Tenure Track Woman

Here's one reason women get sick of it

2005-04-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

NIH Women Describe Sex Harrassment

WASHINGTON (AP) - Women at the National Institutes of Health faced sexual intimidation and repeated disregard of their concerns for the welfare of patients in AIDS experiments, according to testimony by two senior female officers and documents gathered by investigators.

One longtime medical officer at the government's premier medical research agency alleges that the harassment and disregard for federal safety regulations are so widespread that employees are now afraid to hold up experiments even if they see a safety problem.

Her sworn testimony and other documents were obtained by The Associated Press from a variety of sources inside and outside NIH.

``It can be fairly uncomfortable,'' NIH medical officer Betsy Smith testified in a recent civil case deposition that has been turned over to federal and Senate investigators. ``There are a number of things that you really don't talk about.''

In such a work environment, ``You don't hold up any projects even if you feel there are safety issues for certain projects,'' she said.

Testimony by Smith and the chief compliance officer for AIDS research, as well as e-mails involving more staffers and several bosses, paint a picture of a sometimes raunchy, profane-language atmosphere inside an agency regarded for its pristine science.

Documents tell of a supervisor sending a red bra to a former female subordinate and of women being hugged or kissed by bosses. In one instance, a supervisor invited a colleague to a West Coast rock concert and suggested they also visit an AIDS clinic there so the trip could be charged to taxpayers.

Smith and the top regulatory compliance officer in the NIH's AIDS division, Mary Anne Luzar, stepped forward in interviews with investigators and in sworn depositions in recent weeks and expanded upon allegations made last year by an agency whistleblower, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein. Their videotaped testimony was given in Fishbein's lawsuit against the agency.

Fishbein alleges he is in the process of being fired as the AIDS division's chief of human research protection because he raised concerns about patient safety and shoddy science. The NIH says he was fired was poor performance.

The Senate and the inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department are investigating the allegations. In addition, officials told the AP, the NIH is conducting an internal investigation on sexual harassment.

NIH managers acknowledged in interviews that there are problems in their AIDS research program, which pays hundreds of millions of dollars for experiments across the globe. They said they could not address specific allegations because of the investigations, but were taking steps to end any sexual harassment and improve communication among employees when safety issues arise.

``We must be sure our staff works productively and in a timely fashion with our investigators to resolve any issues related to the conduct of our studies, with the highest priority paid to patient safety,'' said Dr. H. Clifford Lane. He is deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which oversees the AIDS research division.

Lane said ``sexual harassment is not tolerated at NIH and we are committed to insuring that all employees are treated with dignity and respect.''

The two new witnesses testified in recent weeks to actions they alleged made the workplace intimidating. Examples included:

female workers receiving unwanted hugs, kisses or catcalls in the hallways.

a safety order on a major experiment delayed for nearly two years.;

safety conclusions changed or disregarded by supervisors.

Luzar, the AIDS division's compliance officer, alleged that her bosses frequently sided with the front-line researchers they are financing, rather than with the agency's safety and regulatory experts.

``I think we (safety officials) got in the way, and that we were an impediment to the science,'' Luzar testified. She described the division managers as ``totally unsupportive'' of safety concerns and bending to ``tremendous pressure'' from drug companies and researchers in the name of trying to cure AIDS.

``I think the culture was certainly strong for a period of time that the ends could justify the means,'' she testified.

Smith said Fishbein was a strong advocate for improving safety for research participants and the effort to fire him is ``a warning to other individuals.''

She said after Fishbein was forced out, NIH held a meeting at which Fishbein and his allegations were attacked and a picture of one of Fishbein's relatives was shown on a screen. Smith said the event was so intimidating that fellow safety and medical officers ``called it scientific terrorism.''

Documents obtained by the AP show that nearly a year ago, NIH managers were warned by the agency's civil rights protection office in a letter that the deputy director of the AIDS division, Dr. Jonathan Kagan, had sent numerous e-mails containing ``profanity and sexual innuendo'' and ``unprofessional and inappropriate statements.''

The letter included e-mails showing Kagan sent to a male worker a picture of a bare-breasted woman with the caption ``priceless'' and sent a note jokingly instructing an employee to leave his pager behind and bring ``bongs,'' or drug paraphernalia, to an event. Kagan also used profane language in a variety of communications, the e-mails show.

NIH officials acknowledged they took no action after getting the letter last May. The investigation remains open, they said.

Luzar, who had disagreements with Kagan over her performance, testified that Kagan once hugged her inappropriately upon hearing her father had died, and routinely kept a mug on his desk with a phrase that included a four-letter expletive.

``I found it very intimidating to walk into Dr. Kagan's office for a one-on-one and see this, the first, first thing you see on the left side as you walk in the door is the cup,'' Luzar testified.

Alyza Lewin, Kagan's lawyer, said her client occasionally hugged or kissed female subordinates, and used ``earthy language'' in some e-mails to workers. Lewin also said Kagan once had retrieved a red bra that had been a gag gift among women in the office and sent it to a woman who had been a subordinate and who had transferred from his office after a falling out with him.

Lewin said the NIH's ombudsman talked with Kagan about the red bra incident but her client was never disciplined for any sexual harassment and never intended to offend women. She said the mug was bought from a popular Web news site and that he removed it from his desk once learning it bothered people.

``Dr. Kagan never sexually harassed any NIH employee,'' she said. ``It is noteworthy these allegations were not raised at the time the incidents allegedly occurred, but only now in connection with Dr. Fishbein's employment action.''

Smith, the medical officer, testified that supervisors elsewhere inside the NIH behaved similarly. She recounted how one colleague had difficulty breaking off a sexual relationship with a branch chief and said that when others at the agency went on trips, they learned ``the hotel only has one room so that the female scientist has to stay with her superior.

``I'm specifically describing individuals that don't appear to be able to interact with females without having some amount of sexuality implied,'' Smith testified. ``Some sexual games. Sexual taunting. Sexual innuendo going on.''

Investigators from the Senate Finance Committee who interviewed some NIH employees have obtained documents showing that safety concerns about AIDS studies were frequently overruled or delayed by supervisors.

For instance:

Luzar testified that NIH failed for two years to comply with federal regulations and her demand - first made in April 2003 - to update the safety protocol and instruct researchers in the field to consider new warnings to patients in a $36 million AIDS drug trial after new side effects emerged, including suicidal tendencies.

The NIH acknowledged the delay, but said patients were never in jeopardy because doctors were told about side effects as they became known.

``It is clear we can do a better job in our communications within the division and our communications with our investigators,'' said Lane, the NIH's No. 2 infectious disease official. ``We want to see all our processes take place in the quickest possible way, and two years is long time for any process.''

Smith detailed how a NIH supervisor delayed reporting for days the death of a patient in an experiment. The supervisor was ``behaving as if she were a pharmaceutical company and did not clearly understand regulatory requirements for such a study,'' Smith testified.

On the Net:

Documents gathered by The Associated Press are available at: http://wid.ap.org/documents/nih/research.html

National Institutes of Health: http://www.nih.gov

04/10/05 15:43

© Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

Women are complex, men are simple

2005-03-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

I love this X chromosome stuff.

Men have just the one, and it apparently expresses the same genes among all men.

Women have two. Dogma holds that we shut down one, randomly, in every cell so that we're just expressing a single dose of all X chromosome genes. It's our dosage compensation mechanism.

Evidently, that ain't right. Not only do we all appear to express double doses of some X genes--putting our allegedly silenced X to good use--but we also individually express our own unique set of X chromosome genes in double doses. Women's genomic expression apparently differs by as much as two percent among women and compared to men; that's more than the genomic difference between humans and chimpanzees.

Wow. No wonder no one can figure women out and we think men are so simple. What a great chromosome! All hail the mighty X!

A little reminiscence

2005-03-24T13:49:00.000-08:00

I was just reading an interesting piece at the Chronicle, which I visit often to keep tabs on the jobs that are out there. The article is about the sense of failure PhDs have when they don't obtain that all-important "real" tenure-track job. You can read the article here.

The reminiscence comes here: I earned my doctorate in a lab with a notorious PI. In addition to being notorious, he could be hilariously unself-aware. The women in the lab had had several discussions among themselves about not pursuing an academic track after finishing their degrees, and one day, our PI distributed a little article about nonacedemic careers for PhDs. We collectively thought, "Hey, Dr. Notorious is really coming around here." We attended the meeting called to discuss the article, tentatively hopeful that we might actually be able to talk about some of our own concerns on this subject.

The first words out of Dr. Notorious's mouth were, "Someday, you all will have labs of your own, and you may encounter students who come to you, wanting to pursue a nonacademic career track."

We just stared at each other and invisibly shook our heads. Heaven forfend that any of US would actually be considering such an apostasy.

Women talk about why they jump the track

2005-03-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

In the last week, I've met two women--one a postdoc and the other formerly a postdoc who jumped the tenure track--and in both cases, they almost immediately brought up the issues that led them to question pursuing the academic brass ring. One woman, who earned her PhD in neuroscience at a highly regarded Ivy League school and completed a postdoc at one our nation's best universities, had left her research career behind because she was sick of the wholesale slaughter of her research animal. She had gone through years of it, and she just didn't want to do it any more. Switching models or going with a nonvertebrate model at that point in her career would have been untenable--it's hard to explain a rationale like hers and have anyone listen--so she jumped the tracks completely and is now involved in a different kind of role in education.

The second woman with whom I spoke found out I had two children, and her next question for me was, "How do you do it?" She is just beginning her postdoc, having been in the field for almost seven years while pursuing her PhD, and is newly married. She commented that she's still just not sure whether or not she can pursue both of her goals of having a family and of being on the tenure-track, and I could tell simply by our discussion that the family, if and when it came, would come first. I told her that when my kids are awake and we're together, they get all of my time, and when they're asleep--evenings, naps on weekends--I work. Thus, I have very little leisure time, but that's just how it is. I also told her that every day, without exception, I ponder whether my pursuit of the mommy and the tenure tracks results in deterioration of my success at either or both. I often consider taking the "easy" way out and "just" working from home--I have many of the tools in place to do so as a writer and editor--and not angsting and worrying and stressing about tenure and its potential to chip away at my ability to be a mother.

Inevitably, I conclude the following: Were I to leave research behind completely, I'd miss it, like I'd miss reading or trees were I denied these suddenly. I'd go nuts reading about new discoveries, things I might have been involved in or know more about had I stayed in research. I'd miss the excitement of running the numbers, seeing that blessed P value of less than 0.05 or 0.01 or whatever cutoff I've designated. I'd miss the theorizing, the handwaving speculation about hypotheses, the way 50 new questions open up for every old one you answer.

And I conclude that I will stick with it, trying my hardest, doing the 24-hr think think think, pausing my brain for the hours I'm with my children, putting all thoughts of downtime for myself in abeyance (I'm grabbing five special minutes right now to write this), and just keep plugging along.

But I understand completely why these women question their choices and why they feel that their choices may be wrong. And I also state here that I have yet to have a conversation even remotely like these with a man in academe--yet I've had them with almost every single woman I've met.

It's just a grrl thing, I guess.

How feminine is your brain?

2005-03-08T10:51:00.000-08:00

I took this little brain sex test--it's real data gathering, and found that I fall right in the middle of the male-female brain spectrum. To my surprise, I kicked ass on the rotation-in-space exercise.

Give it a try here. It takes about 30 minutes and is very interesting.

More on the Harvard debacle from Stanley Fish

2005-02-24T08:20:00.000-08:00

Here is Fish's great commentary on the Harvard situation. Fish is a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, something we all should be reading religiously.

Whoa....a whole new take on Women in Science

2005-02-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

A fella named Ice is looking for a sidekick who's looking for a scientist.

This is a series from Science, 2002

2005-02-18T15:22:00.000-08:00

It covers women in academe--science and math, especially. Here, you'll find the third installment, which discusses why women leave the tenure track. Don't leave it! Fight the power! It's a brave new world out here, and the establishment's just gonna have to deal with that.

Here's what the Harvard prez said

2005-02-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

The link to the transcript of his comments is here. Enjoy, and don't forget to pay particular attention to his discussion of deviations from the mean.

About XX and the Nobel Prize

2005-02-12T20:23:00.000-08:00

Here's a great site that summarizes the XX contribution to the Nobels. Enjoy.

OK...try out Google Scholar beta version

2005-02-12T20:16:00.000-08:00

Give it a try here.

I ran a few searches, and it cuts out the crap very nicely. Don't tell anyone, but I've been Googling as part of my literature searching for years now. Sometimes, I get better hits that way than I do through PubMed, Medline, or other databases. AND I'll even get lucky quite a bit and find authors who have graciously posted their complete PDFs for easy access. I love that. And on a really lucky day, you can capture Nature papers through Google's "html" option for PDFs and go read them.

My favorite way to find a complete PDF on Google is to Google the paper title within quote marks. If the PDF's there, that'll turn it up.

Happy searching!

They say it better than I

2005-02-12T13:12:00.000-08:00

These folks from Stanford et al. have written an op-ed for the Boston Globe addressing the whole "women are too dumb for science" issue. The link is to an Boston Globe article on the op-ed piece, and the actual op-ed piece can be found here.

A few links

2005-02-12T08:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to a 2000 Penn State article about women, families, and the tenure track.

And here's a link to a list of sites on Google that pertain to women in science. I'm going through these myself and if I find any particularly interesting bits, I'll paraphrase them here or link to them.

About the kids

2005-02-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

This one is hard for me. If you're involved in research and teaching, any waking moment could be a moment to work--on data, ideas, papers, lectures, grading, course planning--but it is necessary to stuff down that desire for self-aggrandizement or just the need to get too many things done because I must spend time with my sons. And when I say must, it isn't "must" as in "forced to," but must as in, every fiber of my being compels me to, and it's fun.

It may be that I'm a workaholic, which used to be a word confined to descriptions of men in suits, tie askew, jacket off, working into the wee hours at a mahogany desk with a single, glowing lamp. But in our Internet world, anyone can be a workaholic. I can come home and keep right on working away from the lab and classroom. I've lost my boundaries between work and home because I work at home every day after being in the lab. My life has become a patchwork of work hours and family hours, rather than blocks of each.

Don't get me wrong. I play and spend as much time with my kids as they want with me. We have a great time together. But this computer--the one I'm using right now--sits in the room with us (we're in a pretty small house and our living room is also the playroom and the computer room)--and reminds me with every glance that there is work of another kind to be done.

And what different kinds of work they are. My kids are not work, although they require more energy than I sometimes believe I have; if anyone's still looking for the perpetual motion machine, I've got two they can come see. And being with them is natural, not frustrating, not anxious. Working is different. I get tunnel vision, a focus I can't shake once I'm in there, driving hard, running stats or literature searches, or frenetically putting together a lecture to include the latest research. I don't look to either side, but just speed straight through with an intensity that sometimes surprises me.

Is it a uniquely female trait to shift from mother enjoying wonderful moments with her children to crazed intense computer jockey speeding her way through what is called the tenure track but for me has sometimes become the tenure tunnel?

Something about husbands

2005-02-11T22:26:00.000-08:00

I'm curious about how other women who are married and riding the tenure track work around house and husband. I'm incredibly lucky--my husband and I, without spoken consultation, just divide up child and household duties (I hate using the word "duty" so near "child," but I can't think of a better word). We're split 50-50. Sometimes, I think I do less than he does, but I also have a full-time job and two sideline jobs, so we figure it's even.

I talked my husband into dumping his pretty-lucrative career of seven years and going back to school for a master's degree. It wasn't difficult--he was already deeply disillusioned about his career, which unncessesarily required incredibly long, late-night hours for months on end. When we didn't have kids, we survived OK, but it's just not feasible with children; at least, not for us. So he's getting a master's degree and delighted with school, and I'm thrilled because I hope it will translate into academic schedules for the whole family--we'll get to spend more time together during off-periods in winter, spring, and summer. Why else get all this schoolin' if you can't use it to some advantage?

But I know some women whose husbands are not so amenable to change, and they've derailed themselves from the tenure-track (one of them TWICE now) for the sake of their husbands' careers. Is it just me, or do only women do this? Men are the "breadwinners," right? Women's jobs are secondary somehow and don't take priority. Is that really the case? If the tables were turned, and the man had the tenure-track job and the woman did not, would they still move? Anyone got answers? Anecdotal evidence? Actual studies?

Act II: The Tenured Bee-atch Bites

2005-02-11T21:54:00.000-08:00

I made a few compromises for the tenure-track job I had; one of them would have made even a great position at a great school a trial. But weighing those compromises against what I encountered in my first tenure-track position ended in big changes for me and my family.

In my last post, I discussed the disappointing experience I had applying to Dream State U, pursuing a job that looked promising only to be strangely let down in the end. My story ended with my accepting a post-doctoral appointment at Top-Tier U, a position with the possibility of an assistant professorship two years down the road. But why agree to derail myself from the tenure track in the first place?

When I got my tenure-track job at Bidirectional State U (BSU), I was very pleased. The facilities looked good, the faculty interests looked like a great fit, and I’d even have my very own office with two lab rooms. The chair promised me I’d have a third room with important equipment within months after some shifting of space in the department took place.

When I arrived at BSU, bright-eyed, a tad naïve, hopeful, and full of plans, I found out that BSU is not the same as the Flagship U from which I had earned my Ph.D. That was OK. I didn’t expect things to be the same. What surprised me was that in spite of BSU’s smaller size, its bureaucracy could easily go toe to toe with that of my alma mater.

We all have to deal with bureaucracy. One cardinal rule in academe is “Don’t anger the admins.” You want the staff to be on your side, to facilitate your orders, tell you where the pens are kept, make copies for you when you’re desperate. But my first run-in with the BSU bureaucracy was not with the admin staff; it was with other academics. I was explicitly invited to compete in an intramural grants program, and so I dutifully wrote up a grant proposal, making my case for money. To my surprise, not only was I awarded the grant, my application was the top-ranked submission for the entire university. Woohoo! My first big accomplishment on the tenure track, and it felt great.

Two weeks later, a faculty member from the decision committee contacted me to let me know that the award would be retracted. Because of a technicality concerning when my position began, I was not really eligible to compete for the funds. I received this notification by e-mail, and I was not thrilled. I never would have applied for the grant had I not been explicitly invited to do so, and now, here was my first small victory dissipating via e-mail.

My chair understood my frustration, and we reached a mutually acceptable fiscal compromise. Totally mollified and promising myself to apply again next year, I moved on. Or tried to. My next unwelcome piece of information was that I would not be getting my other room with the important equipment any time in the foreseeable future. Lack of this equipment translates into “difficult to conduct scientific research” in my field. Another faculty member offered me use of his lab two floors up so I could keep moving forward, so I decided I’d just have to punt and accept the offer.

As I began cleaning up my new lab digs, I realized that I had no hot water. When I began to fill up aquaria with water from the faucet, I noticed that the water was yellow. When it sat for a couple of hours, an oily sheen collected in the surface. Yikes. After investigation, I learned that if I wanted hot water, I’d need to get an electric heater to train on the pipes, and the oil was from the pipes themselves. Oily, cold, yellow water is not the optimal environment for my aquatic animal model, so I began purchasing spring water and looking into water filters.

Then I ran up against the Order Lady. She was the Gatekeeper, and no scientist at BSU could order without her; thus, she was the limiting reactant in the conduct of research at our institution. Which was too bad, because the Order Lady sent out almost-weekly messages announcing upcoming multi-day absences and warning that any orders arriving after her stated deadline would be ignored until her return. The Order Lady was serious about this and often used ALL CAPS in her messages. We once attempted to submit an order three minutes after her stated deadline, and she refused to process it.

Beholden to the Order Lady, I resolved always to plan very much ahead and never have any last-minute needs, an optimistic resolve when one is conducting scientific research with living animals.

The animals themselves provided my last straw, my primary motivation, my impetus to pursue job openings beyond the one I had found at Dream State U. I had noticed from my arrival at BSU that faculty camaraderie in our department did not exist. Few attended social events; lunches and dinners were vast wastelands. I once RSVP’d in person to go to lunch with faculty candidate and a colleague, in response to an open invitation for faculty to attend said luncheon. After lingering alone at the appointed meeting place in our building for a few minutes, I decided to check the parking lot. There I found the faculty member driving away in his car with only the interviewee. Boldly stopping them, I asked what had happened. “Oh, I forgot about you,” said the faculty member. I went to lunch with them anyway, but being “forgotten” in that way did nothing for my waning morale.

This lack of camaraderie burgeoned into full-fledged ugliness over some of my research animals one day. I was out of state consulting with some collaborators when I received an e-mail from a faculty member. Without preamble, without questions, she simply stated that she had found two dead animals of mine that evening and I needed to take care of that immediately. She phoned all of my students--whose experiment it was for a course I was teaching--that night, threatening them with dire consequences if they did not immediately come deal with the animals. The following day, she reported me to various administrators, including a university vice-president, for “animal abuse.” Not once did she ask me why the animals might be dead, how long they'd been dead, when the last time was that they'd been assessed. Not once did she even approach me with a tone that was anything but rude, dictatorial, and uncollegial.

I was shocked, completely taken by surprise. Lethality was one of the factors we were measuring in this experiment, one cleared by our animal care and use committee, on which this faculty member served. I could not believe that within a few months of my arrival at BSU, I had been accused—to the level of the vice president—of animal abuse. I learned from others that such incidents with this faculty member were not uncommon and not singular to me. Nevertheless, I realized from that moment that I would not be able to do research in such an atmosphere. This faculty member was on several committees necessary to my survival on the tenure track. I simply had too much to do and too little patience to spend the next five years fighting my way through situations like this; the compromises I had already made personally and professionally simply weren't worth it. So I decided to cast my job search net a little wider, beyond my sole contact with Dream State U.

My net turned up the job at Top-Tier U, a post-doctoral, nontenured position with the possibility of an adjunct assistant professorship in a couple of years. It offered me the chance to pursue new research questions, it’s at a great school, and I really like the PI and all the people in the lab. I accepted. I informed my chair of my decision, and he did not seem surprised. Other faculty had become aware of some of the various events of my short tenure at BSU, and they too exhibited little surprise at my decision.

The thing is, I was an asset to the school, as I have been told by many faculty and students. While I was there, I completed several research projects and submitted pubs, mentored many students—both graduate and undergraduate—taught well and got great student evaluations. And up to a point, I could make lemonade out of oily water, a lack of equipment, absentee Order Ladies, and retracted grant funds. But when confronted with a faculty member with a lot of power and little regard for professionalism, who could and apparently would effectively block my ability to do research, I was forced to weigh the positives against the negatives. At that point, the negatives tipped the balance.

So, my house was sold, my husband was job hunting, our families were resigned, and my very young children didn't understand. I moved to Top-Tier U to see if I can use my time here to regain my footing on the tenure track in a new direction with some exciting new research. In my next post, I’ll talk about the tough choices I’m encountering even after one year of tenure-track: How can I balance being the mother of two toddlers and a wife with being the self-absorbed, self-promoting, 24/7 me-me-me person that a successful, high-powered, hyper-publishing researcher in the biological sciences must be? Coming up next: Diary of a mad academic housewife.

Why am I here?

2005-02-11T21:53:00.000-08:00

The tenure-track can be a long and bumpy ride, especially for us XX types. I was on it, then purposely derailed myself. Will I ever jump on the train again? Truthfully, I am ambivalent, but not for the reasons you might suppose.

Here's how I ended up jumping the tracks:

Act I
It all started in early July as I scoured the Web looking for references to support a grant proposal. I Googled a phrase, and there it was. An ad from a university in Dream State, where my husband and I, in our salad days—pre-children, pre-mortgage, pre-Ph.D.—dreamed of living. We visited Dream State by plane and car. We bought books, read biographies and histories, listened to books on tape. We looked for jobs and thought about all that we would do and how we would enjoy this manifestation of our adventurous natures. Then…well, life flowed along and we flowed with it. A decade later, there we were, still in the same town. Sure, we’d put a couple more degrees under our belts, we lived in a bigger house, and we had kids, but we were still in the same place, geographically speaking.

In the interim, I had gotten a tenure-track job at Bidirectional State University. Facilities were not what I had hoped and the faculty lacked the camaraderie that I had enjoyed so thoroughly as a graduate student, but it was a good job and I resolved to make the best of everything. That’s why I was writing the grant proposal. And that’s how I found the ad. Dream State U wanted someone like me. I read it a couple of times, savoring the idea, letting my mind fly off in fanciful directions, completely groundless from reality. Then I called my husband. “You won’t believe what I just found,” I whispered excitedly on the phone. I could practically hear the eye roll on the other end of the line. But when I told him and zapped him the URL, we giggled and got giddy and decided that maybe I should just go for it. The job looked great—not only was it in Dream State, it offered great startup and facilities. So I went for it.

And they bit almost immediately. The call came within days of my initial e-mail expressing interest. The faculty member on the other end of the phone expressed enthusiasm and “strong encouragement” (I actually kept that voice mail), and so I submitted my application package. Just a couple of weeks later, I heard from them again, this time by e-mail. It was the chair of another committee for another position they had open. He was laudatory, impressed with my CV, and he encouraged me to apply also for the second position. I couldn’t believe my luck and went bounding around my kitchen, jumping up and down under the wary eyes of my husband, who hadn’t seen this kind of behavior from me at least since our salad days. Of course, I applied for the second position, too, bugging my referees to re-send letters and faxing everything anew to satisfy the demanding channels of the hiring bureaucracy. I even went so far as to create a prototype job talk because they had spoken so urgently about how soon I might be able to interview.

Then silence. For months. We talked about Dream State on our walks, explored my husband’s job and schooling prospects, looked at how much houses cost. After hours and days and weeks of speculation, in October I learned that they had filled the first position, without a word to me, not even a letter. But it was OK because the other position was going forward; in fact, they were planning to re-post it with language that fit closely my own background and research interests. Although I was disappointed that the first position had fallen through so suddenly in spite of the “strong encouragement,” this new development certainly looked promising.

But now I had the bug, driven by other events at my current job. I looked at prospects outside of Dream State, always with our specific needs in mind. I applied for a few more that offered what I would need and were located in areas we liked. Dream State U called in mid-November. They wanted to do the phone interview. I thought it went well. They discussed in detail when I might be able to come for an interview, mentioned a time when I would hear from them next, and encouraged me to contact the chair at any time if I had questions. All generally considered positive signs. Woohoo! More leaping around the kitchen. Two weeks later, I received a form letter telling me that they had expanded the search because the current applicant pool was not strong enough.

I’m a scientist. I’m good with looking at facts, looking even at implication, and drawing inferences, creating scenarios. But I had no idea how to interpret this. Was it bureaucracy again? Or did I bomb the phone interview so badly that they had to expand the search to find someone with better phone skills? In a state of conflicting emotions, I e-mailed the committee chair. Was there anything I could do aid my position in light of this expanded search? The response? There just weren’t enough strong applicants in the pool; if I wanted to add a line about any interest I might have in the research field they’d tacked onto the expanded search, I was welcome to do so. Hmmmm. The field they’d added on to expand the search was about as close to my own area of research as Australia is to Greenland. So I left everything as-was.

In the interim, I had found a job posting that made all my synapses fire at once; sounds painful, but it was actually rather pleasant. The appointment seemed like wonderful fit for what I wanted to do, where I wanted to do it, and with a university of stellar national reputation. The only catch? It was a postdoctoral position, with the promise that it could lead to an assistant professorship if things went well. Without thinking twice, I e-mailed my CV. To my astonishment, two hours later, the lead researcher gave me a call. One thing led to another, and within a week, I had an offer. I e-mailed Dream State U to let them know the offer was on the table. The reply? Congratulations. They were still continuing with the expanded search and were frustrated at the lack of response. No “We were just about to call you” or “Can you hold off for a little bit?” or “Great, because we weren’t interested in you anymore anyway.” Just “Great. We’re frustrated.” I had no idea how to interpret that.

I accepted the offer from Top Tier U, after clarifying that the potential for assistant professorship would really be an adjunct position that I’d need to fund with soft money. At the very least, I’d have two years from Top Tier U on my CV with new skills; at the most, I might be an adjunct assistant professor at Top-Tier U at the end of two years, and there are certainly worse career situations. In my next column, I will elaborate on my choice to derail myself from the tenure track and the central motivation for my deciding to pursue a new position more aggressively a few months into my negotiations with Dream State U.

When I contacted Dream State U again, notifying the hiring committee chair in a friendly e-mail expressing civilly and professionally my continued future interest in Dream State U and my confusion about the conduct of the job search, he responded with a terse, three-line e-mail that may as well have been sent to someone who had spammed him, egregiously. It did not reflect the many interchanges we had had. It offered no explanation for why my CV was so attractive in October but failed to attract a call for an interview in January. I mentally added it up. They had strung me along for seven months, always changing something here and there, very personal and collegial-seeming sometimes, brusque, bureaucratic, and impersonal at others. And in the end, discourteous. Even if the rules of hiring demand such terseness and circumspection, the rules of scientific camaraderie and personal relations required at least a hint of recognition of our seven-month journey together. After the interchanges, the invitations to apply, the phone interview, I expected more than form letters and terse e-mails. But that’s what I got. What I also got was a great position at a great school, and it’s just close enough to Dream State that we can visit whenever we like, without having to wait for an invitation that may never arrive.

Can chicks do math and science?

2005-02-11T21:31:00.000-08:00

Many know about the president of Harvard's opening of his capacious mouth and insertion of his odiferous foot while making comments about the success of women on the tenure track in math and science. For those of you living under a heavy tenure-review-looming rock, read the story here.

And here're my own thoughts as a woman in science off and on the tenure track:
When girls and boys are treated equally in a classroom, the girls perform as well as--or better than--the boys in math and science (study from Brown University looking at unisex girls and boys schools, the perfect controlled environment). Also, research indicates that girls perform as well as boys in math and science until middle school, when social pressures lead them to believe that science and math are not what girls should be doing. Yes, the brains of men and women are different, but only in mechanism, not in ultimate ability. In other words, women use one way to solve a problem correctly, and men use another way to reach the same conclusion. Women's brains function like a lot of computers that are very well networked, while men have more concentrated areas of processing with less networking. In the end, it all adds up to the same intelligence levels. Women obtain 51 percent of the doctorates in math and science--that demonstrates that they have abilities on par with men because obtaining the doctorate is much more demonstrative of ability than what you do later; you can get others to do your lab work when you're the PI, but you can't when you're the grad student. It's when you get into tenure-track vs. family that women seem more willing to compromise.

The brain can be modifed through childhood for certain connections. It is likely that if a child is encouraged in a certain way, the neural connections made as a result of that encouragement and tutelage may add up to aptitude or interest later in life. Girls have received little-to-no encouragement in math and science until very recently; many I've spoken with report actual discouragement in this regard because of their sex. In this way, your brain is operating under a "use-it-or-lose-it" scenario.

The discussion in academe is about why there aren't as many women in the top echelons of science and math. One reason is that it is only in the very end of the latter half of the 20th century that girls were even encouraged to pursue either. It takes more than a couple of decades to claw en masse to the top echelons under those conditions. Prior to that, women were only allowed to write, and if they were good little girls, they could write to their friends. So there are millennia of biases to overcome there. Some women did so prior to this time--Marie Curie, Rosalind Franks, Barbara McLintock, Martha Chase come to mind (and they had enormous sex-bais to deal with)--but the en masse movement only began in the late 80s at the earliest, and given the short time period, has been enormously successful.

The real reason there aren't as many women in the top echelons of academe is because of the nature of academe. To be an academic, you once were--and often still are-- expected to give over your family entirely to the distaff side while you slaved away with research and theorizing, presenting and teaching, etc. The wives were at home maintaining the castle. But women don't have this option--their husbands are not at home cleaning, shopping, child-rearing, making dinner, etc., and many women are willing to derail themselves from the tenure track to take on these duties, rather than sacrificing family to career. That's great, but...

What academe really needs is a makeover, a change in attitudes toward parenting and family in general. Women AND men need to have the ability to be family people, to spend time with their kids, etc. It shouldn't be just a "female" concern, but a "parent" concern. That's why they're discussing having women with small children be allowed to take longer before seeking tenure; the dumb thing is, things have changed more than these academics realize, and we need to allow women AND men with small children more flexibility in this regard.

It's not just politically correct ivory-tower nonsense to understand that women are as capable as men of excelling in math and science, and the numbers and studies bear this out. It's not a question of whether or not we can do the work--we can. It's a question of whether or not there's enough time in the day or week or month or year to do the work AND be the wife and mother that many of us are. From my own personal experience, I can say that the only tenured faculty women I know are childless; most are unmarried. The women I know who were on tenure-track, but who had children, no longer are on the track. Their work was great--some are very well-known in their fields, and there is no question about their mental capacity--but they subordinated that for the sake of family. Again, the right thing to do, but it underscores the need for academe to take a different tack. It's a brave new world out here where both parents participate.