Tag Archives: tribe of science

Why does lab safety look different to chemists in academia and chemists in industry?

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Here’s another approximate transcript of the conversation I had with Chemjobber that became a podcast. In this segment (from about 19:30 to 29:30), we consider how reaction to the Sheri Sangji case sound different when they’re coming from academic chemists than when they’re coming from industry, and we spin some hypotheses about what might be going on behind those differences:

Chemjobber: I know that you wanted to talk about the response of industrial chemists versus academic chemists to the Sheri Sangji case.

Janet: This is one of the things that jumps out at me in the comment threads on your blog posts about the Sangji case. (Your commenters, by the way, are awesome. What a great community of commenters engaging with this stuff.) It really does seem that the commenters who are coming from industry are saying, “These conditions that we’re hearing about in the Harran lab (and maybe in academic labs in general) are not good conditions for producing knowledge as safely as we can.” And the academic commenters are saying, “Oh come on, it’s like this everywhere! Why are you going to hold this one guy responsible for something that could have happened to any of us?” It shines a light on something interesting about how academic labs building knowledge function really differently from industrial labs building knowledge.

Chemjobber: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s very difficult for me to separate out whether it’s culture or law or something else. Certainly I think there’s a culture aspect of it, which is that every large company and most small companies really try hard to have some sort of a safety culture. Whether or not they actually stick to it is a different story, but what I’ve seen is that the bigger the company, the more it really matters. Part of it, I think, is that people are older and a little bit wiser, they’re better at looking over each other’s shoulders and saying, “What are you doing over there?” and “So, you’re planning to do that? That doesn’t sound like a great idea.” It seems like there’s less of that in academia. And then there’s the regulatory aspect of it. Industrial chemists are workers, the companies they’re working for are employers, and there’s a clear legal aspect to that. Even as under-resourced as OSHA is, there is an actual legal structure prepared to deal with accidents. If the Sangji incident had happened at a very large company, most people think that heads would have rolled, letters would have been placed in evaluation files, and careers would be over.

Janet: Or at least the lab would probably have been shut down until a whole bunch of stuff was changed.

Chemjobber: But in academia, it looks like things are different.

Janet: I have some hunches that perhaps support some of your hunches here about where the differences are coming from. First of all, the set-up in academia assumes radical autonomy on the part of the PI about how to run his or her lab. Much of that is for the good as far as allowing different ways to tackle the creative problems about how to ask the scientific questions to better shake loose the piece of knowledge you’re trying to shake loose, or allowing a range of different work habits that might be successful for these people you’re training to be grown-up scientists in your scientific field. And along with that radical autonomy — your lab is your fiefdom — in a given academic chemistry department you’re also likely to have a wide array of chemical sub-fields that people are exploring. So, depending on the size of your department, you can’t necessarily count on there being more than a couple other PIs in the department who really understand your work well enough that they would have deep insight into whether what you’re doing is safe or really dangerous. It’s a different kind of resource that you have available right at hand — there’s maybe a different kind of peer pressure that you have in your immediate professional and work environment acting on the industrial chemist than on the academic chemist. I think that probably plays some role in how PIs in academia are maybe aren’t as up on potential safety risks of new work they’re doing as they might be otherwise. And then, of course, there’s the really different kinds of rewards people are working for in industry versus academia, and how the whole tenure race ends up asking more and more of people with the same 24 hours in the day as anyone else. So, people on the tenure track start asking, “What are the things I’m really rewarded for? Because obviously, if I’m going to succeed, that’s where I have to focus my attention.”

Chemjobber: It’s funny how the “T” word keeps coming up.

Janet: By the same token, in a university system that has consistently tried to male it easier to fire faculty at whim because they’re expensive, I sort of see the value of tenure. I’m not at all argue that tenure is something that academic chemists don’t need. But, it may be that the particulars of how we evaluate people for tenure are incentivizing behaviors that are not helping the safety of the people building the knowledge or the well-being of the people who are training to be grown-ups in these professional communities.

Chemjobber: That’s right. We should just say specifically that in this particular case, Patrick Harran already had tenure, and I believe he is still a chaired professor at UCLA.

Janet: I think maybe the thing to point out is that some of these expectations, some of these standard operating procedures within disciplines in academia, are heavily shaped by the things that are rewarded for tenure, and then for promotion to full professor, and then whatever else. So, even if you’re tenured, you’re still soaking in that same culture that is informing the people who are trying to get permission to stay there permanently rather than being thanked for their six years of service and shown the door. You’re still soaking in that culture that says, “Here’s what’s really important.” Because if something else was really important, then by golly that’s how we’d be choosing who gets to stay here for reals and who’s just passing through.

Chemjobber: Yes.

Janet: I don’t know as much about the typical life cycle of the employee in industrial chemistry, but my sense is that maybe the fact that grad students and postdocs and, to some extent, technicians are sort of transient in the community of academic chemistry might make a difference as well — that they’re seen as people who are passing through, and that the people who are more permanent fixtures in that world either forget that they come in not knowing all the stuff that the people who have been there for a long, long time know, or they’re sort of making a calculation, whether they realize it or not, about how important it is to convey some of this stuff they know to transients in their academic labs.

Chemjobber: Yeah, I think that’s true. Numerically, there’s certainly a lot less turnover in industry than there is in academic labs.

Janet: I would hope so!

Chemjobber: Especially from the bench-worker perspective. It’s unfortunate that layoffs happen (topic for another podcast!), but that seems to be the main source of turnover in industry these days.

Gender bias: ethical implications of an empirical finding.

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By now, you may have seen the recently published study by Ross-Macusin et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”, or the nice discussion by Ilana Yurkiewicz of why these findings matter.

Briefly, the study involved having science faculty from research-focused universities rate materials from potential student candidates for a lab manager position. The researchers attached names to the application materials — some of them male names, some of them female names — at random, and examined how the ratings of the materials correlated with the names that were attached to them. What they found was that the same application materials got a higher ranking (i.e., a judgment that the applicant would be more qualified for the job) when the attached name was male than when it was female. Moreover, both male and female faculty ranked the same application more highly when attached to a male name.

It strikes me that there are some ethical implications that flow from this study to which scientists (among others) should attend:

  1. Confidence that your judgments are objective is not a guarantee that your judgments are objective, and your intent to be unbiased may not be enough. The results of this study show a pattern of difference in ratings for which the only plausible explanation is the presence of a male name or a female name for the applicant. The faculty members treated the task they were doing as an objective evaluation of candidates based on prior research experience, faculty recommendations, the applicant’s statement, GRE scores, and so forth — that they were sorting out the well-qualified from the less-well-qualified — but they didn’t do that sorting solely on the basis of the actual experience and qualifications described in the application materials. If they had, the rankings wouldn’t have displayed the gendered split they did. The faculty in the study undoubtedly did not mean to bring gender bias to the evaluative task, but the results show that they did, whether they intended to or not.
  2. If you want to build reliable knowledge about the world, it’s helpful to identify your biases so they don’t end up getting mistaken for objective findings. As I’ve mentioned before, objectivity is hard. One of the hardest things about being objective is that fact that so many of our biases are unconscious — we don’t realize that we have them. If you don’t realize that you have a bias, it’s much harder to keep that bias from creeping in to your knowledge-building, from the way you frame the question you’re exploring to how you interpret data and draw conclusions from them. The biases you know about are easier to keep on a short leash.
  3. If a methodologically sound study finds that science faculty have a particular kind of bias, and if you are science faculty, you probably should assume that you might also have that bias. If you happen to have good independent evidence that you do not display the particular bias in question, that’s great — one less unconscious bias that might be messing with your objectivity. However, in the absence of such good independent evidence, the safest assumption to make is that you’re vulnerable to the bias too — even if you don’t feel like you are.
  4. If you doubt the methodologically soundness of a study finding that science faculty have a particular kind of bias, it is your responsibility to identify the methodological flaws. Ideally, you’d also want to communicate with the authors of the study, and with other researchers in the field, about the flaws you’ve identified in the study methodology. This is how scientific communities work together to build a reliable body of knowledge we all can use. And, a responsible scientist doesn’t reject the conclusions of a study just because they don’t match one’s hunches about how things are. The evidence is how scientists know anything.
  5. If there’s reason to believe you have a particular kind of bias, there’s reason to examine what kinds of judgments of yours it might influence beyond the narrow scope of the experimental study. Could gender bias influence whose data in your lab you trust the most? Which researchers in your field you take most seriously? Which theories or discoveries are taken to be important, and which others are taken to be not-so-important? If so, you have to be honest with yourself and recognize the potential for this bias to interfere with your interaction with the phenomena, and with your interaction with other scientists to tackle scientific questions and build knowledge. If you’re committed to building reliable knowledge, you need to find ways to expose the operation of this bias, or to counteract its effects. (Also, to the extent that this bias might play a role in the distribution of rewards like jobs or grants in scientific careers, being honest with yourself probably means acknowledging that the scientific community does not operate as a perfect meritocracy.)

Each of these acknowledgments looks small on its own, but I will not pretend that that makes them easy. I trust that this won’t be a deal-breaker. Scientists do lots of hard things, and people committed to building reliable knowledge about the world should be ready to take on pieces of self-knowledge relevant to that knowledge-building. Even when they hurt.

Safety in academic chemistry labs (with some thoughts on incentives).

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Earlier this month, Chemjobber and I had a conversation that became a podcast. We covered lots of territory, from the Sheri Sangji case, to the different perspectives on lab safety in industry and academia, to broader questions about how to make attention to safety part of the culture of chemistry. Below is a transcript of a piece of that conversation (from about 07:45 to 19:25). I think there are some relevant connections here to my earlier post about strategies for delivering ethics training — a post which Jyllian Kemsley notes may have some lessons for safety-training, too.

Chemjobber: I think, academic-chemistry-wise, we might do better at looking out after premeds than we do at looking out after your typical first year graduate student in the lab.

Janet: Yeah, and I wonder why that is, actually, given the excess of premeds. Maybe that’s the wrong place to put our attention.* But maybe the assumption is that, you know, not everyone taking a chemistry lab course is necessarily going to come into the lab knowing everything they need to know to be safe. And that’s probably a safe assumption to make even about people who are good in chemistry classes. So, that’s one of those things that I think we could do a lot better at, just recognizing that there are hazards and that people who have never been in these situations before don’t necessarily know ho to handle them.

Chemjobber: Yeah, I agree. I don’t know what the best way is to make sure to inculcate that sort of lab safety stuff into graduate school. Because graduate school research is supposed to be kind of free-flowing and spontaneous — you have a project and you don’t really know where it’s going to lead you. On the other hand, a premed organic chemistry class is a really artificial environment where there is an obvious beginning and an obvious end and you stick the safety discussion right at the beginning. I remember doing this, where you pull out the MSDS that’s really scary sounding and you scare the pants off the students.

Janet: I don’t even think alarming them is necessarily the way to go, but just saying, hey, it matters how you do this, it matters where you do this, this is why it matters.

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: And I guess in research, you’re right, there is this very open-ended, free-flowing thing. You try to build knowledge that maybe doesn’t exist yet. You don’t know where it’s going to go. You don’t necessarily know what the best way to build that knowledge is going to be. I think where we fall short sometimes is that there may be an awful lot of knowledge out there somewhere, that if you take this approach, with these techniques or with these chemicals, here are some dangers that are known. Here are some risks that someone knows about. You may not know them yet, but maybe we need to do better in the conceiving-of-the-project stage at making that part of the search of prior literature. Not just, what do we know about this reaction mechanism, but what do we know about the gnarly reagents you need to be able to work with to pursue a similar kind of reaction.

Chemjobber: Yeah. My understanding is that in the UK, before you do every experiment, there’s supposed to be a formalized written risk analysis. UK listeners can comment on whether those actually happen. But it seems like they do, because, you know, when you see online conversation of it, it’s like, “What? You guys don’t do that in the US?” No, we don’t.

Janet: There’s lots of things we don’t do. We don’t have a national health service either.

Chemjobber: But how would you make the bench-level researcher do that risk analysis? How does the PI make the bench-level researcher do that? I don’t know. … Neal Langerman is a prominent chemical safety expert. Beryl Benderly is somebody who writes on the Sheri Sangji case who’s talked about this, which is that basically that we should fully and totally incentivize this by tying academic lab safety to grants and tenure. What do you think?

Janet: I think that the intuition is right that if there’s not some real consequence for not caring about safety, it’s going to be the case that some academic researchers, making a rational calculation about what they have to do and what they’re going to be rewarded on and what they’re going to be punished for, are going to say, this would be nice in a perfect world. But there really aren’t enough hours in the day, and I’ve got to churn out the data, and I’ve got to get it analyzed and get the manuscript submitted, especially because I think that other group that was working on something like this might be getting close, and lord knows we don’t want to get scooped — you know, if there’s no consequence for not doing it, if there’s no culture of doing it, if there’s no kind of repercussion among their peers and their professional community for not doing it, a large number of people are going to make the rational calculation that there’s no point in doing it.

Chemjobber: Yeah.

Janet: Maybe they’ll do it as a student exercise or something, but you know what, students are pretty clever, and they get to a point where they actually watch what the PI who is advising them does, and form something like a model of “this is what you need to do to be a successful PI”. And all the parts of what their PI does that are invisible to them? At least to a first approximation, those are not part of the model.

Chemjobber: Right. I’ve been on record as saying that I find tying lab safety to tenure especially to be really dangerous, because you’re giving an incredible incentive to hide incidents. I mean, “For everybody’s sake, sweep this under the rug!” is what might come of this. Obviously, if somebody dies, you can’t hide that.

Janet: Hard to hide unless you’ve got off-the-books grad students, which … why would you do that?

Chemjobber: Are you kidding? There’s a huge supply of them already! But, my concern with tying lab safety to tenure is that I have a difficult time seeing how you would make that a metric other than, if you’ve reported an accident, you will not get tenure, or, if you have more than two accidents a year, you will not get tenure. For the marginal cases, the incentive becomes very high to hide these accidents.

Janet: Here’s a way it might work, though — and I know this sort of goes against the grain, since tenure committees much prefer something they can count to things they have to think about, which is why the number of publications and the impact factor becomes way more important somehow than the quality or importance of the publications as judged by experts in the field. But, something like this might work: if you said, what we’re going to look at in evaluating safety and commitment to safety for your grants and tenure is whether you’ve developed a plan. We’re going to look at what you’ve done to talk with the people in your lab about the plan, and at what you’ve done to involve them in executing the plan. So we’re going to look at it as maybe a part of your teaching, a part of your mentoring — and here, I know some people are going to laugh, because mentoring is another one of those things that presumably is supposed to be happening in academic chemistry programs, but whether it’s seriously evaluated or not, other than by counting the number of students who you graduate per year, is … you know, maybe it’s not evaluated as rigorously as it might be. But, if it became a matter of “Show us the steps you’re taking to incorporate an awareness and a seriousness about safety into how you train these graduate students to be grown-up chemists,” that’s a different kind of thing from, “Oh, and did you have any accidents or not?” Because sometimes the accidents are because you haven’t paid attention at all to safety, but sometimes the accidents are really just bad luck.

Chemjobber: Right.

Janet: And you know, maybe this isn’t going to happen every place, but at places like my university, in our tenure dossiers, they take seriously things like grant proposals we have written as part of our scholarly work, whether or not they get funded. You include them so the people evaluating your tenure dossier can evaluate the quality of your grant proposal, and you get some credit for that work even if it’s a bad pay-line year. So a safety plan and evidence of its implementation you might get credit for even if it’s been a bad year as far as accidents.

Chemjobber: I think that’s fair. You know, I think that everybody hopes that with a high-stakes thing like tenure, there’s lots of “human factor” and relatively little number-crunching.

Janet: Yeah, but you know, then you’re on the committee that has to evaluate a large number of dossiers. Human nature kicks in and counting is easier than evaluating, isn’t it?

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* Let the record reflect that despite our joking about “excesses” of premeds, neither I nor Chemjobber have it in for premeds. Especially so now that neither of us is TAing a premed course.

Is how to engage with the crackpot at the scientific meeting an ethical question?

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There’s scientific knowledge. There are the dedicated scientists who make it, whether laboring in laboratories or in the fields, fretting over data analysis, refereeing each other’s manuscripts or second-guessing themselves.

And, well, there are some crackpots.

I’m not talking dancing-on-the-edge-of-the-paradigm folks, nor cheaters who seem to be on a quest for fame or profit. I mean the guy who has the wild idea for revolutionizing field X that actually is completely disconnected from reality.

Generally, you don’t find too much crackpottery in the scientific literature, at least not when peer review is working as it’s meant to. The referees tend to weed it out. Perhaps, as has been suggested by some critics of peer review, referees also weed out cutting edge stuff because it’s just so new and hard to fit into the stodgy old referees’ picture of what counts as well-supported by the evidence, or consistent with our best theories, or plausible. That may just be the price of doing business. One hopes that, eventually, the truth will out.

But where you do see a higher proportion of crackpottery, aside from certain preprint repositories, is at meetings. And there, face to face with the crackpot, the gate-keepers may behave quite differently than they would in an anonymous referee’s report.

Doctor Crackpot gives a talk intended to show his brilliant new solution to a nagging problem with an otherwise pretty well established theoretical approach. Jaws drop as the presentation proceeds. Then, finally, as Doctor Crackpot is aglow with the excitement of having broken the wonderful news to his people, he entertains questions.

Crickets chirp. Members of the audience look at each other nervously.

Doctor Hardass, who has been asking tough questions of presenters all day, tentatively asks a question about the mathematics of this crackpot “solution”. The other scholars in attendance inwardly cheer, thinking, “In about 10 seconds Doctor Hardass will have demonstrated to Doctor Crackpot that this could never work! Then Doctor Crackpot will back away from this ledge and reconsider!”

Ten minutes later, Doctor Crackpot is still writing equations on the board, and Doctor Hardass has been reduced to saying, “Uh huh …” Scholars start sneaking out as the chirping of the crickets competes with the squeaking of the chalk.

Granted, no one wants to hurt Doctor Crackpot’s feelings. If it’s a small enough meeting, you all probably had lunch with him, maybe even drinks the night before. He seems like a nice guy. He doesn’t seem dangerously disconnected from reality in his everyday interactions, just dangerously disconnected from reality in the neighborhood of this particular scientific question. And, as he’s been toiling in obscurity at a little backwater institution, he’s obviously lonely for scientific company and conversation. So, calling him out as a crackpot seems kind of mean.

But … it’s also a little mean not to call him out. It can feel like you’re letting him wander through the scientific community with the equivalent of spinach in his teeth while trailing toilet paper from his shoe if you leave him with the impression that his revolutionary idea has any merit. Someone has to set this guy straight … right? If you don’t, won’t he keep trying to sell this crackpot idea at future meetings?

For what it’s worth, as someone who attends philosophy conferences as well as scientific ones (plus an interesting assortment of interdisciplinary conferences of various sorts), I can attest that there is the occasional crackpot presentation from a philosopher. However, the push-back from the philosophers during the Q&A seemed much more vigorous, and seemed also to reflect a commitment that the crackpot presenter could be led back to reality if only he would listen to the reasoned arguments presented to him by the audience.

In theory, you’d expect to see the same kind of commitment among scientists: if we can agree upon the empirical evidence and seriously consider each other’s arguments about the right theoretical framework in which to interpret it, we should all end up with something like agreement on our account of the world. Using the same sorts of knowledge-building strategies, the same standards of evidence, the same logical machinery, we should be able to build knowledge about the world that holds up against tests to which others subject it — and, we should welcome that testing, since the point of all this knowledge-building is not to win the argument but to build an account that gets the world right.

In theory, the scientific norms of universalism and organized skepticism would ensure that all scientific ideas (including the ones that are en face crackpot ideas) get a fair hearing, but that this “fair hearing” include rigorous criticism to sort out the ideas worthy of further attention. (These norms would also remind scientists that any member of the scientific community has the potential to be the source of a fruitful idea, or of a crackpot idea.)

In practice, though, scientists pick their battles, just like everyone else. If your first ten-minute attempt at reaching a fellow scientist with rigorous criticism shows no signs of succeeding, you might just decide it’s too big a job to tackle before lunch. If repeated engagements with a fellow scientist suggest that he seems not to comprehend the arguments against his pet theory — and maybe that he doesn’t fully grok how the rest of the community understands the standards and strategies for scientific knowledge-building — you may have to make a calculation about whether bringing him back to the fold is a better use of your time and effort than, say, putting more time into your own research, or offering critiques to scientists who seem to understand them and take them seriously.

This is a sensible way to get through a day which seems to have too few hours for all the scientific knowledge-building there is to do, but it might have an impact on whether the scientific community functions in the way that best supports the knowledge-building project.

In the continuum of “scientific knowledge”, on whose behalf scientists are sworn to uphold standards and keep out the dross, where do meetings fall? Do the scientists in attendance have any ethical duty to give their candid assessments of crackpottery to the crackpots? Or is it OK to just snicker about it at the bar? If there’s no obligation to call the crackpot out, does that undermine the value of meetings as sources of scientific knowledge, or of the scientific communications needed to build scientific knowledge?

Could a rational decision not to engage with crackpots in one’s scientific community (because the return on the effort invested is likely to be low) morph into avoidance of other scientists with weird ideas that actually have something to them? Could it lead to avoidance of serious engagement with scientists one thinks are mistaken when it might take serious effort to spell out the nature of the mistakes?

And is there any obligation from the scientific community either to accept the crackpots as fully part of the community (meaning that their ideas and their critiques of the ideas of other ought to be taken seriously), or else to be honest with them that, while they may subscribe to the same journals and come to the same meetings, the crackpots are Not Our Kind, Dear?

Whither mentoring?

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Drugmonkey takes issue with the assertion that mentoring is dead*:

Seriously? People are complaining that mentoring in academic science sucks now compared with some (unspecified) halcyon past?

Please.

What should we say about the current state of mentoring in science, as compared to scientific mentoring in days of yore? Here are some possibilities:

Maybe there has been a decline in mentoring.

This might be because mentoring is not incentivized in the same way, or to the same degree, as publishing, grant-getting, etc. (Note, though, that some programs require evidence of successful mentoring for faculty promotion. Note also that some funding mechanisms require that the early-career scientist being funded have a mentor.)

Or it might be because no one trained the people who are expected to mentor (such as PIs) in how to mentor. (In this case, though, we might take this as a clue that the mentoring these PIs received in days of yore was not so perfect after all.)

Or, it might be that mentoring seems to PIs like a risky move given that it would require too much empathetic attachment with the trainees who are also one’s primary source of cheap labor, and whose prospects for getting a job like the PI’s are perhaps nowhere near as good as the PI (or the folks running the program) have led the trainees to believe.

Or, possibly PIs are not mentoring so well because the people they are being asked to mentor are increasingly diverse and less obviously like the PIs.

Maybe mentoring is no worse than it has ever been.

Perhaps it has always been a poorly defined part of the advisor’s job duties, not to mention one for which hardly anyone gets formal training in how to do. Moreover, the fact that it may depend on inclination and personal compatibility might make it more chancy than things like joining a lab or writing a dissertation.

Maybe mentoring has actually gotten better than it used to be.

It’s even possible that increased diversity in training populations might tend to improve mentoring by forcing PIs to be more conscious of their interactions (since they recognize that the people they are mentoring are not just like them). Similarly, awareness that trainees are facing a significantly different employment landscape than the one the mentor faced might help the mentor think harder about what kind of advice could actual be useful.

Here, I think that we might also want to recognize the possibility that what has changed is not the level of mentoring being delivered, but rather the expectations the trainees have for what kind of mentoring they should receive.

Pulling back from the question of whether mentoring has gotten better, worse, or stayed the same, there are two big issues that prevent us from being able to answer that question. One is whether we can get our hands on sensible empirical data to make anything like an apples-to-apples comparison of mentoring in different times (or, for that matter, in different places). The other is whether we’re all even talking about the same thing when we’re holding forth about mentoring and its putative decline.

Let’s take the second issue first. What do we have in mind when we say that trainees should have mentors? What exactly is it that they are supposed to get out of mentoring.

Vivian Weil [1], among others, points us to the literary origin of the term mentor, and the meanings this origin suggests, in the relationship between the characters Mentor and Telemachus in Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey. Telemachus was the son of Odysseus; his father was off fighting the Trojan war, and his mother was busy fending off suitors (which involved a lot of weaving and unweaving), so the kid needed a parental surrogate to help him find his way through a confusing and sometimes dangerous world. Mentor took up that role.**

At the heart of mentoring, Weil argues, is the same kind of commitment to protect the interests of someone just entering the world of your discipline, and to help the mentee to develop skills sufficient to take care of himself or herself in this world:

All the activities of mentoring, but especially the nurturing activities, require interacting with those mentored, and so to be a mentor is to be involved in a relationship. The relationships are informal, fully voluntary for both members, but at least initially and for some time thereafter, characterized by a great disparity of experience and wisdom. … In situations where neophytes or apprentices are learning to “play the game”, mentors act on behalf of the interests of these less experienced, more vulnerable parties. (Weil, 473)

In the world of academic science, the guidance a mentor might offer would then be focused on the particular challenges the mentee is likely to face in graduate school, the period in which one is expected to make the transition from being a learner of scientific knowledge to being a maker of new knowledge:

On the traditional model, the mentoring relationship is usually thought of as gradual, evolving, long-term, and involving personal closeness. Conveying technical understanding and skills and encouraging investigative efforts, the mentor helps the mentee move through the graduate program, providing feedback needed for reaching milestones in a timely fashion. Mentors interpret the culture of the discipline for their mentees, and help them identify good practices amid the complexities of the research environment. (Weil, 474)

A mentor, in other words, is a competent grown-up member of the community in which the mentee is striving to become a grown-up. The mentor understands how things work, including what kinds of social interactions are central to conducting research, critically evaluating knowledge claims, and coordinating the efforts of members of the scientific community more generally.

Weil emphasizes that the the role of mentor, understood in this way, is not perfectly congruent with the role of the advisor:

While mentors advise, and some of their other activities overlap with or supplement those of an advisor, mentors should not be confused with advisors. Advising is a structured role in graduate education. Advisors are expected to perform more formal and technical functions, such as providing information about the program and degree requirements and periodic monitoring of advisees’ progress. The advisor may also have another structured role, that of research (dissertation) director, for advisors are often principal investigators or laboratory directors for projects on which advisees are working. In the role of research director, they “may help students formulate research projects and instruct them in technical aspects of their work such as design, methodology, and the use of instrumentation.” Students sometimes refer to the research or laboratory director as “boss”, conveying an employer/employee relationship rather than a mentor/mentee relationship. It is easy to see that good advising can become mentoring and, not surprisingly, advisors sometimes become mentors. Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish the institutionalized role of advisor from the informal activities of a mentor. (Weil, 474)

Mentoring can happen in an advising relationship, but the evaluation an advisor needs to do of the advisee may be in tension with the kind of support and encouragement a mentor should give. The advisor might have to sideline an advisee in the interests of the larger research project; the mentor would try to prioritize the mentee’s interests.

Add to this that the mentoring relationship is voluntary to a greater degree than the advising relationship (where you have to be someone’s advisee to get through), and the interaction is personal rather than strictly professional.

Among other things, this suggests that good advising is not necessarily going to achieve the desired goal of providing good mentoring. It also suggests that it’s a good idea to seek out multiple mentors (e.g., so in situations where an advisor cannot be a mentor due to the conflicting duties of the advisor, another mentor without these conflicts can pick up the slack).

So far, we have a description of the spirit of the relationship between mentor and mentee, and a rough idea of how that relationship might advance the welfare of the mentee, but it’s not clear that this is precise enough that we could use it to assess mentoring “in the wild”.

And surely, if we want to do more than just argue based on subjective anecdata about how mentoring for today’s scientific trainees compares to the good old days, we need to find some way to be more precise about the mentoring we have in mind, and to measure whether it’s happening. (Absent a time machine, or some stack of data collected on mentoring in the halcyon past, we probably have to acknowledge that we just don’t know how past mentoring would have measured up.)

A faculty team from the School of Nursing at Johns Hopkins University, led by Roland A. Berk [2], grappled with the issue of how to measure whether effective mentoring was going on. Here, the mentoring relationships in question were between more junior and more senior faculty members (rather than between graduate students and faculty members), and the impetus for developing a reliable way to measure mentoring effectiveness was the fact that evidence of successful mentoring activities was a criterion for faculty promotion.

Finding no consistent definition of mentoring in the literature on medical faculty mentoring programs, Berk et al. put forward this one:

A mentoring relationship is one that may vary along a continuum from informal/short-term to formal/long-term in which faculty with useful experience, knowledge, skills, and/or wisdom offers advice, information, guidance, support, or opportunity to another faculty member or student for that individual’s professional development. (Note: This is a voluntary relationship initiated by the mentee.) (Berk et al., 67)

Then, they spelled out central responsibilities within this relationship:

[F]aculty must commit to certain concrete responsibilities for which he or she will be held accountable by the mentees. Those concrete responsibilities are:

  • Commits to mentoring
  • Provides resources, experts, and source materials in the field
  • Offers guidance and direction regarding professional issues
  • Encourages mentee’s ideas and work
  • Provides constructive and useful critiques of the mentee’s work
  • Challenges the mentee to expand his or her abilities
  • Provides timely, clear, and comprehensive feedback to mentee’s questions
  • Respects mentee’s uniqueness and his or her contributions
  • Appropriately acknowledges contributions of mentee
  • Shares success and benefits of the products and activities with mentee

(Berk et al., 67)

These were then used to construct a “Mentorship Effectiveness Scale” that mentees could use to share their perceptions of how well their mentors did on each of these responsibilities.

Here, one might raise concerns that there might be a divergence between how effective a mentee thinks the mentor is in each of these areas and how effective the mentor actually is. Still, tracking the perceptions of the mentees with the instrument developed by Berk et al. provides some kind of empirical data. In discussions about whether mentoring is getting better or worse, such data might be useful.

And, if this data isn’t enough, it should be possible to work out strategies to get the data you want: Survey PIs to see what kind of mentoring they want to provide and how this compares to what kind of mentoring they feel able to provide. (If there are gaps here, follow-up questions might explore the perceived impediments to delivering certain elements of mentoring.) Survey the people running graduate programs to see what kind of mentoring they think they are (or should be) providing and what kind of mechanisms they have in place to ensure that if it doesn’t happen informally between the student and the PI, it’s happening somewhere.

To the extent that successful mentoring is already linked to tangible career rewards in some places, being able to make a reasonable assessment of it seems appropriate.

It’s possible that making it a standard thing to evaluate mentoring and to tie it to tangible career rewards (or penalties, if one does an irredeemably bad job of it) might help focus attention on mentoring as an important thing for grown-up members of the scientific community to do. This might also lead to more effort to help people learn how to mentor effectively and to offer support and remediation for people whose mentoring skills are not up to snuff.

But, I have a worry (not a huge one, but not nanoscale either). Evaluation of effective mentoring seems to rely on breaking out particular things the mentor does for the mentee, or particular kinds of interactions that take place between the two. In other words, the assessment tracks measurable proxies for a more complicated relationship.

That’s fine, but there’s a risk that a standardized assessment might end up reducing the “mentorship” that mentors offer, and that mentees seek, to these proxies. Were this to happen, we might lose sight of the broader, richer, harder-to-evaluate thing that mentoring can be — an entanglement of interests, a transmission of wisdom, and of difficult questions, and of hopes, and of fears, in what boils down to a personal relationship based on a certain kind of care.

The thing we want the mentorship relationship to be is not something that you could force two people to be in — any more than we could force two people to be in love. We feel the outcomes are important, but we cannot compel them.

And obviously, the assessable outcomes that serve as proxies for successful mentoring are better than nothing. Still, it’s not unreasonable for us to hope for more as mentees, nor to try to offer more as mentors.

After all, having someone on the inside of the world of which you are trying to become a part, someone who knows the way and can lead you through, and someone who believes in you and your potential even a little more than you believe in them yourself, can make all the difference.

_____
*Drugmonkey must know that my “Ethics in Science” class will be discussing mentoring this coming week, or else he’s just looking for ways to distract me from grading.

**As it happened, Mentor was actually Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, in disguise. Make of that what you will.

[1] Weil, V. (2001) Mentoring: Some Ethical Considerations. Science and Engineering Ethics. 7 (4): 471-482.

[2] Berk, R. A., Berg, J., Mortimer, R., Walton-Moss, B., and Yeo, T. P. (2005) Measuring the Effectiveness of Faculty Mentoring Relationships. Academic Medicine. 80: 66-71.

Crime, punishment, and the way forward: in the wake of Sheri Sangji’s death, what should happen to Patrick Harran?

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When bad things happen in an academic laboratory, what should happen to people who bear responsibility for those bad things — even if they didn’t mean for them to happen?

This is the broad question I’ve been thinking about in connection with the prosecution of chemistry professor Patrick Harran and UCLA in connection with the laboratory accident that killed Sheri Sangji. Potentially, Harran could face jail time, and there has been a good bit of discussion (as in these posts at Chemjobber) about whether that’s what he deserves.

I’ll be honest: I find myself uncomfortable weighing Harran’s actions (and inaction) as worthy of jail time or not, let alone assigning the appropriate number of months or years behind bars to punish him for Sheri Sangji’s death. And, other than satisfying our appetite for retribution, I am utterly unsure whether such a penalty in this case would help. I don’t know that it would do much to change the conditions and institutions that ought to be changed in the wake of this accident. (On the matter of changing institutions, read the excellent posts at ChemBark and Chemjobber.)

Sheri Sangji’s death should alert us that things need to change. Conditions in academic labs need to change. Attitudes and behaviors of PIs, students, and technicians need to change. University departments (which are both builders of knowledge and trainers of new scientists) need to change. What kind of resolution of the prosecution of Prof. Harran could bring about the needed changes?

The best way forward should keep lab accidents like the one that killed Sheri Sangji from happening again. Of course, if we’re talking about avoiding such lab accidents, we’re assuming this one was preventable through some combination of proper safety equipment and attire, training, supervision, and the like.

Jailing the PI would certainly get the attention of other PIs and would underline the message that they are responsible for safety in their labs, as well as for addressing deficiencies identified in safety inspections (and maybe even for identifying and addressing the deficiencies themselves). Maybe jailing the PI in this case would also make Sheri Sangji’s family feel that justice had been served.

But, jailing the PI here might also move him, and the larger problem of making research activities reliably non-lethal, out of the sight of the people who really need to be focused on learning the lesson here.

Maybe jail would make him appear like more of the monster; his lab must have been much worse than ours. Or maybe his absence from the academic research milieu might simply mean the other PIs would return their focus to the pressing problems of securing funding, generating data, and cranking out manuscripts. Perhaps their institutions would be stricter about future safety inspections, but the PIs would do what they needed to do to return to the business as usual. Given the extent to which universities rely on external grants secured by such scientific business-as-usual, it’s hard to imagine universities doing much to shake PIs out of this routine.

If we’re interested in justice that actually addresses the dangers of business as usual, I think there is another option we should explore.

I don’t think Prof. Harran should be allowed to continue with the lines of research he was pursuing when the accident in his lab claimed Sheri Sangji’s life. The way he conducted that research — the way he supervised activities and personnel — killed someone employed to advance the research. That’s a big enough strike to bench him and let other PIs play that knowledge-building zone.

Instead, Harran should devote the remainder of his career to creating a scientific culture — at UCLA and beyond — in which the safety of the people performing the experiments (and making the reagents, and fixing the equipment, and cleaning the glassware) is never sacrificed to the goal of getting more and faster results. His mission should be to communicate just how easy it was for a “good PI” to allow lapses in safe procedures, to assume students and staff will figure out how to be safe when using materials or techniques that are new to them, to find tasks more important than supervising lab work, to discourage questions about how to be safe.

This shouldn’t be a new service requirement on Harran in addition to his research and his teaching. This should be the core of his job.

He should not only grapple with the soul-searching a decent person does when he’s allowed conditions that have killed and underling, but also do that soul-searching in a space where the rest of the scientific community can participate and include themselves in the examination. Harran’s presence in this role — his active involvement with his department in this role — means that Sheri Sangji and the circumstances that killed her will not be forgotten.

Since research grants would be unlikely to pay for this new set of professorial professional responsibilities — and since UCLA likely bears some share of responsibility for creating the conditions that killed Sheri Sangji — UCLA should fully fund these new responsibilities of Harran’s position moving forward. As well, UCLA should provide what support is necessary to allow Harran’s colleagues (and students and other personnel in their labs) to adapt their own practices in ways that incorporate his lessons. And, it might have a meaningful impact if professional organizations like the American Chemical Society provided funds for Harran to travel and speak to others running academic labs about how to make them safer.

In short, my hunch is that the best way to achieve progress on safe conditions and practices (not to mention relationships in lab groups that help everyone promote safety) is not to separate Harran from his professional community but to return him to that community with a new mission. His new charge would be to help build a better business-as-usual.

It might not be the science career he envisioned, but I reckon it’s a job that needs doing. Harran now has ample first-hand knowledge of why it matters.

I am science, and so can you!

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Following up on my post yesterday about my own journey with science, I wanted to offer some words of encouragement to those who are still in the early stages of their own journey. I was prompted to write them by Dr. Isis, as part of her excellent and inspiring Letters to Our Daughters Project. Dr. Isis launched this project to fill a particular need she saw for connecting young women making their way through scientific education and careers with the perspectives and wisdom — and most of all the stories — of more senior women who had navigated some of the same terrain.

While the exhortations below were initially addressed to our scientific daughters, I hope that they may also be of use to our scientific sons.

As you pursue an education in science, and perhaps consider a career in science, you will encounter challenges. Do not let these challenges put you off. While science can be beautiful, captivating, and deeply satisfying, it can also be hard. The people around you who seem to find it totally easy did not always (or will not always) find it so. If they did, chances are they were just skimming the surface, missing some of the scientific puzzles worth puzzling over; once you notice them, it’s hard to let go of them.

Doing science is something that is learned. It is not an intrinsic quality of a person. This means that you are not allowed to decide you are bad at it if you haven’t been immersed in learning it. And, if you want to learn how to do science — and want it enough to devote your effort to it — you can.

Understand that part of the challenge is not the mechanics of doing experiments or fieldwork, but the big gap between learning information and making new knowledge. You will need to be patient with yourself as you learn and you will have to refrain from doubting that you could be clever enough to make new knowledge. Many people less clever than you have done it.

Assume that you will need help from others (to learn strategies for devising empirical tests of hypotheses, to learn experimental techniques, to learn good ways to analyze data, to learn how to fix equipment when it breaks, to learn how to file the necessary paperwork). Don’t be shy about asking for help, and don’t be stingy about offering your own help to others. The building of scientific knowledge requires a community, and grown-up scientists ask for help all the time. (Sometimes they call this “networking”, other times they call it “directing graduate research”.)

If you can, join a research group where people cooperate and collaborate. Sharing information makes the climb up the learning curve less lonely, more fruitful, and frequently even something resembling fun. There’s also a useful side effect here: you end up nurturing each other’s excitement about doing science.

Make a point of taking stock on a regular basis, so you appreciate all the knowledge and skills you have gained. Of course, you’ll also be keeping track of the knowledge and skills that you don’t have yet, but want. (That list always seems longer, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It means you’re unlikely to end up with nothing to do.)

Now we get to a big issue: After you immerse yourself in learning how to do science, what about careers? Will you automatically be a scientist when you grow up? And what happens if you decide you want to be something else?

Please trust me that putting yourself out to learn how to do science — and doing actual science as you are learning this — is a worthy end in itself. Building understanding, even if it’s just your own, is a good thing, whether or not you end up deciding to make doing science your life’s work. And deciding to make something else your life’s work does not undo what you’ve learned, nor what you’ve contributed to building new chunks of knowledge, nor what you may have contributed to the experiences of your colleagues climbing up the learning curve.

You can still love science and see other pursuits. Science can handle that kind of relationship, and your happiness matters.

If you decide that you want doing science to be your life’s work — if it feels like science is making a claim on your heart — the perennial problems of the job market may present daunting challenges.

Don’t give up.

If your heart is set on doing science, find a way to make it so. Pay attention to the advice your mentors and colleagues have to offer about finding a scientific career, but be ready to think out of the PI-at-an-R01-university box. There are many other situations where one can do science and be happy. (This is another one of those instances where it’s good to ask for help and to share information.)

Make sure the grown-up scientists training you understand your devotion to science. Nudge them to live up to their responsibilities to create conditions where there is room for the people who are devoted to science to keep making contributions within the field, and to have their contributions valued.

If your choice is not to go forward as a researcher in the field in which you received your scientific training, keep in touch with the grown-ups who trained you. Let them know that your appreciation for science has not wavered, even if you’ve chosen to make different kinds of contributions. Maybe, as you’re catching up with each other, you will even recognize some of the ways that the things you are doing are of value to science and scientists.

You may have a personal relationship with Science, but you will also have an important relationship with the scientific community. When this community raises you to be a grown-up scientist, you can leave home and make your own way in the world, but the connection to the community doesn’t ever really go away.

May this community be a source of strength and comfort to you, whatever path you choose.

I am science … or am I?

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Kevin Zelnio kicked it off on Twitter with a hashtag, and then wrote a blog post that shared the details of his personal journey with science. Lots of folks have followed suit and shared their stories, too — so many that I can’t even begin to link them without leaving something wonderful out. (Search the blogs and Twitter for #iamscience and you’ll find them.)

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to tell my own “I am science” story, but it’s complicated. Thus, I’m preemptively declaring this my first pass, and reserving the right to come back at it from a different angle (or two, or three) later.

One of the things I mentioned in my story at the ScienceOnline 2012 banquet is that I have always loved science. As far back as I can remember, I have wanted to understand how the pieces of my world work. I have thrilled at utility (and fun) of the problem-solving strategies that are part of a scientific approach to the world. I have contemplated the different observational, experimental, and conceptual tools different scientific disciplines bring to the table (and the ways that directing these different toolboxes to the same phenomena can give us starkly different understandings of just what is going on).

I wanted to learn science. I wanted to do science. But I lived in a culture that took pains to make it clear that girls and women were not supposed to be into science, so I should just cut it out.

Luckily for my love of science, well-behaved was not really a tool in my personal toolbox, at least when it came to edicts that got in the way of goals that mattered to me.

I probably got by with the normal ration of sexist crap. For example, I had the junior high math teacher who was convinced (and did not hide this conviction from his students) that Girls Just Cannot Do Math. Finishing geometry in one quarter so I could get the hell out of his classroom (for the matrix algebra class at the high school) was not just liberatory, but it let me give him a metaphorical poke in the eye. It did not, however, change his conviction about girls and math. I had the guidance counselor who was concerned that I was overloading with “hard” (i.e., math and science) courses when maybe it would be better if I took some home ec., or even a study hall.


As I went to a women’s college, I actually skipped the bulk of the classroom sexism I heard about from peers at other universities. None of my chemistry or physics professors started with the assumption that it was weird to have women in the classroom or the lab, which was nice. I did find out later that at least one of the professors had made offhand comments that chemistry majors at my alma mater probably weren’t “up to” graduate programs like the one I went to. Unless this professor was thinking that the graduate school experience should be all margaritas and hot stone massages, I have no idea what this impression was based on; in my graduating class, I was a fair to middling chemistry major (as some of the comments in my lab notebooks attest) — not one of the stars by any stretch of the imagination — and I was sufficiently “up to” the graduate program that I earned my Ph.D. in just over four years.


Of course, I got to bask in the sexism provided by students of a nearby technical school, which my boyfriend at the time happened to attend. Said boyfriend had taken to posting photocopies of each of my grad school acceptance letters on his door, proclaiming to the world (or at least to the frat) what a glorious geek his girlfriend was. After acceptance number 5 (out of 5 applications, to top-10 schools) was posted, a frat-brother said, “Wow, she must have applied to a lot of schools.” When told that the number of acceptances equalled the number of applications, he replied, “Ohh — affirmative action.”


Because clearly, how else could a chick (from a women’s college, no less) get into top graduate programs in chemistry?


And you know, that view was shared by at least some of the men in the graduate program I attended. Because nearly a quarter of our incoming class was female, it was clear to them that affirmative action had been in high gear during the admissions process. (Meanwhile, I was looking at the numbers and thinking, “Where the hell are the rest of the women?”) Women who did very good research, who got publishable results (and publications), and who got their Ph.D.s in four or five years (rather than six or seven or eight) were frequently looked upon with suspicion. They must be getting extra breaks from the system. Or maybe it was that their research focus was not very … significant. (There were never any reasoned arguments to back up the claims that a particular research focus was trivial; it just must be, because … well, she’s doing it.)

Meanwhile, of course, female TAs (in classes like thermodynamics) were treated with contempt by undergraduates. In instances where problem sets and solution sets disagreed about an answer, the fact that the solution set was prepared by a female was treated as reason enough to question its correctness.

Because women don’t really understand physical chemistry as well as men do (even, apparently, men who have not yet taken physical chemistry).


The fact that all of this garbage was clearly recognizable as garbage at the time didn’t make dealing with it any less tiresome. Some days there was barely enough energy just to do my own homework, grade the stacks of problem sets, and try to get things in the lab to function as they should. Keeping myself from punching the noses of the people who treated me as an interloper in science because I was a woman took up energy I could have used for other things.


Sexist crap not withstanding, I made it through. I got my Ph.D. in physical chemistry.

And then, things took an unexpected turn.

I was trying to write an NSF proposal to get funding for a post-doc I had lined up. I was very interested in the research in the lab in which I was planning to work. Indeed, I had been pretty enthuisiastic about the whole thing while I put together an NIH proposal to fund postdoctoral research in that lab. I could definitely imagine three years worth of learning about systems and measurment techniques that were new to me, and I could see it building on (and drawing upon) the things I had learned in my doctoral program in interesting ways.


But the NSF proposal I was writing was such that I could not describe the research project I was planning to undertake as a post-doc. Rather, the task was to describe the first project I envisioned undertaking as a principal investigator. In other words, tell us what you’ll contribute when you are officially a grown up scientist.


Now, I could think of lots of projects I would be qualified to pursue. I could even work out interesting projects in my general area of expertise that would be fundable. But, I was having trouble putting my heart into any of them. Imagining myself setting up a lab of my own to pursue any of these lines of research made me … sad.


I tried to ignore the sad feeling. I tried to put it down to slothful avoidance of the thinking and writing involved in the NSF proposal. But then, every time I’d try to make myself think past the few years of the impending post-doc, I got the same sad, empty feeling.


I knew I was still fascinated by science and its workings, still moved by the elegant model or the clever experiment. But it was becoming clear to me that in my heart I didn’t want to do science for the rest of my life. Serious reflection got me to the reasons: Doing science (i.e., being able to get funding to do science) would require that I focus my attention on the minutiae of a particular system or a particular problem; this is the approach that seems most effective in yielding the data and insight that solves scientific problems. But, the questions that kept me up at night were much broader questions about how, more generally, experiments tell us anything about the deep structure of the universe, how different methodological assumptions make the same phenomena tractable in different ways, what balance of hard-headed skepticism and willingness to entertain speculative hypotheses scientists needed to get the job done …


These were questions, clearly, that I would get into trouble for making the focus of my research were I working in a chemistry department. They had the smell of philosophy all over them. So I had to choose between being kept up at night by questions I couldn’t pursue professionally and pursuing questions I was not so interested in for a living, or admitting that my interest in science was primarily driven by an interest in philosophical questions and get myself the necessary training as a philosopher to pursue them. In some ways living a lie would have been the path of least resistance, but given how little I enjoyed being with me as I contemplated a loveless marriage to a scientific career, I figured I’d probably me cutting myself off from fellowship with other humans as well. So, I made the entirely selfish decision to do what I thought would make me happy.

Here, believe me when I tell you that it felt like a selfish decision in the time — not like a luxurious self-indulgence, but out and out selfishness. I leaked out of the pipeline. I could have improved the gender balance in science by one, and I didn’t. Instead of helping the sisters, I pursued my own individual happiness.


This is the thing I hate most about pervasive sexism. It makes your personal choices important to others in a way that they wouldn’t be if you were just an ordinary human being. It’s hard not to feel that I have let down people I have never even met by leaving the sparse ranks of women scientists, or that I have handed myself over to the pundits: one more example of a woman who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hack it in science.


None of which is to say that my relationship with science is over.

My professional life as an academic philosopher is tied up with understanding how science, and the community that does science, works. If anything, I feel more connected to the intellectual enterprise as a whole, and its connection to other aspects of human flourishing, than I did when I was in the trenches working as a chemist. As an educator, I have an opportunity I might not have had if I were teaching primarily chemistry majors to help folks who fear science understand it better. As it happens, I also have the opportunity to teach lots of science majors (in my “Ethics in Science” course) how ethics matter to scientific knowledge-building, and to the project of sharing a world with non-scientists. Since I’m tickled to be paid to think about the questions that keep me up at night, I have enthusiasm and energy I might not be able to muster otherwise to call shenanigans on misrepresentations of the scientific enterprise, whether by policy makers or science teachers.

Science has my devotion as a philosopher; as a chemist, chances are I would have just been going through the motions.

I may have left the lab bench, but I haven’t left the conversation.

Occasionally, though, I have to grapple with the question of whether I’m in the conversation as an insider or an outsider. Do I really count in the tribe of science? If I don’t do science anymore, how can it make sense to claim that science is part of who I am?

I don’t know what I can say to that except that my love for science, my inclination towards scientific ways of navigating through my world, the formation of myself as a competent scientist as I was figuring out how to become an adult — these are things I cannot separate from my identity. These are features of myself I cannot turn off. If you deal with me, these are some of the facets you are likely to encounter.

Am I science? It sure feels that way to me.

More on #Womanspace: common suggestions and patient responses.

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A few things people have suggested in the discussion of “Womanspace” on multiple blogs and social networking platforms:

  1. That the story does not advance any gendered stereotypes (or, it it does, that these are not negative stereotypes, or that they reflect most poorly upon the hapless men in the story rather than upon the highly competent woman).
  2. That, if the story does rely on gendered stereotypes, these are surely not harmful to women because the author did not intend them to be harmful to women.
  3. That there is something untoward (or vicious, or slanderous) in pointing out that a story comes across to a number of readers (or just to oneself) as sexist — because, again, clearly that was not the intent of the author, and here you’ve gone and sullied his good name!
  4. That if one woman who reads a story does not find it sexist, no other women are within their rights to find it sexist. (A corollary to this is that those women who do find it sexist are actively looking for something to be angry about.)
  5. Peripherally, that a woman whose mode of dress is judged “provocative” will have her credibility to identify, or object to, gendered stereotypes questioned.
  6. That if there is any more pressing problem facing the planet or its denizens, someone will take you to task for “wasting time” pointing out gendered stereotypes and their potential negative effects
  7. That whether or not this particular attempt at humor in short fiction succeeded, the situation for women in scientific education, careers, and publishing is so much better than it used to be that there is no good reason for women to complain — verily, that they should show some appreciation for the golden age of gender equity in which we live.

It’s worth noting that many of these are familiar (so much so that there are bingo cards which collect them), and that many of us have tried patiently to respond to them many, many times (which may explain why we seem less-than-patient explaining the problem on the Nth time we hear these chestnuts, since N is by now a very large number). Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if the need to re-answer familiar objections over and over and over indicates a problem some have with listening to the answers.

But I’m sure that does not describe you, gentle reader. So, some responses:

  1. Here, let us turn to the source material:

    In any general shopping situation, men hunt: that is, they go into a complex environment with a few clear objectives, achieve those, and leave. Women, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish.

    And the interesting thing is — and this is what sparked the discovery — that any male would be very hard pressed to say where she got some of these things, even if he accompanied her.

    Is this not a generalization about gendered differences around shopping? Does it not play into stereotypes of women as shoppers — either always up for the next mall-crawl, or at least clearly in charge of spending the family’s money to procure necessary goods and services, including food, clothing, and cleaning supplies? Even if this is a stereotype that makes men, as a group, look less competent, that does not make it less of a stereotype. Sexist stereotypes hurt men, too.

  2. There is nothing magical about intent. If I accidentally step on your toe, it may hurt just as much as if I had intentionally stepped on it. Regardless of the intent of one’s actions, the effects of those actions may properly matter to the people affected by them. Pretending this is not so is magical thinking.
  3. Following upon #3, having the harmful effects of your actions pointed out to you and taking that as an attack on your character either reflects an inability to separate intent from effects, or an unwillingness to assume any responsibility for those effects (even if they were not intended), or an unwillingness to change in such a way as to avoid those effects in the future. The last of these options starts to look an awful lot like intent, or at least willful negligence — since if you’re listening, you have information that could help you avoid having the same harmful effects in the future.

    One might object that gendered stereotypes don’t actually have significant harmful effects — that at most they are annoying. Christie’s discussion of stereotype threat describes just one of the actual harms.

    If it makes you feel bad to have people point out the harmful effect of your action (even if that harmful effect is not intentional), think of how it must feel to actually experience the harmful effect that you feel bad having someone point out was caused by your action. If you feel bad being connected with sexist impacts, presumably it is because you recognize that sexist impacts are bad. Right?

    Here, the right thing to do is not to holler, “I didn’t mean it!” but rather to say, “I’m sorry I caused you harm; I’ll do my best to avoid doing it again.”

    For more assistance in distinguishing between the “what you did” and the “what you are”, see Jay Smooth.

  4. Women are not, as it turns out, a monolithic group. Among other things, this means some women will be more bothered by particular instances of sexism than others. This does not mean that the women who are bothered are wrong, or that they are not actually harmed. And, if you care about whether your piece of short fiction, or your workplace policy, or whatever, might have the specific effect of alienating women, you should probably take account of women who report actually being alienated rather than deciding that the existence of one woman who is not proves that no woman should be.

    Of course, if you don’t care whether your piece of short fiction, or your workplace policy, or whatever, might have the specific effect of alienating women, proceed accordingly.

  5. One sort of gendered stereotype that women have to deal with is the assumption that we choose our manner of dress to attract men — or, if we do not dress in a conventionally feminine manner, that we object to gendered stereotypes because we are unable to perform femininity (and thus cannot score the approval points available to those women who can). Let me suggest that the very fact that women’s appearance and “what it means” are taken to be relevant in evaluating substantive points those women may be trying to make is part of how women come to learn about sexism and its negative effects.
  6. “Surely being unfairly labeled a sexist is not nearly as bad a problem as children starving, so why are you wasting time complaining about this!” See how that works?

    More generally, caring about (and taking action to address) problem X does not necessitate not caring about (or not taking action to address) problem Y. People can tackle many problems simultaneously (and develop their own best strategies for successfully addressing all the injustices, even if they take them in a different order than you do).

  7. There is likely less overt sexism in scientific education, careers, and publishing than there one was. Research cited in a Nature news item suggests overt discrimination against women in scientific careers is “largely a thing of the past”. However, the same story notes that this research “contrasts with reports that suggest overt discrimination remains a significant problem”. And, the same study identified still-existing societal barriers to women’s success in science.

    Which is to say, things may be better for women in science than they once were, but women still have to grapple with gender-based impediments if they want to be scientists.

    If one thinks that success in science should not be subject to unfair impediments on the basis of gender, perhaps this means one has a responsibility not to introduce or reinforce such impediments, even unintentionally.

More generally, if you care about the situation for women in science, it may be useful to listen to women when they describe their experiences in science. These experiences may have given them some relevant insight.

In which I form the suspicion that I am not Nature’s intended audience.

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Without the benefit of lots of time for reflection or analysis, my off-the-cuff reactions to Ed Rybicki’s piece “Womanspace” in the “Futures” section of Nature:

  1. It suggests (incorrectly) that I, as a middle-aged woman, might not be so interested in electronic gadgets or classic rock.
  2. And that I, as a woman, have some innate (or socially conditioned) “gatherer” approach to shopping, which I don’t; I’m more of the “hunter” Rybicki describes, which I suppose makes me masculine.
  3. As well, being a “hunter”-style shopper does not get me out of primary responsibility for acquiring clothes for my children. (Indeed, while I have been lectured by a teacher about how worn-out knees and art-related stains on my child’s clothes might erode that child’s self esteem, no teacher has ever taken up this issue with the male parent of that child. It’s clear whose job the teachers think it is to clothe the children properly.)
  4. Also, “a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes” is so far off my shopping radar as to be in some other universe within the multiverse. Again, does this mean I’m not a proper member of the category “women”?
  5. With regards to Rybicki’s question, “Have you never had the experience of talking to your significant female other as you wend your way through the complexity of a supermarket — only to suddenly find her 20 metres away with her back to you?”, my mind is drawn not to gendered differences (whether innate or learned) in movement through space-time but rather to differences (likely learned, likely variable within members of genders) in how people engage (or don’t) with those with whom they are trying to have a conversation.
  6. Even given my fairly low level of shopping-fu, I would never expect to find underwear (“knickers”) in a supermarket. Perhaps this is because I have been responsible for buying my own clothing (and food) for my whole adult life, which has given me at least a passing familiarity with what items are stocked in a supermarket and what items are stocked in a clothing store.
  7. If presenting as male in society would mean that someone else would take on responsibility for buying my clothing, I would seriously consider it. Even though I can’t grow facial hair worth a damn.
  8. Demonstrating incompetence once again is demonstrated to be an excellent strategy to avoid being asked to take on a task a second time — unless, of course, it is a task that is deemed a “natural” area of competence for members of your gender, in which case you’re pretty much out of luck weaseling out of it. (This is why I have to buy my own damn clothes.)
  9. Once again, I am frustrated that science fiction seems focused mainly on rethinking our technologies and the physical structure of our reality, rather than on imagining new social structures, relations, and expectations about human diversity.

Maybe all this shows is that Rybicki, in his piece, was not talking to me. If so, I hope that Nature is consciously adopting the strategy of being a “lad mag” (albeit a geeky one), else they are unwittingly alienating a good portion of their potential audience accidentally, which seems foolish.

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For a bigger-picture response, read Christie.