Women and Science
jstemwedel | July 28, 2006Three Bulls is on top of this, but I want to add a few comments of my own (as is my habit).
The story about Susumu Tonegawa sinking MIT's attempt to hire Alla Karpova is not over yet. Sure, the Boston Globe (and the MIT News Office) report that MIT has formed a committee to try to get its neuroscientists to collaborate with each other better. But it looks like they've got their work cut out for them, judging by the email exchange between Tonegawa and Karpova, obtained by the Globe.
On the surface, the emails sound respectful, maybe even friendly. But, anyone who's been in the snakepit that…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2006In light of some of the comments on my ongoing series of posts on trying to combine a family and an academic career, I think a few clarifications may be in order:
1. Children and/or a partner are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having a life. As it happened, I wanted children and an academic career, but that's my path. Not everyone would want to be on that path, and I would never presume to tell anyone that he or she was "missing out" by not electing to raise children.
One of my reasons for blogging about my attempts to have both an academic career and a family is that I…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2006A long time ago, on a flight to a conference, a friend and I discussed the psychology of search committee members. We noticed that even people who thought they were exceedingly fair and open-minded might unconsciously make decisions that don't seem fair, but do, from a certain point of view, seem rational. So, when faced with two equally talented and promising job candidates, the committee members might opt against the one with visible signs of "a life" (such as children, a partner, even a serious hobby) and for the one with no visible signs of a life. Why? Well, which candidate is more…
jstemwedel | July 24, 2006At the end of part 2, I had just dropped the baby-bomb on my unsuspecting advisor. Happily, he did not have a cow about it. Now, as we move into the stage of this story that is A.P. (after pregnancy), we lose the coherent narrative structure for awhile.
Given what the first several weeks with a newborn are like, that's entirely appropriate.
This, also, is the part of the story where particulars start making a huge difference. The decisions we made were contingent on the range of options that were open to us at any given moment; with different circumstances, we might have been on a…
tsmith | July 24, 2006I see Janet has a post series going on family + academic career. (Part 1; Part 2). I've written a bit on my own experience at the old blog (and I do mean "a bit;" it's much more of a Cliff notes version of events than Janet's), so I'm re-posting it here for another view from the trenches, so to speak:
Six years ago today, I was suffering the worst pain I'd ever experienced. I arrived at the hospital a bit before 1AM, and spent the next four hours or so walking around in agony. By 5AM, I decided I was ready for some of the good drugs, but the nurse informed me it was too late--time for the…
jstemwedel | July 22, 2006Where we left off in part 1: In my fifth (and last) year of funding in my philosophy Ph.D. program, staring down 30, trying to finish a dissertation, and bracing myself for the rigors of the academic job market, I said to myself, "How could having a baby make things noticably more difficult?"
Then I remembered: I'd have to tell my advisor.
I would characterize my relationship with my graduate advisor as a pretty good one. He always found time to meet with me, gave me good suggestions about what to read, made useful comments on my writing, and really pressed me to figure out what my view was…
jstemwedel | July 21, 2006I've decided to go ahead and say something about how I navigated (and am still navigating) the challenge of trying to have an academic career and a family as well. This is not a topic I can adequately address in a single post, so bear with me. And, since my main motivation for doing this is the hope that knowing about my experiences may be useful, somehow, to other people contemplating these waters, ask me if there's something I'm leaving out that you want me to talk about. (If it's too personal, I'll say so.)
I think Rob Knop's comment is dead-on. Many of us in academia have been trained…
tsmith | July 21, 2006This week's Ask a science blogger question is:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...
Discussion after the fold...
Several folks have already responded with the answer of "now," and I agree. I've said before that this is an incredible time to be a scientist (funding issues notwithstanding). It's especially good to be a microbiologist. We're just starting to get a view into the incredible diversity of microbial life all around (and within!) us, and advances in our tools are allowing us to work on questions that weren'…
jstemwedel | July 19, 2006I've been having a great email exchange with another blogger about the current flare-up of the battle over women in academic science, and he brought to my attention a bothersome feature of this New York Times interview with Dr. Ben A. Barres:
Q. How does this bias [that men have an innate advantage in science over women] manifest itself?
A. It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants. And then, and this is a huge part of the problem, they don't get the resources they need to be successful. Right now, what's fundamentally missing and…
jstemwedel | July 18, 2006Yami at Green Gabbro puts out a call for interviewees for a book project on women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM).
While the status of women in STEMM has improved in the past few decades, it has been a slow process with many ups and downs. Programs aimed at girls interested in science and Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in universities, have helped increase the number of STEMM degrees awarded to women. But the number of women is still shockingly low in some disciplines, such as physics and computer science, and at the highest ranks in all fields…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2006After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today's Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of…
tsmith | July 15, 2006More interesting stories that I didn't get to this week...
Ewen is looking for volunteer producers for his radio show. If you're in his neck of the woods and would like to learn about science journalism, drop him a line.
Mike notes that MRSA is winning the war on drugs, due in part to dirty needles and a lack of needle exchange programs.
Orac discusses the latest Geiers drama (those would be the folks who've been most prominent in pushing the vaccination/autism link here in the U.S.) Turns out a court recently laid the smackdown on them, Kitzmiller-style.
More sequence information has been…
jstemwedel | July 14, 2006Here is the U.S., especially, we love to think the ivory tower is a meritocracy, and that the tribe of science is objective in all things -- including how it treats its members. A nice little pile of data runs counter to this picture, however. A quick roundup:
At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein points us to the Nature profile of Ben Barres (subscription required). Barres had gender reassignment surgery (at age 42) in the middle of his career as a scientist -- so he has some first hand knowledge of what it's like to be a female scientist vs. what it's like to be a male scientist. Lindsay…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2006Interesting news from Japan: Tohoku University has decided to launch an outreach effort to encourage more girls to pursue science. Rather than relying on secondary school science classes to whip up enthusiam for science, the university is recruiting its own women graduate students in the sciences to serve as role models and mentors.
From the Yomiuri Shimbun:
Tohoku University is to dispatch "Science Angels"--female volunteer students from its graduate school--to primary, middle and high schools in Sendai to attract more females into science. ...
The volunteers will visits schools in the…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2006Given that I've weighed in on "nerd culture" and some of the social pressures that influence women's relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It's pretty much the dreck you'd expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it's not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We're not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, "…
jstemwedel | June 16, 2006Maybe this is a bad idea, but I'm unable to resist poking this particular hornets' nest. (I've poked it before, after all.)
There's a post on Slashdot reporting that GNOME got 181 applications for Google's Summer of Code from men and zero applications from women. As a result, Google has seen fit to mount a Women's Summer Outreach Program 2006.
But here's the "value added" to this information by Slashdot:
Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get…
tsmith | June 10, 2006I talk a lot on here about making science more available (and interesting!) to the public. And I've posted previously about "sexy scientists" before. So you might think I'd be all for an effort to combine the two--but is this really necessary?
Ugh.
(Via new Scienceblog, Pure Pedantry.)
jstemwedel | June 9, 2006Regular readers of this blog know that I periodically muse on the question of why there aren't more women in science. But since I'm not, say, an anthropologist, my musings have been rooted mostly in my own experience and the experiences of people I know.
Well, the Summer 2006 issue of Washington Square, San Jose State University's alumni magazine, has an article -- including interviews of an anthropologist and a sociologist -- entitled "A difficult crossing: Obstacles that keep women from science" (pdf). Some evocative anthropological insight from that article after the jump.
The notion of…
jstemwedel | June 8, 2006This week, the National Review Online's media blogger revealed the secret identity of dKos blogger Armando, who says that this unwanted decloaking probably means he will no longer blog.
While I'm not heavy into the political end of the blogosphere (until someone can provide me with more than 24 hours per day), Armando's story resonates with me because one of my favorite science bloggers, BotanicalGirl, had to stop blogging when members of her department became aware of her blog. So I've been thinking a lot about blogging anonymously versus blogging under one's own name, not just in terms of…
tsmith | May 26, 2006I was heading out, but first I just want to point y'all over to this excellent post of Janet's regarding women and "nerd culture".
Now I'm really leaving...