A long time ago, on a flight to a conference, a friend and I discussed the psychology of search committee members. We noticed that even people who thought they were exceedingly fair and open-minded might unconsciously make decisions that don’t seem fair, but do, from a certain point of view, seem rational. So, when faced with two equally talented and promising job candidates, the committee members might opt against the one with visible signs of “a life” (such as children, a partner, even a serious hobby) and for the one with no visible signs of a life. Why? Well, which candidate is more likely to come in every day (maybe evenings and weekends, too) to bust his or her butt for the job? Which is less likely to be distracted from teaching, research, and service to the organization? Which is less likely to need time off for someone else’s medical crisis? Which is less likely to leave suddenly when a partner gets a job offer elsewhere?
The candidate with no life.
For the job seeker, then, we decided the best strategy would be to hide all traces of “a life” from the search committee. Once you had a job offer, though, you could safely ask questions about childcare facilities, employment opportunities for a spouse, etc., because once the committee was at the point of offering you a job, the committee members had a stake in convincing themselves they had made a completely rational decision that you were the best person for the job. Believing themselves to have made a rational decision to hire you, they could accommodate the knowledge that you came with some baggage; not to do so would force them to engage with the possibility that maybe their decisions were not always based on qualifications for the job.
Four months pregnant with younger offspring, as I prepared to fly, alone, to New York for philosophy’s major job-seeking convention, I couldn’t help but recall this earlier discussion on a plane. I was going stealth with my baggage.
Category Archives: Academia
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 3).
At the end of part 2, I had just dropped the baby-bomb on my unsuspecting advisor. Happily, he did not have a cow about it. Now, as we move into the stage of this story that is A.P. (after pregnancy), we lose the coherent narrative structure for awhile.
Given what the first several weeks with a newborn are like, that’s entirely appropriate.
This, also, is the part of the story where particulars start making a huge difference. The decisions we made were contingent on the range of options that were open to us at any given moment; with different circumstances, we might have been on a completely different trajectory. In a number of instances, we were lucky things worked out as well as they did.
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 2).
Where we left off in part 1: In my fifth (and last) year of funding in my philosophy Ph.D. program, staring down 30, trying to finish a dissertation, and bracing myself for the rigors of the academic job market, I said to myself, “How could having a baby make things noticably more difficult?”
Then I remembered: I’d have to tell my advisor.
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 1).
I’ve decided to go ahead and say something about how I navigated (and am still navigating) the challenge of trying to have an academic career and a family as well. This is not a topic I can adequately address in a single post, so bear with me. And, since my main motivation for doing this is the hope that knowing about my experiences may be useful, somehow, to other people contemplating these waters, ask me if there’s something I’m leaving out that you want me to talk about. (If it’s too personal, I’ll say so.)
I think Rob Knop’s comment is dead-on. Many of us in academia have been trained to exude such dedication to our field (through whatever combination of scholarship, teaching, and service our institution values) that we worry it will get us in trouble to admit we have other interests as well. Especially for those on the job market or trying to get tenure, demonstrating too great an interest in something out of the academic sphere — like having kids — is something you fear might bring critical attention upon you. My sense this is even more true for women in fields that are still largely male-dominated; you want people to notice your great research or teaching, not to think to themselves, “See, she’s not sufficiently committed to the field, or she wouln’t even be thinking of taking time away from it for something as mundane as childrearing! We were better off before we started wasting our program on these women.”
In order to blend in, there are lots of things we don’t talk about. But if more people talked about them, talking about them wouldn’t make us stand out quite as much. So at least in this little corner of cyberspace, let’s talk.
This post is the “set up”: the situation I found myself in when I started contemplating whether it would be feasible (or insane) to have an academic career and a family.
The burden of addressing institutional problems.
I’ve been having a great email exchange with another blogger about the current flare-up of the battle over women in academic science, and he brought to my attention a bothersome feature of this New York Times interview with Dr. Ben A. Barres:
Q. How does this bias [that men have an innate advantage in science over women] manifest itself?
A. It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants. And then, and this is a huge part of the problem, they don’t get the resources they need to be successful. Right now, what’s fundamentally missing and absolutely vital is that women get better child care support. This is such an obvious no-brainer. If you just do this with a small amount of resources, you could explode the number of women scientists.
Q. Why isn’t there more support for scientists who have children?
A. The male leadership is not doing it, but women are not demanding it. I think if women would just start demanding fairness, they might get it. But they might buy in a little bit to all this brainwashing. They are less self-confident. And when women speak out, men just see them as asking for undeserved benefits.
(Bold emphasis added.)
The consequences of a chilly climate in the academic workplace.
After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today’s Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of complaint are female; I’m happy enough to start with a discussion of the alleged behavior itself before paddling to the deep waters of gender politics.
But first, the story:
MIT star accused by 11 colleagues
Prospective hire was intimidated, they say
By Marcella Bombardieri and Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | July 15, 2006
Eleven MIT professors have accused a powerful colleague, a Nobel laureate, of interfering with the university’s efforts to hire a rising female star in neuroscience.
The professors, in a letter to MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield , accuse professor Susumu Tonegawa of intimidating Alla Karpova , “a brilliant young scientist,” saying that he would not mentor, interact, or collaborate with her if she took the job and that members of his research group would not work with her.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they wrote in their June 30 letter, “allowed a senior faculty member with great power and financial resources to behave in an uncivil, uncollegial, and possibly unethical manner toward a talented young scientist who deserves to be welcomed at MIT.” They also wrote that because of Tonegawa’s opposition, several other senior faculty members cautioned Karpova not to come to MIT.
She has since declined the job offer.
Are we going to keep pretending women who want to do science and math aren’t treated differently?
Here is the U.S., especially, we love to think the ivory tower is a meritocracy, and that the tribe of science is objective in all things — including how it treats its members. A nice little pile of data runs counter to this picture, however. A quick roundup:
Watch what you say about my university!
The problem with having eyes and ears everywhere is that sometimes they deliver sensory data that make you want to rip them out of your head or stuff them with cotton, respectively.
An eagle-eyed reader pointed me toward some eyebrow-raising comments on another blog, which would not be of much interest except they purport to transmit information obtained from one of the fine science departments at my university. So, to uphold the honor of my university, I have to wade into this.
First, a representative sampling of the comments from the poster in question. He writes:
I will leave this site with a comment a chemistry professor made. It is simple but for this site it will speak volumes. Can 2 parrots mate and have a crow.
This is the premise of evolution, like it or not. This is it.
If private firms fund research at universities, who do you think will control access to the knowledge?
Just one more follow up on the matter of how research universities will make do as federal funds for research dry up. Some have suggested that the answer will come from more collaboration between university labs and researchers in private industry.
Perhaps it will. But, a recent article in the Boston Globe about conflicts within the Broad Institute is suggestive of the kinds of clashes of philosophy that might make university-industry collaborations challenging. From the article:
Just over a year ago, Cambridge’s prestigious Broad Institute started an idealistic medical-research project, fueled by millions of dollars from drug companies, to create powerful new molecules and make them cheaply available to lab researchers around the world.
Called the RNAi Consortium , the program runs on donations from Novartis AG , Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. , and Eli Lilly & Co. , among others. It has designed a huge collection of molecules to block the workings of each human gene — a new and increasingly important technique for scientists and drug makers. The project embodies the ambitious goals of the three-year-old Broad Institute, which united the czars of top science labs at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to turn genetic research into real treatments for diseases.
But now the altruistic RNAi project has run into the shoals of commerce. The Broad relies on two for-profit companies to produce and distribute the new molecules to researchers, and one of those companies is suing the other to stop it from sending them out.
Sigma-Aldrich Corp. , a global lab supply company based in St. Louis, filed suit against Open Biosystems Inc. of Alabama, a private firm specializing in supplying genetic material, charging that it infringes two key scientific patents.
Although the Broad Institute invents the RNAi molecules, it can’t produce them in the volume needed for research experiments. So it has licensed the two suppliers to keep a ready stock of Broad-invented material in their warehouse freezers to sell to customers. The companies make a profit, but because the Broad Institute absorbs the high cost of the original research, they can keep prices down for their customers.
If the lawsuit succeeds in shutting down Open Biosystems, it would give Sigma an effective monopoly, leading scientists to worry that a resource built with philanthropic money and intended for public access would become unaffordable.
“Our goal is easy access to the world research community,” said David Root , the Broad Institute scientist who manages the RNAi Consortium. “We went to two distributors with the idea of trying to make sure it’s widely available.”
(Bold emphasis added.)
Federal money comes with strings.
Yesterday I blogged a bit about how the rollback of NIH research funding may impact scientists at research universities. In light of those comments, here’s another news item worth your attention.
The Boston Globe reports that Yale University may be in some amount of trouble for accepting lots of federal research funds but then not accounting for its use in ways that satisfied the funders:
Federal authorities are investigating how Yale accounts for millions of dollars in government research grants, school officials said Monday.
Yale received three subpoenas last week from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Defense Department and National Science Foundation seeking grant documents dating back as much as 10 years.
Authorities also have been interviewing university employees about accounting issues.
The school has acknowledged problems with its accounting procedures. In an e-mail to faculty and staff on Friday, Yale President Richard Levin urged employees to cooperate with investigators.
“Regardless of the outcome of the current investigation, we must get all our processes right and make sure that we are good stewards of the funds entrusted to us by the federal government,” Levin said in a statement released Monday. “We know that we have more work to do.”
This sounds like tons of fun for the Yale faculty and staff. Who doesn’t like taking time out of his or her day to cooperate with federal investigators?