Denial is a bitch

Every once in a while, I write a post because I read something that makes my blood boil. This particular piece was written by Eileen Burbidge (@eileentso), an early-stage tech angel-investor, and as you'll see, there's nothing angelic about her.

In this case, she writes as a woman who contradicts herself by arguing that offering opportunities specifically for women is "patronizing", even while admitting that It’s not pleasant (or wise) if someone shuts a door on me strictly because I’m a woman.

And yet, she writes an entire post as if this never happens. And she writes as if, when it does, it means the women are not qualified.

Lady, you can't have it both ways. And I think you're in a denier.

By her own admission, she works in a male-dominated atmosphere, and yet she seems to completely miss the point. She writes,

I currently work in the @whitebearyard office space with a lot of men over 2 floors. I’m quite certain that each one of them (or at least most of them) are acutely aware whenever there is a woman in the office. Full stop. They know if a woman enters the office, steps into the floor or is here for a meeting. In this setting, women get a lot more attention than “just another guy”. And if a woman in this setting cannot make a positive impression or assert her value as a prospective vendor, partner, employee/consultant, then maybe she’s actually not qualified or capable enough – or not wanting it.

What really makes me angry is exactly this atmosphere. Full stop.

The sheer inability to understand what it's like for women who have been harassed and abused to the point where even just walking into a situation where all the men suddenly perk up and look you over, head to toe, is enough to make you want to turn around and go home.

The feeling that, no matter what you wear, or how articulate you are, everyone is too obsessed with your female dog-suit to really hear what you're saying.

And by everyone, this can include women. This woman in particular, sounds like the type who thinks no women are ever as good as she is.

My last job had this all-men, all-the-time atmosphere. I hated just walking to my office.

And the feeling never wore off, because there weren't enough other women around. The men never got tired of staring at me like I was a chunk of meat.

Now, they may not have had any intentions of making me uncomfortable, but nobody told them not to do it, or introduced me as an equal, either.

When you go on a job interview, when you're going to be nervous already, and this is the atmosphere, how would you feel?

How about if you're already highly sensitized to it after an entire career of being treated like an unworthy object? Do you think you're likely to do your best?

Of course not.

Does that mean you're not qualified? Not capable?

Of course not.

Does that mean you're not wanting it badly enough?

Fuck you, lady, for even insinuating that "badly enough" means we should be happy to put up with being treated like meat.

You have no fucking idea what you're talking about. I resent the idea that you get to speak for women in any field remotely related to technology.

You're the last kind of person I would want as an advisor to my career, or anyone else's.

***

Having said all that, reading the comments on this post, I get a completely different impression.

For example, there was this exchange:

“I have never heard a woman in tech say she did not receive something because she is a woman. Can you provide some examples of this, as it seems to be your primary reason for the dearth of women in tech?”

While I have heard of women saying this, I agree with you that I’ve never heard it firsthand (and it doesn’t represent my experience nor that of female friends and colleagues) — which is *precisely* the point of my post! I wrote this in response to quite a few other articles I’ve read over the past month or so “blaming” the issue on a systemic issue or bias against women, men who weren’t paying enough attention to hiring women or other such reasons — blaming and in my view complaining about things.

She also writes in response to a comment that tech is better than most industries (more on this in Part II)

So now I'm curious to see what she writes about in Part II. Which fields is she referring to? Business? And whether she might be right that guys in the Tech sector are better than in other fields.

My impression of guys in Tech is twofold:

(1) They tend to be relentlessly logical, which I like, because it means I can often convince them of my point of view more easily than the men in my field

(2) They have never worked with women, so they tend to have many misconceptions about what women are like, based on what they see in videogames and movies. In other words, we might kick ass, but we're still sex objects.

However, (2) can be overcome with (1).

Which is more than I can say for my field, or for the women who also contribute to the culture of denial.

Hope for the future?

Maybe it's my idealistic streak coming out again, but last night I watched the 60 minutes report on what they call the Millenials, where they were talking about the New Generation.

You know, the kids.

Keep in mind, lately it seems like 60 minutes gets it name from the average age of their viewing audience, not from the length of the show.

So when they say kids, they mean the ones in their 20s now. The ones who hate sucky jobs and say so, because they actually want to have a life, not just a career.

Those crazy kids!

It was a very interesting report, and kind of related to what FSP blogged about ambition recently.

The part that gets my hopes up is where they talk about all the baby boomers who will be retiring and how there will be more jobs than people to fill them.

Can you imagine?? It sounds like utopia.

But that is 5-10 years down the line, and most academic scientists don't retire at 64 if they can help it, so it's probably longer before it would help someone like me get the kind of job I want.

Come on, old guys. RETIRE. You know you want to.

I have also been reading several articles on the new generation and new ways of teaching these kids who are real technophiles, the ones who grew up with Google and text messaging. The ones who aren't content to be spoon-fed information and actually want to direct their own education (that was me, wayyyy ahead of my time).

You know, the ones who would actually rather do real research than sit in a lecture and memorize, and then sit in an exam and spit back out "facts" that will turn out to be false by the time they graduate.

The good news is, we finally have the technology to be able to help students direct their own learning, instead of making them wait until grad school or postdoc or god forbid, until they have their own labs.

So it's pretty inspiring. And in theory this trend should only help me get a job, right??

Unfortunately I don't think most search committees are factoring these sorts of things into their searches.

I definitely don't know how to effectively highlight my techie bent in my applications. All I can think of is to try to work it into my teaching statement somehow (?).

Anyway if there's one thing I've always had faith in, it's nerdy kids. I especially liked the report I saw the other day about tv shows like Chuck and how geek is the new cool.

Why all the negativity?

So I haven't written much lately because I've been pretty busy in the lab. Something came up this week that I thought would be worth discussing, though.

A couple of the postdocs in my lab, their ages are something like 30-ish (+/- 2 years). One of them got up recently and gave a lab meeting where he used some new technology, and he doesn't trust it because it relies on statistics and computers to handle large amounts of data. You mostly don't see everything that goes on behind the scenes, and it makes him uncomfortable.

So he thinks it's all crap.

I was astounded that anyone my age, but especially a scientist, would be a) so ignorant of computers and b) so paranoid about them as to say some of the stuff this guy said.

I mean, if you're 30 and you already closed your mind for business...?

The idea that this guy is in academia terrifies me. How many of him are there? He seems nice enough, very thoughtful about a lot of things, but really unenthused about science. I mean, if you have qualms about something, and you can't figure out how to do experiments to allay your fears, what are you doing here? I hope for all our sakes that he leaves if it will make him happier. He just got a fellowship and doesn't seem to care. Can I just say, we should have some kind of enthusiasm test you have to pass before you even apply for a fellowship? I mean, there are plenty of gung-ho people out there, why give one to someone who's just looking for a chance to jump ship?

I'm used to these kinds of paranoid attitudes from the older generations, although I have to admit it's somewhat foreign to me since my family is very pro-computer, and always has been. Even if they don't always understand what the computers are doing, my family thinks they are a good thing, a big technological advance that changed our way of life for the better.

There's another guy who is similar, but worse. He doesn't trust anything unless it's all or nothing. Alive or dead is about his level of comfort. I'm very relieved to hear he'll be going to industry, because the idea of someone like that having students makes my blood crawl. It's one thing to be that paranoid about your own data. But in biology, where most things are gray areas, it means that the vast majority of stuff your students bring you, you won't believe.

What really gets me is people of my generation - what would you call it, W? we weren't quite generation X? not that I want to be associated with the letter W in any way- who go into science and proceed to be so negative, I don't know how they get up in the morning, much less come to lab or do experiments. I mean, I am far from Mary Sunshine myself, but the stuff that makes me negative usually has to do with people, not technology. In general, I like technology. I admire people who can invent things to do stuff more easily, and stuff we couldn't do before. Although it might not be perfect, I think it's worth my time to understand how these programs work, so I can get the most out of my data. And why not? I like data. I like analyzing data (or rather, I like analyzing the results...).

I feel sorry for postdocs who don't.