I’m a little late on this one, because it went up the middle of last week, but there is now a website Scientiae which will maintain a blog carnival of stories relating to women in science, engineering, technology, and math. In a way, it’s sort of a meta-She’s Such a Geek!, with lots of stories from all over. Check out the first post of the Scientiae blog carnival at Rants of a Feminist Engineer—a couple of our posts are listed, even if I never got my act together to submit to the carnival the first time. Don’t worry, there’s scads more I’ll be writing here. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Career advice’ Category
Scientiae blog carnival
Monday, March 5th, 2007Out, out, damned blind spot!
Friday, March 2nd, 2007Physicists can be some of the most interesting characters you’ll ever meet, with restless curiosity about the world even beyond the confines of their subject. I admire that willingness to take the blinders off and examine the facts, rather than being hamstrung by preconceived notions. A physics education can help teach a person to question assumptions, and the analytical mindset that I gained from the years I spent in physics has helped me to see the world in a far different way from how I might have seen it if I hadn’t had that education. I do treasure having this extra way of seeing the world, even if I left physics behind.
But the problem is, the qualities of open-mindedness and questioning of assumptions in the laboratory can coexist with a huge blind spot: the belief that physics is a meritocracy. (You may substitute any science, or really just about any endeavor really, for “physics” here.) Astronomer Rob Knop posted about this myth on his blog Galactic Interactions after getting copies of these marked-up pages which are from the letters section of the December 2006 issue of the physics trade magazine Physics Today. (more…)
3-D Sex and the Computer Scientist
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007Last month, I was approached by a woman considering going back to school in computer science, which I teach at Mills College. We met, and I encouraged her, lending her some Java training materials. I received this email from her today:
On the 15th I will drop off at your office the Java 2 Training Course. I will not be using it after all, but thank you very much, just the same.After receiving the results of an aptitude test last week I realized CS would not be the best field for me to enter. A key aptitude among engineers is being able to visualize 3-D structures. I scored on the low end of average with this aptitude.
After getting over my surprise, I replied:
I can’t visualize 3-D structures either. Please do not make important career decisions based on a single aptitude test that is likely to be faulty. For example, there could be gender bias. Women are reportedly less able to visualize 3-D structures then men are, but some of us flatlanders are excellent computer scientists.
You shouldn’t abandon CS unless you are not interested in it or you fail in learning it. Please do not leave the field because of some possibly sexist superstitions about what abilities are needed.
I am reminded of Michael Bérubé’s satire on former Harvard president Larry Summer’s statements about women in science:
According to [Harvard geneticist Charles] Kinbote, the presidency of Harvard University requires a unique array of talents and dispositions which, statistically, only a small handful of women possess…..Men are … more adept than women at mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes on aptitude tests, Kinbote added. “You’d be surprised how often a university president needs to do this, and at Harvard the pressure is especially intense.” Kinbote estimated that the president of Harvard spends roughly one-quarter of the working day mentally rotating complex, hypothetical three-dimensional shapes.
Much is being made of Harvard’s recent decision to appoint a woman to its presidency. While some people are speculating that she was hired because of her sex, it is more likely that she is the first Harvard president not appointed on the basis of their sex.
On a similar theme, see Women, men, and IQ tests, posted at my Beyond Satire blog.
If only I’d known this when I was 18
Monday, February 12th, 2007Gals, I know y’all can do physics if you’re bound and determined—I did it for a while, without being a genius. But as I know I’ve mentioned before, you need to ask yourself why you would want to. Sure, making it as a tenured professor sounds great, but so does winning the lottery. You can’t realistically count on either outcome happening.
This experimental condensed matter physicist blogger is telling it like it really is:
This is also why I am so disgusted with certain attitudes in hiring new faculty or new staff members (if we are talking about the parallel universe of national labs). The attitude is basically – we created a situation when there are hundreds of candidates desperately applying for every position available, and because we can afford to be so selective, we can scoop the best of the best of the best, invite them for a song-and-dance presentation (”Impress me!” approach), and treat the rest of applicants who didn’t make the shortlist cut as garbage not worthy [of] our attention. The arbitrary nature of [the] selection process never ceases to amaze me, even though it’s remarkable how programs that are not even nationally ranked can attract people with stellar research records (as far as I am concerned) in hope that they may get desperate enough to accept a position that utilizes those skills in a very marginal fashion, if at all. It’s as if classically trained opera singers were hired to sing catchy commercial tunes at a supermarket to attract more customers for minimum wage pay.
Therefore, I find it somewhat disingenuous when people start talking about how to encourage certain underrepresented groups [to] enter graduate schools in sciences. We should encourage interest in science, but should we encourage more bright and talented people to follow the career path that has 95% chance of leading nowhere (after 6-7 years of living on Raman noodles through grad school and relocating a few times for a couple of 3 year postdoc stints that quickly become the norm)? I am not so sure…
Neither am I. Plus female job candidates have to deal with the swirl of biases out there that stay alive amid entrenched faculty (just check out FemaleScienceProfessor’s blog if you want a taste).
It’s not all right to cry
Saturday, February 10th, 2007I found a great post and discussion on crying in the scientific workplace at A Natural Scientist via another fine blog, Am I a woman scientist? Jenny F. Scientist describes the double bind of being socialized as a girl that it’s all right to cry, but that in the science lab, don’t even think about it.
Not that crying is something that anyone plans on doing. And actually, with the exception of Rosie Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” on Free to Be… You and Me, I got the message growing up that crying is most definitely a huge no-no. And I knew that because I cried easily. I was the kid of whom teachers would say, “She’s very sensitive.” I didn’t really understand the phrase at the time, but I figured it wasn’t good, because I was the weirdo and the kids who called me “crybaby” were the norm.
A chance to put your mentoring where your mouth is
Friday, January 26th, 2007Want to make a living helping girls become geeks? Now you can! Liz Henry at Composite posts a job listing for a program manager at Techbridge, an after-school program to get girls interested in technology:
Techbridge is an innovative program to inspire girls in technology, science and engineering. The program is hosted after school at elementary, middle, and high schools in Oakland, San Lorenzo, and at the California School for the Blind in Fremont. In these after-school programs, girls work on a variety of projects such as making solar LEGO cars, soldering, digital photography, and building robots. The girls also participate in field trips and meet with role models.
Under the supervision of the Program Director, the Techbridge Program Manager is responsible for supporting and supervising staff, coordinating and implementing our after-school programs, developing and piloting curricula, and leading professional development workshops for teachers, role models, and professional audiences. We are looking for an experienced and dynamic individual who has the ability to supervise a team of instructors, work with the Techbridge project director, and oversee the development of training and resources to teachers, professionals and partners.
According to the Techbridge Web site, girls had lots of ideas for things they’d like to do, including “addressing problems at school and in the neighborhood, working with tools, building robots, taking field trips, and meeting role models.”
My sisters in science, my competitors
Monday, January 22nd, 2007I told the truth in my essay “Job Security” in She’s Such a Geek, but what I didn’t tell you is that it’s not the whole truth. Yes, I did have the debacle of my first research project, and that shook my confidence about my chances for success in the highly male-dominated field of physics. My interactions with certain male students and the messages rattling around my head about women’s abilities influenced me to decide that it would be for the best if physics and I parted ways sooner rather than later. These things are all true.
But the trouble with narrative is that the writer has to select the details that support the major arc of the story and leave out the extraneous bits. I didn’t tell you in the essay that my particular research group was exceptionally gender-balanced. There were actually three women in my research group, out of six or seven grad students total. The undergraduates who came in to do thesis projects also had a fairly even gender ratio.
Geeks, sex, gender, and physics
Saturday, January 20th, 2007I’d like to point y’all to a posting about She’s Such a Geek and the ensuing discussion over on SSAG contributor Suzanne Franks’ blog, Thus Spake Zuska. Suzanne, aka Zuska, wrote about someone who asked her for suggestions for books about women in science. Zuska suggested a couple of books, including SSAG, but the person responded that they didn’t feel our book was appropriate to put into high school libraries.
Zuska suspects that the “inappropriateness” of the book is due the fact that several essays have to do with sexuality and the female geek and perhaps some frank language. And she goes on to argue that you can’t have an honest discussion about women and science without acknowledging these issues. Here’s an excerpt of what Zuska writes:
A “role model” book for young girls has to address sex and sexuality. It has to show what it’s like to deal with the vast majority of boys who are intimidated by smart women; what it’s like to deal with the ever-present comments on your sexuality in the workplace; what it’s like to discover your sexuality within and because of your geekhood. I think these are the kinds of true life stories that can help girls, as much as or more so than one more nicely varnished volume about the handful of women who’ve won the Nobel Prize.
Writing about the intimate and personal lives of women geeks, and putting that writing into the hands of young girls, is a political act with the possibility for great reverberation. So it’s no wonder some people are going to be reluctant to find such writing “appropriate”.
Of course, you should read her complete entry.
Zuska is right that the truth isn’t very easy or welcome, because it can be a threat to the status quo. She’s talking here about the discussions of sex in the book, but I also think it’s important to talk about how science and technology careers are sold to girls as well. The thing is, the thinking seems to be that to inspire girls to keep up with science and technology, you have to keep it relentlessly positive, talking about how many opportunities they have and how great it is to be someone who’s succeeded in one of these fields. And it’s true—girls really do have lots of opportunities in the scientific and technical fields if they stick with it, and many women do succeed there. Inspiration most definitely comes from having good things to aspire to.
But not every female science/technology career thrives, and for a variety of reasons that can be very different from why men leave. It could be said, with apologies to Tolstoy, that happy careers are all alike, but every unhappy career experiences its own set of obstacles and setbacks. And I think that we shouldn’t sugarcoat the very real issues that a girl could face in her future if she’s considering going into some of the tougher technical careers.
Unique grad program for bringing women into CS
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
The word is now out about a unique graduate program designed to bring women into computer science, thanks to an article by Charlie Anders in this week’s San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Mills College Interdisciplinary Computer Science program, which I direct, is aimed at women and men who have a bachelor’s degree in a field other than computer science who want to get into CS or interdisciplinary work. Some of the graduates mentioned in the article are:
- Sheri Wetherby, a former casino worker who became a Microsoft programmer
- Erica Rios, a former labor activist who now works as an Internet project manager at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
- Lisa Cowan, who has a BA in anthropology and is now pursuing a CS PhD at UC San Diego
- Constance Connor, a CS instructor at City College of San Francisco
The above photo, not from the article, is of former ICS students Susan Housand and Kiem Sie with a robot they built. Kiem went on to build several more.
On a personal note, I moonlight part-time at Google, which was deservedly named America’s best workplace, and many of my Google co-workers wonder why I don’t leave Mills and work at Google full-time. Charlie’s article does a great job of showing what excites me about teaching.
“It led to muzzling of the scholarly debate.”
Friday, January 5th, 2007Turns out She’s Such A Geek isn’t the only new book delving into the topic of women in science and technology. A more academic work, Why Aren’t More Women in Science: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence, aims to examine the possible reasons for women’s under-representation in the sciences. It’s very much a response to the whole Larry Summers fiasco.
The book’s editors seem to have gone out of their way to give space to biological explanations of women’s under-representation in the sciences. In this interview, they worry that the anti-Larry backlash dampened the spirit of free inquiry: “Defenders of Summers’s remarks were vilified and dismissed. This does not serve the purpose of science — it led to muzzling of the scholarly debate, with one side effectively silenced by the other.”
But it sounds, from the interview, as though they had a balance of arguments for, as well as against, the idea that women are naturally less clever with numbers:
Our biggest surprise was not found in any one essay but in the class of essays about biological differences between men and women. We had anticipated greater agreement among these essayists, but what we found was quite divergent, with some arguing strongly in favor of sex differences in brain organization, hormones, etc., as causative factors in women’s underrepresentation among those who score the highest on standardized mathematics tests, and others arguing against such views.
So that’s something. And they also note the well-known fact that the “science gender gap” is really a white American thing, not a global thing.
They also discuss social factors behind the disparity, including the well-known “leaky pipeline,” where women give up at every stage of the academic process. They also talk about the challenge of balancing a career and family. This gives rise to the following comment from a guy reading the post:
Most of the references to “women” in the article (and perhaps the book it describes) are about women who desire male sexual partners, i.e. heterosexuals. From childhood to adulthood this orientation may well be a liability for women with interests and aptitudes in science…
Studies of lesbian women faculty in the sciences are sorely needed, as is research on adolescent lesbian attitudes towards the sciences. … The question that needs to be asked is this: How much is this problem is caused by female biology and how much is a result of the culture of heterosexuality?
Darn good point, actually… although the lesbian scientists I know are as stressed out by the whole balancing-careeer-and-family thing as everyone else.