Why do we keep writing about women in science? And even inviting guest posts that touch on the topic? Haven’t we more or less exhausted what needs to be said? Maybe it’s time to concentrate on cosmology and/or the World Series? After all, I’m not even a woman! Maybe I’m just trying to impress the chicks? (Honestly suggested at least once.)
Rob Knop has an excellent post up about a presentation he just gave to his department at Vanderbilt (where I’ll be visiting Thursday). He was emphasizing that the department — much like the vast majority of physics departments — doesn’t always present a hospitable environment to female students and postdocs.
We have an issue in our department right now which has (tangentially) brought up the issue of the climate for women in physics. We have a serious problem with the climate for women students and post-docs (at least). I don’t really know if it’s worse here than physics departments elsewhere; I know the climate is globally bad everywhere, and maybe it’s worse on average, or maybe it’s better on average. But I do know it’s bad here, and unless we think about it, it will stay bad.
In a short presentation to the department today, I included a slide with this statement on it:
The biggest problem among the faculty is that we all allow things to slide. None of us speak out when we see and hear things that we should be questioning. We are all, constantly, guilty of this; I can name a few instances for myself, and doubtless have forgotten many more.
In retrospect, using the absolute term “none of us” was probably a mistake, but certainly it’s rare when people speak out. This statement was close to a direct quote from a female graduate student I’ve talked to; I asked her what she thought the biggest climate problem was, and it was this: the fact that behaviors are accepted, not questioned, evidently by all.
Amazingly, some of his fellow faculty members didn’t agree! Other people/places might have issues, but not them.
In fact, it wasn’t until I started blogging about it that I really understood the depth of the problem. I had long known that women faced obstacles, but I thought that the vast majority of male physicists were benignly clueless rather than actively contributing. But there appear to be substantial numbers of people at all levels of academia who are quite convinced that the present situation is determined more by genetics than by bias. Reading the comment sections on these posts, notwithstanding the presence of a good number of thoughtful and intelligent participants, is an incredibly depressing exercise.
But it’s still worth doing. Progress doesn’t happen automatically; it’s because people make the effort to cause it to happen. And when it comes to women in science, there are good reasons why men should take it upon themselves to raise a ruckus. (I suspect that analogous statements hold true for the status of minority groups in science, although I readily admit to being less knowledgeable about those issues.)
I recently had coffee with my friend Janna Levin, author (most recently) of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Janna recently wrote a provocative essay for Newsweek, entitled This Topic Annoys Me. The topic, of course, being the status of women in science.
But while earning my Ph.D. at MIT and then as a postdoc doing cosmological research, the issue started to loom large. My every achievement—jobs, research papers, awards—was viewed through the lens of gender politics. So were my failures. People seemed unable to talk about anything else. Sometimes, to avoid further alienating myself from colleagues, I tried evasive maneuvers, like laughing the loudest when another scientist made a sexist remark. Other times, when goaded into an argument on left brain versus right brain, or nature versus nurture, I was instantly ensnared, fighting fiercely on my behalf and all womankind. I was perpetually inflamed and exhausted. It permeated every aspect of my life. Take this very essay. Here I am, somehow talking about being a woman in science, trying not to even as I do so. Imagine my frustration.
The point is, it’s not easy to be a scientist. There is a great amount of competition (whether we like to think that way or not) for resources, especially jobs. Research is hard, as you are pushing with all your brainpower against some of the knottiest unsolved problems concerning the workings of the universe. Even if you did nothing else, being a successful scientist is a full-time job.
And then women, as a reward for making it through an already-difficult gauntlet made more harsh by lingering Neanderthal attitudes, are asked once they succeed to take on a whole new set of responsibilities — serving on extra committees, making public appearances on behalf of the department, providing a sympathetic ear to younger women. All worthwhile activities, no question, but not the kind of thing that pushes one’s research agenda forward. I admit that I had a certain initial reluctance to ask Chanda to contribute her guest post. She has something interesting to say (from a perspective I can’t possibly offer), and can certainly take care of herself, so in the end I felt quite comfortable making the request. But every minute spent on stuff like that is a minute that isn’t spent doing research. Women should be free to concentrate on thinking about black holes and the early universe, just like guys are.
It’s a balance, of course, and as a blogger I certainly believe that one can do research and other activities at the same time. But it’s completely unfair to expect women and minority scientists to do all the work in trying to eliminate the discrimation that they face. It is perfectly defensible, maybe even highly recommended, for any individual woman scientist to decide that the cause is better served if they concentrate on collecting data and writing papers rather than organizing conferences and raising consciousnesses. So, for the foreseeable future, it’s a good idea for the rest of us to put some effort into making the situation better all around.
In the meantime, how ’bout those Cards?
Re the comments about harrassment here (esp #47), the more I read them, the more I realize that harrassment is something we have to grapple with as a field.
I am male, and have never seen this sort of behaviour first hand so it is not that I have had clear and specific chances to intervene, but I know that many of my close female colleagues have had unpleasant experiences of one sort or another. These can range from being asked out on dates by their senior collaborators, through to situations that are potentially criminal, rather than merely inappropriate.
I certainly do not want this to be misconstrued by any young women considering a career in physics who might be reading this (what do I know, anyway?) as I know that many women in physics can and do succeed. However, if we don’t tackle this issue as a field, it provides a concrete reason why women will be less likely to stay inside physics.
Some of this behaviour is perhaps merely clueless (I know it is another stereotype, but lots of scientiests *are* somewhat maladroit socially), and is probably exacerbated by the way that science can be more than just a job — we don’t make the same clear distinction between the personal and professional spheres that might apply in other professions.
However, a lot of the worst stories I have heard revolve around the same fairly small number of men. One specific horror story concerns a man who has made life miserable for a number of his female colleagues. The irony is that I was recently asked to suggest people who might want to apply for an open position at his institution (a place that is good, but not great). My first thought was that while a number of the people I might suggest were female, it was not at all clear to me I would be doing them any favors by encouraging them to work at a place where this person would be one of their senior colleagues (the upside is that this story is *so* widely known, I doubt this could happen to you by accident.) However, the fact the person concerned still draws a salary probably reflects a shortcoming of academia as a whole, rather than physics in particular.
But if we want to address issues of gender equity in the field, this is something concrete we could try to fix…
I have a simple thesis on why there are fewer women in physics than men. (This is a simplistic view. But I think it is mostly true).
From an early age, girls are given pink barbie dolls to play with. Ovens to play cooking, baby dolls to play as mothers. House toys to take care. And driven to be more interested in their dressing and hair than anything else.
Boys get the best and most interesting toys: cars, planes, spaceships, toys with great movements and lights, animals, thinking toys.
I never played with those pink barbie dolls (hated them); my best friends were boys, and I played with them with spaceships, playmobile, and animals. I had good friends (boys) that enjoyed to play with me, although I was a girl.
At 11 I knew I wanted to be a scientist. While most of my colleagues (girls) were thinking about boyfriends as adolescents, I had other concerns. (No, that’s not what you’re thinking, I am *not* homossexual. Today I have a happy marriage — with a man, and I am mother of a boy).
When my mother would give me money to buy new clothes, I would immediately go to the next bookstore to by a book instead.
I do not mean that a woman to be a scientist must not be feminine. But the incentive to be, in my opinion, *overly* feminine since an early age, and not to exercise thinking, is a major problem for girls. If they try to be different, their families or friends might look at them suspiciously.
I’ve never had a *major* problem in my career because I am a woman (yes, some little incidents happened), but I did (and do) have other difficulties that equally apply to men.
From the comments here, I tend to believe that being a woman in the sciences is much more complicated in the US than here in Brazil, although my country is quite a sexist one.
It would be most helpful if someone would post a list of the top 10 most harmful acts commonly perpetrated by men in physics departments against female colleagues and students.
Belizean — from talking to students here, “believeing there is not a problem and not responding when demeaning comments or actions happen in our presence” should be somewhere on the top 10.
-Rob
Comment #50: It is heartening to see someone talk about race issues as well. I completely agree with this comment…as an asian, I have felt this kind of an attitude in every Physics department I have been to. Makes me and other asians very uneasy, but I really do not see a way out…
As for getting permanent positions, I must say that the best option for the likes of me is to get back to our respective home countries…and keep visiting the US to keep our collaborations going. Work will be slower, and we will face a huge number of problems (e.g. politics in departments), but it will be much better than getting frustrated here…
Don’t get me wrong – I am glad I came to the US. It is just that I don’t think my work and I are appreciated any more here than in my home country. Some universities are definitely much better than others, but this severely limits my options when it comes to looking for a job…
#50 Ponderer of Things: “The science departments may not be kind to women, but they are much more so unkind to foreigners – especially coming from completely different cultural background like students from China or Korea or Japan, where it’s often impolite to ask a question during seminar or respond to a question with “no”. […] So the real question – do we want physics department to be more equally represented by various ethnic and gender groups, resembling a random collection of people from planet Earth[..]”
What you describe is not a physics culture problem, but instead is a U.S. culture [1] problem. There is a strong pressure from the U.S. society-at-large to be ‘the same’ with little respect for differences. I was born and lived for 37 years in the U.S. before I moved away 8 years ago, and it is this particular facet of the U.S. that drove me away the most. When the society-at-large of this particular group of people, which comprises 6 percent of the world’s population, learns to relish and delight in the diversity and richness of the human race, then I think that the problem that you describe will disappear.
[1] Yes, I do know well that the U.S. ‘culture’ is not ethnically homogenous, but instead is a hodge-podge of groups.
#55 Anon–
What can American students do to help Asian students? In my experience, I have found most of the Asian students very insular with each other, and not particularly interested in talking with the non-Asian students.
Clearly, this is a reaction to the attitudes expressed in #50, but what are others to do? I try to be friendly and listen when I can, and have gone as far as to make hotel reservations over the phone for a Chinese student. But, at the same time, I don’t know exactly what to do, beyond this, to help, really.
bittergradstudent and ponderer:
It’s a complex issue. Probably the best approach is to resist the temptation to view them as a homogenous mass. Easy to say, but sometimes hard to do.
The insular tendency is natural when you feel like you’re on another planet. I spent a brief amount of time doing research in Europe. I tried not to “bunch up” w/other anglophiles. Unfortunately, it happened anyway: the Americans, English, and Irish tended to cluster and just English, and thus mutually reinforce our feeling of alienation from the general population. We were hesitant to speak the local language for two reasons: 1.) their English, when they wanted to speak it, was flawless so the conversation was more efficient for everyone when carried out in English; 2.) we were too chicken and were a bit nervous about being laughed at. So, I imagine w/students from Asia, it’s way way harder. At least we all spoke Indo-European languages.
As far as possible discrimination; it seems some do quite well in Academia (e.g. prof positions at good research institutions). Yet, I agree it sometimes doesn’t look too good at the grad-student/post-doc level. It seems there’s a bit of a disconnect. I do know that the Asian students I’ve encountered need to understand the “self-promotion thing” better. Aggressive (although not necessarily arrogant) self-promotion is clearly a key to success in our system. Of course, there are always exceptions, but generally the Asian students need to be more aggressive and question others more often, instead of taking the more traditional passive aggressive appoach. A slam one often hears is that ” Oh those Asians score well on tests and work long hours; but they’re not very creative”. The shuffling, non self-promoting attitude unforunately fuels this rather ridiculous statement.
Interesting discussion. Being female, brown-skinned *and* foreign, I can only shake my head. I thought a bit about whether to post a very individual opinion here, since what I think won’t be viewed as very “politically correct”, and in the end I decided I would – I don’t mean to offend anybody. At some deep level I just feel driven to understand the universe, a feeling that I bet all scientists can relate to. Everything that gets in the way of that, sometimes including eating and sleeping :(, and definitely including the stupid prejudices of others, is somehow insignificant and irrelevant compared to the strength of that drive. I believe that the only way to change these prejudices is to do good work, succeed against all expectations, and provide a counterexample to the prejudices. I have encountered wonderful mentors in my career, who were blind to my gender/skin color/accent and open to my ideas and views. And physics departments are havens of friendship compared to the way the US government makes a foreigner feel upon entering the country.
I am not in favour of affirmative action. I am greatly in favour of changing attitudes at the primary school level and with parents, who knowingly or unknowingly discourage little girls from seeing science as a career; I am greatly in favour of a society with less economic and social disparity for certain minorities who may consequently be discouraged from science; I am in favour of better provision of childcare, and for educating boys from a young age to see themselves as equal partners in raising children. Maybe blind admission/refeering/hiring processes can help correct subconscious prejudices. However I never want to hear anyone say that I got somewhere because I got a helping hand that my academic and research record didn’t deserve, that I wasn’t “good enough”. I can stand on my own two feet. I have heard this comment, which was one of the most hurtful things anyone has ever said to me, from someone who later apologised for thinking it, as he hadn’t realised affirmative action didn’t apply to foreigners.
Its wrong to think that every female or minority person has a monolithic opinion on such issues.
I suspect what is seen as “positive discrimination” or “affirmative action” isn’t always that. Someone who has been promoted and encouraged in their choice of subject throughout their school career in all probability will have achieved better results than someone who is equally as capable but has been discouraged, but these past results are not a perfect guide to future potential, so it may be that the person with a less impressive string of success gets the post because the interviewing panel can see more potential.
Mike, that’s a completely fair and correct point, but the moment its only applied certain groups or gender, and that fact is widely known, it gives an excuse for the subconsciously-predjudiced to retain their views about those groups or gender, and becomes counterproductive. I realize its impossible to have “blind interviews”, but if the shortlist can be drawn up in a blind fashion and the potential can be judged there, this may be a better solution. I haven’t thought in detail about how it could be implemented in practice. Again, just my humble and personal viewpoint.
#57 – bittergradstudent:
You are right, but what I said does *not* have to do with American students. It has to do with departments – the professors, the chair of the department and the graduate student committee etc.
Just to make things clear – I have never had any problems with any American graduate student – in fact, they seem quite willing to listen to others.
I do not agree that Asians like being with other Asians only. I have noticed that there is a significant number of Asian graduate students who look for like-minded company, not necessarily Asian.
#59. Hiranya – strongly agree with what you say – that is a very positive attitude.
“I have heard this comment, which was one of the most hurtful things anyone has ever said to me, from someone who later apologised for thinking it, as he hadn’t realised affirmative action didn’t apply to foreigners.”
Heh. I have had lots of Americans sneer at me because they thought I didn’t have to pay tax, being a foreign student.