Pub-Style Science: exclusion, inclusion, and methodological disputes.

Posted on April 16, 2014April 16, 2014 by jstemwedel

This is the second part of my transcript of the Pub-Style Science discussion about how (if at all) philosophy can (or should) inform scientific knowledge-building, wherein we discuss methodological disputes, who gets included or excluded in scientific knowledge-building, and ways the exclusion or inclusion might matter. Also, we talk about power gradients and make the scary suggestion that “the scientific method” might be a lie…

Michael Tomasson: Rubidium, you got me started on this. I made a comment on Twitter about our aspirations to build objective knowledge and that that was what science was about, and whether there’s sexism or racism or whatever other -isms around is peripheral to the holy of holies, which is the finding of objective truth. And you made … a comment.

Dr. Rubidium: I think I told you that was cute.

Michael Tomasson: Let me leverage it this way: One reason I think philosophy is important is the basics of structure, of hypothesis-driven research. The other thing I’m kind of intrigued by is part of Twitter culture and what we’re doing with Pub-Style Science is to throw the doors open to people from different cultures and different backgrounds are really say, hey, we want to have science that’s not just a white bread monoculture, but have it be a little more open. But does that mean that everyone can bring their own way of doing science? It sounds like Andrew might say, well, there’s a lot of different ways, and maybe everyone who shows up can bring their own. Maybe one person wants a hypothesis, another doesn’t. Does everybody get to do their own thing, or do we need to educate people in the one way to do science?

As I mentioned on my blog, I had never known that there was a feminist way of doing science.

Janet Stemwedel: There’s actually more than one.

Dr. Isis: We’re not all the same.

Janet Stemwedel: I think even the claim that there’s a single, easily described scientific method is kind of a tricky one. One of the things I’m interested in — one of the things that sucked me over from building knowledge in chemistry to trying to build knowledge in philosophy — is, if you look at scientific practice, scientists who are nominally studying the same thing, the same phenomena, but who’re doing it in different disciplines (say, the chemical physicists and the physical chemists) can be looking at the same thing, but they’re using very different experimental tools and conceptual tools and methodological tools to try to describe what’s going on there. There’s ways in which, when you cross a disciplinary boundary — and sometimes, when you leave your research group and go to another research group in the same department — that what you see on the ground as the method you’re using to build knowledge shifts.

In some ways, I’m inclined to say it’s an empirical question whether there’s a single unified scientific method, or whether we’ve got something more like a family resemblance kind of thing going on. There’s enough overlap in the tools that we’re going to call them all science, but whether we can give necessary and sufficient conditions that describe the whole thing, that’s still up in the air.

Andrew Brandel: I just want to add to that point, if I can. I think that one of the major topics in social sciences of science and in the philosophy of science recently has been the point that science itself, as it’s been practiced, has a history that is also built on certain kinds of power structures. So it’s not even enough to say, let’s bring lots of different kinds of people to the table, but we actually have to uncover the ways in which certain power structures have been built into the very way that we think about science or the way that the disciplines are arranged.

(23:10)
Michael Tomasson: You’ve got to expand on that. What do you mean? There’s only one good — there’s good science and there’s bad science. I don’t understand.

Janet Stemwedel: So wait, everyone who does science like you do is doing good science, and everyone who uses different approaches, that’s bad?

Michael Tomasson: Yes, exactly.

Janet Stemwedel: There’s no style choices in there at all?

Michael Tomasson: That’s what I’m throwing out there. I’m trying to explore that. I’m going to take poor Casey over here, we’re going to stamp him, turn him into a white guy in a tie and he’s going to do science the way God intended it.

Dr. Isis: This is actually a good point, though. I had a conversation with a friend recently about “Cosmos.” As they look back on the show, at all the historical scientists, who, historically has done science? Up until very recently, it has been people who were sufficiently wealthy to support the lifestyle to which they would like to become accustomed, and it’s very easy to sit and think and philosophize about how we do science when it’s not your primary livelihood. It was sort of gentleman scientists who were of the independently wealthy variety who were interested in science and were making these observations, and now that’s very much changed.

It was really interesting to me when you suggested this as a topic because recently I’ve become very pragmatic about doing science. I think I’m taking the “Friday” approach to science — you know, the movie? Danielle Lee wants to remake “Friday” as a science movie. Right now, messing with my money is like messing with my emotions. I’m about writing things in a way to get them funded and writing things in a way that gets them published, and it’s cute to think that we might change the game or make it better, but there’s also a pragmatic side to it. It’s a human endeavor, and doing things in a certain way gets certain responses from your colleagues. The thing that I see, especially watching young people on Twitter, is they try to change the game before they understand the game, and then they get smacked on the nose, and then they write is off as “science is broken”. Well, you don’t understand the game yet.

Janet Stemwedel: Although it’s complicated, I’d say. It is a human endeavor. Forgetting it’s a human endeavor is a road to nothing but pain. And you’ve got the knowledge-building thing going on, and that’s certainly at the center of science, but you’ve also got the getting credit for the awesome things you’ve done and getting paid so you can stay in the pool and keep building knowledge, because we haven’t got this utopian science island where anyone who wants to build knowledge can and all their needs are taken care of. And, you’ve got power gradients. So, there may well be principled arguments from the point of view of what’s going to incentivize practices that will result in better knowledge and less cheating and things like that, to change the game. I’d argue that’s one of the things that philosophy of science can contribute — I’ve tried to contribute that as part of my day job. But the first step is, you’ve got to start talking about the knowledge-building as an activity that’s conducted by humans rather than you put more data into the scientific method box, you turn the crank, and out comes the knowledge.

Michael Tomasson: This is horrifying. I guess what I’m concerned about is I’d hoped you’d teach the scientific method as some sort of central methodology from lab to lab. Are you saying, from the student’s point of view, whatever lab you’re in, you’ve got to figure out whatever the boss wants, and that’s what science is? Is there no skeleton key or structure that we can take from lab to lab?

Dr. Rubidium: Isn’t that what you’re doing? You’re going to instruct your people to do science the way you think it should be done? That pretty much sounds like what you just said.

Dr. Isis: That’s the point of being an apprentice, right?

Michael Tomasson: I had some fantasy that there was some universal currency or universal toolset that could be taken from one lab to another. Are you saying that I’m just teaching my people how to do Tomasson science, and they’re going to go over to Rubidium and be like, forget all that, and do things totally differently?

Dr. Rubidium: That might be the case.

Janet Stemwedel: Let’s put out there that a unified scientific method that’s accepted across scientific disciplines, and from lab to lab and all that, is an ideal. We have this notion that part of why we’re engaged in science to try to build knowledge of the world is that there is a world that we share. We’re trying to build objective knowledge, and why that matters is because we take it that there is a reality out there that goes deeper than how, subjectively, things seem to us.

(30:00)
Michael Tomasson: Yes!

Janet Stemwedel: So, we’re looking for a way to share that world, and the pictures of the method involved in doing that, the logical connections involved in doing that, that we got from the logical empiricists and Popper and that crowd — if you like, they’re giving sort of the idealized model of how we could do that. It’s analogous to the story they tell you about orbitals in intro chem. You know what happens, if you keep on going with chem, is they mess up that model. They say, it’s not that simple, it’s more complicated.

And that’s what philosophers of science do, is we mess up that model. We say, it can’t possible be that simple, because real human beings couldn’t drive that and make it work as well as it does. So there must be something more complicated going on; let’s figure out what it is. My impression, looking at the practice through the lens of philosophy of science, is that you find a lot of diversity in the details of the methods, you find a reasonable amount of diversity in terms of what’s the right attitude to have towards our theories — if we’ve got a lot of evidence in favor of our theories, are we allowed to believe our theories are probably right about the world, or just that they’re better at churning out predictions than the other theories we’ve considered so far? We have places where you can start to look at how methodologies embraced by Western primatologists compared to Japanese primatologists — where they differ on what’s the right thing to do to get the knowledge — you could say, it’s not the case that one side is right and one side is wrong, we’ve located a trade-off here, where one camp is deciding one of the things you could get is more important and you can sacrifice the other, and the other camp is going the other direction on that.

It’s not to say we should just give up on this project of science and building objective, reliable knowledge about the world. But how we do that is not really anything like the flowchart of the scientific method that you find in the junior high science text book. That’s like staying with the intro chem picture of the orbitals and saying, that’s all I need to know.

(32:20)
Dr. Isis: I sort of was having a little frightened moment where, as I was listening to you talk, Michael, I was having this “I don’t think that word means what you think it means” reaction. And I realize that you’re a physician and not a real scientist, but “the scientific method” is actually a narrow construct of generating a hypothesis, generating methods to test the hypothesis, generating results, and then either rejecting or failing to reject your hypothesis. This idea of going to people’s labs and learning to do science is completely tangential from the scientific method. I think we can all agree that, for most of us at are core, the scientific method is different from the culture. Now, whether I go to Tomasson’s lab and learn to label my reagents with the wrong labels because they’re a trifling, scandalous bunch who will mess up your experiment, and then I go to Rubidium’s lab and we all go marathon training at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, that’s the culture of science, that’s not the scientific method.

(34:05)
Janet Stemwedel: Maybe what we mean by the scientific method is either more nebulous or more complicated, and that’s where the disagreements come from.

If I can turn back to the example of the Japanese primatologists and the primatologists from the U.S. [1]… You’re trying to study monkeys. You want to see how they’re behaving, you want to tell some sort of story, you probably are driven by some sort of hypotheses. As it turns out, the Western primatologists are starting with the hypothesis that basically you start at the level of the individual monkey, that this is a biological machine, and you figure out how that works, and how they interact with each other if you put them in a group. The Japanese primatologists are starting out with the assumption that you look at the level of social groups to understand what’s going on.

(35:20)
And there’s this huge methodological disagreement that they had when they started actually paying attention to each other: is it OK to leave food in the clearing to draw the monkeys to where you can see them more closely?

The Western primatologists said, hell no, that interferes with the system you’re trying to study. You want to know what the monkeys would be like in nature, without you there. So, leaving food out there for them, “provisioning” them, is a bad call.

The Japanese primatologists (who are, by the way, studying monkeys that live in the islands that are part of Japan, monkeys that are well aware of the existence of humans because they’re bumping up against them all the time) say, you know what, if we get them closer to where we are, if we draw them into the clearings, we can see more subtle behaviors, we can actually get more information.

So here, there’s a methodological trade-off. Is it important to you to get more detailed observations, or to get observations that are untainted by human interference? ‘Cause you can’t get both. They’re both using the scientific method, but they’re making different choices about the kind of knowledge they’re building with that scientific method. Yet, on the surface of things, these primatologists were sort of looking at each other like, “Those guys don’t know how to do science! What the hell?”

(36:40)
Andrew Brandel: The other thing I wanted to mention to this point and, I think, to Tomasson’s question also, is that there are lots of anthropologists embedded with laboratory scientists all over the world, doing research into specifically what kinds of differences, both in the ways that they’re organized and in the ways that arguments get levied, what counts as “true” or “false,” what counts as a hypothesis, how that gets determined within these different contexts. There are broad fields of social sciences doing exactly this.

Dr. Rubidium: I think this gets to the issue: Tomasson, what are you calling the scientific method? Versus, can you really at some point separate out the idea that science is a thing — like Janet was saying, it’s a machine, you put the stuff in, give it a spin, and get the stuff out — can you really separate something called “the scientific method” from the people who do it?

I’ve taught general chemistry, and one of the first things we do is to define science, which is always exciting. It’s like trying to define art.

Michael Tomasson: So what do you come up with? What is science?

Dr. Rubidium: It’s a body of knowledge and a process — it’s two different things, when people say science. We always tell students, it’s a body of knowledge but it’s also a process, a thing you can do. I’m not saying it’s [the only] good answer, but it’s the answer we give students in class.

Then, of course, the idea is, what’s the scientific method? And everyone’s got some sort of a figure. In the gen chem book, in chapter 1, it’s always going to be in there. And it makes it seem like we’ve all agreed at some point, maybe taken a vote, I don’t know, that this is what we do.

Janet Stemwedel: And you get the laminated card with the steps on it when you get your lab coat.

Dr. Rubidium: And there’s the flowchart, usually laid out like a circle.

Michael Tomasson: Exactly!

Dr. Rubidium: It’s awesome! But that’s what we tell people. It’s kind of like the lie we tell the about orbitals, like Janet was saying, in the beginning of gen chem. But then, this is how sausages are really made. And yes, we have this method, and these are the steps we say are involved with it, but are we talking about that, which is what you learn in high school or junior high or science camp or whatever, or are you actually talking about how you run your research group? Which one are you talking about?

(39:30)
Janet Stemwedel: It can get more complicated than that. There’s also this question of: is the scientific method — whatever the heck we do to build reliable knowledge about the world using science — is that the kind of thing you could do solo, or is it necessarily a process that involves interaction with other people? So, maybe we don’t need to be up at night worrying about whether individual scientists fail to instantiate this idealized scientific method as long as the whole community collectively shakes out as instantiating it.

Michael Tomasson: Hmmm.

Casey: Isn’t this part of what a lot of scientists are doing, that it shakes out some of the human problems that come with it? It’s a messy process and you have a globe full of people performing experiments, doing research. That should, to some extent, push out some noise. We have made advances. Science works to some degree.

Janet Stemwedel: It mostly keeps the plane up in the air when it’s supposed to be in the air, and the water from being poisoned when it’s not supposed to be poisoned. The science does a pretty good job building the knowledge. I can’t always explain why it’s so good at that, but I believe that it does. And I think you’re right, there’s something — certainly in peer review, there’s this assumption that why we play with others here is that they help us catch the thing we’re missing, they help us to make sure the experiments really are reproducible, to make sure that we’re not smuggling in unconscious assumptions, whatever. I would argue, following on something Tomasson wrote in his blog post, that this is a good epistemic reason for some of the stuff that scientists rail on about on Twitter, about how we should try to get rid of sexism and racism and ableism and other kinds of -isms in the practice of science. It’s not just because scientists shouldn’t be jerks to people who could be helping them build the knowledge. It’s that, if you’ve got a more diverse community of people building the knowledge, you up the chances that you’re going to locate the unconscious biases that are sneaking in to the story we tell about what the world is like.

When the transcript continues, we do some more musing about methodology, the frailties of individual humans when it comes to being objective, and epistemic violence.

_______

[1] This discussion based on my reading of Pamela J. Asquith, “Japanese science and western hegemonies: primatology and the limits set to questions.” Naked science: Anthropological inquiry into boundaries, power, and knowledge (1996): 239-258.

* * * * *

Part 1 of the transcript.

Archived video of this Pub-Style Science episode.

Storify’d version of the simultaneous Twitter conversation.

Engagement with science needs more than heroes

Posted on March 20, 2014March 20, 2014 by jstemwedel

Narratives about the heroic scientist are not what got me interested in science.

It was (and still is) hard for me to connect with a larger-than-life figure when my own aspirations have always been pretty life-sized.

Also, there’s the fact that the scientific heroes whose stories have been told have mostly been heroes, not heroines, just one more issue making it harder for me to relate to their experiences. And when the stories of pioneering women of science are told, these stories frequently emphasize how these heroines made it against big odds, how exceptional they are. Having to be exceptional even to succeed in scientific work is not a prospect I find inviting.

While tales of great scientific pioneers never did much for me, I am enraptured with science. The hook that drew me in is the process of knowledge-building, the ways in which framing questions and engaging in logical thinking and methodical observation of a piece of the world can help us learn quite unexpected things about that world’s workings. I am intrigued by the power of this process, by the ways that it frequently rewards insight and patience.

What I didn’t really grasp when I was younger but appreciate now is the inescapably collaborative nature of the process of building scientific knowledge. The plan of attack, the observations, the troubleshooting, the evaluation of what the results do and do not show — that all comes down to teamwork of one sort or another, the product of many hands, many eyes, many brains, many voices.

We take our perfectly human capacities as individuals and bring them into concert to create a depth of understanding of our world that no heroic scientist — no Newton, no Darwin, no Einstein — could achieve on his own.

The power of science lies not in individual genius but in a method of coordinating our efforts. This is what makes me interested in what science can do — what makes it possible for me to see myself doing science. And I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one.

The heroes of science are doubtless plenty inspiring to a good segment of the population, and given the popularity of heroic narratives, I doubt they’ll disappear. But in our efforts to get people engaged with science, we shouldn’t forget the people who connect less with great men (and women) and more with the extraordinarily powerful process of science conducted by recognizably ordinary human beings. We should remember to tell the stories about the process, not just the heroes.

Nature and trust.

Posted on January 17, 2014January 17, 2014 by jstemwedel

Here are some things that I know:

Nature is a high-impact scientific journal that is widely read in the scientific community.

The editorial mechanisms Nature employs are meant to ensure the quality of the publication.

Reports of scientific research submitted to Nature undergo peer review (as do manuscripts submitted to other scholarly scientific journals). As well, Nature publishes items that are not peer-reviewed — for example, news pieces and letters to the editor. Nonetheless, the pieces published in Nature that don’t undergo peer review are subjected to editorial oversight.

Our human mechanisms for ensuring the quality of items that are published are not perfect. Peer reviewers sometimes get fooled. Editors sometimes make judgments that, in retrospect, they would not endorse.

The typical non-scientist who knows about journals like Nature is in the position of being generally trusting that peer review and editorial processes do the job of ensuring the high quality of the contents of these journals, or of being generally distrusting. Moreover, my guess is that the typical non-scientist, innocent of the division of labor on the vast editorial teams employed by journals like Nature, takes for granted that the various items published in such journals reflect sound science — or, at the very least, do not put forward claims that are clearly at odds with the body of existing scientific research.

Non-scientists, in other words, are trusting that the editorial processes at work in a journal like Nature produce a kind of conversation within the scientific community, one that weeds out stuff scientists would recognize as nonsense.

This trust is important because non-scientists do not have the same ability to identify and weed out nonsense. Nature is a kind of scientific gatekeeper for the larger public.

This trust is also something that can be played — for example, by a non-expert with an agenda who manages to get a letter published in a journal like Nature. While such correspondence may not impress a scientist, a “publication in Nature” of this sort may be taken as credible by non-scientists on the basis of the trust they have that such a well-known scientific journal must have editorial processes that reliably weed out nonsense.

In a world where we divide the cognitive labor this way, where non-scientists need to trust scientists to build reliable knowledge and organs of scientific communication to weed out nonsense, the stakes are very high for the scientists and the organs of scientific communication to live up to that trust — to get it right most of the time, and to be transparent enough about their processes that when they don’t get it right it’s reasonably easy to diagnose what went wrong and to fix it.

Otherwise, scientists and the organs of scientific communication risk losing the trust of non-scientists.

I’ve been thinking about this balance of trust and accountability in the context of a letter that was published in Nature asserting, essentially, that the underrepresentation of women as authors and peer reviewers in Nature is no kind of problem, because male scientists have merit and women scientists have child care obligations.

Kelly Hills has a clear and thorough explanation of what made publishing this particular letter problematic. It’s not just that the assertion of the letter writer are not supported by the research (examples of which Kelly helpfully links). It’s not just that there’s every reason to believe that the letter writer will try to spin the publication of his letter in Nature as reason to give his views more credence.

It’s also that the decision to publish this letter suggests the question of women’s ability to do good science is a matter of legitimate debate.

In the discussion of this letter on Twitter, I saw the suggestion that the letter was selected for publication because it was representative of a view that had been communicated by many correspondents to Nature.

In a journal that the larger public takes to be a source of views that are scientifically sound, or at least scientifically plausible (rather than at odds with a growing body of empirical research), the mere fact that many people have expressed a view in letters strikes me as insufficient reason to publish it. I suspect that if a flurry of letters were to arrive asserting that the earth is stationary in the center of the universe, or that the earth is flat, that the editorial staff in charge of correspondence wouldn’t feel the need to publish letters conveying these views — especially if the letters came from people without scientific training or active involvement in scientific work of some sort. I’d even be willing to make a modest bet that Nature regularly gets a significant amount of correspondence communicating crackpot theories of one sort or another. (I’m not running a major organ of scientific communication and I regularly get a significant amount of correspondence communicating crackpot theories of one sort or another.) Yet these crackpot theories do not regularly populate Nature’s “Correspondence” page.

In response to the objections raised to the publication of this letter, the Nature Editorial staff posted this comment:

Nature has a strong history of supporting women in science and of reflecting the views of the community in our pages, including Correspondence. Our Correspondence pages do not reflect the views of the journal or its editors; they reflect the views only of the correspondents.

We do not endorse the views expressed in this Correspondence (or indeed any Correspondences unless we explicitly say so). On re-examining the letter and the process, we consider that it adds no value to the discussion and unnecessarily inflames it, that it did not receive adequate editorial attention, and that we should not have published it, for which we apologize. This note will appear online on nature.com in the notes section of the Correspondence and in the Correspondence’s pdf.

Nature’s own positive views and engagement in the issues concerning women in science are represented by our special from 2013: www.nature.com/women
Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief, Nature

(Bold emphasis added.)

I think this editorial pivot is a wise one. The letter in question may have represented a view many people have, but it didn’t offer any new facts or novel insight. And it’s not like women in science don’t know that they are fighting against biases — even biases in their own heads — every single day. They didn’t need to read a letter from some guy in Nature to become aware of this bit of their professional terrain.

So, the apology is good. But it is likely insufficient.

At this point, Nature may also have trust they need to rebuild with women, whether those women are members of the scientific community or members of the larger public. While it is true that Nature devoted a special issue to challenges faced by women in science, they also gave the editorial green light to a piece of “science fiction” that reinforced, rather than challenging the gendered assumption that make it harder for women in science.

And yes, we understand that different editors oversee the peer-reviewed reports of scientific research and the news items, the correspondence and the short fiction. But our view of organizations — our trust of organizations — tends to bundle these separate units together. This is pretty unavoidable unless we personally know each of the editors in each of the units (and even personal acquaintance doesn’t mean our trust is indestructible).

All of which is to say: as an organization, Nature still has some work to do to win back the trust of women (and others) who cannot think of the special issue on women in science without also thinking of “Womanspace” or the letter arguing that underrepresentation of women in Nature’s pages is just evidence of a meritocracy working as it should.

It would be nice to trust that Nature’s editorial processes will go forth and get it right from here on out, but we don’t want to be played for fools. As well, we may have to do additional labor going forward cleaning up the fallout from this letter in public discourses on women in science when we already had plenty of work to do in that zone.

This is a moment where Nature may want women scientists to feel warmly toward the journal, to focus on the good times as representative of where Nature really stands, but trust is something that is rebuilt, or eroded, over iterated engagements every single day.

Trust can’t be demanded. Trust is earned.

Given the role Nature plays in scientific communications and in the communication of science to a broader public, I’m hopeful the editorial staff is ready to do the hard work to earn that trust — from scientists and non-scientists alike — going forward.

* * * * *
Related posts:

Hope Jahren, Why I Turned Down a Q-and-A in Nature Magazine

Anne Jefferson, Megaphones, broken records and the problem with institutional amplification of sexism and racism

Join Virtually Speaking Science for a conversation about sexism in science and science journalism.

Posted on December 18, 2013December 18, 2013 by jstemwedel

Today at 5 P.M. Eastern/2 P.M. Pacific, I’ll be on Virtually Speaking Science with Maryn McKenna and Tom Levenson to discuss sexual harassment, gender bias, and related issues in the world of science, science journalism, and online science communication. Listen live online or, if you have other stuff to do in that bit of spacetime, you can check out the archived recording later. If you do the Second Life thing, you can join us there at the Exploratorium and text in questions for us.

Tom has a nice post with some background to orient our conversation.

Here, I’m going to give you a few links that give you a taste of what I’ve been thinking about in preparation for this conversation, and then I’ll say a little about what I hope will come out of the conversation.

Geek Feminism Wiki Timeline of incidents from 2013 (includes tech and science blogosphere)

Danielle Lee’s story about the “urban whore” incident and Scientific American’s response to it.

Kate Clancy’s post on how Danielle Lee’s story and the revelations about former Scientific American blog editor Bora Zivkovic are connected to the rape-y Einstein bobble head video incident (with useful discussion of productive strategies for community response)

Andrew David Thaler’s post “On being an ally and being called out on your privilege”

A post I wrote with a link to research on implicit gender bias among science faculty at universities, wherein I point out that the empirical findings have some ethical implications if we’re committed to reducing gender bias

A short film exploring the pipeline problem for women in chemistry, “A Chemical Imbalance” (Transcript)

The most recent of Zuska’s excellent posts on the pipeline problem, “Rethinking the Normality of Attrition”

As far as I’m concerned, the point of our conversation is not to say science, or science journalism, or online science communication, has a bigger problem with sexual harassment or sexism or gender disparities than other professional communities or than the broader societies from which members of these professional communities are drawn. The issue, as far as I can tell, is that these smaller communities reproduce these problems from the broader society — but, they don’t need to. Recognizing that the problem exists — that we think we have merit-driven institutions, or that we’re better at being objective than the average Jo(e), but that the evidence indicates we’re not — is a crucial step on the way to fixing it.

I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to talk about more than individual incidents of sexism or harassment in our discussion. The individual incidents matter, but they don’t emerge fully formed from the hearts, minds, mouths, and hands of evil-doers. They are reflections of cultural influences we’re soaking in, of systems we have built.

Among other things, this suggests to me that any real change will require thinking hard about how to change systems rather than keeping our focus at the level of individuals. Recognizing that it will take more than good intentions and individual efforts to overcome things like unconscious bias in human interactions in the professional sphere (including but not limited to hiring decisions) would be a huge step forward.

Such progress will surely be hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible, and I suspect the effort would be worth it.

If you can, do listen (and watch). I’ll be sure to link the archived broadcast once that link is available.

On allies.

Posted on November 19, 2013November 19, 2013 by jstemwedel

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
–George Santayana

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
–a guy who turned out to be a Cylon

Let me start by putting my cards on the table: Jamie Vernon is not someone I count as an ally.

At least, he’s not someone I’d consider a reliable ally. I don’t have any reason to believe that he really understands my interests, and I don’t trust him not to sacrifice them for his own comfort. He travels in some of the same online spaces that I do and considers himself a longstanding member of the SciComm community of which I take myself to be a member, but that doesn’t mean I think he has my back. Undoubtedly, there are some issues for which we would find ourselves on the same side of things, but that’s not terribly informative; there are some issues (not many, but some) for which Dick Cheney and I are on the same side.

Here, I’m in agreement with Isis that we needn’t be friends to be able to work together in pursuit of shared goals. I’ve made similar observations about the scientific community:

We’re not all on the same page about everything. Pretending that we are misrepresents the nature of the tribe of science and of scientific activity. But given that there are some shared commitments that guide scientific methodology, some conditions without which scientific activity in the U.S. cannot flourish, these provide some common ground on which scientists ought to be more or less united … [which] opens the possibility of building coalitions, of finding ways to work together toward the goals we share even if we may not agree about what other goals are worth pursuing.

We probably can’t form workable coalitions, though, by showing open contempt for each other’s other commitments or interests. We cannot be allies by behaving like enemies. Human nature sucks like that sometimes.

But without coalitions, we have to be ready to go it alone, to work to achieve our goals with much less help. Without coalitions, we may find ourselves working against the effects of those who have chosen to pursue other goals instead. If you can’t work with me toward goal A, I may not be inclined to help you work toward goal B. If we made common cause with each other, we might be able to tailor strategies that would get us closer to both goals rather than sacrificing one for the other. But if we decide we’re not working on the same team, why on earth should we care about each other’s recommendations with respect to strategies?

Ironically, we humans seem sometimes to show more respect to people who are strangers than to people we call our friends. Perhaps it’s related to the uncertainty of our interactions going forward — the possibility that we may need to band together, or to accommodate the other’s interests to protect our own — or to the lack of much shared history to draw upon in guiding our interactions. We begin our interactions with strangers with the slate as blank as it can be. Strangers can’t be implored (at least not credibly) to consider our past good acts to excuse our current rotten behavior toward them.

We may recognize strangers as potential allies, but we don’t automatically assume that they’re allies already. Neither do we assume that they’ll view us as their allies.

Thinking about allies is important in the aftermath of Joe Hanson’s video that he says was meant to “lampoon” the personalities of famous scientists of yore and to make “a joke to call attention to the sexual harassment that many women still today experience.” It’s fair to say the joke was not entirely successful given that the scenes of Albert Einstein sexually harassing and assaulting Marie Curie arguably did harm to women in science:

Hanson’s video isn’t funny. It’s painful. It’s painful because 1) it’s such an accurate portrayal of exactly what so many of us have faced, and 2) the fact that Hanson thinks it’s “outrageous” demonstrates how many of our male colleagues don’t realize the fullness of the hostility that women scientists are still facing in the workplace. Furthermore, Hanson’s continued clinging to “can’t you take a joke” and the fact that he was “trying to be comedic” reflects the deeper issue. Not only does he not get it, his statement implies that he has no intention of trying to get it.

Hanson’s posted explanation after the negative reactions urges the people who reacted negatively to see him as an ally:

To anyone curious if I am not aware of, or not committed to preventing this kind of treatment (in whatever way my privileged perspective allows me to do so) I would urge you to check out my past writing and videos … This doesn’t excuse us, but I ask that you form your opinion of me, It’s Okay To Be Smart, and PBS Digital Studios from my body of work, and not a piece of it.

Indeed, Jamie Vernon not only vouches for Hanson’s ally bona fides but asserts his own while simultaneously suggesting that the negative reactions to Hanson’s video are themselves a problem for the SciComm community:

Accusations of discrimination were even pointed in my direction, based on a single ill-advised Tweet. One tweet (that I now regret and apologize for) triggered a tsunami of anger, attacks, taunts, and accusations against me.

Despite many years of speaking out on women’s issues in science, despite being an ardent supporter of women science communicators, despite being a father to two young girls for whom it is one of my supreme goals to create a more gender balanced science community, despite these things and many other examples of my attempts to be an ally to the community of women science communicators, I was now facing down the barrel of a gun determined to make an example out of me. …

“How could this be happening to me? I’m an ally!” I thought. …

Hanson has worked incredibly hard for several years to create an identity that has proven to inspire young people. He has thousands of loyal readers who share his work thousands of times daily on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. He has championed women’s causes. Just the week prior to the release of the infamous video, he railed against discriminatory practices among the Nobel Prize selection committees. He is a force for good in a sea of apathy and ignorance. Without a doubt, he is an asset to science and science communication. In my opinion, any mention of removing him from his contract with PBS is shortsighted and reflects misdirected anger. He deserves the opportunity to recalibrate and power on in the name of science.

Vernon assures us that he and Hanson are allies to women in science and in the SciComm community. At minimum, I believe that Vernon must have a very different understanding than I of what is involved in being an ally.

Allies are people with whom we make common cause to pursue particular goals or to secure particular interests. Their interests and goals are not identical to ours — that’s what makes them allies.

I do not expect allies to be perfect. They, like me, are human, and I certainly mess up with some regularity. Indeed, I understand full well the difficulty of being a good ally. As Josh Witten observed to me, as a white woman I am “in one of the more privileged classes of the oppressed, arguably the least f@#$ed over of the totally f@#$ed over groups in modern western society.” This means when I try to be an ally to people of color, or disabled people, or poor people, for example, there’s a good chance I’ll step in it. I may not be playing life on the lowest difficulty setting, but I’m pretty damn close.

Happily, many people to whom I try to be an ally are willing to tell me when I step in it and to detail just how I’ve stepped in it. This gives me valuable feedback to try to do better.

Allies I trust are people who pay attention to the people to whom they’re trying to give support because they’re imperfect and because their interests and goals are not identical. The point of paying attention is to get some firsthand reports on whether you’re helping or hurting from the people you’re trying to help.

When good allies mess up, they do their best to respond ethically and do better going forward. Because they want to do better, they want to know when they have messed up — even though it can be profoundly painful to find out your best efforts to help have not succeeded.

Let’s pause for a moment here so I can assure you that I understand it hurts when someone tells you that you messed up. I understand it because I have experienced it. I know all about the feeling of defensiveness that pops right up, as well as the feeling that your character as a human being is being unfairly judged on the basis of limited data — indeed, in your defensiveness, you might immediately start looking for ways the person suggesting you are not acting like a good ally has messed up (including failing to communicate your mistake in language that is as gentle as possible). These feelings are natural, but being a good ally means not letting these feelings overcome your commitment to actually be helpful to the people you set out to help.

On account of these feelings, you might feel great empathy for someone else who has just stepped in it but who you think it trying to be an ally. You might feel so much empathy that you don’t want to make them feel bad by calling out their mistake — or that you chide others for pointing out that mistake. (You might even start reaching for quotations about people without sin and stones.) Following this impulse undercuts the goal of being a good ally.

As I wrote elsewhere,

If identifying problematic behavior in a community is something that can only be done by perfect people — people who have never sinned themselves, who have never pissed anyone off, who emerged from the womb incapable of engaging in bad behavior themselves — then we are screwed.

People mess up. The hope is that by calling attention to the bad behavior, and to the harm it does, we can help each other do better. Focusing on problematic behavior (especially if that behavior is ongoing and needs to be addressed to stop the harm) needn’t brand the bad actor as irredeemable, and it shouldn’t require that there’s a saint on duty to file the complaint.

An ally worth the name recognizes that while good intentions can be helpful in steering his conduct, in the end it’s the actions that matter the most. Other people don’t have privileged access to our intentions, after all. What they have to go on is how we behave, what we do — and that outward behavior can have positive or negative effects regardless of whether we intended those effects. It hurts when you step on my toe whether or not you are a good person inside. Telling me it shouldn’t hurt because you didn’t intend the harm is effectively telling me that my own experience isn’t valid, and that your feelings (that you are a good person) trump mine (that my foot hurts).

The allies I trust recognize that the trust they bank from their past good acts is finite. Those past good acts don’t make it impossible for their current acts to cause real harm — in fact, they can make a current act more harmful by shattering the trust built up with the past good acts. As well, they try to understand that harm done by other can make all the banked trust easier to deplete. It may not seem fair, but it is a rational move on the part of the people they are trying to help to protect themselves from harm.

This is, by the way, a good reason for people who want to be effective allies to address the harms done by others rather than maintaining a non-intervention policy.

Being a good ally means trying very hard to understand the positions and experiences of the people with whom you’re trying to make common cause by listening carefully, by asking questions, and by refraining from launching into arguments from first principles that those experiences are imaginary or mistaken. While they ask questions, those committed to being allies don’t demand to be educated. They make an effort to do their own homework.

I expect allies worth the name not to demand forgiveness, not to insist that the people with whom they say they stand will swallow their feelings or let go of hurt on the so-called ally’s schedule. Things hurt as much and as long as they’re going to hurt. Ignoring that just adds more hurt to the pile.

The allies I trust are the ones who are focused on doing the right thing, and on helping counter the wrongs, whether or not anyone is watching, not for the street cred as an ally, but because they know they should.

The allies I believe in recognize that every day they are faced with choices about how to act — about who to be — and that how they choose can make them better or worse allies regardless of what came before.

I am not ruling out the possibility that Joe Hanson or Jamie Vernon could be reliable allies for women in science and in the SciComm community. But their professions of ally status will not be what makes them allies, nor will such professions be enough to make me trust them as allies. The proof of an ally is in how he acts — including how he acts in response to criticism that hurts. Being an ally will mean acting like one.

On the labor involved in being part of a community.

Posted on November 16, 2013November 16, 2013 by jstemwedel

On Thursday of this week, registration for ScienceOnline Together 2014, the “flagship annual conference” of ScienceOnline opened (and closed). ScienceOnline describes itself as a “global, ongoing, online community” made up of “a diverse and growing group of researchers, science writers, artists, programmers, and educators —those who conduct or communicate science online”.

On Wednesday of this week, Isis the Scientist expressed her doubts that the science communication community for which ScienceOnline functions as a nexus is actually a “community” in any meaningful sense:

The major fundamental flaw of the SciComm “community” is that it is a professional community with inconsistent common values. En face, one of its values is the idea of promoting science. Another is promoting diversity and equality in a professional setting. But, at its core, its most fundamental value are these notions of friendship, support, and togetherness. People join the community in part to talk about science, but also for social interactions with other members of the “community”. While I’ve engaged in my fair share of drinking and shenanigans at scientific conferences, ScienceOnline is a different beast entirely. The years that I participated in person and virtually, there was no doubt in my mind that this was a primarily social enterprise. It had some real hilarious parts, but it wasn’t an experience that seriously upgraded me professionally.

People in SciComm feel confident talking about “the community” as a tangible thing with values and including people in it, even when those people don’t value the social structure in the same way. People write things that are “brave” and bloviate in ways that make each other feel good and have “deep and meaningful conversations about issues” that are at the end of the day nothing more than words. It’s a “community” that gives out platters full of cookies to people who claim to be “allies” to causes without actually having to ever do anything meaningful. Without having to outreach in any tangible way, simply because they claim to be “allies.” Deeming yourself an “ally” and getting a stack of “Get Out of Jail, Free” cards is a hallmark of the “community”.

Isis notes that the value of “togetherness” in the (putative) SciComm community is often prioritized over the value of “diversity” — and that this is a pretty efficient way to undermine the community. She suggests that focusing on friendship rather than professionalism entrenches this problem and writes “I have friends in academia, but being a part of academic science is not predicated on people being my friends.”

I’m very sympathetic to Isis’s concerns here. I don’t know that I’d say there’s no SciComm community, but that might come down to a disagreement about where the line is between a dysfunctional community and a lack of community altogether. But that’s like the definitional dispute about how many hairs one needs on one’s head to shift from the category of “bald” to the category of “not-bald” — for the case we’re trying to categorize there’s still agreement that there’s a whole lot of bare skin hanging out in the wind.

The crux of the matter, whether we have a community or are trying to have one, is whether we have a set of shared values and goals that is sufficient for us to make common cause with each other and to take each other seriously — to take each other seriously even when we offer critiques of other members of the community. For if people in the community dismiss your critiques out of hand, if they have the backs of some members of the community and not others (and whose they have and whose they don’t sorts out along lines of race, gender, class, and other dimensions that the community’s shared values and goals purportedly transcend), it’s pretty easy to wonder whether you are actually a valued member of the community, whether the community is for you in any meaningful way.

I do believe there’s something like a SciComm community, albeit a dysfunctional one. I will be going to ScienceOnline Together 2014, as I went to the seven annual meetings preceding it. Personally, even though I am a full-time academic like Dr. Isis, I do find professional value from this conference. Probably this has to do with my weird interdisciplinary professional focus — something that makes it harder for me to get all the support and inspiration and engagement I need from the official professional societies that are supposed to be aligned with my professional identity. And because of the focus of my work, I am well aware of dysfunction in my own professional community and in other academic and professional communities.

While there has been a pronounced social component to ScienceOnline as a focus of the SciComm community, ScienceOnline (and its ancestor conferences) have never felt purely social to me. I have always had a more professional agenda there — learning what’s going on in different realms of practice, getting my ideas before people who can give me useful feedback on them, trying to build myself a big-picture, nuanced understanding of science engagement and how it matters.

And in recent years, my experience of the meetings has been more like work. Last year, for example, I put a lot of effort into coordinating a kid-friendly room at the conference so that attendees with small children could have some child-free time in the sessions. It was a small step towards making the conference — and the community — more accessible and welcoming to all the people who we describe as being part of the community. There’s still significant work to do on this front. If we opt out of doing that work, we are sending a pretty clear message about who we care about having in the community and who we view as peripheral, about whose voices and interests we value and whose we do not.

Paying attention to who is being left out, to whose voices are not being heard, to whose needs are not being met, takes effort. But this effort is part of the regular required maintenance for any community that is not completely homogeneous. Skipping it is a recipe for dysfunction.

And the maintenance, it seems, is required pretty much every damn day.

Friday, in the Twitter stream for the ScienceOnline hashtag #scio14, I saw this:

@jtotheizzoe Wait, you are a MOD at #scio14? Your thanksgiving video makes me afraid and unsafe. Because you think harassment is "funny."

— Bug G. Membracid (@bug_girl) November 16, 2013

To find out what was making Bug Girl feel unsafe, I went back and watched Joe Hanson’s Thanksgiving video, in which Albert Einstein was portrayed as making unwelcome advances on Marie Curie, cheered on by his host, culminating in a naked assault on Curie.

Given the recent upheaval in the SciComm community around sexual harassment — with lots of discussion, because that’s how we roll — it is surprising and shocking that this video plays sexual harassment and assault for laughs, apparently with no thought to how many women are still targets of harassment, no consideration of how chilly the climate for women in science remains.

Here’s a really clear discussion of what makes the video problematic, and here’s Joe Hanson’s response to the criticisms. I’ll be honest: it looks to me like Joe still doesn’t really understand what people (myself included) took to the social media to explain to him. I’m hopeful that he’ll listen and think and eventually get it better. If not, I’m hopeful that people will keep piping up to explain the problem.

But not everyone was happy that members of our putative community responded to a publicly posted video (on a pretty visible platform — PBS Digital Studio — supported by taxpayers in the U.S.) was greeted with a public critique.

The objections raised on Twitter — many of them raised with obvious care as far as being focused on the harm and communicated constructively — were described variously as “drama,” “infighting,” a “witch hunt” and “burning [Joe] at the stake”. (I’m not going to link the tweets because a number of the people who made those characterizations thought about it and walked them back.)

People insisted, as they do pretty much every time, that the proper thing to do was to address the problem privately — as if that’s the only ethical way to deal with a public wrong, or as if it’s the most effective way to fix the harm. Despite what some will argue, I don’t think we have good evidence for either of those claims.

So let’s come back to regular maintenance of the community and think harder about this. I’ve written before that

if bad behavior is dealt with privately, out of view of members of the community who witnessed the bad behavior in question, those members may lose faith in the community’s commitment to calling it out.

This strikes me as good reason not to take all the communications to private channels. People watching and listening on the sidelines are gathering information on whether their so-called community shares their values, on whether it has their back.

Indeed, the people on the sidelines are also watching and listening to the folks dismissing critiques as drama. Operationally, “drama” seems to amount to “Stuff I’d rather you not discuss where I can see or hear it,” which itself shades quickly into “Stuff that really seems to bother other people, for whom I seem to be unable to muster any empathy, because they are not me.”

Let me pause to note what I am not claiming. I am not saying that every member of a community must be an active member of every conversation within that community. I am not saying that empathy requires you to personally step up and engage in every difficult dialogue every time it rolls around. Sometimes you have other stuff to do, or you know that the cost of being patient and calm is more than you can handle at the moment, or you know you need to listen and think for awhile before you get it well enough to get into it.

But going to the trouble to speak up to convey that the conversation is a troublesome one to have happening in your community — that you wish people would stop making an issue of it, that they should just let it go for the sake of peace in the community — that’s something different. That’s telling the people expressing their hurt and disappointment and higher expectations that they should swallow it, that they should keep it to themselves.

For the sake of the community.

For the sake of the community of which they are clearly not really valued members, if they are the ones, always, who need to shut up and let their issues go for the greater good.

Arguably, if one is really serious about the good of the community, one should pay attention to how this kind of dismissal impacts the community. Now is as good a moment as any to start.

The ethics of admitting you messed up.

Posted on October 14, 2013October 14, 2013 by jstemwedel

Part of any human endeavor, including building scientific knowledge or running a magazine with a website, is the potential for messing up.

Humans make mistakes.

Some of them are the result of deliberate choices to violate a norm. Some of them are the result of honest misunderstandings, or of misjudgments about how much control we have over conditions or events. Some of them come about in instances where we didn’t really want the bad thing that happened to happen, but we didn’t take the steps we reasonably could have taken to avoid that outcome, either. Sometimes we don’t recognize that what we did (or neglected to do) was a mistake until we appreciate the negative impact it has.

Human fallibility seems like the kind of thing we’re not going to be able to engineer out of the organism, but we probably can do better at recognizing situations where we’re likely to make mistakes, at exercising more care in those conditions, and at addressing our mistakes once we’ve made them.

Ethically speaking, mistakes are a problem because they cause harm, or because they result from a lapse in an obligation we ought to be honoring, or both. Thus, an ethical response to messing up ought to involving addressing that harm and/or getting back on track with the obligation we fell down on. What does this look like?

1. Acknowledge the harm. This needs to be the very first thing you do. To admit you messed up, you have to recognize the mess, with no qualifications. There it is.

2. Acknowledge the experiential report of the people you have harmed. If you’re serious about sharing a world (which is what ethics is all about), you need to take seriously what the people with whom your sharing that world tell you about how they feel. They have privileged access to their own lived experiences; you need to rely on their testimony of those lived experiences.

Swallow your impulse to say, “I wouldn’t feel that way,” or “I wouldn’t have made such a big deal of that if it happened to me.” Swallow as well any impulse to mount an argument from first principles about how the people telling you they were harmed should feel (especially if it’s an argument that they shouldn’t feel hurt at all). These arguments don’t change how people actually feel — except, perhaps, to make them feel worse because you don’t seem to take the actual harm to them seriously! (See “secondary trauma”.)

3. Acknowledge how what you did contributed to the harm. Spell it out without excuses. Note how your action, or your failure to act, helped bring about the bad outcome. Identify the way your action, or your failure to act, fell short of you living up to your obligations (and be clear about what you understand those obligations to be).

Undoubtedly, there will be other causal factors you can point to that also contributed to bringing about the bad outcome. Pointing them out right now will give the impression that you are dodging your responsibility. Don’t do that.

4. Say you are sorry for causing the harm/falling down on the duty. Actually, you can do this earlier in the process, but doing it again won’t hurt.

What will hurt is “I’m sorry if you were offended/if you were hurt” and similar locutions, since these suggest that you don’t take seriously the experiential reports of the people to whom you’re apologizing. (See #2 above.) If it looks like you’re denying that there really was harm (or that the harm was significant), it may also look like you’re not actually apologizing.

5. Identify steps you will take to avoid repeating this kind of mistake. This is closely connected to your post-mortem of what you did wrong this time (see #3 above). How are you going to change the circumstances, be more attentive to your duties, be more aware of the potential bad consequences that you didn’t foresee this time? Spell out the plan.

6. Identify steps you will take to address the harm of your mistake. Sometimes a sincere apology and a clear plan for not messing up in that way again is enough. Sometimes offsetting the harm and rebuilding trust will take more.

This is another good juncture at which to listen to the people telling you they were harmed. What do they want to help mitigate that harm? What are they telling you might help them trust you again?

7. Don’t demand forgiveness. Some harms hurt for a long time. Trust takes longer to establish than to destroy, and rebuilding it can take longer than it took to build the initial trust. This is a good reason to be on guard against mistakes!

8. If you get off to a bad start, admit it and stop digging. People make mistakes trying to address their mistakes. People give excuses when they should instead acknowledge their culpability. People minimize the feelings of the people to whom they’re trying to apologize. It happens, but it adds an additional layer of mistakes that you ought to address.

Catch yourself. Say, “OK, I was giving an excuse, but I should just tell you that what I did was wrong, and I’m sorry it hurt you.” Or, “That reason I gave you was me being defensive, and right now it’s your feelings I need to prioritize.” Or, “I didn’t notice before that the way I was treating you was unfair. I see now that it was, and I’m going to work hard not to treat you that way again.”

Addressing a mistake is not like winning an argument. In fact, it’s the opposite of that: It’s identifying a way that what you did wasn’t successful, or defensible, or good. But this is something we have to get good at, whether we’re trying to build reliable scientific knowledge or just to share a world with others.

——
I think this very general discussion has all sorts of specific applications, for instance to Mariette DiChristina’s message in response to the outcry over the removal of a post by DNLee.

I’m happy to entertain discussion of this particular case in the comments provided it keeps pretty close to the question of our ethical duties in explaining and apologizing. Claims about people’s intent when no clear statement of that intent has been made are out-of-bounds here (although there are plenty of online spaces where you can discuss such things if you like). So are claims about legalities (since what’s legal is not strictly congruent with what’s ethical).

Also, if you haven’t already, you should read Kate Clancy’s detailed analysis of what SciAm did well and what SciAm did poorly in responding to the situation about which DNLee was blogging and in responding to the online outcry when SciAm removed her post.

Also relevant: Melanie Tannenbaum’s excellent post on why we focus on intent when we should focus on impact.

Standing with DNLee and “discovering science”.

Posted on October 12, 2013October 12, 2013 by jstemwedel

This post is about standing with DNLee and discovering science.

In the event that you haven’t been following the situation as it exploded on Twitter, here is the short version:

DNLee was invited to guest-blog at another site. She inquired as to the terms, then politely declined. The editor then soliciting those guest-posts called her a whore.

DNLee posted on this exchange, which provides some insight into the dynamics of writing about science (and about being a woman of color writing about science) in the changing media landscape on her blog.

And then someone here at Scientific American Blogs took her post down without letting her know they were doing it or telling her why.

Today, by way of explanation, Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina tweeted:

Re blog inquiry: @sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed.

— Mariette DiChristina (@mdichristina) October 12, 2013

Re blog inquiry: @sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed.

Let the record reflect that this is the very first time I have heard about this editorial filter, or that any of my posts that do not fall in the category of “discovering science” could be pulled down by editors.

As well, it’s hard to see how what DNLee posted counts as NOT “discovering science” unless “discovering science” is given such a narrow interpretation that this entire blog runs afoul of the standard.

Of course, I’d argue that “discovering science” in any meaningful way requires discovering that scientific knowledge is the result of human labor.

Scientific knowledge doesn’t wash up on a beach, fully formed. Embodied, quirky human beings build it. The experiences of those human beings as they interact with the world and with each other are a tremendously important part of where scientific knowledge comes from. The experiences of human beings interacting with each other as they try to communicate scientific knowledge are a crucial part of where scientific understanding comes from — and of who feels like understanding science is important, who feels like it’s inviting and fun, who feels like it’s just not for them.

Women’s experiences around building scientific knowledge, communicating scientific knowledge, participating in communities and networks that can support scientific engagements, are not separable from “discovering science”. Neither are the experiences of people of color, nor of other people not yet well represented in the communities of scientists or scientific communicators.

Unless Scientific American is really just concerned with helping the people who already feel like science is for them to “discover science”. And if that’s the situation, they really should have told us bloggers that before they signed us up.

“Discovering science” means discovering all sorts of complexities — including unpleasant ones — about the social contexts in which science is done, in which scientists are trained, in which real live human beings labor to explain bits of what we know about the world and how we came to know those bits and why they matter.

If Scientific American doesn’t want its bloggers delving into those complexities, then they don’t want me.

Teaching chemistry while female: when my very existence was a problem.

Posted on September 4, 2013September 4, 2013 by jstemwedel

Not quite 20 years ago, I was between graduate programs.

I had earned my Ph.D in chemistry and filed my applications to seven Ph.D. programs in philosophy. (There were some surreal moments on the way to this, including retaking the GRE two weekends after defending my chemistry dissertation — because, apparently, the GRE is a better predictor of success in graduate school than is success in graduate school.) In the interval between the graduate stipend from the chemistry program from which I was now a proud graduate and the (hypothetical) graduate stipend from the philosophy graduate program on the horizon, I needed to earn some money so I could continue to pay my rent.

I pieced together something approximating enough earnings. I spent a few hours a week as a research assistant to a visiting scholar studying scientific creativity. I spent many hours a week as an out-call SAT-prep tutor (which involved almost as many hours on San Francisco Bay Area freeways as it did working one-on-one with my pupils). I even landed a teaching gig at the local community college, although that wouldn’t start until the summer session. And, I taught the general chemistry segment of a Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) prep course.

Teaching the MCAT prep course involved four meetings (each four hours long, with three ten-minute breaks interspersed so people could stretch their legs, use the bathroom, find a vending machine, or what have you) with a large number of students planning to take the MCAT and apply to medical school. The time was divided between providing a refresher on general chemistry concepts and laying out problem-solving strategies for the “passage problems” to which the MCAT had recently shifted. I was working with old-school overhead transparencies (since this was 1994), with key points and the problems themselves in permanent ink and the working-out of the problems in transparency markers that erased with a damp cloth. The screen onto which the transparencies projected was very large, so I’d have to make use of the long rubber-tipped wooden pointer that was resting on the ledge of the chalkboard behind the screen.

During hour two of the very first meeting of the very first session I taught this MCAT prep course, as I retrieved the pointer from the chalk-ledge, I noticed that a single word had been written on the chalkboard:

Bitch

I was pretty sure it hadn’t been on the board at the beginning of the session. But I still had three hours worth of concepts to explain and problems to work before we could call it a day. So I ignored it and got down to business.

The second meeting with this group, I made a point of checking the chalkboard before I pulled down the projections screen, fired up the overhead projector, and commencing the preparation of the students for the MCAT.

Before the four hour session began, the chalkboard was blank. By the end of the four hours, again, there was a single word written on it:

Bitch

The same thing happened in our third session. By then it had started to really bug me, so, at the beginning of our fourth and final meeting together, I resolved at least to flush out whoever was doing the writing on the chalkboard. I collected all the chalk from the ledges and put it in the sink of the lab counter at the front of the room (for I was lecturing in a proper laboratory lecture hall, with sink, gas jets, and such). And, I brought a water bottle with me so I wouldn’t have to leave the lecture hall during the ten minute breaks to find a water fountain.

At the very first break, one of the young men in the prep course followed a path between the projection screen and the chalkboard, paused as if lost (or in search of chalk?), and then exited the room looking only a tiny bit sheepish.

On the board, appearing like a film negative against the light residue of chalk dust, he had written (I presume with a moistened finger):

Bitch

I still have no idea at all what provoked this hostility. The structure of the MCAT prep course was such that all I was doing was giving the students help in preparing for the MCAT. I was not grading them or otherwise evaluating them. Heck, I wasn’t even taking attendance!

What on earth about 25-year-old me, at the front of a lecture hall trying to make the essentials of general chemistry easy to remember and easy to apply to problem-solving — something these students presumably wanted, since they paid a significant amount of money to take the course — what made me a “bitch” to this young man? Why was it so important to him that not a single meeting we had passed without my knowing that someone in attendance (even if I didn’t know exactly who) thought I was a bitch?

When it happened, this incident was so minor, against the more overt hostility toward me as a woman in a male-dominated scientific field (soon to be followed, though I didn’t anticipate it at the time, by overt hostility toward me as a woman in male-dominated academic philosophy), that I almost didn’t remember it.

But then, upon reading this account of teaching while female, I did.

I remembered it so vividly that my cheeks were burning as they did the first time I saw that chalk-scrawled “bitch” and then had to immediately shake it off so that we could cover what needed to be covered in the time we had left for that meeting.

And I ask myself again, what was I doing, except a job that I was good at, a job that I did well, a job that I needed — what was I doing to that particular young man, paying for the service I was providing — that made me a bitch?

“There comes a time when you have to run out of patience.”

Posted on August 7, 2013August 7, 2013 by jstemwedel

In this post, I’m sharing an excellent short film called “A Chemical Imbalance,” which includes a number of brief interviews with chemists (most of them women, most at the University of Edinburgh) about the current situation for women in chemistry (and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, more generally) in the UK. Here’s the film:

A Chemical Imbalance
(I’m including my transcription of the film below.)

Some of the things I really appreciate about this film:

We get personal impressions, from women of different generations, about what it’s been like for them to be in chemistry in the UK.
We get numbers to quantify the gender disparity in academic chemistry in the UK, as well as to identify where in the career pipeline the disparity becomes worse. We also get numbers about how women chemists are paid relative to their male counterparts, and about relative rates of tenure that can’t be blamed on choices about childbearing and/or childrearing. There’s not just the perception of gender disparities in academic chemistry — the numbers demonstrate that the disparities are real.
Lurking beneath the surface is a conversation the interviewees might have had (but didn’t in the final cut) about what they count as compromises with respect to parenting and with respect to careers. My sense is that they would not all agree, and that they might not be as accepting of their colleagues’ alternative ways of striking a balance as we might hope.
Interviewees in the film also discuss research on unconscious gender bias, which provides a possible causal mechanism for the disparities other than people consciously discriminating against women. If people aren’t consciously discriminating, our intuition is that people aren’t culpable (because they can’t help what their unconscious is up to). However, whether due to conscious choices or unconscious bias, the effects are demonstrably real, which raises the question: what do we do about it?
The interviewees seem pretty hesitant about “positive discrimination” in favor of women as a good way to address the gender disparity — one said she wouldn’t want to think she got her career achievements because she’s a woman, rather than because she’s very good at what she does. And yet, they seem to realize that we may have to do something beyond hoping that people’s individual evaluations become less biased. The bias is there (to the extent that, unconsciously, males are being judged as better because they’re men). It’s a systemic problem. How can we put the burden on individuals to somehow magically overcome systemic problems?
We see a range of opinions from very smart women who have been describing inequalities and voicing the importance of making things in STEM more equitable about whether they’d describe themselves as feminists. (One of them says, near the end, that if people don’t like the word, we need to find another one so we don’t get sidetracked from actually pursuing equality.)
We see a sense of urgency. Despite how much has gotten better, there are plenty of elements that still need to improve. The interviewees give the impression that we ought to be able to find effective ways to address the systemic problems, if only we can find the will to do so within the scientific community.

How important is it to find more effective ways to address gender disparities in STEM? The statistic in the film that hit me hardest is that, at our present rate of progress, it will take another 70 years to achieve gender parity. I don’t have that kind of time, and I don’t think my daughters ought to wait that long, either. To quote Prof. Lesley Yellowlees,

I’ve often heard myself say we have to be patient, but there comes a time when you have to run out of patience, because if we don’t run out of patience and we don’t start demanding more from the system, demanding that culture change to happen faster than it’s happening at present, then I think we not only do ourselves a disservice, but we do the generations both past and the ones to come a huge disservice as well.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen 13 minutes packed so effectively with so much to think about.

* * * * *
Transcript of “A Chemical Imbalance”:

Dr. Perdita Barran, Reader in Biophysical Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: I’m not sure why it is Edinburgh has such a high number of female faculty, and indeed, female postdoctoral researchers and female research fellows. One of the greatest things about this department is, because they’re are such a high proportion of female faculty — it ranges between 20 and even up to 30 percent at a few times — it becomes less important and we are less prone to the gender bias, because you don’t need to do it. You just think of scientists as scientists, you don’t think of them in terms of their gender.

Prof. Eleanor Campbell FRSC FRS, Professor of Physical Chemistry, Head of School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: It’s very difficult to put your finger on it, but I do feel a different atmosphere in a place where you have a significant percentage of women. That’s not to say that women can’t be confrontational and egoistical, of course they can. But on the whole, there is a difference in atmosphere.

Text on screen: 1892 Women are finally allowed to attend The University of Edinburgh as undergraduates.

Text on screen: By 1914, over 1000 women hold degrees.

Prof. Steve Chapman FRSE FRSC, Principal & Vice Chancellor, Heriot-Watt University: There’s still not enough women representation in STEM at all levels, but it gets worse the higher you go up, and when you go to management levels, I think, there is a serious disparity.

Prof. Eleanor Campbell: Yeah, the leaky pipeline is a sort of worrying tendency to lose women at various stages on the career path. [Graph on the screen about “Women in STEM, UK average”.] Here we [discussing the chemistry line on the graph] have roughly 50-50 in terms of male/female numbers at the undergraduate level. It [the proportion of women] drops a little bit at postgraduate level, and then it dives going to postdocs and onward, and that is extremely worrying. We’re losing a lot of very, very talented people.

Text on screen: Women in STEM, UK average
Undergraduate 33%
Professor 9%
(2011 UKRC & HESA)

Dr. Elaine Murray MSP, Shadow Minister for Housing & Transport, Scottish Parliament: I feel that I did — 25 years ago I made the choice between remaining in science and my family. You know, 52% of women who’ve been trained in STEM come out of it. I’m one of them.

Prof. Anita Jones, Professor of Molecular Photophysics, University of Edinburgh: On the whole, women still do take more responsibility for the looking after children and so on. But again, I think there are things that can be put in place, improved child care facilities and so on, that can help with that, and can help to achieve an acceptable compromise between the two.

Dr. Marjorie Harding, Honorary Fellow, University of Edinburgh: The division of responsibilities between husband and wife has changed a lot over the years. When I first had children, it was quite clear that it was my responsibility to cope with the home, everything that was happening there, and the children’s things, and not to expect him to have time available for that sort of thing.

Dr. Carole Morrison, Senior Lecturer in Structural Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: When the children were small, because I was working part time, I felt that I was incredibly fortunate. I was able to witness all of their little milestones. But it’s meant that my career has progressed much slower than it would have done otherwise. But, you know, life is all about compromises. I wasn’t prepared to compromise on raising my children.

Dr. Alison Hulme, Senior Lecturer in Organic Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: I don’t go out of my way to let people know that I only work at 80%, for the very fact that I don’t want them to view me as any less serious about my intentions in research.

Dr. Perdita Barran: I really understood feminism when I had children and also wanted to work. Then it really hits you how hard it is actually to be a female in science.

Text on screen: 1928 Dr. Christina Miller produces the first ever sample of pure phosphorus trioxide.
In the same year British women achieve suffrage.

Text on screen: 1949 Dr. Miller becomes the first female chemist elected to The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Prof. Steve Chapman: Do I consider myself to be a feminist?

Prof. Anita Jones: Well, that’s an interesting question.

Dr. Perdita Barran: Uh, yeah!

Dr. Marjorie Harding: No.

Dr. Carole Morrison: No, definitely not.

Prof. Eleanor Campbell: No, I’ve never thought of myself as a feminist.

Dr. Alison Hulme: I think that people don’t want to be labeled with the tag of being a feminist because it has certain connotations associated with it that are not necessarily very positive.

Dr. Elaine Murray: I’m of an age when women were considered to be feminists, you know, most of us in the 1970s. There are battles still to be fought, but I think we had a greater consciousness of the need to define ourselves as feminists, and I would still do so. But, there’s been progress, but I think the young women still need to be aware that there’s a lot to be done. All the battles weren’t won.

Text on screen: 1970 The UK Parliament passes The Equal Pay Act.
Over 40 years later, women still earn on average 14.9% less that their male counterparts, and they get promoted less.

Prof. Polly Arnold FRSE FRSC, Crum Brown Chair of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: The Yale study on subconscious bias was a real shocker. I realized that it was an American study, so the subjects were all American, but I don’t feel that it’s necessarily any different in the UK.

Prof. Steve Chapman: It was a very simple study, but a very telling study. They sent out CVs to people in North American institutions and the only difference in the CV was the name at the top — a male name or a female name. The contents of the CVs were identical. And when the people were asked to comment on the CVs, there was something like a 40% preference for the CV if it had a male name associated with it. Now those people I don’t think were actively trying to discriminate against women, but they were, and they were doing it subconsciously. It scared me, because of course I would go around saying, ‘I’m not prejudiced at all,’ but I read that and I thought, if I saw those CVs, would I react differently?

Dr. Janet Lovett, Royal Society University Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh: You hear the kind of results from the Yale study and unfortunately you’re not that surprised by them. And I think … I think it’s hard to explain why you’re not that surprised by them. There is an endemic sexism to most high-powered careers, I would say.

Prof. Polly Arnold: When I was a junior academic in a previous job, I was given the opportunity to go on a course to help women get promoted. The senior management at the university had looked at the data, and they’d realized that the female academics were winning lots of international prizes, being very successful internationally, but they weren’t getting promoted internally, so what we needed was a course to help us do this. And to this day, I still don’t understand how they didn’t realize that it was them that needed the course.

Dr. Elaine Murray: I think a lot of it isn’t really about legislation or regulation, it’s actually cultural change, which is more difficult to affect. And, you know, the recognition that this is part of an equality agenda, really, that we need to have that conversation which is not just about individuals, its about the experience of women in general.

Text on screen: Women without children are still 23% less likely to achieve tenure than men with children.

Prof. Anita Jones: I’m not really in favor of positive discrimination. I don’t think, as a women, I would have wanted to feel that I got a job, or a fellowship, or a grant, or whatever, because I was a woman rather than because I was very good at what I do.

Prof. Steve Chapman: I think we have to be careful. I was looking at the ratio of women in some of the things that we’re doing in my own institution, and accidentally you can heavily dominate things with males without actually thinking about it. Does that mean we have to have quotas for women? No. But does it mean we have to be pro-active in making sure we’re bringing it to the attention of women that they should be involved, and that they add value? Yes.

Dr. Elaine Murray: I was always an advocator of positive discrimination in politics, in order to address the issue of the underrepresentation of women. Now, a lot of younger women now don’t see that as important, and yet if you present them some of the issues that women face to get on, they do realize things aren’t quite as easy.

Text on screen: 2012 The School of Chemistry receives the Athena Swan Gold Award, recognising a significant progression and achievement in promoting gender equality.

Prof. Steve Chapman: We shouldn’t underestimate the signal that Athena Gold sends out. It sends out the message that this school is committed to the Athena Agenda, which isn’t actually just about women. It’s about creating an environment in which all people can thrive.

Prof. Eleanor Campbell: I think it is extremely important that the men in the department have a similar view when it comes to supporting young academics, graduate students, postdocs, regardless of their gender. I think that’s extremely important. And, I mean, certainly here, our champion for our Athena Swan activities is a male, and I deliberately wanted to have a younger male doing that job, to make it clear that it wasn’t just about women, that it was about really improving conditions for everybody.

Dr. Elaine Murray: I know, for example, in the Scottish government, equalities is somehow lumped in with health, but it’s not. You know, health is such a big portfolio that equalities is going to get pretty much lost in the end, and I think probably there’s a need for equalities issues to take a higher profile at a governmental level. And I think also it’s still about challenging the media, about the sort of stereotypes which surround women more generally, and still in science.

Text on screen: 2012 Prof. Lesley Yellowlees becomes the first female President of The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Prof. Lesley Yellowlees MBE FRSE FRSC, Professor of Inorganic Electrochemistry, Vice Principal & Head of the College of Science & Engineering, University of Edinburgh, President of The Royal Society of Chemistry: I’ve often heard myself say we have to be patient, but there comes a time when you have to run out of patience, because if we don’t run out of patience and we don’t start demanding more from the system, demanding that culture change to happen faster than it’s happening at present, then I think we not only do ourselves a disservice, but we do the generations both past and the ones to come a huge disservice as well.

Text on screen: At our current rate of progress it will take 70 years before we achieve parity between the sexes.

Prof. Polly Arnold: If we’re unwilling to define ourselves as feminists, we need to replace the word with something more palatable. The concept of equality is no less relevant today.