So women have to deal with a lot more B.S. at work than men in general, but in particular in male dominated fields such as physics. I am in the middle of a conflict at work where I volunteered to work on a project, but after I was treated poorly by the guy in charge of the project I quit. My work was called insufficient at meetings I wasn't invited to, the guy in charge cross-checked my work behind my back, and two people from another institution were asked behind my back to cross-check my work. My professional judgments were summarily dismissed without being heard, and I was treated like unskilled labor and bossed around in ways similar to how I was bossed around when I worked at Target in high school. The male graduate student on the project had some problems, but his work was not bad-mouthed or his work checked behind his back.
The guy in charge of the project - who is not my boss but a post doc in my group - does not believe I quit. He really does not believe it. I did say I would reconsider and named my conditions, but he didn't even address my concerns and instead made patronizing comments about my "feelings" and how my work was "appreciated." He did not agree to stop the cross-checks of my work behind my back or to include me in meetings and decisions relevant to my work. So I have not re-joined the project. He said that requiring these conditions was "threatening" him.
That really takes the cake.
This, along with other events of the past year, makes me wonder why I still want to stay in physics after all of this. What is the personal cost of such a decision? There is some element of wanting to prove people wrong, to prove that women are just as capable of physics. And I truly enjoy physics. I love what I do on a daily basis and the people I get to meet and work with - well, most of them. I hate the patronizing comments and the dismissal of my work and the fact that I am not taken seriously as a scientist. People remember who I am because I stand out at a conference, but they often don't remember what I say about physics. At least one man probably only remembers my legs because that's all he looked at. I hate that I have to fight to get respect and that when I do that - instead of rolling over and playing doormat - I'm called a bitch.
It also seems like everyone thinks I'll stay in the field simply because I've been successful. But when I find myself unable to work, either because people purposefully omit me from communications or I'm so upset about B.S. people pull on me, or I find that I've been working in circles because I've been purposefully omitted from communications, I wonder whether it's all worth it. To work in a field where 10% of the people fundamentally don't think I deserve respect, and where my salary is at least a factor of two below what I could get in the private sector. Not that the private sector is necessarily more respectful of women, but at least one could be adequately compensated, if not necessarily respected. At what point does personal happiness trump social good? If life is a hell 20% of the time because of sexist behavior and a woman has to achieve 2-3 times as much as a man to get the same amount of recognition, is it still worth it for a woman to stay in academia?
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
The voluntary double standard
My collaboration now comprises 20% women at the post doc and student levels, so it is no longer abnormal to see women in committees and there is no longer only one token female on committees. Indeed, most of the committees I've been on have 30-40% women. We had an alumni conference at Yale and students were asked to submit posters for the conference. Even though the grad student pool is, again, no more than 20% female (I think closer to 15% at Yale, although the graduation rate is higher because the drop out rate is higher for men), about 30-40% of the people giving posters were female. About 50% of the students in elected positions in the RHIC community - on our collaboration's council, the RHIC/AGS UEC, the BNL Association for Students and Post Docs board - have been women, even though we make up 20% of the student pool. Similarly, I would estimate that 70% of the work supervising undergraduates and beginning graduate students in our group - measured in hours spent with students - was done by women, even though the time average of the percentage of women in the group is about 35-40%.
These things are mostly voluntary. They do help someone in getting positions and getting invited talks, however, their exact contribution is questionable and not necessarily proportional to the work required. Service on committees is not considered at all, for instance, by the STAR talks committee as a qualification for giving an invited talk, while service work (calibrating detectors, maintaining code, etc) - which is mandatory anyways, even if that requirement is not always enforced - is. One colleague referred to my service on a committee in the RHIC community - which required approximately 15 hours of work each month over the course of two years - as an extracurricular activity and asserted that it should not be considered work at all, even though it added up to 9 weeks of working full time. No one made me do it, after all.
Every activity I've done in grad school that has not directly moved me closer to my goal of graduation has been done disproportionately by women - giving up a Saturday to teach school children, giving tours of our detector, supervising undergraduates, serving on committees. Indeed, these are activities that my fellow male grad students have hardly done at all, and when they have done them, it was largely by arm twisting. I had the temerity to ask my advisor to get out of one activity working with undergrads because I had had the undergrads in my office a couple hours a day for a few weeks already. This was ok with my advisor, who understood completely, but one of my male colleagues was outraged that I had gotten "out of it." This has meant that, while my male colleagues work a 40-50 hour week, I have largely worked and 80-100 hour week.
How did this happen? I am in a group which I regard as generally healthy. I can't think of many instances where male and female grad students and post docs were explicitly treated differently by our supervisors and indeed my advisor has frequently stood up for women, but the female grad students and post docs have done more "voluntary" work. (I am using the term "voluntary" even though these tasks are often explicitly mentioned in job descriptions for lack of a better word.) Here's what I think (and there is some research to back me up I'm not going into) - men and women perceive requests from supervisors differently.
When my advisor comes in and asks me to do something, I view it as just shy of an order. If it isn't possible or I have compelling reasons why I can't do it, he'll listen to me and I won't have to do it, but if it's possible, I'll do it. If someone asks me if I'm interested in running for a committee or being on a committee, my answer is generally yes because I view it as part of my responsibility as a member of the community. My male colleagues don't react similarly. They try to get out of requests from our supervisor, although not necessarily by directly saying no. Sometimes they just make it such a low priority that it either doesn't get done in the end or it is done poorly, such as when my male colleagues failed to get a poster for the aforementioned alumni conference done on time. (They started it the night before the poster session and tried to print it that morning.) Their default answer to a request - to be on a committee or work with school children or give tours of the experiment - is no.
I do not want to let my supervisors down so my default answer is yes. This is a completely irrational response because there is no apparent negative consequence of saying no. Since it means I would have more time for my own research and research is valued over other contributions to the extent that other contributions are almost not considered at all for professional advancement, it actually hurts me to say yes. This is fundamentally an unhealthy situation for the field, since we need the contributions of all members, including men, and we do not reward people for work which is necessary for the field. Research is valued above all else - to the extent that we accept dysfunctional, abusive, and even violent behavior from someone who is capable of some advanced thoughts on physics and often even hold them up as role models.
How do we deal with this? First, supervisors should be wary of people - men and women - who always agree to do something and if an unfair burden is falling on some members of the group, the people doing more "voluntary" work should get out of other responsibilities and not be asked to do more "voluntary" things. Second, people who never volunteer and do poorly at "voluntary" tasks should face negative consequences, in the form of fewer invited talks and more difficulty with career advancement. People who make fewer contributions to the community should face barriers to advancement and people who make more contributions to the community should be supported and promoted. This is so obvious that it almost seems stupid to say it, but it is not the way that science works today.
Women also bear some of the responsibility. As long as we are always willing to do extra work with no rewards, we will do more work than our male colleagues and they will get the rewards. We need to evaluate these tasks more objectively and say no to things that won't help us get where we're going. When we do that, people in the field will realize how much they need people to do these things and they'll be forced to value them more.
These things are mostly voluntary. They do help someone in getting positions and getting invited talks, however, their exact contribution is questionable and not necessarily proportional to the work required. Service on committees is not considered at all, for instance, by the STAR talks committee as a qualification for giving an invited talk, while service work (calibrating detectors, maintaining code, etc) - which is mandatory anyways, even if that requirement is not always enforced - is. One colleague referred to my service on a committee in the RHIC community - which required approximately 15 hours of work each month over the course of two years - as an extracurricular activity and asserted that it should not be considered work at all, even though it added up to 9 weeks of working full time. No one made me do it, after all.
Every activity I've done in grad school that has not directly moved me closer to my goal of graduation has been done disproportionately by women - giving up a Saturday to teach school children, giving tours of our detector, supervising undergraduates, serving on committees. Indeed, these are activities that my fellow male grad students have hardly done at all, and when they have done them, it was largely by arm twisting. I had the temerity to ask my advisor to get out of one activity working with undergrads because I had had the undergrads in my office a couple hours a day for a few weeks already. This was ok with my advisor, who understood completely, but one of my male colleagues was outraged that I had gotten "out of it." This has meant that, while my male colleagues work a 40-50 hour week, I have largely worked and 80-100 hour week.
How did this happen? I am in a group which I regard as generally healthy. I can't think of many instances where male and female grad students and post docs were explicitly treated differently by our supervisors and indeed my advisor has frequently stood up for women, but the female grad students and post docs have done more "voluntary" work. (I am using the term "voluntary" even though these tasks are often explicitly mentioned in job descriptions for lack of a better word.) Here's what I think (and there is some research to back me up I'm not going into) - men and women perceive requests from supervisors differently.
When my advisor comes in and asks me to do something, I view it as just shy of an order. If it isn't possible or I have compelling reasons why I can't do it, he'll listen to me and I won't have to do it, but if it's possible, I'll do it. If someone asks me if I'm interested in running for a committee or being on a committee, my answer is generally yes because I view it as part of my responsibility as a member of the community. My male colleagues don't react similarly. They try to get out of requests from our supervisor, although not necessarily by directly saying no. Sometimes they just make it such a low priority that it either doesn't get done in the end or it is done poorly, such as when my male colleagues failed to get a poster for the aforementioned alumni conference done on time. (They started it the night before the poster session and tried to print it that morning.) Their default answer to a request - to be on a committee or work with school children or give tours of the experiment - is no.
I do not want to let my supervisors down so my default answer is yes. This is a completely irrational response because there is no apparent negative consequence of saying no. Since it means I would have more time for my own research and research is valued over other contributions to the extent that other contributions are almost not considered at all for professional advancement, it actually hurts me to say yes. This is fundamentally an unhealthy situation for the field, since we need the contributions of all members, including men, and we do not reward people for work which is necessary for the field. Research is valued above all else - to the extent that we accept dysfunctional, abusive, and even violent behavior from someone who is capable of some advanced thoughts on physics and often even hold them up as role models.
How do we deal with this? First, supervisors should be wary of people - men and women - who always agree to do something and if an unfair burden is falling on some members of the group, the people doing more "voluntary" work should get out of other responsibilities and not be asked to do more "voluntary" things. Second, people who never volunteer and do poorly at "voluntary" tasks should face negative consequences, in the form of fewer invited talks and more difficulty with career advancement. People who make fewer contributions to the community should face barriers to advancement and people who make more contributions to the community should be supported and promoted. This is so obvious that it almost seems stupid to say it, but it is not the way that science works today.
Women also bear some of the responsibility. As long as we are always willing to do extra work with no rewards, we will do more work than our male colleagues and they will get the rewards. We need to evaluate these tasks more objectively and say no to things that won't help us get where we're going. When we do that, people in the field will realize how much they need people to do these things and they'll be forced to value them more.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Lowering our standards
I couldn't make this stuff up.
So a friend and I organized a session at a recent meeting at BNL on Diversity in Physics and the lab newspaper was going to do a story on it. A guy from the PR department called the two of us and talked to us, and sent us a draft of the story before he published it. The draft contained - I kid not - the phrase, "all must remember that hiring women and minorities cannot equate to lowering standards." We recommended some changes and stated that the last few paragraphs were outright inaccurate. It went on like this - the last paragraph twisted a quote that was a recommendation to young people in the field not to worry about it but to let more senior people worry about it into something which appeared to say no one should worry about it at all. We never heard from the author, but the latest version of the paper came out and there was no story at all about the session.
So we hold a session about problems faced by women and minorities in the field and the story which is proposed by BNL's PR guy implies that hiring women and minorities leads to lowering the standards in the field and says that people shouldn't worry about diversity or the problems faced by women and minorities. The whole point of the session was to discuss problems faced by women and show data proving that there was a problem. A main point was that women and minorities are held to higher standards so by not hiring women and minorities, we are lowering our standards. This was backed up by data. Although given the drivel he wrote, one has to question whether we hit a sore point in saying that unqualified men were hired over qualified women.
Things like this are enough to make leaving the field and working on wall street really appealing. At least if I'm going to be treated unfairly and held to higher standards than men, perhaps I could get paid 80 cents on the dollar of what a man would get in a job with a salary of $200k instead of the typical post doc salary of $40-50k.
So a friend and I organized a session at a recent meeting at BNL on Diversity in Physics and the lab newspaper was going to do a story on it. A guy from the PR department called the two of us and talked to us, and sent us a draft of the story before he published it. The draft contained - I kid not - the phrase, "all must remember that hiring women and minorities cannot equate to lowering standards." We recommended some changes and stated that the last few paragraphs were outright inaccurate. It went on like this - the last paragraph twisted a quote that was a recommendation to young people in the field not to worry about it but to let more senior people worry about it into something which appeared to say no one should worry about it at all. We never heard from the author, but the latest version of the paper came out and there was no story at all about the session.
So we hold a session about problems faced by women and minorities in the field and the story which is proposed by BNL's PR guy implies that hiring women and minorities leads to lowering the standards in the field and says that people shouldn't worry about diversity or the problems faced by women and minorities. The whole point of the session was to discuss problems faced by women and show data proving that there was a problem. A main point was that women and minorities are held to higher standards so by not hiring women and minorities, we are lowering our standards. This was backed up by data. Although given the drivel he wrote, one has to question whether we hit a sore point in saying that unqualified men were hired over qualified women.
Things like this are enough to make leaving the field and working on wall street really appealing. At least if I'm going to be treated unfairly and held to higher standards than men, perhaps I could get paid 80 cents on the dollar of what a man would get in a job with a salary of $200k instead of the typical post doc salary of $40-50k.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Advice to new graduate students
This is some advice I would give to graduate students just starting in a large experiment such as the experiments at RHIC. It is only half tongue-in-cheek.
- Avoid service work. If you do service work it will never get recognized anyways. It will only hurt your chances of getting invited talks and reduce your standing in the experiment. If you do get roped into doing something, avoid visible service work since it will only make people believe you must not be doing an interesting physics analysis - because if you were, you would have been able to get out of service work. (See this paper.)
- If you see a problem in the collaboration or in the field, don't try to fix it. Genuinely trying to help the collaboration work better has all of the same negative consequences as service work. Worse, this will give you the reputation of being "difficult," and if you're a woman you will become known as a "bitch."
- Never, ever serve on committees. If you can't get out of it, shirk responsibilities so no one will ask you to ever do anything again. If you're a woman and you serve on committees, people will think of you as more of a secretary rather than a scientist.
- Choose your thesis project on the basis of buzz words without regard to the scientific merit. This will ensure that your abstracts will get accepted to the hottest conferences. Choose an analysis with impossibly larger error bars to ensure that no one can prove you wrong - your data will be consistent with the most exotic, exciting, implausible theories.
- Choose your thesis advisor carefully. I don't mean to choose someone who will teach you how to be a good scientist or direct you to a meaningful study which will contribute to our understanding of the field. Choose an advisor who promotes his people ruthlessly, whatever their qualifications. Choosing someone on the talks committee of your experiment is always a good bet.
- Never miss an opportunity to demonstrate how stupid other people in the field are relative to you. Ask impossible questions at conferences and obfuscate them using obscure terminology and lots of abbreviations and speaking quickly. Always pick victims less senior than you in the field so that this won't backfire on you.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Oh no, you take the credit for my work, please!
Like many of my colleagues, I have been thinking a lot about the new paper about gender disparities in the allocation of talks in D0. This paper actually raises a lot of issues we need to address as a community - perhaps the fact that service work had a negative impact on one's talks is the most harmful aside from the sexism, but here I will focus on the sexim. The author used publicly available information about talks given and internal D0 notes and compared productivity of male and female researchers (measured by the number of D0 notes they are authors on) to their rewards (measured by the conference talks they were awarded.) She found that the least productive woman was more productive than 50% of the men, that women did more service work, and that service work was negatively correlated with conference talks. She found a relation between various variables and one's conference talks using some fancy statistical method I'm not familiar with, and found that if women had been awarded conference talks at rates comparable to men, 6/9 instead of 4/9 female post docs would have gotten faculty positions. The thing is, D0 has a talk allocation procedure the same in essence (if not in detail) as nearly every other large physics experiment.
My first response was to try to discuss this with someone who might be in a position to change things. I also brought up some preliminary results from an analysis I started - looking at the percentage of talks given to women compared to the percentage of female post docs and graduate students. My experiment has about 22% female post docs and students, yet about 18% of the talks given to female post docs and students (analyzed separately). Confronted with these data (where I had no way to measure productivity), this man provided a possible interpretation that only a person able to shed any preconceived notions and "political correctness" could come up with - that possibly the women in my experiment aren't as good as the men. At least, that is always the way that men who don't want to confront gender inequality always view themselves. He wanted to be "open-minded" and consider "all possible interpretations of the data" - which actually involves ignoring decades of research or dismissing it as completely irrelevant. Which he did when I brought up other studies supporting my point. Because a large particle physics experiment with over 500 collaborators at Fermilab in Chicago that allocates talks using a small committee of senior physicists can't possibly have any similarities to a large heavy ion physics experiment with over 500 collaborators at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, NY that allocates talks using a small committee of senior physicists. They might be sexist at Fermilab, but we're not sexist at Brookhaven.
Oh, by the way, when you go to the bathroom, could you bring us some coffee? We put the kitchen in there for your convenience. (Yes, there really is a kitchen in a woman's restroom at Brookhaven.)
I think the hardest part about having such conversations is hiding the disgust. A senior physicist in the management of my experiment - with some influence over my ability to continue in the field - honestly believes that men are getting more talks because they're better. They really just like believing that they got where they are simply because they were better than everyone else. Being confronted with the fact that there has been affirmative action for men for most of recorded history scares them. These guys all believe that they are being so original, so unique, so intelligent - in coming up with the same old, tired theories that have been debunked already.
An interesting example that highlights all of this - there are four grad students currently in my group at my university. There is one fourth year male who has gotten one invited talk from our talks committee, one fifth year male who has put in a year less on the experiment than me and has gotten two invited talks from our talks committee, a fifth year female - me - who has gotten no talks from our talks committee, and a sixth year female who has gotten one invited talk from our talks committee. We are all at the same university. Six years for a PhD is normal. The men have, on average, less than 2.5 years working full time on the experiment and the women have, on average, more than 3.5 years. (There are some details with working summers I'm not going into.) The men have approximately 30% less experience but have gotten three times more invited talks. Obviously I'm not in a good position to objectively rate the grad students in my group, but I do not believe the men are better than the women, and certainly not three times better.
But what I think might be the most damaging thing is this - women seem to have become accustomed to getting less. A senior female colleague of mine was complaining about how grad students at my university complained if they hadn't had an invited talk at a major conference by the time they graduated. But my male colleagues - whom I'm competing with in the job market - get invited talks at major conferences. Why shouldn't I expect it if I view myself as having worked at least as hard and done work that was at least as good? By all means, I should complain. Part of our training includes being trained to expect less recognition than men.
And the training is working. Study after study has shown that, while men attribute a negative evaluation to a problem with the evaluator, women equate failure with a personal deficit. If you ask women in the field, we do not believe we are being discriminated against. We don't think we're getting fewer talks than comparably qualified men. We don't think we're getting paid less than comparably qualified men in equivalent positions. We don't think we are shunted into menial tasks (like service work) more than men. We don't think we are getting evaluated harsher than men. But the data say we are.
My first response was to try to discuss this with someone who might be in a position to change things. I also brought up some preliminary results from an analysis I started - looking at the percentage of talks given to women compared to the percentage of female post docs and graduate students. My experiment has about 22% female post docs and students, yet about 18% of the talks given to female post docs and students (analyzed separately). Confronted with these data (where I had no way to measure productivity), this man provided a possible interpretation that only a person able to shed any preconceived notions and "political correctness" could come up with - that possibly the women in my experiment aren't as good as the men. At least, that is always the way that men who don't want to confront gender inequality always view themselves. He wanted to be "open-minded" and consider "all possible interpretations of the data" - which actually involves ignoring decades of research or dismissing it as completely irrelevant. Which he did when I brought up other studies supporting my point. Because a large particle physics experiment with over 500 collaborators at Fermilab in Chicago that allocates talks using a small committee of senior physicists can't possibly have any similarities to a large heavy ion physics experiment with over 500 collaborators at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, NY that allocates talks using a small committee of senior physicists. They might be sexist at Fermilab, but we're not sexist at Brookhaven.
Oh, by the way, when you go to the bathroom, could you bring us some coffee? We put the kitchen in there for your convenience. (Yes, there really is a kitchen in a woman's restroom at Brookhaven.)
I think the hardest part about having such conversations is hiding the disgust. A senior physicist in the management of my experiment - with some influence over my ability to continue in the field - honestly believes that men are getting more talks because they're better. They really just like believing that they got where they are simply because they were better than everyone else. Being confronted with the fact that there has been affirmative action for men for most of recorded history scares them. These guys all believe that they are being so original, so unique, so intelligent - in coming up with the same old, tired theories that have been debunked already.
An interesting example that highlights all of this - there are four grad students currently in my group at my university. There is one fourth year male who has gotten one invited talk from our talks committee, one fifth year male who has put in a year less on the experiment than me and has gotten two invited talks from our talks committee, a fifth year female - me - who has gotten no talks from our talks committee, and a sixth year female who has gotten one invited talk from our talks committee. We are all at the same university. Six years for a PhD is normal. The men have, on average, less than 2.5 years working full time on the experiment and the women have, on average, more than 3.5 years. (There are some details with working summers I'm not going into.) The men have approximately 30% less experience but have gotten three times more invited talks. Obviously I'm not in a good position to objectively rate the grad students in my group, but I do not believe the men are better than the women, and certainly not three times better.
But what I think might be the most damaging thing is this - women seem to have become accustomed to getting less. A senior female colleague of mine was complaining about how grad students at my university complained if they hadn't had an invited talk at a major conference by the time they graduated. But my male colleagues - whom I'm competing with in the job market - get invited talks at major conferences. Why shouldn't I expect it if I view myself as having worked at least as hard and done work that was at least as good? By all means, I should complain. Part of our training includes being trained to expect less recognition than men.
And the training is working. Study after study has shown that, while men attribute a negative evaluation to a problem with the evaluator, women equate failure with a personal deficit. If you ask women in the field, we do not believe we are being discriminated against. We don't think we're getting fewer talks than comparably qualified men. We don't think we're getting paid less than comparably qualified men in equivalent positions. We don't think we are shunted into menial tasks (like service work) more than men. We don't think we are getting evaluated harsher than men. But the data say we are.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Why do we lose women at every level of education?
I recently read the book Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls by Myra and David Sadker. It is a little out of date - from 1994, so I was in 7th or 8th grade when it was published. This book was about my educational experience.
The book discusses how girls are separated from boys early, both on the playground and in the classroom, especially in physical education. When I was in elementary school - which is before puberty so girls and boys bodies are still pretty much the same - girls did flex arm hang in PE as their test of fitness instead of pull ups because the girls were just too weak to do pull ups. I was so mad about this because I could beat most of the boys at pull ups. Which I did in the fourth grade when I placed second in pull ups at Field Day. I also won the (unofficial) kindergarten mud wrestling match, which my mother was none too pleased about. I also alienated the entire football team at my high school when I did speed camp with them and beat them all. Of course when I took weight lifting with one of the football coaches, who saw me in the weight room three times a week for three summers and watched me teach half of the class proper technique, I still got a B. Both semesters. B is for Born-the-wrong-sex.
We also are constantly viewed as sex objects. "A 1986 Minnesota survey of predominantly white, middle-class juniors and seniors found that 33-60 percent of the girls, but only one out of 130 of the male students, had experienced sexual harassment." (pg 111) When I was in the seventh grade, a group of about three boys commented extensively on the breasts of two of my friends and me. It occurred in my home economics class - I don't remember well enough to comment on whether the teacher heard or not. We complained to the teacher. She did nothing. I complained to my mother, who went in and talked to the teacher with me. The teacher explained that it had all been a misunderstanding, that the boys must not have really been discussing our breasts and we must have misheard. The boys? They were not even approached to get their version of the story. The teacher assumed we must have misheard without even asking them. This was my first experience where I learned that the school really did not concern itself with stopping sexual harassment. A harder lesson in the apathy of Littleton Public Schools towards protecting the girls under their tutelage would soon come.
In my junior year of high school, the head of the math department at my high school was indicted and eventually pleaded guilty to a felony count of sexual assault on a minor by a person in a position of trust because one of the students he'd slept with finally came out and filed charges against him. (I'm not going to give links proving this assertion because I found out Colorado lets you track down the homes of sex offenders. While I hope that this pathetic, lecherous bile heap rots in Hell or Tartarus or wherever, I don't want to encourage retribution.) He is one of the main reasons I got out of my high school's honors math program. The honors program was the only way to take calculus, and taking calculus was the only way to take AP physics. But how can you be educated by a man who puts all of the cheerleaders in the front row so he can look up their skirts and then has them sit on his lap - in the middle of the department office in full view of the other teachers - while he "helps" them with the material? He let women on his basketball team on the basis of their looks - why should I believe he would he evaluate women in his class fairly? Moreover, he preyed on his students so visibly that the fact that the school did nothing was an endorsement of his behavior. To this day, the administration of both the high school and Littleton Public Schools refuses to accept that they are partially responsible. By doing nothing, the administration told us that female students sexual toys for teachers and that it sanctioned that behavior.
Women are also constantly underestimated and pushed away from lucrative career paths. My brother, who was a C student, was advised to major in engineering. I was an A student in multiple honors classes who had shown an early interest in math and science. The same counselor advised me not to take physics my senior year because it was, "too hard." She - and multiple other teachers - said nothing as I elected out of upper level math and science. No one even asked me why - or else they would have found that I didn't want to be in a class taught by a lecher. Which was also why my parents didn't object. Moreover, my Advanced Algebra teacher told us often that girls just couldn't do math as well as boys. Not that I believed her, but why would I want to put up with that? When I chose not to try to test into biology my freshman year because I thought the default class, Energy, Resources, and Environment, sounded interesting, no one pushed me. No one even questioned my decision. (ERE proved to be a waste of time and a lost year in my scientific education.) When I chose to take the AP biology test without taking the class, no one from my high school supported me - although I'm sure they through my 5 into their statistics when discussing what good teachers they were.
So in short, I was told I couldn't measure myself against the boys because girls were weaker. I was penalized when I beat the boys. I was told that males - both students and teachers - could say and do whatever they wanted to the girls, that we were just an outlet for men's lust. And I was allowed to pull myself out of challenging courses without even being questioned.
I was lucky. There were things pushing me back on track. I eventually realized that "Rock Star" was not a plausible career goal. I had an excellent teacher, Mrs. Dodson, for trigonometry in my senior year who taught me to love math again, and an excellent calculus teacher, Gerald Taylor at Colorado State University, who supported me. I had a mother who had made a career in academia so I knew women could do it. I had parents who managed to raise a daughter who played rugby and a son who is a cheerleader. I had a brother who let me play the boys' games with him and even contributed a calculus book in excellent condition - never used - to my studies. I had an excellent advisor in physics at CSU who, when this crazy girl who had only had one semester of college physics, sent him an email saying she wanted to double major in physics and biochemistry, met with me to talk to me about how to do it when everyone else laughed at me. I had parents who were willing and able to help me pay grad school admissions fees. I found a really good and supportive graduate advisor.
But we lose a lot of women who would make really good physicists.
The book discusses how girls are separated from boys early, both on the playground and in the classroom, especially in physical education. When I was in elementary school - which is before puberty so girls and boys bodies are still pretty much the same - girls did flex arm hang in PE as their test of fitness instead of pull ups because the girls were just too weak to do pull ups. I was so mad about this because I could beat most of the boys at pull ups. Which I did in the fourth grade when I placed second in pull ups at Field Day. I also won the (unofficial) kindergarten mud wrestling match, which my mother was none too pleased about. I also alienated the entire football team at my high school when I did speed camp with them and beat them all. Of course when I took weight lifting with one of the football coaches, who saw me in the weight room three times a week for three summers and watched me teach half of the class proper technique, I still got a B. Both semesters. B is for Born-the-wrong-sex.
We also are constantly viewed as sex objects. "A 1986 Minnesota survey of predominantly white, middle-class juniors and seniors found that 33-60 percent of the girls, but only one out of 130 of the male students, had experienced sexual harassment." (pg 111) When I was in the seventh grade, a group of about three boys commented extensively on the breasts of two of my friends and me. It occurred in my home economics class - I don't remember well enough to comment on whether the teacher heard or not. We complained to the teacher. She did nothing. I complained to my mother, who went in and talked to the teacher with me. The teacher explained that it had all been a misunderstanding, that the boys must not have really been discussing our breasts and we must have misheard. The boys? They were not even approached to get their version of the story. The teacher assumed we must have misheard without even asking them. This was my first experience where I learned that the school really did not concern itself with stopping sexual harassment. A harder lesson in the apathy of Littleton Public Schools towards protecting the girls under their tutelage would soon come.
In my junior year of high school, the head of the math department at my high school was indicted and eventually pleaded guilty to a felony count of sexual assault on a minor by a person in a position of trust because one of the students he'd slept with finally came out and filed charges against him. (I'm not going to give links proving this assertion because I found out Colorado lets you track down the homes of sex offenders. While I hope that this pathetic, lecherous bile heap rots in Hell or Tartarus or wherever, I don't want to encourage retribution.) He is one of the main reasons I got out of my high school's honors math program. The honors program was the only way to take calculus, and taking calculus was the only way to take AP physics. But how can you be educated by a man who puts all of the cheerleaders in the front row so he can look up their skirts and then has them sit on his lap - in the middle of the department office in full view of the other teachers - while he "helps" them with the material? He let women on his basketball team on the basis of their looks - why should I believe he would he evaluate women in his class fairly? Moreover, he preyed on his students so visibly that the fact that the school did nothing was an endorsement of his behavior. To this day, the administration of both the high school and Littleton Public Schools refuses to accept that they are partially responsible. By doing nothing, the administration told us that female students sexual toys for teachers and that it sanctioned that behavior.
Women are also constantly underestimated and pushed away from lucrative career paths. My brother, who was a C student, was advised to major in engineering. I was an A student in multiple honors classes who had shown an early interest in math and science. The same counselor advised me not to take physics my senior year because it was, "too hard." She - and multiple other teachers - said nothing as I elected out of upper level math and science. No one even asked me why - or else they would have found that I didn't want to be in a class taught by a lecher. Which was also why my parents didn't object. Moreover, my Advanced Algebra teacher told us often that girls just couldn't do math as well as boys. Not that I believed her, but why would I want to put up with that? When I chose not to try to test into biology my freshman year because I thought the default class, Energy, Resources, and Environment, sounded interesting, no one pushed me. No one even questioned my decision. (ERE proved to be a waste of time and a lost year in my scientific education.) When I chose to take the AP biology test without taking the class, no one from my high school supported me - although I'm sure they through my 5 into their statistics when discussing what good teachers they were.
So in short, I was told I couldn't measure myself against the boys because girls were weaker. I was penalized when I beat the boys. I was told that males - both students and teachers - could say and do whatever they wanted to the girls, that we were just an outlet for men's lust. And I was allowed to pull myself out of challenging courses without even being questioned.
I was lucky. There were things pushing me back on track. I eventually realized that "Rock Star" was not a plausible career goal. I had an excellent teacher, Mrs. Dodson, for trigonometry in my senior year who taught me to love math again, and an excellent calculus teacher, Gerald Taylor at Colorado State University, who supported me. I had a mother who had made a career in academia so I knew women could do it. I had parents who managed to raise a daughter who played rugby and a son who is a cheerleader. I had a brother who let me play the boys' games with him and even contributed a calculus book in excellent condition - never used - to my studies. I had an excellent advisor in physics at CSU who, when this crazy girl who had only had one semester of college physics, sent him an email saying she wanted to double major in physics and biochemistry, met with me to talk to me about how to do it when everyone else laughed at me. I had parents who were willing and able to help me pay grad school admissions fees. I found a really good and supportive graduate advisor.
But we lose a lot of women who would make really good physicists.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Don't poop where you eat
I took a friend on a tour of women's restrooms in the physics department at Yale in order to show her the fainting couches. To my surprise, the old disgusting fainting couches, which looked similar to something you might find under a bridge with some unfortunate soul sleeping on them, were gone. Even more surprising was that they had been replaced with new fainting couches. My male moles have informed me that there are no couches in the men's room in this very same building. Rather than a relic of the bad old days (in the mid-90's) when the physics department had bathrooms for "Faculty" and for women, these are entirely modern fainting couches reflecting the perception that modern female physicists are simply too weak to make a full day of work.
A few people made the suggestion that the couches were there for breast feeding. There was a similar arrangement in Laurence Berkeley National Lab, where I was informed that the couch dating from the 1970's (I think it may have been the hand-me-down couch we had in our house in my childhood) in the handicapped stall of one women's restroom - which probably rendered the stall unusable for a person in a wheel chair - was there so that a particular woman could breastfeed. The same argument has been made in defense of fainting couches in women's restrooms throughout Brookhaven National Lab. Let's assume this is true. Is this a step forward, sideways, or backward?
Most restrooms are kind of stinky, no matter how well cleaned they are. No one goes home and spends hours in their bathroom simply because it's a really nice place to sit. On the other hand, it could be an improvement over the attitude expressed to one job applicant at LBNL - "We don't do families here." Given that 70% of married female physicists are married to a male scientist and 50% to a physicist (I can dig up a citation if anyone wants it) and study after study has shown that women continue to do the lion's share of the housework even as women are earning more and more of the family's income, jobs that aren't family friendly aren't woman-friendly. But still, telling women to hide in the bathroom if they have to breast feed reinforces societal shame cast upon breastfeeding and generally on the woman's body. It is more socially acceptable for a man to urinate outside than for a woman to breastfeed in public, and both are ticketable offenses in most places. Many women probably want a private place to breastfeed, but telling women that the only place for them to do something so disgustingly feminine as breastfeeding is the same place as where they deficate doesn't really seem to be a step forward to me. Maybe a step sideways...
I've exerted myself too much writing this. I think I have to lie down.
A few people made the suggestion that the couches were there for breast feeding. There was a similar arrangement in Laurence Berkeley National Lab, where I was informed that the couch dating from the 1970's (I think it may have been the hand-me-down couch we had in our house in my childhood) in the handicapped stall of one women's restroom - which probably rendered the stall unusable for a person in a wheel chair - was there so that a particular woman could breastfeed. The same argument has been made in defense of fainting couches in women's restrooms throughout Brookhaven National Lab. Let's assume this is true. Is this a step forward, sideways, or backward?
Most restrooms are kind of stinky, no matter how well cleaned they are. No one goes home and spends hours in their bathroom simply because it's a really nice place to sit. On the other hand, it could be an improvement over the attitude expressed to one job applicant at LBNL - "We don't do families here." Given that 70% of married female physicists are married to a male scientist and 50% to a physicist (I can dig up a citation if anyone wants it) and study after study has shown that women continue to do the lion's share of the housework even as women are earning more and more of the family's income, jobs that aren't family friendly aren't woman-friendly. But still, telling women to hide in the bathroom if they have to breast feed reinforces societal shame cast upon breastfeeding and generally on the woman's body. It is more socially acceptable for a man to urinate outside than for a woman to breastfeed in public, and both are ticketable offenses in most places. Many women probably want a private place to breastfeed, but telling women that the only place for them to do something so disgustingly feminine as breastfeeding is the same place as where they deficate doesn't really seem to be a step forward to me. Maybe a step sideways...
I've exerted myself too much writing this. I think I have to lie down.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
