Disenfranchised

I read an article the other day that made me really sad. It said young women are the biggest users of Facebook. That the first thing many young women do every morning, is log into Facebook.

The article said the survey-takers weren't sure why, and maybe it has something to do with young women feeling particularly disconnected, and Facebook is a way of trying to feel less disconnected.

But they didn't pursue why that would be.

Is it possible that there are a lot of women who are being deprived of careers now? I read another article that said most people in the world, including the US, believe that when jobs are scarce, it's more important for men to have them.

Among the many books I've been reading lately, one is a compendium of interviews that Bill Moyers did with a bunch of poets. Every once in a while, I happen upon something in there that really strikes a chord.

So I'm about halfway through the book and got to this interview with a Japanese American poet named Garrett Kaoru Hongo.

Bill asks him why he decided to write poetry and he says

I was experiencing a social and historical sadness

He says he wanted to connect with the history that was repressed.

Bill says "Repressed in what sense?"

He says I wanted the words I was reading to belong to me, but there were no words for me. He talks about how there wasn't anything in his high school textbooks about Japanese in America. That they weren't there when the US gained independence from Britain or during the Civil War.

This is something that always bothered me. Somehow we were supposed to be thrilled that Martha Washington sewed the flag? I never enjoyed history class until college. Before that, it was always taught as if the women weren't even around. The men were off having important conventions and signing important paperwork and the women were at home making butter. Anybody see John Adams?

Hongo says: I felt I didn't have an identity

Then there's this long story about how Hongo's grandfather told him about how he was treated by the American government and how angry he was. And so he was basically charged with telling his grandfather's story. Somehow, to speak for him.

I don't know about you, but my mother and my grandmother and great-grandmother always expressed disappointment that they didn't get to pursue their career dreams. That they were held back by their families, by society's expectations, by the men coming back from the war and taking all the jobs.

Hongo says: I was basically indoctrinated in a Western vision of articulation, of speaking to emotional and historical issues, but my experience was one of repression.

Lately I feel like even when I'm just expressing an opinion, just telling the story of my personal experience, I'm being told to shut up. That it's my imagination. That it can't be true. That it's dangerous to say what I think. Or that things will change on their own (!). Or that I'm just being too negative. Or that I'm discriminating against men if I say anything that implies women don't actually have equality.

It makes me sad.

For example, I know this guy who really feels a lot of frustration about being a white man these days. He feels like all the women and minorities get all these fellowships and clubs and opportunities and he's left out. He thinks his career is in jeopardy because of that.

So when he had a daughter I thought, "Oh good, maybe now he'll learn what it's like."

But I don't think so. He's a big fan of John Tierney's.

Now I'm just worried for that little girl. Even though she's not old enough for Facebook yet.

How would you fare if science were a meritocracy?

First, in answer to the summer student who wants to submit a co-first author paper:

Use asterisks. You'll see examples of this all over the literature, and it will look like this (sorry I won't do it in LaTeX here!):

Name, Yours*, Name, Friend's*, Name, Supervisor, Name, Figurehead PI.

Name of University.

*These authors contributed equally to this work.

------


Anon asked in a comment:

What would be your opinion on a scenario in which all PhDs/postdocs were qualified individuals who actually wrote their own papers and grants? Surely, of all the people who actually make it to the coveted tenured positions, some people actually deserved it. My question is basically if the system only allows a chosen few to ascend, what do the rest of us hardworking, decent scientists do? Clearly, there are biases that prevent this from happening in reality. I'm just saying if these egregious offenses weren't happening, would you feel any different? Like, ok, I gave it my best shot but it just wasn't meant to be. Or maybe something else?


Honestly I haven't thought about this in a long time.

I would have quit before/during grad school if I thought that, objectively speaking, everyone else was better than me and therefore I had no shot at a job in this business.

In fact, I had no expectation of a job when I started my postdoc. I was kind of figuring I would hate it, the way I hated grad school.

But you know how YFS is, she had to do the experiment.

Instead I had this bizarre realization: I am good at what I do. (Maybe even really good!)

It took me a while to figure this out.

Not many people have ever given me compliments on my work, until very recently.

But during my postdoc, I've gotten lots of little clues that I'm doing things the right way.

1. Lots of people cite one of my papers from grad school. In fact, it is my thesis advisor's most-cited publication of all time (so far!). This was a weird little ego boost, since to this day, when I go to meetings, most people have not heard of me or my advisor. But the ones who have, know of us because of that paper.

The whole idea of that paper was my idea, not my advisor's. Nobody knows that from looking at my CV (!), but it is nice for me to know that I have good ideas and I know how to test them.

2. After I left my thesis lab, the senior postdoc who had never really been friendly admitted to me that nothing got done after I left. She hadn't realized, until I was gone, that I was the one ordering anything when we ran out, refilling the tip boxes, autoclaving everything, taking out the biohazard trash, making all the buffers, etc.

Needless to say, I had to laugh at that. Minor victories! Not only did I keep my work going, I kept everyone else's going, too. Not to underestimate the amount of work it takes to set up and fund a lab and hire people (a lot), but there's no question that I could run a lab, if I had one of my own.

3. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to do an experiment that would test one of the main hypotheses of my thesis more directly than had been possible at the time. Hooray for technological advances!

And, yes you guessed it. It worked! Hooray for confirmation! That was very satisfying.

Even if it's not the sort of thing I could publish on its own, it was very nice to get that result.

(I'll admit though, one thought that crossed my mind was, "Okay, that's my contribution, I can quit now!")

4. More minor victories: friends who come to me to help troubleshoot their experiments. I have one friend, a couple years ahead of me, who needed to learn some basic molecular biology (not her field). So she came to me. And we got her stuff going.

My proudest moment of that whole story: when she told me she was helping other people do their molecular biology now, using my protocols.

Another random example, I have a grad student friend right now who swears her project would not be working if I hadn't given her a couple of little suggestions along the way (and she actually followed them!).

This got me thinking that yes, I do have the expertise, I could be a good advisor. I like that part of the job.

5. This is the last one, because my timer is about to beep. I think I've mentioned it before on this blog, when someone told me they never believed my data before, because they could never get a certain (critical) technique to work that well.

I was totally baffled by this, since it was sort of a backhanded compliment. (Because it was brought up in the context of, now they believe me....!)

It had never occurred to me that not everyone's data looked that good. I mean, sure, I've read lots of papers with crappy looking data and wondered why it looked so bad. But it took a long time for me to realize I'm good at that technique, and it's actually a useful skill.

It is one of my (last remaining?) missions in science to get everyone to learn how to do it the way I do, and get great results like I do.

So I guess my point is, I think if science were a meritocracy, I would be one of the chosen few. Otherwise I would have quit by now. Any rational person would!

But since science is not a meritocracy, I might quit any day now. As any rational person would.

Better vs. not really

Well, taking the weekend off helped in a lot of ways, and I got a lot done yesterday.

One thing I found out this weekend was not very encouraging. It's funny, though, in a black humor - aha I knew it! that explains a lot! - kinda way.

....

Although we hear lots about how "most" universities are either trying or are forced to use some kind of affirmative action in their faculty searches, not all of them are actually even trying.

This weekend I found out from a friend that one of the places I always wanted to go is among the worst when it comes to hiring.

Case in point: last year they interviewed 6 people.


1) 1 of the 6 people they interviewed was female.



2) The search committee consisted of: two guys.



3) They concluded after the interviews that the one woman they interviewed was
"too unfocused" and "sounded like a first-year grad student."



4) They also concluded that "the best candidates" are "waiting" and "not applying right now."

(I can't quite follow the logic of why the best candidates would be waiting to apply, but hey, since I think I'm one of the best candidates and didn't apply last year, I kind of have to laugh at that.)

However, when asked how they chose the candidates, and whether they even tried to take diversity into account, the answer was that they "just interviewed the top candidates."



5) The reason these two guys ran the search: the department chair is basically a figurehead. They're sort of the puppetmasters of their department. But how would an applicant know that before applying there, unless they had friends inside?



6) The two guys said there were no women faculty on the search "committee" because they were given "ample opportunity" and "chose not to participate".

Uh huh. I can think of about ten reasons why that might be, and none of them make me feel better about the outcome.



7) Last but not least, the department somehow 'dictated' that they wanted new faculty who work in particular areas, so topic was one of the major criteria by which candidates were chosen to interview.

However- and this is in some ways the best punchline- neither of the two guys choosing the candidates knows anything about the topics that were supposed to be top priority.

One has to wonder, then, how qualified these two guys could be to evaluate the quality and impact of the work from these candidates.

My guess is that lots of departments conduct searches this way, and even if there are more bodies on the search committee, it doesn't mean anyone in the whole group knows anything about the research topics of the candidates they're supposed to be evaluating.


....

So there you have it, folks. Another example of the scientific ways in which we hire scientists, while making conscientious strides towards increasing diversity.