{"id":5690,"date":"2019-01-24T20:29:43","date_gmt":"2019-01-24T19:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=5690"},"modified":"2019-01-24T20:29:47","modified_gmt":"2019-01-24T19:29:47","slug":"feeling-exhausted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2019\/01\/24\/feeling-exhausted\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling Exhausted"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


This week I came across an article<\/a> highlighting the accumulated evidence from multiple studies of the disadvantage women in science suffer, with specific reference to the fields of anthropology, ecology and evolution, the field the author – Kathleen Grogan<\/a> \u2013 had most familiarity with. My own experience would suggest there is nothing unique about those fields. She identified all the reasons women fall out of the scientific pipeline (yes I know, not everyone likes that analogy, but I am simply quoting her) or suffer detriment during their careers plus some simple actions male colleagues could take to improve the situation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is, as is appropriate for an article appearing in one of the Nature\u2019s stable of journals, evidence-driven and scholarly. Judging by the number of people who retweeted my original tweet about it, it nevertheless struck a chord with many readers. Although it does not spend time hand-wringing over the women whose lives were damaged, even those who \u2018survived\u2019 the system, we should not forget the huge waste of potential, knowledge and innovation implied by the aggregated loss of female time, energy and talent. Women get tired battling against the odds; I know I do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me give you a concrete example. Suppose you are an up-and-coming researcher with some innovative ideas that challenge the mainstream. This doesn\u2019t have to be anything as major as a Kuhn-style paradigm shift \u2013 even men have trouble getting such radical ideas accepted \u2013 but something which provides a different way of looking at things or a new factor that had been overlooked perhaps. Does Mary Smith find it easy to get her paper accepted if she is the corresponding author? Significantly less so than Mark Smith, according to the studies<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any individual Mary may feel that she hasn\u2019t argued it well enough or that the referees are right when they pick up on some detail (which may incidentally demonstrate that they haven\u2019t even read the paper thoroughly). If she is brave enough, she may even try to get into correspondence with the editor. But this same Mary may find that two years down the line she has still not published this paper, wasting her time in endless rewrites and resubmissions, while her colleague Mark who (she secretly believes) is coming up with ideas of much less significance easily gets his papers accepted. Then she starts to think it isn\u2019t her, so much as her name. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is worth considering that full names are now very much the standard style so that it is not so easy to hide behind initials as in years past. (Although, thinking back to my ECR days, some journals expected women to give their names in full but men only their initials, thereby highlighting the difference. Male by default<\/a>.) I am all in favour of uniformity but if we\u2019re not going down the path of double blind refereeing maybe we should remove the subliminal message conveyed by \u2018Mary\u2019 as the corresponding author and leave it at \u2018M\u2019. (And let us remember that women may be just as unconsciously prejudiced against women as men.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could make the same arguments about grant applications, or promotions or salaries or job offers. I won\u2019t because you can find these examples plus the evidence supporting them made expertly in Grogan\u2019s article. Anyhow you get the message. If you happen to be called Mary you may start to feel after a while that the odds seem stacked against you in ways you had not expected. But what do you do then? Persistence and determination, resilience and courage are all very well, but it is undermining to confidence if your career is faltering for reasons that aren\u2019t, as you first assumed, down to some internal flaw but instead arises from something external and systematic\/systemic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I first realised stutters in my own career might not be because I was incompetent when I read the 1999 MIT report on the Status of Women<\/a>. Up till that point I felt the fact I never seemed to win an argument in my department about space or other resources was because I was useless at arguing. After reading the report I began to wonder. I can\u2019t say the recognition that it might not be my incompetence causing the problem cheered me up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anger entered my lexicon then, although I hope not too\nvisibly. I am not sure it has ever fully departed, however rosy my life may\nlook. But I hope I have harnessed that anger to argue much more broadly for\nwomen\u2019 status, position, rights (whatever word you like to use) collectively\nthrough taking on championing the issues. But anger can still surface when I\nsee things go awry. And it isn\u2019t always easy to use that constructively or even\nknow when and whether to deploy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, another emotional topic that Grogan does not touch on, is how to handle the male colleague \u2013 at whatever level \u2013 who is, intentionally or not, obnoxious. I don\u2019t mean the predator or the openly aggressive, but the master of the smaller put-down. It is a troubling scenario. Do you make a fuss in public and hope others will join in? Perhaps even wait to see if they would leap in to defend you before you have to do it for yourself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You know the kind of comment: the one that implies you\u2019re ditzy, ignorant, na\u00efve or incompetent without actually being openly hostile. The ones that leaving you feeling bullied or harassed without being quite specific enough to lead to a formal complaint (and who wants to go down that route with its even greater cost?). The kind that leaves you thinking \u2018did that guy really just say that?\u2019 Do you write to him privately afterwards (as I described in one of my earliest blogposts<\/a>) and hope he will see the error of his ways. It might just inflame the situation if you can\u2019t find good allies. Do you avoid him like the plague in the future, so that you are the one who loses out on opportunities to do good stuff, look after your team, get more space or whatever it might be? The time penalty in even thinking how to handle such casual put-downs costs you whatever action (or inaction) you choose. And, of course, if it happens enough it may push you out of science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I feel exhausted when such situations arise. And they still\ndo \u2013 to me as to every woman (and every minority scientist I\u2019m sure). Not as\noften as when I was younger but often enough that the memory of the\naccompanying hassle does not fade.  The\nsoul-searching \u2013 did I deserve that?; the soul-searching, friend-asking,\nsleep-losing hassle of how do I stop this guy getting away with such behaviour\nto me,  my colleagues and the students he\nmay teach. We have to keep up the good fight. Adducing scholarly evidence is\nnecessary if the collective world is going to take note, but each woman who is\nimpacted is reduced by that impact and the world loses out. We should never\nforget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I came across an article highlighting the accumulated evidence from multiple studies of the disadvantage women in science suffer, with specific reference to the fields of anthropology, ecology and evolution, the field the author – Kathleen Grogan \u2013 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,27],"tags":[994,691,490,250],"class_list":["post-5690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-culture","category-women-in-science","tag-bias","tag-bullying","tag-leaky-pipeline","tag-mit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}