Link: Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches - New York Times
I just love reading articles like these, and given that so many are having amnesia about the 1970s and the feminist movement, I'm SO GLAD conferences like these below are being held.
Storm the gates, indeed. Replace sexist gatekeepers! Make visible the invisible extra criteria women have to meet, the extra arses they have to kiss, and the glass ceilings. Women are excelling at university like no other time, outnumbering men as male students fall behind with the general falling literacy levels and anti-intellectualism of our current times.
It feels like dark ages, to see the overall decline in critical and creative and analytic skills not just at university, but across the board. So WHAT DOES IT MEAN if society is losing its marbles wholesale, while women are excelling academically at their highest rate ever, YET WOMEN STILL CANNOT COMPETE in spite of the declining intellectual standards?
It tells me that a reverse merit system has become the norm, an old boys network that isn't just smarmy and clubby, but one which overtly rejects merit on principle across the board, but especially if there's a female gender attached to it.
In other words, women will still get promoted, but they will be carefully chosen women, chosen for how well they level DOWN to the current standards, how well they learn the suck-up system, how well they carefully reveal only a lack of cleverness that won't threaten a promotion system based on de-merit.
Both women and men will have to stand up for scientific standards in these times, times when grants mean results that favor the grant-giver, when government studies have to get their results cleared through the White House before they're announced, when it seems that interested parties not only want their interests conveyed through the lens of corrupted scientific methods, the rich patrons also want to keep their own private alchemists from publishing any results that might advance science, in the name of keeping them "proprietary," patentable, trademarked, and OUT of the public domain.
Which throws verification of results out the window. Not that there's a whole lot of that going around anyway. Can't get the hot grant your university or institute demands to plow the same field someone else already went over.
So this is about women in science and engineering, to be sure, but it's also about the integrity of the intellectual products of our century, and, dare I say it? It's even about Enlightenment values, because those values recognize proven merit, instead of smarmy clubs and insider scams. The value of weighing and proving things, just as one might weigh qualifications and prove a woman might be the best person to get a grant or be promoted.
When contracts go to insiders with no-bid contracts, tunnels collapse, people take kick-backs, the science of our construction doesn't work. When science is corrupted by creeping standards of private alchemy, by the government dictating results as if it were the Inquisition, it means the power of analysis has been overthrown, proof discarded, measurement meaningless.
In that world, the proof of one's qualifications and credentials mean far far less than what you did to buy your favors behind the scenes.
I think it's one step away from one of the more notorious aspects of the Dark Ages, when those who held the greatest power, many princes and rulers, could not read or write themselves, and didn't need to. Every court had a scribe to do it for him, and it wasn't that important a position anyway. The language of power did not speak with the written word.
Contrast that to the time of the Greek democracy at Athens, where the teachers of speaking and writing, the Sophists, were among the highest paid folks around, and they got filthy rich selling their services, because a participatory democracy demanded it.
Link: Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches - New York Times.
Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches
Published: December 19, 2006
HOUSTON — Since the 1970s, women have surged into science and engineering classes in larger and larger numbers, even at top-tier institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nation’s medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics.
Yet studies show that women in science still routinely receive less research support than their male colleagues, and they have not reached the top academic ranks in numbers anything like their growing presence would suggest.
For example, at top-tier institutions only about 15 percent of full professors in social, behavioral or life sciences are women, “and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits,” an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported in September. And at each step on the academic ladder, more women than men leave science and engineering.
So in government agencies, at scientific organizations and on university campuses, female scientists are asking why, and wondering what they can do about it. The Association for Women in Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council are among the groups tackling these issues. In just the past two months, conferences have been held at Columbia University and the City University of New York graduate center. Harvard has a yearlong lecture series on “Women, Science and Society.”
This fall, female scientists at Rice University here gathered promising women who are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to help them learn skills that they will need to deal with the perils of job hunting, promotion and tenure in high-stakes academic science.
“The reality is there are barriers that women face,” said Kathleen S. Matthews, the dean of natural sciences at Rice, who spoke at the meeting’s opening dinner. “There are circles and communities of engagement where women are by and large not included.”
Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are somehow innately deficient in mathematics. The organizers point to ample evidence that any performance gap between men and women is changeable and is shrinking to the vanishing point.
Instead, they talk about what they have to know and do to get ahead. They talk about unspoken, even unconscious sexism that means they must be better than men to be thought as good — that they must, as one Rice participant put it, literally and figuratively wear a suit and heels, while men can relax in jeans.
They muse on the importance of mentoring and other professional support and talk about ways women can provide it for each other if they do not receive it from their professors or advisers.
And they obsess about what they call “the two body problem,” the extreme difficulty of reconciling a demanding career in science with marriage and a family — especially, as is more often the case for women than men in science, when the spouse also has scientific ambitions.
Just having a chance to talk about these issues with others who face them lifts some of the burden, said Marla Geha, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., who attended the Rice meeting. “It’s even just knowing there’s someone else out there going through the same things.”
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One issue is negotiating skills, said Daniel R. Ames, a psychologist who teaches at Columbia University’s business school and who spoke last month at a university-sponsored symposium, “The Science of Diversity.” Dr. Ames said that when he asks people what worries them about navigating the workplace, men and women give the same answer: How hard should I push? How aggressive should I be? Too little seems ineffective, but too much comes across as brash or unpleasant.
Answering the aggressiveness question correctly can be a key to obtaining the financial resources (like laboratory space or stipends for graduate students) and the social capital (like collaboration and sharing) that are essential for success in science, he said. But, he told his mostly female audience, “the band of acceptable behavior for women is narrower than it is for men.”
Women who assert themselves “may be derogated,” he said, and, possibly as a result, women are less likely to recognize negotiating opportunities, and may beapprehensive about negotiating for resources when opportunities arise. That is a problem, he said, because even small differences in resources can “accumulate over a career to lead to significant differences in outcomes.”
For example, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in its report, women who are scientists publish somewhat less over all than their male colleagues — but if surveys control for the amount of support researchers receive, women publish as often as men, the report said.
[...]
And because science is still widely viewed as “a male arena,” she said, a woman who succeeds may be viewed as “selfish, manipulative, bitter, untrustworthy, conniving and cold.”
“Women in science are in a double bind,” Dr. Heilman said. “When not clearly successful, they are presumed to be incompetent. When they are successful, they are not liked.”
Women do better, she said, in environments where they are judged on grants obtained, prizes won, findings cited by other experts, or other explicit criteria, rather than on whether they are, say, “cutting edge.” “There has to be very little room for ambiguity,” Dr. Heilman said. “Otherwise, expectations swoop in to fill the vacuum.”
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