Metaphorical Cats and Roosters

This morning, my husband showed me an article in which a political contest between 2 women was described as a "catfight". I think the description illuminates more about the reporter (and his editor(s)) than anything else.

We searched for news articles that use beast-adjectives to describe acrimonious political contests involving 2 men, but didn't find anything easily. I can think of one good one, but it would never be printed.

Rewarding Awards

The issue of Awards (prestigious grants, honors etc.) just won't go away. I recently finished my term on one awards committee, but have recently been asked to be on a different one. I said yes because this one involves early career faculty. This type of award can have a major impact on someone's career, and it's important to have a diverse committee.

This phenomenon of getting asked to do something after just finishing a similar activity also seems to occur with reviews. I will just finish one review and send it off, and within minutes or hours, the next request will come in from a different journal. It's as if editors sense a reviewing void and rush to fill it.

But back to awards: I had some early career awards that helped me a lot, and I think it is important for more senior faculty to encourage younger colleagues to apply for those that can be applied for, and nominate younger colleagues for other types of awards. As you get older, awards aren't so critical, but they are still a gauge of how you're perceived in your field, and to some extent a monitor of your visibility.

Of course, the whole awards thing can also be disheartening. For example, as an associate professor, I was nominated for an award that involved a nice bit of unrestricted research funding for a couple of years, but my chair unfortunately asked the 'wrong' person for a letter. I got to see the letter, and found that although the writer thought highly of me and my work, he felt that I had published "too much", and was working "too hard", and that this was "not healthy". He encouraged me to slow down. He thought that I was a "victim" of the modern pressure to publish too much and write endless grant proposals, and that he would be encouraging this if he supported my nomination . So, I didn't get the award and it went to a male colleague who had published a lot and written endless grant proposals.

Other experiences with awards have been more satisfying. A few years ago, I realized that neither my husband nor I had been nominated for fellowship in a particular professional society in which one of our spectacularly unproductive senior colleagues was a fellow. One could reasonably ask why we would want to belong to a *club* that had members like that, and there is no good answer. In any case, there was no reason we weren't fellows of this society, other than it had not occurred to anyone to nominate us. Our colleague clearly wasn't going to rouse himself from his torpor to nominate us, so I pointed out my husband's fellowlessness to another colleague (who had just assumed we were both already fellows) and this colleague got the process started. Being a Fellow (can't someone think of a better name for this?) has no effect whatsoever on one's life, but to me it felt like correcting a slight imbalance in the academic universe.

The Professor News

Thanks to Maxine for reminding me about the letters to Nature (Aug. 24) re. the Barres' commentary. The statistics on the number of women who have received some major awards is shocking in an unsurprising kind of way. Also very interesting was the letter about how changing the wording in an NIH proposal announcement and instructions - and changing the make-up of the panel - seems to have 'fixed' the problem they had both with getting women to write proposals for the young investigator grants and how the grants were awarded. For example, removing the description that "high risk" proposals were encouraged may have been one factor in increasing the number of women who applied.

That interested me in part because I don't think that the "high risk" wording, or the other descriptions mentioned, would have stopped me from writing a proposal. In fact, I find the concept appealing. I've long assumed (with some evidence from observations when serving on panels) that women's proposals are in some cases deemed to be "too risky" (for a woman?) whereas men are given the benefit of the doubt for similar proposals. So, a proposal that was not going to be undermined by a high risk factor might actually work for women IF the reviewers and panels apply fair criteria when evaluating them. In other words, I guess I'm a hurl-myself-at-the-castle-wall type (apply and see what happens).

Random note about Nature letters, which all start with "SIR-". If the editor-in-chief were a woman, would these all say "MADAM-"? (Maxine?)

In other professor news: I temporarily set aside my reluctance to read yet another barrage of New York Times articles about Harvard, and read about the demise of early admissions. If it helps those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged with their chances of admissions, that's great. I am too cynical to believe that this will happen, but will keep an open mind and see what happens. Speaking entirely selfishly as someone who applied early to one college, got in, and was done with the process in a low-stress and efficient way, I very much appreciated a process that defanged my father's obsession with the application/admittance process.

My Far Flung Correspondent

From an email from my conference-attending husband, in Europe: "You would hate this conference. Lots of senior men dominating the meeting. A few senior women, mostly keeping quiet."

Better Living Through Least Publishable Units

In recent weeks I've been on a committee that selects a recipient for one of the highest awards in a field related to my own, and it's been very interesting to observe the dynamics of the committee and also to reflect on the careers of the very successful nominees for the award. I suppose I am a "diversity" member of the committee. No woman has ever won this award, and I think only one has ever even been nominated. Many other members of the committee are past winners of the award, so as you might imagine, their opinions carry a lot of weight. And then there's me.

It will surprise no one that recipients of the award tend to have vast numbers of papers, even if the total is inflated by lots of Least Publishable Unit (LPU) papers such as "Results of My Experiments with Material X", followed by "Results of the Same Experiments with Material Y", and let's not forget the papers with multiple parts, like "Part I: My Data" and "Part II: Now I Am Going to Think About my Data."

And then there is the phenomenon of giving someone an award because he got some other awards which he got because he got some other awards and so on to infinity. Even if the early awards were well deserved, it's surprising how long you can coast on that without doing anything more creative than edit books of other people's original articles (a useful and necessary thing to do, I admit).

This recent committee was quite divided between one group that wanted to award someone with a War-And-Peace length CV with some important papers and a fair number of LPU's, and another group that favored someone who had fewer papers, but a large number of his papers were creative and had a high impact on the field. That is of course not an objective description, and it reveals what my (losing) choice was.

Many of us know colleagues who "shingle" publications by publishing more than one paper on something that probably could be just one paper, and often this practice is spoken of with contempt. Yet, publishing LPU's clearly hasn't harmed some prominent people. You wouldn't be able to get a job today if you had a CV full of LPU's and shingled papers, and you most likely wouldn't get promoted either. But perhaps there is some point at which the shear number of papers starts to impress people. I don't completely understand this phenomenon.

Is this another depressing and cynical post? I guess, but I will say that I am at least slightly optimistic that these old-style committees, awards, and such will change in the not-so-distant future.

Should One Rant to Administrators?

I guess I will find out soon because I did rant to an administrator (via email) today and he replied that we should chat more about my Issues this week. I was really fed up about a whole lot of things, and reached my tipping point when two weekend departmental functions came up in quick succession. My husband and I went to one event yesterday, and we told the powers-that-be that we would try to find childcare for an event that is 2 weeks away, but we hadn't found anything yet. We were told we have 3 more days to figure it all out. I am not feeling too motivated to do that.

Overall, I think I balance life and work very well, but it's a rather delicate balance. The balance can handle such things as travel (in fact, my husband just left for a conference), major deadlines (proposals), assorted visitors, minor illnesses and so on. I could even handle extraneous departmental functions if I had to, but that's where my attitude problem kicks in.

Last year, in a reorganization of the leadership positions in my department, for the first time in 10+ years every single position was given to male faculty (some were elected, some were appointed). The reason given to me for why I was not as qualified as my male colleagues is that they would be better able to "balance research with other responsibilities". The colleague who told me this has a stay-at-home wife. Of all the reasons one could come up with for why I shouldn't have a position of responsibility (my strange sense of humor? my tendency to be sarcastic in a place where sarcasm is not always appreciated?), this is the last one I would have thought possible. In fact, it would not have occurred to me. You will just have to believe me that in my case, this particular reason is bizarre. But there it is.

So, I have that still seething in my brain, and then these extra events come up that are easy for the guys with Wives to attend but challenging for other people. If my colleagues think I have trouble *balancing*, even though I dealt with everything that came my way and more for the past 10 years, then why should I continue being an uncomplaining team-player? I am done being nice about dealing with extra administrative activities because (1) I dealt with them for years, and it got me nowhere, and (2) I'm a full professor, and I can complain about stuff like this. My rant today wasn't just about the immediate issue of departmental functions on weekends, it was that the current department organization and culture will impact our recruitment and retention of faculty. If we keep going as we are, at the very least we have a major morale problem among the women faculty (20% of the department!), and at worst we won't be able to recruit excellent candidates who see our regressive departmental structure and culture.

Nothing But Time

Working at home just doesn't work for me -- it never has. I need to be in my office, surrounded by all my office stuff, without the home distractions of people and cats. I don't think this is any more virtuous than people who work successfully at home, though. The key thing is what you accomplish, wherever that may be. I have postdocs and students who prefer to work at their homes, and that's totally fine with me as long as we have enough time in the department when our schedules intersect, and as long as they are making progress in their research.

I was recently entertained when a colleague who NEVER comes to the department at night or on weekends, and seldom in the summer months either, stopped by the office one weekend to check his mailbox after one of his many vacations. He saw me coming out of my office, and was very surprised. He said "I didn't expect to see YOU here". So I said "Why not?" He had no response to my question. It occurred to me then that perhaps some people who 'work' at home (as opposed to the ones who really do) assume that no one else is working in the off hours either.

When I was a grad student, there were lots of grad students and postdocs working late at night and on weekends in the department. In my department now, it's the faculty and postdocs who are there at all hours, and we seldom see grad students at night and on weekends. I have always assumed that this means that the students are better at working at home than we older people who 'grew up' working in the office. And, without getting into the whole cat vs. dog issue, for some reason a large number of people in my research group have dogs, and these dogs require a lot of attention and company. This is fine with me -- I like both dogs and cats, although at present I only have cats at home. I have been strangely fascinated to watch two dog-owning but childless people in my research group juggle schedules that are much more complex than mine (a non-dog-owning mother of one). They love these dogs, of course, and the dogs are important for their emotional well-being, so we all just work around it, just as my students and postdocs have to deal with my occasional absences or erratic schedule when my daughter doesn't have school.

The 60 Hour Week

A recent op-ed essay in the NYT about the end of summer noted that most academics work a lot more than 40 hours a week, though we have somewhat erratic schedules and our work is not typically 8-5. I have some colleagues who are strictly 8-5ers, but am not one of them. I would have a hard time with a strict schedule, and with working so few hours. I added up my hours in a typical week, and easily got to 60+. Maybe I am less efficient than some of my colleagues, but even so, I wouldn't feel satisfied with working so little. It takes about 40 hours for teaching and administrative work each week, and then there's the research I want/need to get done. It doesn't really feel like it's so much time because the work is so varied, and much of it is interesting and fun.

That said, I am not looking forward to an upcoming faculty 'retreat'; i.e., an all-day faculty meeting on a weekend. Overall, I am fortunate that my department has very few evening/weekend activities that are not family-friendly. Some of my colleagues in other departments at this university have lots of such activities, and they are always torn between not going (possibly harming their standing in the department; stressful for tenure-track faculty) and going but having less time with their kids/spouses (+ the expense of baby-sitters). I don't have to deal with that much, but these retreats are different. Even if we could find an all-day babysitter who could come to our house as early as 8 a.m. on a weekend, it would probably cost about $100 for my husband and I to attend this retreat thing. I don't mean to be cheap, but the general idea of paying to go to an all-day faculty meeting is annoying. The previous chair refused to pay a student to babysit faculty offspring during these retreats because he says it wouldn't be 'fair' to those faculty without kids. I think that reason is bizarre. In the past, my husband and I have flipped a coin to see who goes and who doesn't (the loser of the coin toss attends the retreat).

Men 12 : Women 0

The official departmental speaker list was posted today. Twelve weeks of male speakers, no women speakers. It is possible that a woman will be invited in the spring as part of a special effort to promote the invitation of women scientists as speakers. Swell. I mentioned this 12 : 0 situation to one colleague today, and he explained to me, very patiently, that there are no women speakers because none were invited, so it's not that we turned down anyone's request for women speakers.. we just didn't even invite them in the first place. Oh, so that's fine then <-- sarcasm.

It is too bad that he spoke with no data to back up his hypothesis because he is not correct. I had one woman speaker on my list of possibilities, and I really find it hard to believe that I'm the only one. And even if I am, does that mean that only women faculty are interested in inviting women speakers? We have had women speakers in past years, so it does happen.

Maybe we've already invited everyone there is to invite? Some of the most prominent women in my general field have actually been here 2-3 times in recent years, so maybe we have to recycle women? We do, but only if we restrict ourselves to already famous people.

The possible speaker on my list is an early career person. I didn't sit down and make sure there was a female name on my list. I just thought about who might give an interesting talk about something new and exciting, and I thought of her. Unfortunately, she didn't make the cut this time, perhaps because she is not yet famous enough.

Meanwhile, I'll be giving 4 research talks. I always hope that when I'm invited to give a talk that I'm invited at least partially because someone is interested in my research, and not just to provide gender diversity, although I don't mind doing the role model thing as well. I would just prefer that research interest come first, as that would enhance my effectiveness as a role model (though I've doubts about how effective I really am, as I've noted before).

Teaching

Over the summer, I've done a lot of the kind of teaching that involves working individually with undergraduates and grad students on research projects. Tomorrow will involve a dramatic switch to the stand-in-front-of-a-big-class and *lecture*, although of course we aren't supposed to really *lecture*, because students apparently don't learn well in that format anymore (did they used to? is it really such a bad thing even today?). Unless I'm willing to throw out a large proportion of my course's content, which I am not willing to do, the class is going to be mostly *lecture* format. I like to think that my socratic style, use of some in-class activities, thrilling mix of powerpoint+chalkboard-writing+demonstrations, and availability for discussion/help outside of class make the lecture format effective for this class. Maybe my pedagogical imagination is limited, but this is a big university, I get these students in class for < 2 hours/week, and I have a huge amount to teach them.

Predicted positive aspects of this class:
- It's an interesting subject and I enjoy teaching it.
- Typically, at least 50% of the students in it WANT to be there; the rest have to take it for various degree requirements.
- There have been some interesting new developments in this sub-discipline, and I'm looking forward to incorporating these into the class. It's not my major field of research, but it's not too far removed from what I do, so I can also mention relevant aspects of my own research.
- It's a great course for taking a bunch of students who know nothing about the topic at the beginning, and ending up with a group in which at least some will be so interested that they will get involved in research by the end of the year.

Possible negative or worrisome aspects of this class:
- In the 15+ years I've been teaching this or similar classes, I've never had so few female students (a trend or a random occurrence?).
- It's the first 'serious' course in this discipine that some students have taken, and it can be a bit of a shock for some.
- Although there are some allied science/math prerequisites for this course, the registration system does not have the ability to notice if students have actually taken these. It always amazes me that students without the prereqs do not think it is their responsibility to know the information in those courses, and they want me or the TA's to give them extra help and/or they just don't think they should be expected to know this information. I hope this is not an issue this semester.
- The other professor who teaches this class is convinced that he does it better than I do owing to his superior intellect and teaching skills (or something), and he likes to chat with me about my shortcomings. I do not enjoy these conversations, although mostly I think they are ridiculous. I am sure there are things I could do to improve as a teacher, but I happen to know that my teaching evaluations are better than his (I was on a committee that looked at such things for the department) and I've won teaching awards. See earlier post on patronizing colleagues.

Grads & Jobs

I have attended or participated in quite a few Ph.D. thesis defenses over the past few weeks, and in every case, the graduating Ph.D. student is going to a postdoc or short-term teaching position (e.g., sabbatical replacement). Our department has many recent graduates who are now in faculty positions at universities and colleges around the world, but almost none go directly from being students to being professors. I think that's a good thing overall for both the early-career scientist and the department, but it can be stressful for those with partners/spouses/children to move around so much and have the uncertainty about the future continue for the first few post-graduate years. Some choose to take a less desirable job right away rather than gamble with the uncertainty. I've seen some promising women scientists leave the research track for just that reason.

Only one graduate in the past 10 years from my research group is now a professor at a small liberal arts college, and that person attended a SLAC as an undergraduate. When I was in job-search mode, I got interviews at SLACs, as did my fellow job-seekers who had attended SLACs, but it was very rare for a SLAC to interview someone who had spent their entire career at large universities. Colleagues at small schools admit that they discriminate in this way because they think that someone who hasn't been part of the culture won't fit in or won't appreciate it. I don't think they would completely eliminate from consideration an otherwise excellent candidate, but having attended a SLAC gives one an edge for applying for faculty positions at one. I think this general approach filters out some excellent candidates who might have enjoyed a small liberal arts college experience but couldn't afford it or had other reasons (economic, family etc.) for attending a large university. An extreme example of this is one prominent SLAC whose department in my field consists almost entirely of faculty who attended that school as an undergraduate. At present, everyone in my research group (other than me) has been at medium to large universities for their entire academic careers and none of them are seriously considering faculty positions at small schools for reasons varying from lack of interest (wrong balance of teaching vs. research) to a strong feeling that they won't fit in. So, there's definitely some self-filtering at the application stage as well.

It can be a bit perilous to take a job at a SLAC (depending on the SLAC of course) if you have research aspirations beyond what can easily be accomplished at a small school, unless you don't stay there long (1-2 years, maybe 3 years max) and if you work insanely hard to do well at both teaching and research while you're there, despite having what is likely a huge teaching load and few research resources. That said, it is quite possible to develop an active research program by taking advantage of NSF and other programs that encourage research at undergraduate institutions.

So Many Ceilings

In just the past week or so, there have been front page articles in the New York Times about the general lack of women ministers of large churches and the decrease this year in the number of women Supreme Court clerks. In the first article, the scariest part was when parishioners were quoted as saying they just didn't like to see a woman up there preaching. In the second article, the scariest part was when one Supreme Court Justice (Souter) said that, alas, none of the top applicants for his clerk positions were women this year. I believe (though of course disagree with) the first sexist statement -- it's the same with other professions, including academia, that many people prefer to get information from deep-voiced, authoritative-sounding men -- but I don't believe the second statement. How lame. I've heard the same excuse for why 0.014% of the math faculty at my university are women. The 'top' candidates are always men. Amazing! If a Supreme Court Justice hired only women clerks, would people assume that the 'top' candidates just happened to be all women? Unfortunately, I cannot set aside my deep cynicism for even a second to believe that would be the case.

When I was in grad school, one of the few other female grad students in my department failed her prelims because her committee just didn't think she was "ready" to complete her degree. Her committee told her that they just couldn't "see" her as a professor yet, but because she'd done so well with the exam, they were willing to give her another try later. (happy ending: she did try again, passed, got a tenure-track position at a large university, and became a prominent researcher in her field). Her research contributions have far surpassed those of contemporaneous male grad students who easily passed their prelims. Why should women continue to be held back because men lack imagination? Why are we hearing the same thing today that men have been saying for centuries?

The article about women ministers had many parallels with the situation of women in academia, including perhaps the implicit equating of 'success' with being hired by a large church (= large research university?). Of course bigger isn't really better for either churches or universities, but in both cases, bigger place = more people, more money, and more prestige, and that's where women leak, fall, or are forcibly ejected from the so-called pipeline.

Shopping/Alienation and Wedding Ring/Lack Thereof

My daughter and I went back-to-school shopping today. We are both very fond of acquiring school supplies, and less fond of shopping for clothes, but it was a fun day anyway. It is always a bit weird to venture out into the real world on a weekday. I felt like I was visiting an unfamiliar culture, with rituals and customs I don't really understand. Mostly that is because I lack a Shopping Gene, and feel acutely alienated from the rest of humanity when I am in a Mall, which is exactly where we went today.

We were very entertained by some of the bizarre fashions, including what I will call "mature" styles for pre-teens. Fortunately my daughter isn't interested in wearing something that looks like adult women's lingerie to school.

I was also entertained by the saleswomen who glanced in an obvious way at my ringless ring finger (I am married but don't wear a wedding ring) and then called me "Miss", as in "Can I help you, miss?". The beringed woman near me got a "Can I help you, ma'am?". Perhaps that's part of the sales job, to identify people by their situation and customize the greetings? I don't care what they call me, but it briefly interested me to be categorized like that. I know it is odd to be married and ringless, but I've never worn jewelry (I seldom even wear a watch), and the ring symbolism doesn't mean anything to me or my husband, so neither of us wears a wedding ring. My ringlessness has resulted in some strange encounters over the years, and some people are quite disapproving of my lack of a wedding ring, as if I'm less committed to my husband, trying to look single and available, or somehow violating a law of nature. I keep thinking that eventually some of my relatives might change their mind about the significance of a wedding ring, as my husband and I remain happily married and my ring-wearing siblings/cousins and others divorce, but it hasn't happened yet. I have never met another married woman who doesn't wear a wedding ring, but I think there must be others out there somewhere. (?)

Women & Girls

I recently asked some of my female students, including 23-30+ year old grad students, why they referred to themselves and their friends as girls instead of women. I feared that their answer would involve the explanation that they didn't consider themselves feminists, but no, they just shrugged and said that the words "woman" and "women" sounded "old" to them. Their mothers are women, they are girls.

I told them that my college and grad school friends were quite insistent on being called women and not girls, in part because the male students were referred to as Men, and it was annoying to be considered a girl when our peers were considered Men. My students said they didn't think of their male peers as men, just as guys, dudes, boys, whatever. My most talented, independent, smart, energetic female students call themselves girls, and I know they see themselves as the equal (or better) than their male peers, so the girl/woman thing clearly doesn't have the baggage that it used to.

My generation drew the line at age 18 or so, but now I wonder where the boundary is for my grad students -- when they get their degrees? get married? get a job? have children? get some wrinkles? Or never? My aged aunt still refers to herself and her friends as "the girls", as did my grandmother. Perhaps there were a few decades in the late 20th century when "woman" was considered a positive term that was worth insisting on, but now that's over.

Even if the women/girl terminology is no longer an issue for some, I still correct my senior male colleagues when they refer to the women grad students (or undergrads, for that matter) as "girls", "gals", or even "ladies", since they do not refer to the male students as boys or guys or gentlemen. And I can't help it.

Vital Information or Boring Old War Stories?

I always wonder how much to tell my own graduates students and postdocs, particularly the women, about 'the bad old days' of being harassed and patronized. I must admit that if I have to hear the same old stories from some of my senior women colleagues yet again, I will run screaming from the room, but that is only because I've heard some of their tales 5 or 6 or 10 times. I am glad I heard the stories at least once though. It gives me some perspective about what has changed and what has not, and I respect these women very much for having prevailed against the odds.

But what do I want and need to tell my own students about my history? And how much do I tell them about things that happen to me today? I keep things pretty informal in my research group, and the research activities sometimes require my spending lots of time with my students and research associates (traveling or in the lab), and we have lots of opportunities for chatting about things other than the tasks at hand. Sometimes I tell stories about my grad school days, presenting a mix of generic tales of science and personalities, and a few times I've mentioned The Dark Side of being a woman in these settings. I've never told them about the really bad episodes though, and I doubt I ever will.

Most of my group are, to varying extents, aware of what life is like today for a woman science professor, but are they getting a balanced view? Are they learning what they need to know to succeed, not just as talented researchers, but as women who will have to navigate some difficult situations? Is it enough just for me to be a quasi-passive role model?

My most typical way of discussing these topics with students or postdocs is to make a joke of some annoying episodes (the old professor who patronizes me, the jerk on a committee who called me a 'feminist' to discredit my support for a female candidate, etc. etc.), as in - aren't these guys amazing? and then I discuss how I handled the situation, for better or worse, and we talk about it and laugh. This sometimes seems a bit feeble to me as an approach to being an Inspiring Role Model, but I'm not sure I'd succeed at anything more direct.

Credit Check

Lately I have observed some excellent examples of a phenomenon that has intrigued and disgusted me over the years. The phenomenon involves how students and others decide to acknowledge help from advisors, committee members, and assorted persons. It will shock no one that most people have a tendency to profusely thank famous people who said hi to them in the hall, giving less credit and thanks to lower ranked people who helped them with actual research activities, not to mention slaving away at editing their convoluted prose. Even though it is a cliche and perhaps just human nature, the phenomenon is still semi-interesting to think about. What is actually going on in people's brains when they make these Credit decisions?

I first encountered this years ago as an Assistant Professor, when I spent vast amounts of time I didn't really have to help a student whose committee I wasn't even on, but who needed my expertise for one part of a research project. I didn't even merit a thank you in the thesis defense or thesis, although the student used my interpretations and results I helped obtain. Another example years later as an Associate Professor: I routinely spent many days with various students in an analytical lab helping them get data they couldn't get themselves, showed them how to reduce the data, and gave them advice on interpretation and illustration. No mention of my help in their defenses or theses or papers using the data. Meanwhile, some of my senior colleagues were mentioned as inspirations and mentors even though all they did was suggest a paper to read.

A very recent example: I helped a student (whose committee I am on) with something he was incapable of doing himself. He had proved himself incapable again and again and was in a dire situation. Once I helped him, he said "Yeah, that's pretty much what I would have done myself." What was I expecting? I would not enjoy grovelling gratitude, but a sincere "Thanks, I couldn't have done that without your help and your time" would be quite nice. Maybe they think of me as a mom-type person -- like when you're a kid and you don't thank your mom every time she does your laundry? I guess the difference is that I feel I am giving them something valuable (my ideas, for example) that they don't have and, in some cases, will never have, themselves.

For years I thought it was an age-related issue, but it's still happening. My help is routinely requested, but then the results of my help just become part of the student's own work, not to be credited in any particular way, whereas the 'micro-help' some of my colleagues provide is treasured. I keep providing help because I get interested in a problem and want to investigate and I like working with and helping students, so I typically get something out of the activity.

I think this no-credit situation might be related to the phenomenon (mentioned in an earlier post) of my seeming to have *more time* than some other faculty just because I'm good at getting lots of things done. I really think I'm going to have to lose my nice, cheerful, and helpful persona.

This is just something to muse about. I am not sitting here bitterly counting up all the times I am overlooked and uncredited, and I do not want to turn into one of those people who constantly point out exactly where and when they should be cited and credited -- I've known a few of them and I think they are absurd. I am not oblivious either, though, and when I sit there in the auditorium watching my ideas and data incorporated without attribution into a presentation by a graduating student, I start to wonder: did they simply forget? not think my help was important? or what?

Mismeasuring

I'm a little behind in the news, so I just recently read "The mismeasure of woman" in the Economist
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7245949.
It's interesting to read about research into gender differences in terms of brain function and other 'objective' measures of male vs. female abilities in terms of spatial reasoning, vocabulary, and things like that. The rather detailed article has a rather disturbing ending though. The article concludes that the difference between male and female brains isn't so great, and therefore that female brains could be *educated* in a different way to acquire better skills for succeeding in math, science, engineering. OK.. The article was focused on brain research and not the culture of science, but even so, anyone who has survived the current system of discrimination and harassment knows that it's going to take more than spatial reasoning exercises in elementary school to help females succeed in math/science/engineering. I think it would be great if more people had skills for succeeding in science etc., but can't help but think that the most dramatic changes need to occur in the system rather than in female brains.

August Does Not Really Exist

It's deep August -- the one month during which I am paid neither by my university or by my grants (max = 2 months in summer), and therefore the month in which I am particularly reminded of several things: (1) I (and, I think, most professors) don't do this for the money, and (2) That doesn't mean I want to do any department committee work, field emails from students about next term's classes, or do other things that could be dealt with in September when the term starts and when my daughter is back in school and when I am supposed to deal with things like that. Yet the latter activities are more than looming. They are here.

Last week I was very pleased to learn that a male colleague of mine at another university feels similarly oppressed about being asked to do lots of departmental tasks just because he's organized and efficient. He is often told that his other colleagues are 'too busy', as if he isn't. In fact, his other colleagues are just less able to balance everything. I think it might not be a coincidence that this colleague is a single dad and has probably had to learn to balance everything, and he got so extremely good at it that he always seems to have time for just one more task.

Meanwhile, I am doing the final checking and rechecking of a manuscript that came back from review and is ready for final submission. One of my students is first author, but his idea of finishing a manuscript clearly doesn't involve running a spellchecker, making sure all the references, figures, and tables are in order, and so on. This is one of those times that makes me feel old because I can't help thinking "When I was a graduate student...". [I would sooner have stuck thumbtacks in my eyes than have my advisor do this much editing work on a manuscript.] But I'd rather just get it done and do it well than hand it back to my student yet again for another stab at punctuation, verbs, and logical ordering of text and figures. It's a good thing it's still August and I have lots of time for this.

All Guys

Every summer, undergrads from other colleges work with my research group. This summer, I have 3 in my group and all 3 are from small liberal arts colleges. They wanted to get some experience doing research at a large university because they are thinking about applying to grad schools in the fall. So, in addition to doing some interesting work this summer, they are testing the waters to see if grad school is in fact what they really want to do, and, if it is, if this is the right field for them. And of course the research experience helps if they do apply to graduate programs.

I have been talking to them about where they might apply, how to go about applying, and things like that. A century ago when I was applying to graduate programs, my main concern was finding an advisor and program that best fit my research interests. In recent conversations with the female students, however, I have found that they are very aware of gender ratios in the departments they are considering for graduate school. I mentioned one excellent school to one of my interns, and she said "I would never want to go there. I looked at their website and it's all guys." True, though "the guys" there are excellent researchers and some of them are even nice people/advisors. I don't think she cares if she has a male or female advisor; she's just checking to make sure that the department as a whole has a good climate for women students, and is using the number of women faculty as an indicator of this. I think this is fine, and I wonder if these departments know that they are missing out on some top applicants because of their lack of women faculty.

Fortunately for my intern, these days it is unusual for a department to be so extremely male dominated, so if she's going to use that criterion, she still has lots of excellent options. Even so, what if The Best Place for her research interests was at a bastion of maleness? Unless I knew that there was a serious problem with how women were treated there, I would encourage her to apply/attend.

Even if a department has women faculty, this is of course no guarantee that faculty (male or female) are sensitive and caring individuals and good advisors. I have a few colleagues who could definitely treat their students (again, male and female) better, but the women students generally have more trouble dealing with obnoxious advisors. When women graduate students talk to me because they are in despair about how their obnoxious male advisors treat them, I always say that I understand it is difficult (and we talk about whether there is anything constructive that can be done), but the most important advice I give them is to stick with it. I say "If you quit, then academia will continue to be populated by people like your advisor. If you stay, then YOU will be a professor and you can make a difference in changing the academic culture". I know that I'm advising them to suffer in the hopes that it might eventually be worth it, but the alternative seems even more bleak.

Distinguished Women

My department is in the throes of making invitations to outside speakers for our weekly seminar series in the coming academic year, and the Chair has asked in particular that we suggest women speakers as part of a Distinguished Women in Science effort promoted by the Dean's office. I always have mixed feelings about this type of thing.

Mixed Feeling #1/Pro: There have been many years when there were no women speakers for the entire year. It always amazes me that this is possible, given that there are excellent women scientists who could be invited, but the general philosophy of the seminar organizers has typically been to invite their friends or to invite Really Big Names in the field, and both of these categories are rather male. So, for this reason, I support the effort to bring in distinguished women speakers. An added benefit is that grad students and postdocs can see that there are in fact women with successful careers and interesting things to say.

Mixed Feeling #2/Con: Why do we have to make a special effort and designate these speakers in a particular way, so that it is clear that a major reason they are being invited is because they are women? It's true they wouldn't be invited if they didn't also have interesting research ideas and results to discuss, but even so. It's sort of like how some scientific organizations have designated 'special' awards that only go to women, to try to mitigate the problem of gender bias for the major awards. Does this solve anything? I hate it when people say or write things like "She's one of the best female _________s" (fill in the blank with a scientific field). I've seen that in letters of recommendation for faculty positions. When can we remove the adjective? When can we just be chemists or oceanographers or astronomers, for example, and not female chemists, female oceanographers, female astronomers?