New study: Self-doubt plagues female astronomers, from Nature 463, 574 (27 January 2010)
This link was passed on by someone in our department for discussion. Though we didn’t get to it at our monthly Women in Astronomy lunch gathering, I did talk about it a bit with a post-doctoral researcher on our way to the lunch.
First, I think that many astronomers’ self-doubts are magnified by the gross over-confidence of some other astronomers. Before I got to grad school, I had never seen so many people just get up and say things so confidently, even when they are wrong. And not just “wrong” as in “oh perhaps we have different political opinions about that” but wrong as in “those numbers don’t add up, the conclusion is false, scientifically-speaking.” Sometimes it’s hard to separate out the fact from fiction when people are speaking so matter-of-factly, especially when you are (say for example) a first or second year grad student and you still are figuring out what’s going on in the first place.
The problem is, even after I’ve spent years researching my thesis and am very confident in my field, I still don’t want to talk like that. I still think a certain level of humility is not only required because we truly don’t always know everything, but also because it’s just polite. However, will this sense of humility cost me in the end? Will others look down on me for not being as confident, because I admit the shortcomings of my knowledge or the true length of my error bars?
There’s definitely a socialized difference by gender. Girls are just taught to be more polite. I have so much going for me against this socialization: my mom is a high-powered lawyer who takes crap from no one and taught her daughters to do the same, I did years of debate in which struggled to throw away all signs of feminine meekness while not being “a bitch” (this is a HARD line to draw for female debaters, especially in male-dominated events), I’ve studied my feminism. And yet, I still act differently than my male colleagues. This article reminded me of my upper-division physics classes my junior and senior year of undergrad, in most of which I was the only woman. I noticed that if the professor made an error on the board, I was more likely to ASK “should the x be squared?” while my male colleagues were more likely to STATE “you missed the square on the x.” I would often ask about an error when I knew 100% that I was right. It was so obvious, yet I would ask. It just seemed impolite to say it any other way, but in retrospect, someone could interpret that as me being weaker than the other students. I don’t think it’s just a professor/student relation either; even in our comps exam study group, of all women of the same academic standing, we would rarely flat out say “you’re wrong.” We’d often say “no, I think that in class the professor said it was xyz” or “are you sure you don’t mean abc?” (Now, we probably had our more stressed moments where this wasn’t the case, but in general, we spoke with a degree of humility.) Because after all, maybe they are right, maybe you misheard what they said, maybe you were thinking of something else. But maybe you are right, too.
I’m trying to have less self-doubt. I’ve had a few instances where I’ve had to stand my ground and insist that I was right to researchers that were more senior than I, and it worked. But I still don’t want to become the kind of person who insists that they are right all the time. I want to be the kind of person who says what I mean with confidence, but who is still open to hear what others have to say and open to reconsider my statement if someone proves me wrong.
This will be the first of (probably) many posts inspired by the Women in Astronomy meeting I attended last Fall. I know, it’s a long time in coming; I’ve been busy with general grad student hell. Anyway, it was an awesome experience, simultaneously enlightening, encouraging, and depressing. (Specifically, while the number of women in astronomy is increasing at each stage of career development, there are still distressingly few minorities in astronomy and related fields.)
The final day of the conference, Peggy McIntosh gave a talk (for me, it could be described as life-changing) describing her 1986 paper, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in the context of women and minorities in science. Essentially, the punchline is that people who are on the upside of discrimination are not only free of disadvantage, but are actually given an advantage. This means that meritocracy is a farce (as anyone who has been disadvantaged could probably tell you), and that because of any unearned privileges a person has, their successes are not only due to their hard work, but also due to the circumstances of their birth.
For one thing, this opened my eyes to white privilege I have experienced and moved me deeply in the direction of systematically removing white privilege. For another thing, it sheds some light on the behavior that white men exhibit in academic settings.
White men are subtly educated in our society to believe that they are the smartest, the most powerful, the most fit for leadership, etc. This happens on a day-to-day basis during one’s life, much as the opposite is told to women, people of color, homosexuals, etc. It’s not that our teachers necessarily say (nowadays – they certainly used to), “Little girl, you’ll never amount to much. Women just aren’t as good at math, science, and other hard things as men are.” (That said, as recently as 1994, a talking Barbie was manufactured that said, “Math is hard!”) But the message is still propagated subconsciously and picked up subconsciously, apparently as early as first grade. Likewise, when boys are encouraged more than girls, they on some level come to believe that they really are the best.
Why does this make so much sense to me? I have to say that I’m very comfortable in my department; the guys in my group are great, and if they’re awkward, I certainly don’t sense that it’s because they don’t think women belong. It’s probably more of a scientist thing. (A friend of mine commented that she’s less socially adept now than before she spent so much time around scientists.) I don’t feel that I’m treated as less than equal by male colleagues. And some of the men I know sound like they consciously have the same issues surrounding lack of self-confidence, even the Impostor Syndrome, that I and my female colleagues suffer from.
But when some of the white men around me profess (and believe in) their own awesomeness, I just wonder if they would feel that way if they did not have the unearned advantage of being raised to think they were the best.
As much as this is a problem, my eyes have been opened to the reality that it is much more of a problem for other underrepresented minorities. We white women are quite aware of being marginalized by privileged males, and we also have the unearned advantage of being white, which tells us that it’s OK to speak up and change things. For some reason, though, we are happy to ignore the plight of other underprivileged groups. I’m disgusted that I’ve been doing the same things to others that men (and, frankly, other women – we perpetuate these unconscious biases against each other) have done to me.
So it stops now. I’m becoming an ally, and you should too.
A few of us recently came across an article on a Newsweek blog titled Is Motherhood Keeping Good Scientists Down? How to Fix Research’s “Mommy Gap”. While the article itself is worth reading (I’ll also summarize below), what knocked us off our feet was the kind of comments that were left by readers.
First, the article. The author talked about a new report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) which found that motherhood (not just being a woman) was largely responsible for the leaks in the pipeline:
But according to the CAP study, which compared not only women to men, but parents to those without children, married women with children were 35 percent less likely to secure a tenure-track position than married men with children, and 33 percent less likely to do so than single women without children.
There are a handful of suggestions to alleviate this problem (see the article), but the conclusion is:
No matter what institutions or individuals do, having both a career—any career—and children requires making choices, and then making sacrifices. The more demanding the career and the more ambitious the individual, the more difficult those choices will be. But women shouldn’t be the only ones who have to choose. [Emphasis mine.]
All in all, I liked the article. But when I got to the comments – holy moly! I was floored. I’ll ignore the comments which are outlandishly inflammatory and sexist (but please do read those by Home412AD), and address instead the top myths spouted out by these commenters.
- Larry Summers didn’t say that women had biologically lower math/science aptitude.
Why don’t you read the full text of his speech for yourself? Yes, Summers does offer up 3 hypotheses, and the one that people were upset about was the argument about variances in aptitude. His claim was not that average men/women have different scientific aptitudes, but that men have a higher variance in their distribution and thus more of the upper, most highly performing people are male. This is still a claim about the biological difference in aptitude of men and women, and he in fact felt that it was more important of a factor than socialization. My surprise reading his speech was a high disregard for socialization, which seems unfounded… in fact, it is unfounded, because as I wrote about before, this variance difference disappears in countries where girls and boys are treated equally. Did Summers know the results of that study at the time? No. Could he have thought a little harder and not ruled out socialization so soon? Yes. (His main example is that he saw young girls, when given trucks, use them to play with dolls… as though giving a kid a toy will replace years of socialization.)
- “I still dont understand why every occupation has to be neatly divided 50-50 between men and women. Is it possible that some career paths appeal more to members of one gender or the other?”
Summer’s also mentions this at the beginning of his speech, by noting that many other groups lack diversity (“that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture”), which definitely a) ignores and b) belittles the problem. The question is whether or not there are systematic obstacles for any particular people to participate in a career. Is there anything about being a farmer that prevents a Jew from becoming one, in ways that it does not affect people of other faiths? Clearly not, but this kind of tactic diverts the attention from the real problem and trivializes the efforts of those trying to change things for the better.
- “Some women want to be treated “equally” when it benefits them to be treated “equally” and then treated “like a woman” when it benefits them to be treated “like a woman” – that is “unequally.”"
Ah, the classic dilemma. ”Because of feminism, I don’t know if I’m supposed to hold the door open for a woman or not, and that makes for awkward situations, and I hate awkward situations, so I’m really mad at feminism!” Yes, life would be so much simpler if we all just followed the scripts, but of course that would mean playing the part of a less-than-person, and I’d rather take my independence, awkwardness and all. This also manages to completely miss the point – any advocacy for maternity leave ought to include advocacy for paternity leave (as the article does), so I’m not sure where the “treat me different” part comes in. It sounds to me more like “let’s share the responsibilities equally.”
- Women who want to be scientists should just not have children and/or women who want to have children should not work.
Obviously, this is the meat of most people’s arguments, and the most offensive, because nobody is asking it of men. Why should only women be the ones to choose? With the exception of some technological advancements, most children were created by a man and a woman. I cannot believe that people still do not consider the fact that a man would have to “make a sacrifice” or “choose between” being a parent or having a career. There is a tradeoff to be made, because both are very demanding, but yet only women are actually told to choose. Which is funny, because I feel as though these same arguments would be made by people who insist on the preservation of the “2-parent family” when apparently only one is actually doing any parenting. And if you think that “this is the way it has been” for the entire history of humanity (which, according to one poster, seems to be 5500 years), please do some research before speaking. Commenter “kissmeimkati” addressed this pretty well.
I appreciate that other supportive comments eventually came in, and it’s really the first half of the comments that are most offensive (although some of the later ones make no sense). Until people see women as both parents and career-driven people, as men already are, the cause of advancing women in science will continue to be seen fruitless or misguided – and we all know it is not!
The most recent cover story of the University of Iowa Spectator (an alumni magazine) is titled “Driven to Discover: What Makes Scientists Tick.” Though the article is mostly just there to express “Hey, we do science here at U of I, isn’t that great,” my partner brought this great quote to my attention:
“People see shows like CSI, where difficult questions are quickly solved and mysteries are wrapped up in a one-hour episode,” says Mark Blumberg, professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. ”They don’t see the obsession, the struggle, the reading, the thinking, the mistakes. The path to discovery almost never follows a straight line. It’s typically more like a drunken walk.”
Yes.
Did I do a disservice to all women in science by asking a male colleague to remove a bug from my office…
…twice?
I’m always a little curious about why one of the top searches that leads people to this blog is “sexy scientists.” (I’m sure those folks are disappointed when they get here, and this post will no doubt make that misunderstanding worse.) So I searched “sexy scientists” and came up with this blog (“Sexy Science”). It features men and women, which is somewhat refreshing, but the tone is dissatisfying.
First of all, let me say that there are absolutely sexy scientists. I’m not denying that I know plenty! And I don’t want people, especially young people, to have this view of scientists:
By the way, he would look a lot less menacing standing behind a telescope.
It’s awesome to point out that scientists, much like humans (indeed, some do classify us as humans – but they are also scientists) can be attractive/outgoing/cool/well-dressed/socially adept.
But I don’t think it’s right, as the aforementioned blog does, to “hope these [attractive] women continue to be good examples for all the girls out there who want to join one of the STEM fields.” Can’t an ugly scientist encourage girls to join STEM? Or do ugly scientists discourage girls from joining the ranks? (If this is somehow the case for females, I can’t see how it can be the case for males given how many there are and the above stereotyped image.) Shouldn’t the best scientists, not the sexiest ones, be held up as the best role models? And yes, this occurs just about everywhere in society, but that doesn’t make it excusable.
If one wanted to honor scientists for their “extracurriculars,” so to speak, look to their service activities, hobbies, interests, and conduct at the work place. Don’t look to their junk – please.
Now, in case anyone is deeply disappointed at not having seen a sexy scientist, a REAL one – my husband. (OK, he’s an engineer… don’t tell.) He plays ultimate frisbee, enjoys reading, and rocks at science.
On our Fiji honeymoon
Today I booked my flight to the Women in Astronomy conference (subtitle: Meeting the Challenges of an Increasingly Diverse Workforce). It takes place next month. I’m especially excited to meet interesting, brilliant, influential people such as Meg Urry, Anne Kinney (although I saw a talk of hers once), Kathie Olsen, Laurie Leshin, etc. etc.
In my unabashed excitement, I googled a healthy handful of people, and found a story from Indiana University about Meg Urry’s planned talk there earlier this year. In it, the writer mentioned Urry’s role in promoting diversity in science, and that
“Meg Urry is a leading expert in the world on black holes in galaxies, and through her work we’ve learned about the roles black holes play in the origin and evolution of galaxies,” said IU Astronomy Department Chair Caty Pilachowski.
Rightly so. Then, unexcusably, the caption under her picture (which is delightfully natural and lighthearted) says, “Meg Urry, one of the world’s leading female scientists, visits Bloomington tomorrow.” This is like saying, “Look! We found a WOMAN to talk to our department – and she’s a SCIENTIST, too!” I realize that it’s overwhelmingly likely that this was the last-minute attempt by a copy editor to write yet another thoughtless caption and does not represent any stupidly penis-centric view of the department at IU.
That said, I look forward to the day when “female scientist” is not distinguished from “scientist.” Does it really need to be stated that she’s one of the best FEMALE scientists in the world? Isn’t she simultaneously one of the best scientists – period? Is it so much to ask that things like this be eliminated from our vernacular, without whining that people like me are just angry feminists?
I recently looked at my meticulously charted iCal schedule, which includes classes, colloquia, meetings, study sessions, exercise, etc. Yes, it’s a little sickening (and looks like a lego sculpture), but what I took away this time was that, in order to get in the *minimum* 20 hours of research per week that I’m paid to do, I would have to work during every block of “free” time until about 7 p.m. every night. There’s a little leeway if I don’t eat lunch, and as a friend pointed out, no, this doesn’t include weekends.
However, the above schedule does not include homework, which I predominantly do on weekends. It also does not factor in the now glaringly obvious fact that the expected amount of research isn’t REALLY what’s expected; it’s the minimum, and if I really want to get anywhere, I’ll need to do considerably more.
Why are grad students expected to work constantly? Is this such a tough question to ask? Does asking it make me lazy or a whiner?
The system, it seems to me, is desperately broken. My office mate comes in before I do every morning – 8 or 8:30 – and doesn’t leave until 7 or 8 every night. And why shouldn’t he? He enjoys his research; he’s single, living with a bunch of other male grad students who also live at their desks. (He also has two – yes, TWO – federally-funded fellowships.) I, however, am married. I enjoy my husband. I enjoy knitting on the couch and watching Star Trek in the evenings, and for some reason, I thought it wasn’t ridiculous to expect that I could do that and still be a successful grad student (if not the most successful – I have no fellowships). To be fair, this semester is especially bad for me, but I don’t see that grad school will suddenly become like a day job after advancing to candidacy.
The system is designed to get people like my office mate into faculty jobs, doing research full time. That’s fine with me; there should be a rewarding destination for hard-working, single-minded, science-loving people. What I don’t like is that there is no niche for the other folks, primarily women, who love science and CAN do it full time – but maybe only the 40-hours-per-week type of full time, rather than 70. Why is a 40-hour commitment seen as half-hearted? Are we just supposed to love our research SO MUCH that we can’t wait to sit in a cubicle and stare at IDL code until we forget what our loved ones’ faces (and the sun) look like?
There’s no way that I can see to excel at science professionally, writing papers and attending conferences and whatnot, without seriously, single-mindedly devoting your life to that pursuit for some substantial amount of time (say, 10 to 15 years). Why? Why is this OK with so many people? How do I change this? Do I become a fringe scientist, doing outreach or writing articles or making policy? (Although admittedly, the last might be more time-consuming than science itself.) Do I continue, as I have been since my classes started, to spend 12 hours per day at the office and forget any hope of having a home life that starts at 5 p.m.? Is that really sustainable or reasonable?
It’s been suggested to me that I do a post on my experiences dating someone in the same field as me. And while I’d like to, it’ll have to wait. Because when I began writing with that theme in mind, my post quickly morphed into another topic entirely.
The background is as follows: my boyfriend and I are in the same field and doing fairly similar research, and we have both been asked by our advisors to apply for an NSF fellowship this year. This initially caused me a great deal of angst, as I’m not terribly keen on competing with him directly for a limited resource like that. But that’s not today’s key theme. Today’s key theme arises from what he pointed out when I expressed my anxiety about competing with him: that the NSF believes in affirmative action.
I’ll admit that this well-intended attempt to make me feel better didn’t have the desired effect. The question is: why not? Why is it that the words “affirmative action” always leave a sour taste in my mouth?
I should be glad that I’ve got an increased chance of getting an NSF compared to your average white male, right? Yet I’m left thinking, “Well, great. Now if I get one, I’ll assume that it only happened because I’m female. And if I don’t get one … well then, I’ll feel like I must really suck.”
Shortly after this conversation, I went to talk with my advisor about my NSF application. I asked his advice about reporting my physics GRE score, which isn’t particularly exemplary. He responded by pointing out quite seriously that women systematically score 20% lower on the physics GRE, and in light of that, my score was perfectly good.
I was again torn on how to react. I should be glad that my score is worth reporting, sure. But can I really be overjoyed that it’s common knowledge that women should be held to a lower standard than men?
Affirmative action is supposed to be the great equalizer — yet it frequently only serves to segregate further. All of my accomplishments in the field of physics have been tainted by the nagging question of, “Did I get this because I earned it? Or because I’m a woman?” And I know that some of my male peers, while too polite to say it to my face, have wondered the same thing.
So what does that mean? Should affirmative action be abolished? Does it need reform? Or is it fine in its current condition?
Should those of us who benefit from it be grateful for the attempt to level the playing field? Or do we have an obligation to hate it for exacerbating the problem?
Another interesting link:
http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/08/24/paid-parental-leave-in-18-countries/
Many “developed” countries (I really hate that word – it implies that the U.S. is no longer developing!) provide several months, up to a year or more, of paid leave to one or both parents. This seems natural to them, and indeed, the brief story above states that this has an equalizing effect by reducing wages, and thereby distributing resources from non-parents to parents. Is this right? Is it socialist?
I don’t know how this change could come about in the states, or why it hasn’t already. Because I certainly don’t think it’s right to provide NO paid leave – i.e., ZERO weeks off – for new or expecting mothers and fathers in the U.S.
