Arts as Astra

Why is it that Supreme Court nominees are suspected of being racist when only when the nominee herself is a minority?

On the other hand, why is it that being a mysogynist is not a disqualification for the same Court?

The Republican Party ought to rename itself the Party for Insecure White Men and have done with it.

Caught sight of this item over at Thus Spake Zuska. Apparently, the journal Nature reprints its original mission statement in every issue. Said mission statement includes the line,

"to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time."

Recognizing that the phrase "Scientific men themselves" might be objectionable in the 21st century (if not the preceding 1.38 centuries as well, really), the editors announced a change in the wording in an editorial in yesterday's issue. The new improved wording will be... wait for it...

"Scientific men [sic] themselves".

hmphf. Personally, I agree with Zuska, that it's a big cop out.

Nature likes to thinks it's on the cutting edge of science research, but it's more like the bleeding edge - I'd estimate that half the results published in it get quietly retracted within a year, at least in astronomy. Maybe by being behind the times in gender equality, it balances out?

My friend, M-Lo, likes to gripe about how faculty search committees tend to look for "rock stars" - splashy, self-promoting, and usually male.

As ukelele informed me, sometimes they really are rock stars.

I also recently read that Danica McKellar (Winnie from "the Wonder Years") recently wrote a book on math for middle schoole girls called "Math Doesn't Suck." She apparently also has a Bacon-Erdos number of 6.

I'm clearly going about this academia business in entirely the wrong way - I ought to be developing my singing/acting career first. Good thing I've recently been cast in the musical "Carousel." It's only a chorus role, but as much as I would have liked to get a bigger role, I can't really afford that kind of time commitment. But it ought to look good on the CV anyway, right?

The Supreme Court has decided to make it easier for employers to discriminate against women. I guess the wage gap doesn't bother them in the slightest. Perhaps it's only coincidence that this comes soon after I read this article* about pretty blatant sex discrimination against an assistant professor at UCLA, where "it was discovered during court proceedings that her UCLA department had a secret reserve of money that they used to supplement the salaries of male faculty members only." So if your employer does something behind your back, and you don't find out about it until more than 180 days afterwards, does that mean you don't get to file suit against them? If your employer systematically gave you smaller raises than your male collegues over the past 19 years, it's not a valid claim? Oh right, that is what they ruled.

I used to be pretty naive about sex discrimination - I never really experienced it myself, so I thought. Up through grad school, I felt like I was treated pretty much the same as my male cohorts. Certainly my grades showed that I was as good as them. But as the criteria for success becomes more and more subjective, I'm feeling it more and more. It's nothing truly blatent, just the thousands of tiny paper cuts ("You'll have no problem getting a job, you're a woman." "Did having children in grad school make you take longer?") that bleed you to death. To have the Supreme Court, of all entities, make it harder for a woman to fight discrimination, that makes me all the more paranoid about my chances for success.

What with this and the "partial birth abortion" rulings, it seems pretty clear that the majority of the Supreme Court hates women. I share Ruth Bader Ginsburg's frustration and anger. The end of Bush's term in office and the accompanying chance to rectify the makeup of the Supreme Court can't come soon enough for me.

*seen at Bitch PhD

The Boston Globe has an interesting article today about a study done by the MIT Workplace Center (yay, MIT!) the difficulties in retaining female lawyers until they make partner. While this isn't exactly about women in science, the parallels to retaining women in many professions are analogous.

Of the 1,000 Massachusetts lawyers who provided data for the report, 31 percent of female associates had left private practice entirely, compared with 18 percent of male associates. The gap widens among associates with children, to 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively -- reflecting the cultural reality that women remain the primary care givers of children and are therefore more likely to leave their firms for family reasons.

The dropout rate among women lawyers is overwhelmingly the result of the combination of demanding hours, inflexible schedules, lack of viable part-time options, emphasis on billable hours, and failure by law firms to recognize that female lawyers' career trajectories may alternate between work and family, the report found.

...

Nearly 40 percent of women lawyers with children have worked part time, compared with almost no men, even though men in the profession have more children than women, on average.

(Emphasis mine)

It seems like there's no getting around the fact that women are still expected to be the primary caregivers for children, regardless of our own career ambitions and no matter what lip service is paid to gender equality. And then employers choose not to make allowances for that and, in fact, often penalize women for demands for flexibility, hence fewer women at the upper echelons despite growing parity in numbers at entry levels.

This is why I don't believe any of the arguments about intrinsic differences between genders leading to differential career success. Social conditioning and institutional inflexibility have much more to do with it. In scientific terms, I would say that social, cultural, and institutional forces are first order effects, and intrinsic differences are second order. And any good scientist knows that dealing with lower order effects is more important.

That's right. I started cleaning my office on Thursday, and now I'm finally on the last bit of going through Giant Mountains of Papers, sorting them, tossing out duplicates, and filing them away. And then maybe I can do some Real Work again.

In the meantime, here are some interesting articles I came across on the internet today:

• How the tenure process discriminates against female professors


• The Opt-Out Myth

The "leaky pipeline" metaphor is explained in this article as:

In corporations, women tend to talk about a "glass ceiling." In academia, the more commonly used metaphor is the "leaky pipeline." The flood of women in graduate and professional schools gives way to a trickle at the highest levels in many fields.

And as with many articles on the subject, it cites having children and trying to balance career and family as one of the biggest obstacles to keeping women in science. And look, a way to tackle the problem!

Grant won a Claflin Award. It was only a modest prize -- $60,000 over two years, offered since 1997 to select Massachusetts General Hospital women trying to balance their medical research with young children. But, she says, it made an enormous difference: It not only paid for staff to help on her research, it gave her "the positive feedback you need when you're overworked and exhausted to kind of keep in the game."

I'm a huge fan of grants programs like this that give women scientists a hand up when they have children.

On the other hand, this item bring up an important point. Why is childcare always considered almost exclusively a woman's issue?

Most men in corporate, political, judicial and non-profit positions of power -- Democrats, Republicans, independents, apoliticals -- don't have childcare as a national problem anywhere on their radar screens. It's a "woman's issue." A special interest group concern. Their wives' problem. Despite the fact that, obviously, men have something to do with creating children.

And I totally agree. Which is why DH and I do our best to share childcare duties.

This begs the question, why not make the grants programs cited above open to both new mothers and new fathers? To which I say, fine, if the father is actually doing the bulk of the work tending to the children -- which is just not the case in most families. But that involves a huge cultural shift, as evidenced by the second article. And maybe if men in positions of power did pay attention, then special help for young mothers in academia would not be necessary. So until that happens, I'm fine with giving women an extra hand up.

I've posted about stereotype threat before, but I found this article particularly interesting. Basicially, stereotype threat is the self-fulfilling prophecy that can lead to women and minorities underperforming, by simply reminding them of their minority status. The article cites a study that looks at extremely subtle triggers that invoke the stereotype threat, like subliminally flashing the words "doll" and "lipstick" at women to cause them to favor arts over math, or the presence of a US flag causing an uptick in math scores among whites.

Boy, who knew this sort of thing could be so insidious. Imagine you're the only woman on the faculty of a science department. Not only are you very isolated in your position, but you have all these constant reminders (like the faces of the others in your department) that you are a woman in science, thereby invoking the stereotype threat. It makes me very leery of applying to some of these all-male departments.

I feel like I should feel guilty about delighting in schadenfreude at the misfortunes of others, especially prominent leaders of ginormous megachurches. But they're such easy targets.

2003 UB313 has an official name now.

It will be called Eris, after the goddess of discord. Its moon will be called Dysnomia, after Eris' daughter, the spirit of lawlessness.

Doesn't have the same ring to it as Xena and Gabrielle, but I think the names are appropriate. There's even something to appease the fans of Lawless-ness.