younger women quitting because they're watching what is happening to me. I'm a negative example without wanting to be. But I don't really see any alternatives.

All I can do is a) fight back (tried that, it doesn't work), b) quit, c) try to rise above it all.

Unfortunately both (b )and (c) end up being bad examples, and (a) is a trap that will end up getting me forced out of here.

Hmm. Happy thoughts for a Monday.

Time to go redo the experiments that didn't work over the weekend.

1. Place forehead against brick wall.
2. Push.

Response to Comments on Cover Letters

Badbug,

Thanks, that helps a lot! I guess when I applied for jobs before (after my first postdoc publication, as suggested by Anonymous #1), I did write kind of a mini-scientific biography of where I came from, why I got into science and why I'm currently in my particular field, what got me interested in that, etc.

I think I will have work on how to making it sound short and sweet, even though it's a little more complicated than that.

Someone said to me the other day that I'm "too honest." So there you go: I suck at lying. That must be why I find this part difficult. But see the comment from Anonymous #1, who thinks I should quit academia just because I find this part difficult. Challenging. Let's say it's challenging.

Anonymous #1,

You come off sounding pretty negative but I don't think you mean to be. Yes, this part is painful to me. That's partly because I'm doing it with very little mentoring/support.

No, I don't like the attitude that just because one part of your job is hard you should run away from it. Most things that have been hard for me, I've gotten better at them through practice.

Actually you might have seen, there was a little blurb in Science recently about how chess masters are good because they PRACTICE. Past a certain point, everyone is talented. The ones who win are the ones who practice the most. This is my general approach to life.

Yes, I have long suspected that some people don't read cover letters at all. But I know some people do. However, you make a very good point to try to include any pertinent information in the research proposal even if it's in the cover letter, since they are more like to read the research proposal than the cover letter.

Anonymous #2,

I didn't think it was limited to females, but it is always comforting to hear that other people have had this problem. I find it interesting that your committee helped you with this, though. Maybe I wasn't like this in grad school, but my committee, while generally helpful scientifically, was no help whatsoever on career advising. The main thing I got from your comment is to discuss "motivations" and "help from other people."

One of the things I've been struggling with is who would actually be willing and able to help me with my application package. The first time I applied for jobs I had at least two new Asst. Profs look at my research proposal, and I took all their advice but didn't get any interviews. Needless to say I won't ask them again, but seeing how they just went through the application process, I guess I thought they would know, and they were very willing to (try to) help.

This time, I was thinking I would try to get people who have done the hiring rather than the applying. But I don't know too many people who have sat on hiring committees, at least not in my field, and the ones I do know are not good mentor types. At all. Either they're not available, or they're incapable of giving advice.

You know, the kind who think that good professors are just born knowing how to do everything, not that any of this can or should be taught. What are people like that doing in academia, one might ask? But they are pretty good at research, and they were hired in an era when mentoring wasn't even a vocabulary word yet. They certainly were never trained in teaching or mentoring!

Phd Mom,

That's awesome, I will definitely try that. I do think the righteous indignation concept works. I fall into this trap a lot, that I've done a lot more than I have effectively broadcasted, because formal communication in science is pretty limiting, in my opinion.

So unless someone asks, I might not have a way to tell them and they would definitely not have a way to know.

Momentum.

A while back, LOGO hosted an interview/debate thing with some of the presidential candidates. I didn't see the original, but the Daily Show made fun of Melissa Etheridge for talking about herself too much. The supporting clips really did make it seem like she started every sentence with "I."

This topic is relevant to my current suffering: self-promotion. I hate the whole "mememememe I, I, I, I" business. I don't know how to do it gracefully so it always feels ham-handed to me. And I probably come off sounding arrogant to anyone who reads my attempts without ever having actually met me.

Supposedly this is a problem that most women have- we've been taught since a young age to always be self-effacing, which is terrible for your career, especially in science.

Today I am hammering away at updating my cover letters. The research proposal part is better in the sense that it's more about science, and less about me, me, me.

The cover letter, I don't know how much to say about what I've been doing, who I've been working with, and what I want to do next. A lot of this is in my research proposal, too, and making it all fit into 1 page is tough.

Anybody have any suggestions for

a) How to get revved up to self-promote? Do you listen to the theme from Rocky? What works for you?

b) What's the most important thing to get across in a cover letter?

I've always gotten the impression that what they're trying to get is some inkling of "fit", which to me is a totally ambiguous, touchy-feely concept that includes both what you work on and your perceived personality.

But right now- ugh. I just want to go back to bed.

Curse of the female pronouns

When I went to college, I was used to hearing people refer to any example character in a story as "he." Stories went like this:

So let's say there's a scientist studying butterflies. He collects them. Then he dissects them. Then he wins a Nobel Prize for discovering the butterfly testis.

Imagine my surprise when I went to college and sat in a required Philosophy class and heard a male professor use exclusively "she."

Does the chair exist because she thinks it does? She perceives the chair by seeing it, by sitting on it.

At the time, I remember literally gasping out loud. OH MY GOD. I had never seen anyone do that before. Suddenly I realized this college thing was a really big deal. It was a whole other world, where people were really enlightened.

Needless to say, it was that experience that made me sign up for a Women's Studies class to fill one of my other requirements. And other than using "she" for everything, the guy who taught that Philosophy class was terrible. I think my grade for that class was a B.

This week I noticed two examples of something that made me think of the guy who taught that class.

One was in a survey I took online for my university. We do these a lot. Would you like better parking? Yes. Would you be interested in attending this event? Yes.

This one was a safety re-certification. Are you aware that this is unsafe? Yes.

But in this one, there were little scenarios. You know the type.

Bob spills radioactive superglue on his hand.

Does he

a) pick up the phone with that hand to call EH & S ?
b) yell and scream for help ?
c) sit down and calmly wait for someone to come along and rescue him ?

And as I went along and did the little questions, I noticed something weird.

In all the examples where Bob did the right thing, Bob was a guy.

In all the examples where Bob did the wrong thing, he was Roberta.

Similarly, today I'm reading a book about how to communicate your ideas clearly. It's a great book, I'm really enjoying it and learning a lot.

But again, there are almost no examples where the scenario character is "she."
So now I'm on ~ page 37, and I just found one: a female engineer who does the wrong thing.

On the next page is an example of a brilliant (male) engineer who created a great product and led his company to fame and fortune.

Subtle? Sure. Hard to miss? You bet.

And I bet the authors don't even realize they're doing this.

Meanwhile, Larry King was interviewing Bill Clinton, who said something about how Hilary was a great example of her gender. Or something to that effect.

Thanks, Hillary.

The best Hillary quote I've heard yet: Pay attention to your hair, because everyone else will.

You go, girl. That's a great message to send!

I like this brief summary after I heard on Meet the Press about how she attended a hair stylist convention.

I realize that she's trying to joke about it, but she's no Kathy Griffin. Seems to me most everything Hillary says or does, everyone takes very seriously.

I guess that can be both a good and bad thing.

Check out this article where they drew attention to what she's wearing (they have a picture) and claimed that she was showing "cleavage" - and made a HUGE deal about it.

I mean, COME ON!

And here I have to tolerate co-workers who make excuses for why they "can't help noticing" women's anatomy at work.

The article contains another gem of a quote, for those of you who might not have known:
"After all, it wasn't until the early '90s that women were even allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor."

Equality, my ass. Americans are so repressed, it's no wonder we're lagging behind all these other countries who have already had women presidents.

More long-winded responses, continued.

Re: the Ben Barres comment, I’m wondering how respect and opportunity are measures, if people crediting you for revolutionizing a field and getting tenure at Stanford are on the low end of the spectrum.

I think the point is, she wasn't happy until she became a man. How's that for a measure? I think it's safe to assume most of us don't want to get a sex change, but I find it especially interesting that someone who has switched sides, as it were, finds it easier on the other side, confirming all our suspicions that the grass doesn't suddenly get greener over here when you're looking back at it!

Dear Physics Anonymous,

I'm pleased to say that other fields are bigger, and that does help in some ways (and hurt in others). On the one hand, your chances of getting the same people to review both your job and grant applications are nowhere near 100%, unlike in your field. On the other hand, it's easier for people to curry favors and assume that if they're the only ones cheating in a giant crowd, they'll never be caught trading politics rather than evaluating ideas on their merit.

Where the hell do you get the 1:20 pyramid? It's more like 1:300.

Dear Anonymous of the many publications,

You sound a little bit bitter about all that slaving away. Was it worth it?

I think my personal achievements are very respectable, but almost beside the point.

I've checked, and of the people I know who got jobs in the last year or two (male AND female) in my field, my publications are equivalent despite the fact that I've had a LOT more independence getting there and a LOT more obstacles put in my way.

Does any of that count for anything? Apparently not.

In my field it's pretty clear who are the candidates, male and female, but choosing among us based on scientific ability is difficult, so they use politics and good old-fashioned sexism.

Some fields are worse than others, politically speaking, but I've spoken to faculty in other fields who are familiar with mine and they agree, mine is among the worst in terms of being inbred, snipey, and hierarchical (with only men at the top).

Bad choice on my part? Shouldn't I want to work on what interests me scientifically and not have to worry about factoring in the assholes who work on it?

You do sound like a chauvinist, by the way, because you're missing a key point about publications even while you're bragging about yours: they're not completely objective measures.

If you read the archives of this blog, you'll see many posts detailing all the ways in which men climb over women in publishing, not because they work harder or more hours than the women do (despite your perceptions that you're the only one who's working hard!) but because their PIs give them more opportunities, more credit for the work they do, and because even just having a female first name on your paper will make it harder for you to get your paper accepted.

Studies have been done, with statistics and everything. You seem to publish a lot, but maybe you should read more before you go around complaining there isn't a problem with sexism in science. See the links on previous posts. I put them there for people like you, who should know better.



***

Oh, and thanks Rosie, Propter Doc, and person who pointed out that some labs are collaborative. A breath a fresh air is always a good thing.

Response to a variety of comments on last post- Keeping up with the jonesing

Anonymous 1 writes: It is interesting to note (and I dont mean this as a dig at you) that all the FEMALE scientific blogs do not really cover science at all but are generally full of moaning and bitching about people in the lab colleagues etc. Whereas the majority of male scientific bloggers concentrate on science issues. Strange!

This is a very astute observation, though not strictly correct. Grrrlscientist, over at ScienceBlogs, was one of the first blogs I found when I started reading ~ 2 years ago, and she writes a lot about her scientific love of birds. Not my field, but I admire her passion. So that's one exception. Perhaps we can amend it from "all" to "most"?

Nevertheless, you have noticed something that reflects one of the central problems of discrimination that many people have pointed out here.

Perhaps we spend too much time reflecting on how gender works against us, when we should just be reflecting on our science? I have received many comments that basically said just that.

Or perhaps all the discrimination prevents us from being able to do our science, so in order to clear our minds we feel compelled to at least vent about it before we can move on and pretend like it's not a major problem even though we know it is?

I for one have considered, for a while now, starting a separate blog with my Real Name where I would write about scientific issues that I find interesting, but for a variety of reasons haven't (yet?). Unfortunately I do not feel that I can combine the two without getting majorly burned for it. So, there you go.

I write this blog because I have to. It's as much for me as it is for what I think of as "giving back."

Scientifically, I don't know. I guess I was surprised to find that, when I started this blog, people started writing comments and thanking me for it. I was surprised to learn that people really do care what YFS thinks. Or are at least entertained by (arguing with) it.

Scientifically, under my Real Name, I don't know if anyone would care to know what I think. I certainly get mixed reviews when I speak up in lab meeting. I know some people really wish I would just shut up, even when I'm trying to be helpful the way I wish other people would be helpful to me.

Here, anonymously, I can afford to occasionally piss some people off, whether I mean to or not, and who cares if they don't read my blog anymore?

Scientifically, under my real name, I can't afford to annoy any more people than I already have. =D

So in some ways there's a lot more risk in putting my scientific views out there. As a woman, I already have more strikes against me without getting slammed for that, too.


Brian Haugen, Amen on the catch-22. And there is more to it than that, but yes, I would definitely talk to my SRA if it were sufficient for me to write a grant and send it in. Unfortunately, as the catch-22 points out, it's not.


Anonymous re: the Ben Barres article, YES, THAT IS MY POINT EXACTLY. IT SHOULDN'T MATTER, BUT IT DOES.


Almost-done anon asked: If you had to identify reasons for your current predicament, how far back would you go? I guess what I am trying to ask is 1) are there things you wish you had done differently in grad school, or while looking for a post-doc or during your post-doc and 2) are there things beyond your control that you wish were different.

Oy, this is a good one. Would I go back so far as to whether I should have done science at all? Yes. Though, I said this to a friend the other day over lunch and she said, "But you're pretty good at this science thing." (she's a scientist, too). And I looked at her and said "Apparently not good enough by most objective measures."

Yes, I am bitter that I don't have a faculty position yet. But I do have to admit that scientifically, I am pretty happy with my choices.

If there is one thing I would have done differently, scientifically speaking, it's to never ever doubt myself.

The few times when I thought I was doing something wrong, I wasn't, and I wasted a lot of time that way. Every "weird" result I've gotten had a scientific explanation, and chasing those down has always been worth my time. Even when my advisor(s) told me not to. It's hard because we're taught to second-guess everything, to always be skeptical. But so far I've found that scientifically, my intuition (or whatever you want to call it) is usually right, even if I can't always articulate why until I actually have all the data in hand to prove it.

Number one thing I would have done differently in grad school: I would have tried hard to get and keep political allies, starting from day one.

I think if I had more people (faculty of the right sort) willing to act as a safety net, just because they liked me and not because, ethically they should have seen it as a moral obligation, I would have been better off and had a much easier time. I think you get more and better help from people who genuinely like you than you do from from people who feel it is part of their job (because most people don't).

As for choosing my postdoc lab(s), I don't know. Scientifically things are going pretty well for me lately and it is tempting to look back and pretend this is how it was "supposed to be" because there's no other way I could have ended up getting the nifty results I have now.

Could I, who I am now, have done things differently? Sure.

Could I, as I was then, have done things differently? I think it's safe to assume I couldn't possibly have known then what I know now. So if I had to do it all over again, still not knowing, I would probably do the same stupid things.

I guess for me one of the hardest parts has been realizing how poorly my parents prepared me to function successfully in the world.

I have a student right now, and she is so incredibly mature for her age, she fundamentally understands how much appearances matter, that you have to kiss ass sometimes, and how it's all bullshit but you have to do it. I really admire how she always talks about her mother and I think her family has really taught her a lot about how to be ambitious and make things happen for yourself.

My parents are not like that, they were always very unrealistic and told us that if you're good enough, people will notice, so you just have to work really hard all the time.

Well clearly that's not how it works and there's a lot of other stuff involved. It's that stuff, that likeability factor, that never came naturally to me and I never learned. What some of us cynically call "playing the game."

This same person also asked "what do you think of advice that is given in a certain popular sci-career forum." I'm not sure which one you mean. There are so many, and most of them are remarkably useless, so far as I can tell.

Amazingly Patient Anonymous (and yes, that is a compliment, not sarcasm) asks how I define luck.

I read an article by Jim Watson years ago who said you make your own luck (though I don't think he's the only one to have said that as such, I can't remember who said it first). I think it is true in the lab, that, as he put it, the more times you spin the centrifuge, the better your chances that you will eventually get something useful out of it.

This is also true to some degree in politics, in the sense that if you're nice to the right people and bite your tongue at the right times, eventually you build up enough good will that somebody will pull some strings for you when there's an opening, and that's a "right place, right time" sort of luck.

But there's definitely another component that is made up of having the right things in common with the right people, and that's out of our control and largely influenced by the same cultural norms that create discrimination.

I don't have that. I have the opposite of that.

I have this friend, he's an extremely successful young PI, and he's just one of those people. He's easygoing with everyone at work, he likes all the right hobbies and makes all the right sorts of very academic conversation at cocktail parties (wine, books, etc.). That's just who he is, and it's who the academy has been for a long time and still is right now.

I usually feel like I was born either way too early or way too late, but this is just not my time. I wouldn't want to be a man, but most days I still think being a woman sucks.

Maybe I've been reincarnated a lot and will be a few more times before I get it right, I don't know.

As a kid I always felt displaced, like I'm not supposed to be here, in my life, right now. Like I'm the result of some kind of cartoony time machine accident.

That kind of detachment has never really gone away, despite trying to find people and places where I feel like I fit and occasionally having moments when things do seem to click. They're few and far between.

My point being that I have to work really hard to have things in common with the right people. Because deep down, I don't really care what people think of me so long as I get to do my job and be left alone.

Being that kind of person doesn't get you luck, it gets you in trouble.

I was thinking about this today and how it's probably not normal for little kids to imagine themselves living alone when they grow up, but I did. That was my dream. And I did live alone all through grad school, and I loved it.

I sometimes wonder if, things being different, I should have been a writer. I deal very well with being alone and most of the time I crave it. According to all the career tests, this is a prerequisite for being a novelist or a poet.

So the point of all this rambling is, sometimes I worry academia is too social for me and that people can sense that when I am trying to schmooze at meetings, that it doesn't come naturally at all.

It seems more socially acceptable- warning, generalization here- to be a loner if you're a man.

So I guess I'll sum it up like this: I think a lot of luck has to do with knowing yourself, your abilities and needs, well enough to choose the right career/partner/place to live, etc.

Otherwise you can easily spend your life feeling cursed, like the answer is somehow hidden and no amount of self-reflection, writing, meditative journeys, or hallucinogenic drugs could possibly get you there (though I haven't actually tried that last one, maybe I should?).



ena7800, Tell him exactly what you think might be wrong with his samples and what he should do differently next time, and then tell him that while you're flattered that he obviously thinks you're good at running gels or he wouldn't have asked you, that you simply don't have time to rerun this gel for him, and you wish him the best of luck on his grant. That's all.

If he gives you crap about it, tell him you don't feel you can afford to take time away from your thesis. See what he says. Perhaps he will offer to help you in some way in return. Perhaps not.

If he gets mad, don't worry about it. What he's asking you to do is totally inappropriate, but if you don't tell him that, you're a doormat. Don't be a doormat.

Do be polite about it, and give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he knows he sucks at running gels and it just didn't occur to him that, you know, you have your own stuff to do. Some people are just like that, living in their own little bubble.

Or perhaps he's just going to push you until you push back. Most people will push you until you push back.

Push back.

Impress Them With Your Arrogance.

Today I had lunch with a friend who got annoyed enough with an arrogant HR person from Big Academic Company (you can guess which one) and decided to try fighting snotty, stuck up bullshit about You Need Three Top Tier Papers with... arrogance.

Et voila! HR Person backed down and started treating her like an equal, or even better, someone worth hiring.

So maybe it's not that I'm not nice enough.

Maybe I'm nice to the wrong people (the ones who are more impressed by arrogance, like certain admins around here), and being "arrogant" with people who can't appreciate it (people who are threatened by smart women, for example).

I am tempted to test this out. Perhaps instead of turning on the charm, I should just start intimidating the hell out of people. If you can't make them love you, you can make them fear you, right?

I've always wondered if maybe I'm not self-promoting enough in that really obnoxious way that works for a subset of people whom no one can stand but everyone is impressed by anyway.

Like the story about the grad student who stopped all the classmates in the parking lot, one by one, and asked them how many papers they had published yet, as an excuse to brag.

I mean, that takes balls.

Maybe I just should go around bragging about what I've done, drop names, and so on.

Something of a Worthy Goal.

Today I got a pep talk about staying in academia to help improve the state of academia for women.

Some days it really is the only thing keeping me going.

This pep-talking friend was leading by example, giving me advice to surround myself with women who are farther up, and farther out, of my immediate circles.

This was new advice, or at least, it sounds different from the vague command I've gotten before:
"Get a mentor!"

She said there are some women out there who, like me, want to help bring others up behind them.

And more importantly, she knows some and wants to introduce me.

Hooray! A minor victory. Amazing how sometimes meeting just one person can make such a huge difference.

And another minor revelation.
Obviously I knew these women must, statistically speaking, exist.
And that some might even be on my campus. Somewhere. I just never met any at my university before.

But I know you're out there. I've e-met some of you, however anonymously, through blogging.

And then I realized that, while knowing intellectually that this is true, and while I have benefited from it at a distance, this is another place where my faith has been lacking.

Why the lack of faith in my fellow chicas? My big attempt at having a female advisor totally backfired. I'm still mucking through the emotional damage she caused. Today I was reading about aggressive personality types, and guess what? Now that I can name all the tactics she used, I can say with confidence that she is way up there on the aggressive end of the manipulative scale.

I think this is why I assumed, perhaps subconsciously, that the women in my field wouldn't help me. Or worse, would actively try to discourage me.

That one was awful, went the logic, so why would any of the others be different?

But as anyone who has been discriminated against knows, that's not fair at all!

I was over-extrapolating.

I have been guilty of assuming that women in other fields wouldn't want to be bothered or couldn't help.

But I'm not giving us enough credit. We're smart, we can see parallels and patterns, and abstract away the differences in the details, and apply what we know to different areas.

And we know people who know people.

So, a Worthy Goal and a minor revelation or two. Not bad, even if I didn't do any experiments all day.

This made me laugh.

from the irony mine.