Here at CV we occasionally pat ourselves on the back at the high quality of some of our comment threads. So it’s only fair that we acknowledge our dismay at the depressingly consistent character of the discussions about women in science; posts by Clifford and me being just the most recent examples. What a depressing exercise to poke a finger into the turgid world of pseudo-scientific rationalizations for inequality that people will believe so that they can feel better about themselves. Among other things, it makes it nearly impossible to have a fruitful discussion about what we could realistically do about the problem; it’s as if Columbus were trying to equip his ships to voyage to the Indies and a hundred voices kept interrupting to point out that the world was flat.
There’s no question: a lot of people out there truly believe that there isn’t any significant discrimination against women in science, that existing disparities are simply a reflection of innate differences, and — best of all — that they themselves treat men and women with a rigorous equality befitting a true egalitarian. A professor I knew, who would never in a million years have admitted to any bias in his view of male and female students, once expressed an honest astonishment that the women in his class had done better than the men on the last problem set. Not that he would ever treat men and women differently, you understand — they just were different, and it was somewhat discomfiting to see them do well on something that wasn’t supposed to be part of their skill set. And he was a young guy, not an old fogey.
Who are these people? A lot of physicists grew up as socially awkward adolescents — not exactly the captain of the football team, if you know what I mean — and have found that as scientists they can suddenly be the powerful bullies in the room, and their delight in this role helps to forge a strangely macho and exclusionary culture out of what should be a joyful pursuit of the secrets of the universe. An extremely common characteristic of the sexist male scientist is their insistence that they can’t possibly be biased against women, because they think that women are really beautiful — as if that were evidence of anything. If they see other men saying anything in support of women’s rights, they figure it must be because those men are just trying to impress the babes. They see women, to put it mildly, as something other than equal partners in the scholarly enterprise.
These are the same people who used to argue that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, that African slaves couldn’t be taught to read and write, that Jews are genetically programmed to be sneaky and miserly. It’s a deeply conservative attitude in the truest sense, in which people see a world in which their own group is sitting at the top and declare it to be the natural order of things. They are repeating a mistake that has been made time and time again over the years, but think that this time it’s really different. When it comes to discrimination in science, you can point to all the empirical evidence you like, and their convictions will not be shaken. They have faith.
The good news is that they are on the losing side of history, as surely as the slaveholders were in the Civil War. Not because of any natural progression towards greater freedom and equality, but because a lot of committed people are working hard to removing existing barriers, and a lot of strong women will fight through the biases to succeed in spite of them. It’s happening already.
Get used to it, boys.
I’ve been so blind.
Here I was worrying about math and science education in the U.S. compared with other countries (e.g. The Math and Science Deficit in American Schools). It’s such a relief to know that it’s just because of cognitive differences! Students in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and England (just to name a few examples) must have an inherited characteristic that gives them a higher ability or inclination to do well in science than American students have.
It’s too bad this discrepancy exists, of course, and it’s laudable that people are trying to improve American science education. But I guess it’s just unrealistic to expect parity in the face of such overwhelming evidence for genetic differences in math and science ability between children of different nations.
JoAnne: the wider distrubution argument is precisely what those who argue for innate differences use, and women are at a disadvantage here. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence, which looks at among other things the distribution of IQ scores, “the standard deviation was 14.1 for girls and 14.9 for boys.” This does not make a huge difference for average people, but at the tails it does. When you start to select at a level corresponding to 1 in a 1000, you begin to see a real effect. At even higher levels (at what level do you expect the average Nobel Prize winner in physics (especially for doing theoretical work) to be?), obviously the effect is even larger.
It is interesting to wonder about why the distributions are different for men and women. One hypothesis is that it has to do with gene expression, and that women have two X chromosomes, whereas men have X and Y. A particular gene in a man’s X chromosome will always be expressed, because there is no other X chromosome to dominate it. Therefore the gene expression in men is more extreme, for good and for worse – more really unintelligent men, more really smart men (who were lucky to have the right genes expressed).
Lubos & Sean: I think that both discrimination and innate differences probably contribute to and are important for the discussion we are having. It is easier to quantify the innate differences and more work has been done in this direction, it seems. It is serious work. To characterize the people who believe in it as “These are the same people who used to argue that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, that African slaves couldn’t be taught to read and write, that Jews are genetically programmed to be sneaky and miserly” as Sean does, won’t contribute anything to the discussion. It is more accurate to say that these are the kind of people who just keep hearing one side of the story, i e discrimination, and think that the other side really needs to be emphasized more, and that discrimination needs to be quantified more in order to be taken seriously (a valid critique; the links to the empirical evidence that Sean gave are not so impressive, but that of course doesn’t mean it’s nonexisting – it’s just a difficult effect to quantify). Similarly, Lubos characterization of Sean as a propaganda machine is also quite exaggerated. For one thing, it is one thing to use ad hominems (and are you really innocent on that account Lubos? ;-)) and other such means of arguing as an individual person – it is another to do it representing the state.
So (for god’s sake!): stop demonizing each other, portraying the other as a communist propagandaist, or someone who would be against universal suffrage! Doesn’t matter if you really believe it’s true. The point is that it is utterly inconstructive. I for one believe that you are seeing different sides of the same story and it would do either side better to take the other side more seriously, acknowledge that there is or at least may be something to what they say, and try to put together the whole picture, identify where more research needs to be done, what the strong points and the weak points are, et cetera. As it is, this is a discussion going nowhere.
There are a lot of anecdotal stories here. The fact is every young scientist, male or female is going to get ‘discriminated’ against at some point in their career, and particularly when they are younger before college. The name calling is different, but the result is the same.
It just strikes me that the people who whine about it the most, are the ones who never quite got over it and are attributing a general phenomenon to their specific group/gender/whatever.
I personally (anecdotally) don’t see anymore discrimination against a woman at the upper echelons of science w.r.t to her merits than I do against anyone else. It seems to me the discrimination perhaps doesn’t come so much from her peers, as it does from society/family and so forth and typically at a formative stage in highschool and early college hwen people decide to make their career path.
Ultimately physics and math is a pretty big meritocracy, if your paper is very important and vital, people will read it regardless of gender/sexual orientation/class or whatever. And thats a great thing and it will be what makes or breaks your career prospects, nothing else.
Unfortunately I largely agree with #61. This blog is a must read and I love most of the posts, but I find the presumption that anyone who thinks there are innate differences in maths/physics ability between the genders must feel threatened a little unsavory.
On the other hand, I do find some of the evidence Sean has provided fairly convinicing, especially this one.
disturbed: “… comparing their mindset to those supporting a type of racism is going too far.”
If you look in the literature and debates on slavery and then later racism you will find the absolutely indentical claims and arguments about the inferiority being innate, interpretating research in support and so on.
Sam, as I said, contextually that goal is well justified. Inate differences may exist, but they should cause something like a 55% to 45% ratio in order of magnitude, not a 95 to 5 one. Also see Spelkes talk I link below, differences in the cognitive profile of men and women do not neccessarily add up to differences in mathematical abilities.
The big massive point that the innaters oversee is that innate differences do not matter, since you can take from a) context b) a look around you c) numerous bits of easily available data that discrimination of subtler form is very wide and active. Social structures are still the single overwhelmingly strongest force, only someone who has very specifically filtered his/her perception can denie this.
JoAnne, in fact a part of the discussion after Summers was about the statistics, with the suggestion that it is precisely the wider distribution of male abilities that produces a disproportionate effect at the far ends.
Here is an excellent debate on this issue, which focuses on the evidence there is (hardly any), between people who actually have a clue about the field, in a context (3rd culture) that should be sympathetic to innate differences claims.
It’s a very informative read Spelke cites 30 years of research into these questions, so it’s worthwhile especially for those shouting around that somebody should go look, and who still need more links then what Sean posted about.
I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I definitely feel threatened when a woman physicist is better than me. In fact, I feel threatened when a male is too.
Who among us here, who has ever met someone like say Edward Witten and talked physics with him, doesn’t walk away thinking to themselves: “Wow, that guys mind is just one scale up on the evolutionary ladder, relative to mine”. Quite a humbling experience I might add.
There are plenty of women i’d stick up there as well, same difference.
An old physicist I once knew (Kursunoglu) talked about what it was like to work with Einstein, he said even in his old age he could silence an entire room of the best minds in the business, the emotions being nothing but awe/respect and envy. Like everyone around were insects crawling in the light of a master.
“as I said, contextually that goal is well justified. Inate differences may exist, but they should cause something like a 55% to 45% ratio in order of magnitude, not a 95 to 5 one.”
fh, where do you get these numbers from (the 45%/55%)?
My personal best estimate of the expected order of magnitude of the effect given the by neccessity tainted and incomplete data that does not allow to directly meassure the effect?
Comparative analysis of the size of the known innate differences in cognitive profile and the size of the known unequal treatments that occur?
I also just noted a studie Spelke quotes in the debate above which turns the “anecdotal evidence” into something a bit more solid:
“[When given candidates to evaluate for tenure track positions] people were invited to express their reservations, and they came up with some very reasonable doubts. For example, “This person looks very strong, but before I agree to give her tenure I would need to know, was this her own work or the work of her adviser?” Now that’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But what ought to give us pause is that those kinds of reservations were expressed four times more often when the name was female than when the name was male.”
fh, I think you would need to look at what IQ distribution in a top physics department is like and see how the various Gaussians for men and women add up to that data. I don’t have the data and I don’t know if it exists, but it would interesting to have a look.
There was an interesting essay in Nature recently,
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7067/full/438429a.html
that ties in quite well with what Sean wrote in the original post. Here’s a quote:
“Science has always been a man’s world. The values and norms that control our disciplines were established by men. In physics there is an alarming lack of female participants; it would be tempting to claim that because of physicists’ typically masculine power games the physics community is not an attractive option for female scientists…”
(I found this on Christine Dantas’ blog, christinedantas.blogspot.com )
Everyone one of you with an explanation, do explain the ratio of women to men with undergraduate science majors.
Count Iblis — I think that’s a good point (your comment #48), but remember that once you narrow things down to the level of a PhD, you’re talking about a fairly small group. If you look at science as a *whole*, the disparity is really large, and if you talk to women — there are studies that start asking about interests in science, math, etc, starting with young children — you find that somewhere around puberty the number of girls interested in science drops dramatically. And, for some nice evil anecdotal non-evidence, in my experiences young women who are going into the sciences right now are *incredibly* aware of the debate that is raging. Additionally, my generation grew up hearing about the 60% divorce rate, we’ve experienced the fight of working-outside-the-home vs. stay-at-home mothers, and when it comes time to fill out grad school applications, we’re *extremely* attuned to the fact that we may be, ultimately, not deciding what to do NEXT, but whether we’re going to be able to have children! Or whether we’re going to be able to stay home with them, or whether we’re going to end up with an advisor who thinks women don’t belong in science, and whether that’s going to mean we can’t end up with a good postdoc . . . These decisions are not made in a vacuum.
I don’t personally *believe* that innate biological differences are to blame here, but that’s not really fair of me, is it? So then, trying to be more scientific about my approach, I look at the *ridiculous* number of confounding variables . . . Really, the only way to accurately test “innate” differences while controlling for socialization is to drop pods of girls and boys on opposite sides of the Moon and see whether any differences pop up. Just look at Supernova’s comment — #76. And, additionally, look at how women are closing the gap in the biological sciences. I understand that the practice of medicine is substantially different from the practice of physics, but certainly 20 or 30 or 100 years ago you could have made the argument, “Oh, women can’t become doctors because they are biologically inclined to stay home with their children” or “Women are better as nurses, because they are biologically inclined to want to nurture patients and take orders; they have no need to become doctors to increase their standing.” And you could support those arguments with some of the research cited here. A little time and a little encouragement has shown such attitudes to be patently false. Who’s to say this won’t happen with other areas if we focus on young students?
#63 — I like your point, I LOVE your point. I have undergrad degrees in both English and physics, and I consistently hear professors saying, “Wow, that’s really going to help you; not having to teach you how to write makes my job so much better.” And yet, when people are talking about “innate differences,” the most common examples are that men are better at spatial learning, so they gravitate to math and science, and women are much better at written and oral communication, so they apparently gravitate to some sort of nebulous place of “not math and science.” And every time I hear that, it pisses me off. Because that line of reasoning seems to be saying, “We expect men to be able to learn to read, write and give incredible talks, and close the cognitive gap on that front, but we don’t think women can do the same thing where the science(ie spatial learning, mental rotation, etc) is concerned.”
Doesn’t that make anyone else want to scream?
#38, Dissident, yes, I see #11, but you missed many of their conclusions.
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# 87 Annie,
Here in Holland there are some sciences (I think also in biology and medicine) where there are have more female students than male students. I have read, however, that the fraction of women in physics is less here than in the US. I think that this must be due to the social factors you wrote about.
Even though there is probably less discrimination against women here than in the US, it still harder for both partners in a family to have a full time job. Shops used to be open here from 8 Am to 6 Pm and on Sunday everything used to closed. It is also difficult to find arrangements for children’s daycare. This has changed somewhat but the situation still isn’t ideal.
There is no doubt that historically women and minorities have been discriminated against, and such attitudes persist in a minority of people today. However, I am surprised that no-one in this discussion has pointed out an obvious fact–that at an institutional level, there is now a degree of discrimination in the opposite direction. In all graduate admissions processes I have been involved in, once rankings are done, people actively look for ways to admit more women, and I have often seen women leapfrog 20 people ahead of them in “score” to be admitted. In faculty hiring, one is always looking to see if there are *any* qualified women, and if there are, they shoot to the top of the list. Simply look at the recent hiring record even in high-energy physics, and you will find that high-quality women end up on top of all the short-lists and get the most attractive faculty positions, while their often equally (and on occasion more) qualified male colleagues don’t do as well. One can discuss whether or not this sort of affirmative action is appropriate–I think in the long run it may well be the right thing to do, though its a complex problem–but any discussion of this issue should take note of the fact that at the highest levels and where it matters, in hiring decisions, there is certainly a “thumb on the scale” for women. Sean is wrong in painting physicists as non-football playing neanderthal bullies–on the contrary, they are mostly thoughtful people who are struggling to understand these difficult problems and doing the best they can to solve them.
Here’s a (hopefully) amusing story. After following along and contributing to this and its companion thread over the last day, I decided to do a little “field research”. So I asked my 13 year old daughter whether she felt if boys or girls are treated equally by her math teacher. She said “I guess so”. So I probed further. I asked “Do you ever get the feeling that the teacher might think that boys are better than girls at math. Her reply “Dad none of the boys at my school are all that smart.”
Elliot
More on the Grif. paper much cited by Lubos Motl – the paper does not take into account economics :). That is, for instance, the assumption is that the topmost math brains are solely candidates for the National Academy of Sciences for the Math and Applied Math sections In real life, there is competition, such brains go into many fields – other fields of science, as well as into finance and other areas of business, etc. So rather than the cut-off for NAS being 4.x standard deviations above average, the cut-off is going to be lower. Then all that the Grif. paper can give is the upper bound on the percentage of men in such a select group.
That is, assuming the premise of the Grif. paper of the distribution of math. aptitudes, and adding the assumption neglected by Grif. that high math. aptitude folks have many other places to land up other than just the math/applied math section of the NAS, then the current 5% women for that section of NAS is a lower bound – the die-hard believer in this paper should still be asking – where are the missing women?
I’ve read many and skimmed many and skipped many of these comments, so forgive me if I’m asking an existing or answered question; but why is parity so important? It seems to reason that either there is no discernible innate difference, or a relatively minor one; but in any case—be it that there is no, a minor, or a significant difference in natural aptitude—is that the only determining measure? Are there not people who love something for which they have no noticeable talent, and, conversely, those with exceptional ability they choose to ignore?
The issue of the current disparity between population distributions and distributions within the sciences is, I think, real and worthy of scrutiny. If nothing else, understanding why it is that women are so disproportionately underrepresented is a step to understanding the human animal. However, to set as a goal gender parity in the sciences is a step toward the call for a world in which the natural talents of the population are assessed, and their functions assigned thereby. We shouldn’t so readily want to decant our generations for that world.
As to commentary stating that the discussion of innate ability of a gender being too broad for this inquiry quickly ignores the necessity for some measure of the probability of any given male or female in the population to be qualified for a career in the sciences. Without an appraisal of what the world of Huxley’s determinism might look like, there is no benchmark against which to contrast the actual statistics. Ultimately, yes, it would be injurious to the sciences and the human population as a whole to insist upon quotas based on the natural distribution along gender, racial, or any other dimensions of society of any innate talents. But it’s a fair requirement toward largely purging demographic prejudice that we understand what part of a disparity would otherwise result naturally, and what part might be the product of demographic prejudice.
Daniel,
I think it would be useful to somewhat decouple the issue of parity and discrimination. Let me recharacterize discrimination as any behavior, rule, or policy, that limits or intereferes with an underrepresented group from achieving parity. I think the goal is to eliminate the discriminatory behavior. Parity should take care of itself.
Elliot
Making the Mind: Why we’ve misunderstood the nature-nuture debate, by Gary Marcus (via Cosma Shalizi)
This post reads as if it were designed specifically to evoke an irrational sputtering out of Lubos, and of course it succeeded.
I look forward to a time in the not too distant future when we can put people like Lubos in fMRI machines and watch the rationalization process in real time.
Your perceptions of social issue X reflect the fact that you’re male/female, black/white, young/not-so-young, conservative/liberal, etc. Once a dichotomy is defined it persists. Solutions complicate and worsen the problem.
#91– Is it just trying to make up some of the possible gender bias in aspects of the applications? The physics GRE is so ridiculous that one can often determine the gender and location of a student (US or foreign educated) with just the score. Women consistently score much lower on this exam. So maybe some of those people were taking that (or similar things) into consideration?
Or maybe the committees, too, wanted to allow for an understanding of some of the discrimination some women have faced? A female physicist I recently had lunch with related a tale of and advanced laboratory course. Before the professor knew names, she had turned in her lab reports with her first initial and last name. And received fabulous marks. It’s once he found out that J. stood for Jenny instead of Joe (names withheld for protection;) ), that her grades dropped and he questioned her about the validity of her performance on the first labs. Her grade dropped more than a full letter.
Some physicists are aware of this and feel as though it hurts the community and the departments in general, and thus may be more inclined to look at female applicants, though they may on a blind basis be less qualified. A lot goes into the numbers and the letters and all of that. We’re not as good as quantifying someone’s qualifications without bias as well as we’d like.
Unlike the data about the MIT women not feeling discrimination until in graduate school, I think it does start before then, but often in a more subtle way, and that’s what we need to address.
Sean, thanks for the post. It’s nice to know that some out there understand (or at least are trying to) without writing the whole thing off as innate differences. Growl to that.
Keep in mind that Summers proposed, not one or two, but six things that could be done to increase the representation of women in engineering and science at the top universities. I would be interested to get Sean’s reaction to them:
I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them…
What’s to be done? And what further questions should one know the answers to? Let me take a second, first to just remark on a few questions that it seems to me are ripe for research, and for all I know, some of them have been researched.
First, it would be very useful to know, with hard data, what the quality of marginal hires are when major diversity efforts are mounted. When major diversity efforts are mounted, and consciousness is raised, and special efforts are made, and you look five years later at the quality of the people who have been hired during that period, how many are there who have turned out to be much better than the institutional norm who wouldn’t have been found without a greater search. And how many of them are plausible compromises that aren’t unreasonable, and how many of them are what the right-wing critics of all of this suppose represent clear abandonments of quality standards. I don’t know the answer, but I think if people want to move the world on this question, they have to be willing to ask the question in ways that could face any possible answer that came out.
Second, and by the way, I think a more systematic effort to look at citation records of male and female scholars in disciplines where citations are relatively well-correlated with academic rank and with people’s judgments of quality would be very valuable. Of course, most of the critiques of citations go to reasons why they should not be useful in judging an individual scholar. Most of them are not reasons why they would not be useful in comparing two large groups of scholars and so there is significant potential, it seems to me, for citation analysis in this regard. Second, what about objective versus subjective factors in hiring? I’ve been exposed, by those who want to see the university hiring practices changed to favor women more and to assure more diversity, to two very different views. One group has urged that we make the processes consistently more clear-cut and objective, based on papers, numbers of papers published, numbers of articles cited, objectivity, measurement of performance, no judgments of potential, no reference to other things, because if it’s made more objective, the subjectivity that is associated with discrimination and which invariably works to the disadvantage of minority groups will not be present. I’ve also been exposed to exactly the opposite view, that those criteria and those objective criteria systematically bias the comparisons away from many attributes that those who contribute to the diversity have: a greater sense of collegiality, a greater sense of institutional responsibility. Somebody ought to be able to figure out the answer to the question of, if you did it more objectively versus less objectively, what would happen. Then you can debate whether you should or whether you shouldn’t, if objective or subjective is better. But that question ought to be a question that has an answer, that people can find.
Third, the third kind of question is, what do we know about search procedures in universities? Is it the case that more systematic comprehensive search processes lead to minority group members who otherwise would have not been noticed being noticed? Or does fetishizing the search procedure make it very difficult to pursue the targets of opportunity that are often available arising out of particular family situations or particular moments, and does fetishizing and formalizing search procedures further actually work to the disadvantage of minority group members. Again, everybody’s got an opinion; I don’t think anybody actually has a clue as to what the answer is.
Fourth, what do we actually know about the incidence of financial incentives and other support for child care in terms of what happens to people’s career patterns. I’ve been struck at Harvard that there’s something unfortunate and ironic about the fact that if you’re a faculty member and you have a kid who’s 18 who goes to college, we in effect, through an interest-free loan, give you about $9,000. If you have a six-year-old, we give you nothing. And I don’t think we’re very different from most other universities in this regard, but there is something odd about that strategic choice, if the goal is to recruit people to come to the university. But I don’t think we know much about the child care issue.
The fifth question-which it seems to me would be useful to study and to actually learn the answer to-is what do we know, or what can we learn, about the costs of career interruptions. There is something we would like to believe. We would like to believe that you can take a year off, or two years off, or three years off, or be half-time for five years, and it affects your productivity during the time, but that it really doesn’t have any fundamental effect on the career path. And a whole set of conclusions would follow from that in terms of flexible work arrangements and so forth. And the question is, in what areas of academic life and in what ways is it actually true. Somebody reported to me on a study that they found, I don’t remember who had told me about this-maybe it was you, Richard-that there was a very clear correlation between the average length of time, from the time a paper was cited. That is, in fields where the average papers cited had been written nine months ago, women had a much harder time than in fields where the average thing cited had been written ten years ago. And that is suggestive in this regard. On the discouraging side of it, someone remarked once that no economist who had gone to work at the President’s Council of Economic Advisors for two years had done highly important academic work after they returned. Now, I’m sure there are counterexamples to that, and I’m sure people are kind of processing that Tobin’s Q is the best-known counterexample to that proposition, and there are obviously different kinds of effects that happen from working in Washington for two years. But it would be useful to explore a variety of kinds of natural interruption experiments, to see what actual difference it makes, and to see whether it’s actually true, and to see in what ways interruptions can be managed, and in what fields it makes a difference. I think it’s an area in which there’s conviction but where it doesn’t seem to me there’s an enormous amount of evidence. What should we all do? I think the case is overwhelming for employers trying to be the [unintelligible] employer who responds to everybody else’s discrimination by competing effectively to locate people who others are discriminating against, or to provide different compensation packages that will attract the people who would otherwise have enormous difficulty with child care. I think a lot of discussion of issues around child care, issues around extending tenure clocks, issues around providing family benefits, are enormously important. I think there’s a strong case for monitoring and making sure that searches are done very carefully and that there are enough people looking and watching that that pattern of choosing people like yourself is not allowed to take insidious effect. But I think it’s something that has to be done with very great care because it slides easily into pressure to achieve given fractions in given years, which runs the enormous risk of people who were hired because they were terrific being made to feel, or even if not made to feel, being seen by others as having been hired for some other reason….
And I think that’s something we all need to be enormously careful of as we approach these issues, and it’s something we need to do, but I think it’s something that we need to do with great care….
Let me just conclude by saying that I’ve given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can. That’s why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable. Thank you….