Monday, August 07, 2006

Thus Spake Zuska Has Moved! Thus Spake Zuska has moved to a new site! Zuska is now blogging at http://www.scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/. Thanks to the folks at Seed Media Group and Scienceblogs.com for inviting Zuska to join the family! And apologies for the long delay in announcing this...I started this post on August 7 but some family emergencies intervened.  At the new blog, I'll pick up some loose threads from this site, including a follow-up on the post about Rollins President Lewis Duncan's remarks, and a response to a comment by a young woman on one of the Screen Goddess IT Calendar posts.  Hope to see you over at the new site! If you've subscribed to Thus Spake Zuska via RSS, you can continue to do so via Scienceblogs.com's RSS feed.   12:15:48 PM    comment []

Monday, July 24, 2006

How to Start a Racial Diary Skookumchick over at Rants of a Feminist Engineer is keeping a racial diary as part of a project: A friend of mine asked me to be on a panel she was organizing at an interesting sounding conference, to be held in September. She and a postdoc wrote an abstract which proposed that 4 people - including two white people, one of whom is me - would keep a "racial diary" for a month and then use it to talk about unearned privilege and prejudice, particularly all the little things that we White people tend to overlook. What a nifty idea for a conference panel!  What a nifty idea in general.  If you are a white person who would like to start keeping your own racial diary as a means of becoming a more sensitive person and better colleague, but you aren't quite sure how to begin, you could start by reading Peggy McIntosh's classic White Privilege:  Unpacking the Invisible Backpack and then just writing down your thoughts and reactions to the article.  In the article, McIntosh offers a list of unearned white privileges.  It's a pretty dandy list.  Here are just a few: I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.  I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.   If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.  That last one is a real zinger, isn't it?  Think of the luxury of all that time and energy I don't have to spend worrying whether people are reacting to me in a certain way based upon my race.  Whiteness is like having an Airport EZ Pass for everything in life.  2:59:15 PM    comment []

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Women Should Boycott Fermilab I am serious about this.  First, there's the embarrassingly shoddy way they dealt with Sherry Towers, who discovered a goddam particle, for Christ's sake.  Then, there's their willingness to exploit the unpaid labor of female physicists with children and then plaster their pictures all over their propaganda rags as if they are the #1 happy workplace for women (see the Elizabeth Freeland story).  But now, we have The Last Straw.  Katherine Weber v. Fermilab  Thanks to Absinthe for providing that link. Katherine Weber was a mechanical engineer at Fermilab.  Katherine had jock straps and condoms placed in her mailbox.  Yes, dear readers, condoms and jock straps.  And when she complained about it, she was told that she should "be good", "ignore it", or "make a joke out of it".  And later she was demoted, and finally she was fired.  She says it was because she complained.  Naturally, her employer says it was not.  I would just like to go on record as saying that even if she loses her case - NO WOMAN SHOULD HAVE TO GO TO WORK AND FIND JOCKSTRAPS IN HER MAILBOX.   I am so, so very tired of writing about things like condoms and jock straps and pornographic screen savers and research assistants who get raped for years on end.  (Must be how those folks at the Southern Poverty Law Center feel when they are stuffing envelopes - you know, same old frickin' neo-Nazi racist skinhead Klan-wannabes, same old tired Aryan nations rhetoric, only the venue changes.) This week it's jockstraps in the mailboxes; last week we were simulating ejaculation in the lunchroom; next week we'll just feel her up in the instrument room.  What's the matter, can't you take a joke? Don't be so serious!  We're just kidding around!  Uptight bitch.  The things that happen to women in science and engineering are ugly things.  They are not pleasant to talk about.  But as Audre Lorde has told us, in The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action: I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. They'll tell you to make a joke out of it.  But you should go to the EEO officer anyway. My silences have not protected me.  Your silence will not protect you...What are the words that you do not have?  What do you need to say?  What are the tyrannies that you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?...[O]f course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger... We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.  For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definitions, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.     Women are choking to death in America's national laboratories and university research labs.  And as they drop to the floor, men around them pick up the research findings that fall from their listless hands and say, "Thank you!  This is just what I was looking for."  Then they step over the bodies and walk on.      So, women:  Don't apply to Fermilab.  Don't accept job offers there.  Don't send your students there.  Don't actively recruit from there.  If you aren't a physicist but you live in the vicinity of Fermilab and want to do something, put a little sign in your car window that says "Women:  Boycott Fermilab".  Because we should not sell the fruits of our labor so cheaply to those so unworthy.    9:27:47 PM    comment []

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Book Project Call For Interviewees: Women in STEMM Many thanks to Science Woman for alerting me to this very interesting call for interviewees for a book project titled "Where the Girls Aren't", over at a blog called Green Gabbro.  Finding this new blog (new to me) is also cool!  I'm sure I've seen Yami's presence elsewhere on the web; why have I not been to her blog before?  Go forth and read, for she is good.  Here's about the book project: [A] science and tech writer in my extended social network just landed a book deal on women’s experiences in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM). She’s looking to interview women and girls from all walks of sciencehood; if this sounds interesting to you, details are below the fold. Two similar works are Talking About Leaving:  Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt, and Leaving Science:  Occupational Exit From Scientific Careers by Anne Preston.  Seymour and Hewitt's book may be more well known.  Elaine Seymour was a recipient of WEPAN's Betty Vetter Award for Research in 2000.  Talking About Leaving documented that the shameful attrition rates in engineering and the sciences were not the result of separating the wheat from the chaff.  The fleeing students were among the most highly qualified, and, I know this will come as a huge shock to you, but - well - just guess which groups had disproportionately high loss rates.  I'll give you a hint.  It wasn't the white males.  Preston analyzed data from 1700 men and women who received degrees in the natural sciences or engineering between 1965 and 1990 and placed this data in context with federal funding and market force pressures on scientific career trajectories during this period, finding differences in male and female exit patterns for the 49% of those who left science.  I'm much more familiar with Seymour and Hewitt's work.  However, from what I know of both, it sounds like the project that generated the call for interviewees above might dovetail nicely with both these books.  Seymour and Hewitt's book is rich in anecdotes, data analysis, research summary, and theory, but it focuses at the undergraduate level.  Preston's work looks at postgraduate workforce issues, and includes an analysis of how common factors have a differential impact on men and women's decisions to stay or leave.  It provides statistical analysis along with illustrative anecdotes.  However it doesn't necessarily look deeply at the experiences unique to postgraduate women in academia that affect the decision to stay or leave. Not the "will my proposal get funded?" or "should I take that industry job for double my current salary and half the hours I work now?" worries or dilemmas.  No, I mean, the stuff like There are only two women in this WeAreTooRealMen Engineering department.  At the departmental retreat, the schedule shows at the end of the first day "Let's all gather at the hotel pool for an hour of swimming and relaxing!"  We don't want to seem uncollegial, but we don't want to appear in our swimsuits in front of 17 men we have to work with.  Will they talk about us if we don't go?  Will they talk about us if we do?  (A true story, some details slightly altered.) I've just defended my PhD and I'm getting interviews but no offers.  I finally found out why.  I got an anonymous letter from someone after my last interview, just signed "A Friend", letting me know MY THESIS ADVISOR was writing to the places I'd interviewed and telling them I was no good. (This one had a reasonably happy ending.  She sued his ass.  He lost his job at Ivy Envy U.  She's a full professor at Prestige Public U.  Should you find yourself in a similar situation, you may want to consult with Absinthe.)  I am the only woman of color in the entire college of engineering.  They want me to serve on everything that even sounds like it has the word diversity somewhere connected to it.  They want me to mentor every student of color.  They want to trot me out at every fundraising event to show how they are "working their diversity plan".  They say things like, "I hope you don't feel like you got your job just because of your race."  They say things to me like, "Well, I'm glad we were finally able to hire a woman of color."  Why can't they say things like "Well, I'm glad we were finally able to attract one of MIT's best electrical engineering PhD's to our university"? I just had my three-year review and they told me I'm not publishing enough and not bringing in enough research money.  I'm a physicist working at a national lab.  Last year I discovered a new particle!  This year I'm going to give birth to a baby!  I'd like to take the maternity leave that the written policy says I'm entitled to.  I have a meeting with my supervisor in a few minutes.  I'm going to let him know.  I'm sure it will be fine because the baby won't be coming for six months yet and that gives us plenty of time to plan and schedule things.  It's not like I'm sick or anything; that, you can't plan for.  You know, like when men have heart attacks. At hiring time I was told that publications and research were the most important things for tenure.  I have 12 papers in Science and NSF has opened their coffers and told me to take whatever I want.  Six engineering firms are fighting to license my incredible patented gadgets.  I just had my three-year review. My undergraduate students write remarks on their course evaluations about my clothing.  They say my breasts interfere with their learning.  My department chair said that teaching is one of the core missions of a land-grant university and I need to improve my course evals or start thinking about places where I might find a "better fit" for my priorities.   Okay, I may have exaggerated just a tiny bit on that last one.  Everybody knows funding is tighter than a botoxed socialite.  6:33:02 PM    comment []

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Ethics in Physics-Land Lest you think Absinthe and I are shrill, hysterical harpies, may I direct you to this Physics Today article from 2004 titled "Ethics and the Welfare of the Physics Profession".  An APS task force undertook a survey on ethics.  Here's the good stuff: The 1987 APS statement on integrity in physics reads, in part, "The physics community has traditionally enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for maintenance of high ethical standards and integrity in its scientific activities. Indeed, the American Physical Society is one of the few professional societies which has not felt the need for a formal code of ethics."  Hee! The task force reported that "By far the highest response rate and the most extensive and heart-felt answers to the open-ended survey questions came from the junior members of APS-that is, physicists within the first three years after getting the PhD."  Nearly half of them responded, a lot of them within hours via the web.  "In contrast to the high response rate among junior members, only a quarter of physics department chairs responded to the survey they were sent. " "Particularly shocking to the task force was how often the words 'abuse' and 'exploitation' were used to describe the treatment of graduate students. A number of junior members suggested that ethics training should first be made mandatory for professors, so that they could 'learn how to treat their students and postdocs in a humane way.'  Several wrote of the 'powerlessness' of graduate students and postdocs, who depend on their supervisor for letters of recommendation and therefore cannot afford to blow the whistle on instances of mistreatment." Dear readers, please note that the vast majority of physicists are white males.  Therefore we can assume that the vast majority of the junior members describing abuse and exploitation are white males.  And that's what it's like to be one of the privileged ones in physics. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, another article published in 2004 in the Chronicle of Higher Education asked the question "Is Graduate School a Cult?" (no subscription needed).  Author Thomas Benton was talking about the humanities, and was half tongue-in-cheek, half serious, but I think his remarks are chillingly relevant for women - hell, for any decent human - in science and engineering.   For all its claims to the contrary, graduate education does not seem to enhance the mental freedom of many students, some of whom are psychologically damaged by the experience...[graduate school seems] to have a lot in common with mind-control cults. It's not difficult for a casual researcher to gain entry into the bizarre world of cults and anti-cult activists. A quick Internet search will inevitably lead one to...Freedom of Mind Center. [Steven Alan] Hassan was a member of the Unification Church...[he is] "America's leading expert on cults."  For anyone who has been in graduate school, numerous portions of Hassan's outline of the mind-control practices of cults will seem weirdly familiar...[and] mildly disturbing.  Hassan calls his outline the "BITE Model," which stands for behavior, information, thought, and emotional control. Let's review a few of the traits of each category and see if any of them sound familiar. Behavior control: "major time commitment required for indoctrination sessions and group rituals"; "need to ask permission for major decisions"; "need to report thoughts, feelings, and activities to superiors." Information control: "access to non-cult sources of information minimized or discouraged (keep members so busy they don't have time to think)" and "extensive use of cult-generated information (newsletters, magazines, journals, audio tapes, videotapes, etc.)." Thought control: "need to internalize the group's doctrine as 'Truth' (black and white thinking; good vs. evi;; us vs. them, inside vs. outside)" and "no critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy seen as legitimate." Emotional control: "excessive use of guilt (identity guilt: not living up to your potential; social guilt; historical guilt)"; "phobia indoctrination (irrational fears of ever leaving the group or even questioning the leader's authority; cannot visualize a positive, fulfilled future without being in the group; shunning of leave takers; never a legitimate reason to leave"; and "from the group's perspective, people who leave are 'weak,' 'undisciplined. ' " Are you experiencing some shock of recognition? I was particularly startled when I learned that recent college graduates are one of the groups most frequently targeted by cult recruiters. Women scientists, say goodbye to your identity guilt.  Visualize positive, fulfilling futures for yourselves, devoid of pinhead control freaks who desperately cling to power by sucking the life force of younger, more talented individuals.  Do not shun those who have left academia as if they are diseased and proximity might infect you with their plague.  Vacation on Planet Zorn as needed.  Slap on your anger tiara and read Natalie Angier's Woman:  An Intimate Geography.  Photocopy and blow up good parts and leave them lying around the physics lounge, just for grins.  Hey, if they're still putting up the girlie calendars in the labs and pornographic screen savers on their computers and riding lactating mothers out of national labs on a rail, then I think we can offer up some top-notch science-writing about the exquisitely designed clitoris and its 8,000 nerve endings, which need no man to make a woman happy.  12:33:42 PM    comment []

Monday, July 17, 2006

A Simple Method for Women to Improve the Quality of Their Work Today's Philadelphia Inquirer had a nifty little story about Ben Barres, who used to be Barbara Barres.  Ben/Barbara is a neurobiologist.  Here is my very favorite quote from the article: After he undertook a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's." There's nothing in the world like objective peer review, I always say.  Nothing in the world.  Apparently, Ben has not had nice things to say about Lawrence Summers, Steven Pinker, or Peter Lawrence, standard-bearers for the Penis-Is-Mightier-Than-the-Brain Club.  Has Ben Barres been accused of being a shrill, hysterical harpy as a result?  Well, try this exercise:  Google "Ben Barres hysterical".  Then Google "Nancy Hopkins hysterical".    Larry refused to comment for the Inquirer. (Probably just as well, dude - you've gotten yourself into enough trouble with your mouth already.)  Curly and Moe, I mean, Steve and Pete whined that Ben had "misrepresented their views and unfairly tarred those who disagree with crude assertions of racism and sexism ".   Pete had this to say: Lawrence said it was a "utopian" idea that "one fine day, there will be an equal number of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research." Here's another utopian idea:  one fine day, I won't have to read this dreck anymore.  Lawrence also tells us females on average are innately designed to empathise, to communicate, and to care for others. Males tend to think narrowly and obsess, while females think broadly, taking into account balancing arguments. Awwwww....that is so sweet.  We're all kind and nurturing, except for when we are enraged, castrating feminists, or shrill hysterical harpies.  Well, I guess that's what happens when you go against nature and try to become a scientist - you start secreting those lesbo harpy hormones.  Which interfere with your ability to do math anyway, even as they destroy your femininity.  Or something like that.     Personally, I do not care for others who make these kinds of stupid assertions.  I would like to communicate to them that I do not feel much empathy for their desire to keep women down, and even if they don't recognize their all-encompassing, societally broad obsession with keeping women down, of which science's sorry-ass state of affairs is but one manifestation, I do.  I encourage everyone to read Cynthia Burack's The Problem of the Passions  and Mary R. Jackman's The Velvet Glove.  Women are angry as much as they are nurturing.  I think we ought to be even angrier, more often.  Certainly stubborn sexism disguised as "I just want to help the ladies" ladled out by the likes of Peter Lawrence and his ilk ought to at least make you angry enough to feel like horking up your breakfast on his shoes next time you see him. In an earlier post, I ended by encouraging my readers to imagine themselves as the princess of the planet Zorn (you'll just have to read it to learn why).  One of my commenters wrote to say that zorn means anger in German and therefore he/she would not want to be princess of Zorn.  I say:  even better.  Zorn is exactly the planet women scientists need to take up residence on and rule, dammit. Empathy, communication, and caring are HUMAN traits available to all of us; most men choose or are trained not to practice them.  Labelling them innately female, labelling mathematical prowess innately male, devaluing one and over-valuing the other, is one of the crudest forms of sexism there is.  Well, aside from raping your research assistant.       p.s.  Thank you, Ben, for remembering the ladies.        11:02:02 PM    comment []

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Homophobia is Not Permitted Here It seems like just yesterday that I wrote a post entitled Why Don't They Hear What I Say?  Picture a scene some years ago:  I'm in the kitchen at my older brother's house along with him, my sister-in-law, and niece.  Brother is talking about his calculus class - he's recently returned to college to get his degree while working full time in the coal mine.  No shabby feat - takes a lot of determination and energy.  His wife has pushed and supported him in this effort.  Brother is annoyed by his younger classmates who seem more cavalier about their college studies than he is - they are young, they don't have kids, they don't work in a coal mine, they goof off, they don't know how easy they have it.  He chooses to vent his frustration in the form of a story making fun of a young woman in his calculus class, depicting her as a hopeless airhead who just can't cope with math.  I listen for awhile, but I am pissed.  I am pissed because he is describing this young woman as incapable of calculus because she is a woman, and as an airhead because she is a woman.  Finally I interrupt and point out that of all the people currently in the room, his wife and I are the only two with college degrees.  And mine is in engineering.  And presumably he will want his daughter to someday get a college degree.  And that maybe he does not really want to give his wife, daughter, and sister the impression that he thinks women are constitutionally incapable of math, or that women are in general brainless bimbos undeserving of respect.  I ask him if there aren't, perhaps, any men in the calculus class who are having problems with the material.  Does their difficulty stem from the essential fact that they are men?  He hems and haws a bit but the message seems to have gotten through.   Now we move forward in time to the initiation of this blog.  Early on, I discussed the issue of the production of genius and the eternal straw-woman question, why are there no great women scientists?  My brother weighed in on this debate, and displayed a  remarkable resistance to understanding the ways in which his view of genius as something "streaky, rare, and unpredictable" supports the myth of the "great man", the lie that women can't do science, and the fallacy that there is some kind of inherent, magical math genius that can't be taught or nurtured into existence.  Great scientists are great because they are made, they are shaped and formed and trained.  They do not just spring forth from the womb.  And despite the fact that my brother has had to crawl through, over, and around all kinds of obstacles to obtain his education and a better standard of living than our parents had, despite the fact that his off-the-charts genius level IQ and intense fascination with science and computers from an early age did not automatically translate into his becoming a Bill Gates-equivalent, he would prefer to believe in streaky, rare genius.  I am sure that if Bill Gates had been one of six children of a coal miner in western Pennsylvania, attending some of the worst public schools in the state, he would have gone on to found Microsoft just the same.  Being one of three children of an attorney in Seattle, attending private school and Harvard, had little to do with it, because Bill Gates is a genius.  Genius, being streaky and rare, hardly ever visits coal mining villages.           And now we come to the present.  My brother has read what I wrote about the Duke lacrosse players mess, and commented on it.  And all I can say is, this kind of support, I can do without.  I don't know what planet you are living on, brother, but whoever told you that you could score points with me by mocking the Duke lacrosse players with homophobic slurs was sorely mistaken.  What on this blog has ever given you the idea that I would condone this kind of behavior without a public scolding?  Do you not understand that homophobia is one of the weapons the fundamentalist right uses to advance its agenda, which includes keeping women home and out of the science and engineering professions?  Did you not read my post about Bitches, Faggots, and Real Men?  If you haven't, go read it.  If you have, go re-read it till you understand why and how homophobia contributes to the oppression of women and why the policing of masculinity is bad for all men.  In the meantime, stop waving your Real Man dick around in the vicinity of this blog. "We Mountaineers never had to pay women to come to our parties..." says my brother.  Please remember that when you speak, you do not speak for all Mountaineers.  Some of them are women.  And some of the men are gay.  In fact, one of the most wonderful Mountaineers I know is Jeff Mann, and all of you ought to read everything he's ever written, because he writes prose and poetry like nobody's business. (Allow me to especially recommend Edge to straight women, as I did in my review on Amazon.  Brother, you should read it, too.)   His latest book is Loving Mountains, Loving Men.  When you gay-bash, brother, you are contributing to the societal attitudes that endanger my friend Jeff and that would force him back into the closet.   And, incidentally, when you gay-bash you find yourself in some interesting company.  One of the three Duke lacrosse players who was indicted in the rape case has a prior arrest for an incident in Washington, DC that included taunting the victim with a homophobic slur.     Now.  When I say that Zuska is, among other things, the Avenging Angel of Angry Women, and that she will say what others are already thinking but afraid to say, I hope you will now believe me if you didn't before.  Women need to get in touch with their anger and let it show to the men in their lives.  No exemptions for blood relatives, spouses, significant others, or friends.   Three solid wallops with the virtual Homophobia is Tied to Women's Oppression Coal Shovel of Justice on my brother's ass.               2:46:01 PM    comment [] How to Speak Academese Have no fear, grad students and postdocs.  Soon you'll be slinging that academic jargon around just like the professors, if you'll just read this piece from the Chronicle (no subscription needed, I believe).  Lots of nifty links within the article, too, including links to two previous jargon-deciphering articles.  Scientists and engineers will find much that is specifically useful for them in these articles.    2:19:34 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Suzanne E. Franks. Last update: 8/23/2006; 5:12:18 PM.