{"id":892,"date":"2011-03-09T08:53:39","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T08:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/?p=892"},"modified":"2011-03-21T14:26:14","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T14:26:14","slug":"in-which-i-assert-my-right-of-interpretation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2011\/03\/09\/in-which-i-assert-my-right-of-interpretation\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I assert my right of interpretation"},"content":{"rendered":"

In doing research for my previous World View piece for Nature<\/em> about the lack of female science pundits<\/a>, I came across the notion that women might be discouraged from expressing their views in public in part because they didn\u2019t want to deal with nasty responses. I can sympathize with this perspective. Even though I don\u2019t let it stop me from speaking my mind, I am naturally conflict-adverse and can often feel physically sick in the midst of it. But I strongly believe it\u2019s more important to speak your mind than allow fear of reprisal (or ridicule) to stop you.<\/p>\n

Last week, I published a second World View piece in Nature<\/em>, about post-doctoral career problems in the life sciences<\/a>. There was a very robust response in the comment thread, by email and in the blogosphere. Overall, I received hundreds of responses from all over the world, the vast majority of them supportive.<\/p>\n

I am not going to discuss the post-doc topic further here; the point I want to make is a lot more meta. In a few of these responses, I encountered a recurring trope: irritation that I was writing something similar to something that someone else, somewhere, had once mentioned. The implication seemed to be that in matters of opinion \u2013 even something as often discussed as post-doc careers \u2013 particular ideas could somehow be owned<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Is there any justification for this view? First and foremost, there is a big difference between an op-ed and a scholarly article. And it would be very difficult, in a 700-word piece, to enumerate all the hundreds of influences that led to my ultimate argument. I am writing from the perspective of someone who has been in the academic system for more than two decades: in that time, I have absorbed thousands of conversations from colleagues in coffee rooms, in pubs, and in the banter of the laboratory. I am also writing<\/a> as someone who is precariously close to being squeezed out of the system herself: indeed, in the past few months I have thought of little else, and bored my readers<\/a> here with some of that angst. More recently, as I\u2019ve got more into politics, I\u2019ve started having conversations with various stakeholders about the issues, canvassing as wide an opinion as I can. For the piece, I needed to frame the argument for an international readership, and I needed to propose a solution (of arguably many), and for this I chatted to many different people, including a number of esteemed scientists. All of this was distilled, in a quite painful process, to fit on one page of a magazine \u2013 and was then further cut and refined by an editor, a subeditor and a copyeditor, some of this out of my direct control.<\/p>\n

The internet is a big place. There are millions of voices, spinning out words into the void. And I am extremely time-poor, unable to take in more than a few blogs from time to time. An infinite number of monkeys would probably reproduce my Nature <\/em>piece in full, while a sub-infinite number of bloggers collectively have probably said every part of it at one time or another.<\/p>\n

But does this mean I didn\u2019t have a right to say what I said, to put my own spin and stamp on the well-known tide of post-doctoral angst, to propose a solution \u2013 not the<\/em> solution, but one possible one \u2013 to get a discussion going? Is the protestation \u201cBut I wrote about this last year\u201d really a good reason to expect others not to? If we all think an issue is worth discussing, and none of us can read everything, surely the best thing to do is just to embrace all the various versions that struggle to the surface in the messy scrum of the online world. Implying that people have stolen ideas when they are probably just unaware of them is counter-productive. Convergent evolution is bound to happen whenever enough people are thinking along similar lines, and collectively, many overlapping voices will be more powerful than one. Indeed, the day after my piece went live, I opened up EMBO Reports<\/em> and saw a piece by Howy Jones about women scientists<\/a> that echoed a few points in both my recent Nature<\/em> pieces. I was happy, not upset, that the arguments would get even more exposure.<\/p>\n

If there had been infinite space for citations, and had an infinite amount of time to read every blog on earth, who would I have chosen? I am a big fan of Michael Teitelbaum<\/a>, and have blogged about his views before<\/a>. I was taken to task for not acknowledging Beryl Lieff Benderly<\/a>, whose work I honestly have never come across before \u2013 but I\u2019m glad I have now, because her stuff looks well worth a serious read. I\u2019m sure I\u2019m unaware of hundreds of other key voices. But I\u2019m not going to apologize for saying what I needed to say, in my own words, in my own particular corner of space-time. Because sometimes you just have to speak out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In doing research for my previous World View piece for Nature about the lack of female science pundits, I came across the notion that women might be discouraged from expressing their views in public in part because they didn\u2019t want … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-careers-2","category-the-profession-of-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}