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Friday, May 16, 2008
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Yet another update on the seemingly never ending saga of my FOIA request to the Department of Energy to determine exactly how much Fermilab spends on EEO litigation each year (documents I have found on the web indicate that it is way, waayyyy more than the national average per EEO-1 employee). If you recall, back in January I drafted an appeal the Director of the DoE Office of Hearings and Appeals because the DoE had denied of my FOIA request that I had made 8 months before. Not only had the DoE taken 8 long months to deny my FOIA request (despite the fact that the law states unequivocally that they are supposed to respond within 20 days), but they also denied it on the premise that the data I was asking for did not even exist, even though those data are extensively documented in GAO report GAO-04-148R.
The DoE Office of Hearings and Appeals got back to me in a timely fashion and told me that the denial of my FOIA request was a mixup, and that the Department of Energy would be contacting me in the near future with the information I had requested.
That was back in January.
I never heard from the Department of Energy with the promised information.
But then a couple of days ago out of the blue a message was left on my answering machine by someone from the Department of Energy Office of General Counsel. She wanted me to call her back to discuss my FOIA request.
My first response was "What the hell???"...it's been four months since the Office of Hearings and Appeals told me I would get the information I requested. If the Department of Energy is just going to ignore the freaking laws of the land, why don't they go all the way and simply ignore them completely instead of this bull crap of taking months and months and months to reply to even the most simple FOIA requests. It would save everyone a whole lot of time if they were just honest about their dishonesty.
Anyway, back to the phone call...I have this advice for FOIA newbies: never, ever let a government entity discuss your FOIA request with you on the phone. By law, they are supposed to respond to your request in writing. Talking about your request on the phone ensures that pesky incriminating paper trails are avoided, which is just what the DoE is trying to do right now.
So yesterday I phoned the Office of General Counsel and told them that if they have anything to say to me about my FOIA request, they need to put it in writing and send it to me in a letter. And I would respond to them in writing. Because that is how FOIA requests are properly handled.
You would think an entire office filled with freaking lawyers would know that. Actually, I know they know that. They simple couldn't give a damn about actually complying with the laws of the land....because what are people going to do about it? Sue them? They have infinitely deep litigation pockets, and are more than happy to use them. Which, of course, is the reason behind my original FOIA request.
I'll let you all know if the DoE ever writes me a letter. I wouldn't hold your breath though.
8:57:17 PM 
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Thursday, May 15, 2008
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Another article about my study of conference allocations at Fermilab was published earlier this week. I disagree somewhat with the first paragraph of the article; I'm not sure if the particle physics community is "reeling" because of the results of my study and I'm also not sure if I'd classify the results of the study as "damning"...it sounds harsher than I would have put it.
I was interested to read in the article that some people at ATLAS (a new particle physics experiment due to start soon in Europe) feel that ATLAS won't likely have gender equity problems because women currently hold a significant fraction of leadership roles on the experiment. This is interesting because the Dzero experiment at Fermilab also had a healthy fraction of women in physics leadership roles for several years before the experiment started taking data. Immediately after the experiment started taking data, the number of women in physics leadership roles plummeted, and the number of women shunted into service work leadership roles rose significantly. The fraction of women in physics (service work) leadership roles remained low (high) for the rest of the time I was on the experiment. The probability of this pattern randomly occuring simultaneously in the absence of gender bias is 0.1%.
Unlike the conference allocation study, this study took all of half an hour...I simply looked at the long list of physics working group and service working group leaders since 2000 on Dzero and counted how many people were female, and how many were male. The experiment started taking significant amounts of data and cranking out its first analyses in mid to late 2003 so the time period I looked at was divided almost exactly in half by that milestone.
It will be really interesting to see if the number of women appointed to physics leadership roles on ATLAS stays as high as it is now once ATLAS starts recording significant amounts of data. It would be nice if that happens.
10:51:04 PM
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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Mark your calendars everyone, Fermilab has asked the American Physical Society to do a site review of the climate for women at the laboratory May 20-21.
If you are a woman at the lab and you want to talk to the APS reviewers, you are required by the lab to register with the Fermilab Equity office first, giving your name and position at the laboratory.
Great.
Just like the recent luncheon meetings at Fermilab, this will no doubt be really productive and everyone will feel free to express their views in an open and inviting atmosphere, similar to the time several months ago when the lab individually interviewed its female employees because the lab said they were thinking of asking the American Physical Society to do an onsite review of the climate for women at the lab, but they wanted to know what the women were going to say to the APS first. Will the women who want to talk to the APS next week have to first be interviewed by the Fermilab Equity office as part of the "registration" process the lab has put in place? Why do women have to register with lab to talk to the APS anyway? I've taken part in site reviews of university physics departments before, and group meetings with the reviewers were scheduled but no one had to register to attend because it violated confidentiality.
In its description of its site review procedures, the APS states
Prior to the visit, APS will administer survey questionnaires to graduate and undergraduate students or lab employees. The results of the surveys, as well as any written comments, are then provided to the site visit team to assist them in preparing for the visit. All survey results are confidential to the team.
This confidential survey has not been given to women based at Fermilab. Instead the only way the women have been given by the lab to communicate with the APS is rather non-confidential and controlled by the lab.
In an ideal world, a APS site review would result in positive changes for a better work climate on site for everyone at the lab. In practice, manipulation of the review process and issues of trust between Fermilab administration and researchers at the lab will perhaps make the review a lot less productive than it could be. Perhaps there are some women at the lab who implicitly trust the Fermilab administration, but I can say for a fact that I know of many who do not, and these issues of mistrust have to be overcome if progress is to be made.
5:37:10 PM
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Sunday, May 11, 2008
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We are getting our house re-roofed later this week and it will be a complete tear-off because it currently has the original cedar shakes plus three layers of asphalt shingles over it. The mess left behind in an attic after a complete tear off has to be experienced to be believed. We had a complete tear off done to our old house in Chicago and it took us three weeks to clean the attic.
In prepartion for having our attic ankle deep in old shingles, we spent the weekend moving stuff out of the attic. This has prompted us to go through all the boxes up there and throw out or give to charity stuff we haven't used in the three years we've been living here. I had ruthlessly culled our posessions before we moved here, but apparently I wasn't ruthless enough, because there were around 18 boxes up there that have never been opened since the move. They are now gone.
Three of those boxes were from my old office at Fermilab. Up until now I had never had the heart to go through the stuff. It was too much like admitting outright that my career was completely over. And I couldn't just throw out the boxes because there is some evidence in them pertinent to my lawsuit. But today I finally went through them and tossed all my old analysis notes and log books and papers. The detritus of a once very active professional life that is no more.
Over the past few years I have met several women who have had their professional lives ruined by blatant discrimination. For some of them it happened a couple of decades ago. Most of them never got past it, and the misery is all to evident when they speak about it even today. When I was down at the AAUW convention in Florida recently there were three women there who fit this description. While talking to them about their experiences a little voice in the back of my head was saying "is this the way I want to be in 20 years? feeling like my entire life has been ruined by something that happened 25 years ago?".
For the past several months I've been moving on in my life in many different ways, and meeting those women in Florida made me realize that I needed to stay the course towards change. Bad things happen all the time to good people, but it is how you live your life in response to hardships that makes or breaks you. I haven't completed my metamorphosis yet, and there is still some unfinished business that needs to be taken care of, but for the most part I am well on my way. In 20 years I don't want the loss of my physics career to be a central theme in my life. I don't even want it to be a central theme now...enough emotional and physical energy has been spent on that topic, and it is time to move on.
9:21:19 PM
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Thursday, May 08, 2008
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Kay Weber has declared today "Blog Awareness Day" in honor of a blog I recently talked about here.
I additionally suggest that May 8th should be Free Speech Awareness Day. People need to speak out about their right to free speech, especially women who have suffered discrimination and harassment in the workplace. When the American Physical Society can get all documents sealed in a discrimination lawsuit by pointing to tame blog entries as the need for the gag, there is something very wrong. Especially when those blog entries were the only evidence put forth as the "need" for the gag, and then the judge subsequently ruled in the partial gag order that the Plaintiff is free under the first amendment to continue blogging!
To sum up, the APS managed to somehow get a gag order judgement based on public statements the Plaintiff made that have subsequently been ruled as protected by the first amendment. The APS managed to convince the judge that the Plaintiff might publicly say something that wouldn't be protected by the first amendment, merely because she was publicly mentioning her lawsuit in the first place.
Women, if you are fighting or have fought a discrimination lawsuit (or know someone who has), say something about it to someone today. Share your experiences. Exercise your right to free speech.
Before someone tries to take it away from you.
2:54:47 PM
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I came across a very recent gender discrimination lawsuit against the American Physical Society in PACER today.
What is really interesting about this particular lawsuit is that a partial gag order was issued, such that the Plaintiff's original complaint and the Defendant's response to the complaint are not available in PACER. This pretty much never happens. It would seem that some pretty wild and lurid stuff apparently went on at the APS office that ultimately resulted in the lawsuit.
The APS demanded a gag order by pointing to blog articles written by the Plaintiff and saying they were "malicious". You can see their motion for a gag order here, and the blog entries they submitted as an Exhbit to their motion. Interestingly, the blog entries are very tame stuff, and the entries that talk about the APS do so for the most part only very generally. Taken by themselves, it is extremely odd that they would be grounds for a gag order because the blog entries give very few actual details of the events that led to the lawsuit. The APS was clearly fearful of the prospect of the Plaintiff potentially talking in more depth about what happened to her.
The judge granted only a partial gag...everything collected during discovery in the case will be confidential, and it also appears the original complaint and response have also being made confidential. The Plaintiff however is free to continue blogging. As she should be...she has a first amendment right to state her feelings about her employment at APS.
It always amazes me how freaking scared people in the sciences are of women who find their voice. Even when what those women say is very moderate compared to what they could be saying while still being protected by the first amendment.
2:04:47 PM
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I came across this blog today. The author appears to be suing the American Physical Society. Females in the sciences blogging about their discrimination lawsuits appears to be a new trend.
I believe everything she says about the APS. I have been less than impressed with this society in the past. They host the Women in Physics (WIPHYS) online bulletin board, which in my experience is ruthlessly moderated. The bulletin board pretty much sticks to posting new job openings, which could be easily found elsewhere on the APS website. Take a look at their archived posts and marvel at the fact that virtually none of them talk about gender issues in any form whatsoever (despite the stated mission of the bulletin board).
Oh, and the reporter that I mentioned a couple of posts back who managed to completely piss me off a couple of days ago...he was from the APS.
Go APS! Proudly not serving the women of the physics community for over 100 years!
This new blogging trend is great. When I first started this blog, it was literally the only one of its kind in the blog-o-sphere. Even today when people do Google searches related to Title IX, Title VII, or EEOC my blog comes up right near the top of the list. Very few people blog about the machinations of going through a lawsuit...even fewer blog about the general topic of gender discrimination in academia and its legal aspects. The more people who do it, the better. It gives a voice to a very lonely struggle, and it lets other people in similar situations know that they are not alone. Isn't technology a wonderful thing?
9:39:07 AM
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Wednesday, May 07, 2008
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Several little birds forwarded on news to me recently that Fermilab is holding luncheons once a week for the next three weeks for female scientists at the lab to come and talk about their "experiences at Fermilab" (the women have to bring their own lunches, in case you were wondering).
Wow. "feel good" meetings. That will fix everything! That will be way better than, for instance, actually making the conference allocation process more transparent and democratic...even though changing the conference allocation process would be trivial, free, and take less time than the luncheons...
I am sure the lunch meetings will be really productive and everyone will feel free to express their views in an open and inviting atmosphere. Like the time in recent history where the lab individually interviewed its female employees; the lab said they were thinking of asking the American Physical Society to do an onsite review of the climate for women at the lab, but they wanted to know what the women were going to say to the APS first. What blew me away is that the lab actually told the women this. They didn't even try to be subtle about it.
I am so freaking tired of Fermilab and its games.
8:35:21 PM
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I am officially tired of being contacted by reporters about the preprint. The requests for interviews are getting more and more narrowed on minutiae and idiotic. Hello...stop looking at the moss on one tree with a magnifying glass and look at the freaking forest. Increasingly people are missing the point that the real story here is that Fermilab and the Department of Energy have not investigated the complaint after two freaking years. The haven't dismissed the complaint, they simply have not deigned to investigate. And the changes needed to fix the problem are utterly trivial, free, and in no way would impede the physics output of the lab. Even if some might have some doubt about the analysis, why wouldn't the lab take the safe route and change the conference allocation procedure to be more transparent and democratic? What are they afraid of?
How's that for an issue that deserves some serious investigational reporting.
8:02:09 PM
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I came across this today...a commentary on the Wenneras and Wold article. Interesting how virtually the same things were said about them as have been said about me. Being confronted with hard data appears to be very threatening to some people...they end up doing screwball "meta-analyses", filling in for the fact that they don't have the data by picking numbers out of the air (and then, not surprisingly, coming to the conclusion that the original analysis is flawed).
There have been a couple of similar bizarre "meta analyses" done with my analysis. What is disturbing is that at least one of them has been pointed to as an "alternate analysis of [my] data". Umm, yeah right...neither of those people had my data. They picked numbers out of the air. And the patriarchy finds their made up numbers much more believable than my analysis. Because it is so much more comforting to believe a made up analysis that concludes my analysis is flawed than actually concede that something might be wrong and make the simple changes that would fix the frigging problem.
Speaking of numbers being picked out of the air; the Dzero administrators are quoted in the Nature article as saying that they checked the conference allocations over the past year and found that 10% had been allocated to women. And then said that the experiment was 10% female, so everything looked fine.
Odd. When I was collaborating on the experiment it was almost 15% female. I checked the demographics today using their online public photo gallery of collaborators and discovered that the experiment is currently 14.3% female. So, by their own analysis, women are getting screwed out of around 30% of their fair share of talks. They didn't break the numbers down by seniority, so for all we know the female postdocs are as bad off as they were when I did the original analysis.
9:50:26 AM
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Monday, May 05, 2008
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I was going to spend my summer taking some necessary courses to get my licensure to teach high school math and physics. But then the university cancelled all three courses I was going to take at the last minute. Suddenly I have a whole lot of free time on my hands.
So, what better way to spend time than by tackling the never ending supply of home rehabbing projects our Victorian house affords. Last year I spent part of the summer rehabbing the Worst Window In The House (see the window painted white in the picture below). It is in our guest bedroom and it was all dry rotted, loose in its frame, etc etc. I managed to fully rehab it (it works great now and is very weather tight) but also busted my left pinky knuckle in the process while removing trim with a crowbar. I now have a condition called Boxer's Knuckle, and it still hurts. I need surgery to fix it. Because of that I have come to fear the guest bedroom because rehabbing the other two windows in there (which are in similar condition) will also involve crowbar work. In addition to the windows, the guest bedroom has a whole slew of other problems:
- It has nasty ugly brown vinyl wallpaper (the kind that has a wierd soft bubbly surface). The wallpaper only goes about 3/4 of the way up the wall (why, I don't know), and is edged by an equally hideous paisley border. The wallpaper isn't coming down without a serious fight. Except for the parts where it already started to come down by itself....necessitating the need to remove it all...
- The trim apparently used to be painted Absinthe Green many decades ago. Then someone about 30 years ago painted it the blue colour you see in the pictures. What the pictures do not show very well is that the blue paint is chipped all over and the Absinthe Green is showing through in lots of places. I hate the blue color of the trim (and hate even more the Absinthe Green showing through), but to repaint is going to be a serious hassle because there are already too many coats of paint on the trim. And at least some of those coats of paint are guaranteed to be lead based.
- All the 1/4 round baseboard trim is missing.
- Not shown is the light fixture, which was all too obviously added in the 1970's.
- The bedroom has become a dumping ground for all the family's junk. Every time someone doesn't know where to put something, they put it on the bed in there. You can no longer see the surface of the bed. I quake at the thought of having to sort through a year of everyone's "I don't know where else to put it" stuff.
- And don't even get me started on the topic of surface wiring in that room...
We have a bunch of family coming for the May long weekend, so I timorously ventured into the guest bedroom today to survey the problem(s) because we will need that room...so far we have been making do with a sleeper couch in one of our parlors when guests come to visit, but there are too many people coming in a few weeks for that to work this time around.
So, as you can see, I spent the day documenting the problem. And now writing about it. Progress has been made.
I guess if worst comes to worst, all I need to do in the next few weeks is clean off the bed. The thing that bugs me though is that room is 16'x18' with three huge windows and it could be absolutely stunning. After several hundred hours of work that is. I have got to get over my fear of using the freaking crowbar...
3:41:44 PM
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New Scientist has asked me to write an article for them describing my reasons for doing the statistical study of the conference allocations at Fermilab, and describing my feelings about the response the study has gotten.
It was interesting to get a chance to write about both. The preprint doesn't give the background behind the study, and except on this blog I haven't publicly spoken about my feelings about the study, and especially about the responses it has received.
I was at a party yesterday where roughly 20% of the people were particle physicists and they all had either read my study or knew about it. None of them had known I had ever done the study up until now (which was my main reason for releasing it...people should know when they are working under a system that is prone to bias). One of my friends asked what I thought of the commentary left on the Nature article. I said that, to be honest, I am dismayed at the extremist responses the study has engendered. I never expected the preprint to get this kind of publicity, and I am not sure it is good for the field. There may be some good that comes out of it (for instance, new particle physics experiments trying to avoid administrative systems that are ripe for endemic bias), but there has been a whole lot of bad that has come out of it; the commentary left on the Nature article and the Chronicle of Higher Ed article is a terrible advertisement for STEM as a career, whether you are male or female. Also, it is a terrible advertisement as to what happens to, or is said about, people who dare to do studies like mine. And I don't think the commentary is going to raise anyone's awareness enough to make it any easier for the next person who does a study like mine. I read the commentary and it literally makes me wince.
I don't know what the "right" amount of publicity is for something like my preprint. Obviously I released it because I wanted particle physicists at Fermilab to be aware of the problem. I don't know how much publicity would have struck a good balance between particle physicists knowing about the study, and a media circus that is painful to witness.
Things have calmed down considerably at Casa Absinthe as far as e-mails and phone calls, etc, but the last couple of weeks have been a rocky ride. But, if I had to do it all over again, I would have released the pre-print last month. There is no "good time" that it could have been done. Also, as my husband has pointed out, it would have been something that would have always bothered me if I had never released it.
So, despite the media circus, I am glad that it is out there. If the extremist commentary has done damage to the field by discouraging young people from pursuing physics, it isn't my fault, because the commentary thread just reflects the sorry state of the field. I didn't write the commentary, other people did.
Still, I hope other people have not been scared away from doing studies such as mine. There is a lot of similar data out there at other experiments just waiting to be analyzed and it would be really interesting if a trend started where people in the field started doing studies like this on a regular basis. If they haven't been scared off that is.
2:45:12 PM
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
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The dirt comment thread was posted off of http://www.darwincentral.org. If you want to see other stuff RWP writes, just search for it on that website (see http://forum.darwincentral.org/search.php)
My husband took a look at the website's stated mission, and then took a look at various commentary on the site (much of which has nothing whatsoever to do with the websites stated mission actually). My husband's comment was "it looks like a bunch of atheist right wing nutjobs mostly slamming religious right wing nutjobs, and god help you if you aren't either and you get caught in their cross-fire...because they probably all have guns".
For the next while I'll be Googling myself a few times a day just to make sure nothing comes up that shouldn't. People who have contacted me about this are probably correct that the person who sent the mail is not so much dangerous as a complete whacko with a penchant for personal cyber-harassment.
It bugs me that this kind of crap is exactly why women don't speak out more. I guess I could not write about it on this blog and leave everyone believing that everything has been rosy in the wake of the Nature article, but there is something to be said here in how this has played out that really underlines why women usually keep silent. If nothing else, even much of the commentary that was left on the Nature article is demoralizing (and also the commentary left on the Chronicle of Higher Education article that followed it). Young people are reading that, and the arguments back and forth aren't exactly a great advertisement for careers in physics (not that my paper was either, but I never in a million years thought it would get this much attention).
It's been a tiring week...
9:30:26 PM
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Some background on the dirt post of yesterday; yesterday I logged into the email account associated with this blog and found an e-mail from a person who didn't give their name (they just identified themselves as a "friend of RWP"), and said that they had come across some dirt I might be interested in....then they had my home address and the names of my husband and children. The e-mail address was of the canonically-completely-obscure hotmail type.
My first reaction was
- shock that someone had my home address and the names of my husband and kids,
- puzzlement as to what in the hell the person meant by ''dirt'' I might be interested in,
- and further puzzlement as to who in the hell RWP is.
I Googled the hotmail e-mail address and nothing came up. So then I checked the list of recent referring URL's to the blog and found a whole slew of hits coming from an internet chat site (see http://forum.darwincentral.org/search.php and search for my name). Checking out the chat site revealed that "RWP" had posted an item saying that he was intending to "have all the dirt I can drag up on her" (referring to me). It turns out RWP is the pseudonym of the person who has recently been declaring me a lunatic far and wide.
This is scary...the tone is hostile of the various people participating on that chat site. I did some Googling and couldn't find my address and the names of my husband and kids posted in tidy format anywhere on the web. The "friend of RWP" might have gotten them from one of the many news articles written about my lawsuit. And my address doesn't exactly take a genius to figure out.
Unfortunately, this isn't the first problem I've had with people who claim to be "friends" of the man behind the RWP pseudonym (it might in fact probably be just one person). Several months ago I had a spate of e-mails sent again from canonically-completely-obscure hotmail accounts (different from the hotmail account of yesterday). What was rather unique was that someone (or someones...but I kind of suspect it is likely just one person even though multiple accounts were involved) had taken the time to set up a cron job to send e-mails every few hours. And they weren't nice e-mails. So I tightened my e-mail filter, but soon after the person changed the name of the hotmail account to a different equally obscure one, and the automated nasty e-mails started again. More tightening of the filter eventually made the person give up.
What is unsettling is that someone actually took the time to set up a cron job to do this; I know what is involved in doing such a thing, and it is non-trivial. It was no ordinary knee-jerk-reaction-whacko who set up the cron jobs. It is somewhat less non-trivial to do it from a Unix based platform, but given that the e-mails appeared to be coming from hotmail accounts, that probably rules out Unix. And I say "appeared to be coming from hotmail accounts" because it is actually not that hard to make an e-mail appear to come from a particular address when it actually isn't. If the e-mails had gone to my university account instead of the hotmail account associated with this blog, the university would be able to verify the true source of the e-mail. And since the university has strict guidelines they follow in cyber-harassment cases, they would actually investigate the problem on my behalf. The person who wrote me yesterday was smart enough to send the email to my blog hotmail account rather than my university account. Unless a direct threat is involved, there is no grounds for me to get anyone to trace the real name behind the hotmail address that sent the mail to the blog hotmail account. But the somewhat-less-than-subtle threat of yesterday would probably have the university contacting the police if it had been sent to my university account instead.
I kept all the cron job e-mails, and the one from yesterday (update April 30th: and another one today), and another from RWP himself where he said that he pities me because he thinks I'm "vulnerable". I also made a copy of the html of the chat comment thread that apparently inspired the message of yesterday. And I also made a copy of the other comment thread on that chat site where RWP promises to buy anyone a drink for every instance in which anyone can "piss [insert my name here] off", and that he'd like to go bankrupt doing so. I wonder what he buys people when they scare the bejeezus out of me by threatening my kids? Or does that fall under his category of merely pissing me off?
So far it appears the "friend" person did not post the ''dirt'' they had found on the internet chat site, nor did I find it anywhere else on the web. I'll be checking regularly for a while though because posting of such information, especially in the format given in the e-mail, and especially if it is on a web-site where people are talking about me with open hostility, tickles the line of felony. Any reasonable person would have cause to fear for their kids in the situation I am now finding myself.
I don't know if the "friend" of RWP is in fact RWP himself. Part of me suspects not actually...I suspect the "friend" who sent the e-mail yesterday is the same "friend" who set up the cron jobs several months ago, and the computing savvy needed to set up cron jobs like that is beyond the capabilities of the average senior professor in the sciences (except maybe computer science). But maybe I'm wrong. Either way, the man and the people he apparently associates with are now scaring the hell out of me. This is no ordinary bunch of whackos.
I was actually braced for the cron job person to return to his antics (and yes, I assume it was a "him") after the Nature article ran, and I was somewhat worried that my university e-mail account would be targeted (it wouldn't be hard to make an account I use for work quickly inoperable if cyber-dump-truck-loads of automated e-mail was coming in). And I was braced for a spate of nasty e-mail to all my various e-mail accounts from whomever, not just RWP and his associates. But actually all the e-mail I have gotten so far is overwhelmingly supportive. This one e-mail is the only bad one yet.
But that one e-mail alone is more than equal to the weight of ten thousand generically-nasty emails.
4:07:51 PM
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Monday, April 28, 2008
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I discovered today that the person who has been proclaiming me a "lunatic" far and wide for daring to ask why our labs aren't Title IX compliant has stated that it his mission to make sure that if I testify before Congress, the committee will (and I quote) "have all the dirt I can drag up on her"
I am not going to even link to that crap here. If you want to find the comment, some trivial Google'ing with my name and the above comment will lead you to it.
Dirt??? I am a 40 year old woman with two kids, a husband of 16 years, two dogs, a cat, a guinea pig, a mortgage on a historic house that we are rehabbing, and two getting-older-all-the-time cars. I have a PhD in physics and 6 years postdoctoral experience, during which time I amassed a nice research and publication record. I'm now pursuing a master's degree in statistics and also getting my licensure to teach high school math and physics. I have a garden. My other main hobby is knitting. I've gone to a few knitting conventions. I jog and do yoga. I make the occasional quilt. I do stained glass. I donate my services as a statistical consultant to local school boards in communities where we have lived. I had skin cancer surgery a year ago. I regularly attend church. I've got a wonderful large extended family. I've got a wonderful large circle of very dear friends. I've had my driver's license for over two decades; I got a speeding ticket once 10 years ago. I've never been divorced. Both of my kids were born in wedlock (my eldest was born just after our 6th anniversary). I read voraciously and have wildly varied tastes in literature. I study epidemiology for fun. I am adult/child/infant CPR certified. I play Scramble and Scrabble online with my family and friends at least a couple of evenings a week. I donate my services as a judge at local and state science fairs. I don't tutor for money anymore (I used to do it as a side job as a graduate student) but I still do free tutoring in math for kids from low-income families. I like to drink tea. In fact I like to drink a lot of tea. I rarely drink anything else. I've got a soft spot for all stray/unwanted/abused animals. I've got a soft spot for anyone in need. I tuck my kids in every night and kiss them goodnight. Very occasionally I watch TV. I sometimes listen to the radio. I read the newspaper regularly.
Very, very sordid stuff. Well, maybe only to a freaking lunatic who gets his jollies out of digging up ''dirt'' on people.
The depth and the viciousness of the Hatred is truly astonishing; no wonder women in physics are afraid to open their mouths to complain. Do a statistical study of gender inequity and you'll have extremist whackos stalking you.
9:27:59 PM
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As a particle physicist I used to travel a lot. Apparently not as much as I thought though. My fraction of world countries visited is only 3% (note that I didn't include here countries I've changed airplanes in...it would roughly double the number I've "visited")
I need to work on getting more travelled.
create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands
7:00:19 PM
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As mentioned in a previous post, there is at least one person in the blog-o-sphere who has expressed disbelief that the data that I used to perform the Fermilab study exist.
Note that if the data did not exist in public databases, that would have been the first thing Fermilab would have complained about to Nature. Fermilab and the administrators of my former experiment did not deny that the data exist.
I was contacted by someone today who doesn't a priori deny that such data exist, but has expressed some skepticism in the analysis until he actually looks at the dis-aggregated data set himself. I should note here that I have found his commentary on the paper thoughtful, and it is obvious he actually read it thoroughly. He also asked me very politely for my data.
The problem in responding to his request for my data is that the US has very stringent ethics laws when it comes to the study of human subjects. Every university or research institution that studies human subjects has to have an Institutional Review Board. Every analysis must be vetted by this board. In my case, the analysis is exempt from having to get permission from people to study them because the data was publicly available. However, I have to abide by other IRB rules, which means that the published analysis has to be aggregate.
I told him this (as a physicist, and particularly a physicist in Canada, he is unlikely to know about US laws regarding human subject research and IRB's). I also told him that the URL's to the public databases used are all in the paper so anyone who is so inclined could repeat the analysis.
I do find it interesting that the reaction of a few to this study is that they are skeptical of the analysis until they see the full data set themselves. Why should this kind of analysis come under such scrutiny or skepticism compared to any other analysis that involves human subjects? Literally thousands of analyses involving human subjects (everything from sociological studies to drug trials) are published each year. Indeed, I spent a year working on a study of post-surgical cognitive decline in the elderly, and in that case the data was so sensitive that even the people analyzing the data did not know the names of the patients involved in the study. When the data analysis was written up and sent off to be peer reviewed, the peer reviewers never asked us for the names of the patients, nor did they ask to see the dis-aggregated data.
I also have many, many physics publications to my name. Not in a single instance during peer review was I ever asked for dis-aggregated physics data.
There is a certain amount of trust in the scientific and ethical integrity of researchers that is involved in the peer review process. It is true that anyone can make up or fudge data; peer review is supposed to detect such unethical behaviour. Peer review does not involve members of the general public asking for your data. Peer review is anonymous, and experts from the field in question are chosen by the journal to review the analysis in question.
This analysis has not yet been peer reviewed, but I do not understand why that means that my scientific integrity is any less credible than that of any other researcher who releases their paper as a preprint prior to peer review. arXiv.org is a preprint server. Lots and lots of people release preprints there every day. Are the ethical standards of people who do gender equity studies a priori lower than that of someone doing any other kind of research? People have stated that because such analyses are so "controversial" they must bear intense scrutiny. Why are they more controversial than any other research subject? You form your null hypothesis, collect the data, and then test the null. As described before, the null hypothesis was developed before I looked at the data. This is scientific research just like any other, and the same code of ethics applies.
I am not saying that the person who asked me for my data is necessarily questioning my scientific integrity (actually, he has assured me he is not...he really has been very polite), but it certainly is very, very odd to have someone express some skepticism of your analysis until they see the dis-aggregated data themselves. It does, in my opinion, subtly imply at least a little bit that perhaps I have either fudged the data or manipulated it in some unethical way.
I can say one thing...in all the gender equity studies I've done, finding gender inequity is unfortunately as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. It is very, very depressing that this is the case, and I actually had to make a New Year's resolution to myself that this year I would take a break from doing such studies. If I were inclined to fudge data to make sensational claims of gender discrimination, you can be sure I would have come up with something much more impressive than a sample of 57 people, and if I was really unethical I would claim that none of the women went on to faculty positions. As it was, all I had was 57 people, 9 of whom were female, and my statistical analysis had to be robust enough to take into account the relatively small sample size. Reality is that with the 9 females and 48 males I was able to show using the binomial model that the probability of career advancement was significantly correlated conference allocations. The null hypothesis that it was not correlated to conference allocations was rejected at p<0.10. And this was while simultaneously taking into account socialization of the researchers (the p value is much more significant if you just take conference presentations alone). If I was unethical, I would have regressed on those variables separately, and my p values would have been even more significant than p<0.10 (and it would probably pass peer review, by the way, even though it would be somewhat fudging the analysis to do it that way) .
The fact that I then performed an example of what we would expect if the females were not discriminated against as far as conference allocations go (and got that 6 females instead of 4 were predicted to have gone on to faculty positions) is separate from the significance test that comes from the binomial model analysis. The statement that conference allocations significantly impact the career advancement of females is based on the parameters of the binomial model. A p-value is a p-value. Maybe different people have different ideas of what "significant" means to them, but I think a p-value of less than 0.1 testing the null is significant. For some detractors of this paper it is clear that even if the p-value was 0.00000001 they would never believe the analysis.
Reality is also that even if you want to ignore productivity as measured by internal publications, males still get significantly more conference presentations. The paper mentions this, but some people seem to have conveniently ignored that part. Some people have even made bizarre assertions that the females have more internal publications than males not because they are more productive, but because
- the females like publishing more than males. What? suddenly publications aren't a good measure of productivity because some people might like publishing more than others, apparently supposedly though they have less to talk about than the people who aren't publishing?. Also, why would a preference for producing publications be a thing that females would do more than males? Under the null hypothesis of the paper, which is gender parity, males and females "like" to publish just as much. The paper does not test a thousand different null hypotheses. The paper tests the null hypothesis of gender parity.
- or, the 24 males in the sample who were less productive than the females actually weren't postdoctoral researchers at all, but instead technicians. Again, what? I said all 57 people were postdoctoral researchers. That means that they were all postdoctoral researchers. The implication that I included a whole slew of males who in fact were just technicians instead of postdocs subtly implies that I am fudging data.
- or, that females were simply added to the author list of internal publications just to be politically correct (ie; the implication being here that the women did not actually do anything to deserve to be on those author lists). Again, under the null hypothesis being tested in this paper, which is gender parity, that doesn't occur. The most unreasonable of the detractors to this paper seem to have the null hypothesis that gender inequity is occuring, but it is actually the men who are being screwed over by some sort of affirmative action...thus they will only look at the analysis from that angle and pick it apart as such.
I do appreciate thoughtful commentary from people on the analysis. And I am happy Massimo has taken a keen interest in it. I have always appreciated input on any analysis. In fact, I sent this particular paper last year to a senior male physics colleague who I knew to be completely disinterested in gender equity issues (but who I knew respected me very much for my scientific abilities). He gave a great set of very tough comments on the paper, and it was vastly improved because of his input.
Certainly Massimo's comments have made me realize that the paper needs a little bit more clarification to aid non-statisticians in understanding the analysis. The paper will ultimately be stronger because of Massimo's input.
2:19:24 PM
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Sunday, April 27, 2008
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I'm back tonight from a perfectly lovely weekend down in Florida attending the AAUW convention there. I was one of their featured speakers and I got to talk about Title IX and our national laboratories...a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
All other professional conferences I have attended have been physics conferences, and they are totally male dominated. There is also an air of competition permeating these conferences because they are a place where experiments release new results. And often various experiments are in keen competition to be the first to release a particular result. I've heard some conferences referred to as "a big pissing match" (a rather male analogy if there ever was one). I remember being at a conference in the 1990's when I was still a graduate student and the first top quark observations had been made by the CDF and Dzero experiments at Fermilab (at the time I was collaborating on an experiment in Europe). I recall groups of physicists from the two experiments actually being openly hostile (apparently there were hard feelings because one experiment had to hold its results for a week or two while the other experiment completed its analysis such that the two analyses could be unveiled simultaneously). I remember being appalled at seeing such open hostilities during a professional meeting. And then I went and did a postdoc at Fermilab....in hindsight, what a dumb thing to do...
There was no sense of competition at the AAUW convention. Just warm welcome. And wonderful conversations with people who were perfect strangers (at least at the beginning of the convention...by the second day I had met most of the people there and knew many by name). I was approached by many people who started up warm friendly conversations with me. I can tell you that this never happens at a physics conference; if you don't know someone, they don't come up and start a friendly conversation with you. I don't want to generalize too much, but I've been to a lot of physics conferences, and I have repeatedly noted that people really do not mingle. If you don't have friends at the conference with you, it is pretty dreary. And it isn't just me who has noted this about physics conferences.
I had a wonderful time down in Florida, and I enjoyed being at a conference for once in my life that was not male dominated, and was overwhelmingly welcoming and friendly. I cannot say enough good things about AAUW as an organization, and their members as individuals. I am so grateful for their support, and I was honored to be a part of their recent convention.
10:23:16 PM
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Friday, April 25, 2008
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The attention my recent paper has gotten has taken me completely by surprise. I had released it out of frustration with the reluctance of the Department of Energy Office of Civil Rights to investigate my complaint that Fermilab is not in compliance with Title IX.
The response to the paper has been overwhelmingly postive. It is interesting that I have heard from women on three different experiments who told me that they had noticed similar gender inequities in the conference allocations at their experiments.
But then there is the response from the fringe, and some of it is truly hateful (and not just towards me, towards women scientists in general). And it is obvious that most of these people didn't even bother to read the paper. Some call me a harpy, a raving lunatic (literally), and some have even questioned that the data even exists; which begs the question what does "public internet database" mean to them? the URL's for those databases are all in the paper. But of course they would have known that if they had actually read it.
But they don't want to read the paper. They want to spew bile and even hatred.
People who don't know me have questioned my scientific integrity. Apparently the fact that I am pursuing a completely unrelated discrimination lawsuit means that I am a priori unbelievable. There appear to be people out there who think that all gender discrimination lawsuits are frivolous. And if you are a woman and you complain more than once about discrimination you observe around you, you are, by definition, a shrill harpy.
It apparently hasn't dawned on these people that I have nothing to gain from trying to ensure that Fermilab becomes Title IX compliant (as it is beholden to do under federal law). Even if I was so inclined, I cannot sue the lab because I no longer do research there. My complaint is to benefit the women who are still at the lab, and the women who will be there in the future (ie; potentially my daughters and your daughters). I lodged the complaint while I was still a collaborator at the lab, and thus I have the right to pursue it through the proper complaint channels (ie; the Department of Energy Office of Civil Rights). Which is what I am doing.
It was only after the Department of Energy Office of Civil Rights made it clear last week that they had no intention of investigating the complaint that I released the paper. More astute readers will note that the paper was written a year ago; I sat on the paper for a year. I knew the complaint process with the DoE OCR would go more smoothly if it was unimpeded by influences from the outside world.
I merely wanted the problem fixed, because it is a very simple matter for my old experiment to change their conference allocation procedures to a much more transparent and democratic process. It is a simple fix that would take less than a day to arrange, and wouldn't cost them a dime. Why wouldn't they want to make this fix? My intention was certainly not to embarass the people on my old experiment. I have many friends on that experiment, some of whom have served in administrative roles. All I wanted was for the problem to be fixed, and I was very aware that publicly releasing a paper describing the study would likely cement Fermilab into their position of non-compliance.
But in the end, with very few options left, I released the paper. By publicly pointing out the inherent gender inequity problems in the traditional particle physics administrative schema, I have a lot to lose. Hate mail from people, harassment, etc.
Some people have accused me of mistakingly seeing gender inequity wherever I look because supposedly I am inherently biased to do so. I didn't examine the databases of my old experiment randomly looking for cases of gender inequity. I was inspired to do the study by a previous survey I had performed in collaboration with a sociologist to try to determine why people (both male and female) leave academic physics. The survey asked a lot of background questions (like age, gender, how often people were asked to peer review journal articles, how many conference presentations they were allocated, whether they thought their boss actively fostered their career, whether they had served in administrative roles on their experiment, etc, etc, etc). One of the surprising results from the survey (which had 300 respondents) was that females reported getting on average half the conference presentations compared to their male peers. The result was shocking in its statistical significance, and I thought at first this might be some strange survey bias (ie; I didn't automatically assume it was true...the differences between conference allocations to the males and females were so large that I found it almost unbelievable that such gross gender discrimination could be occuring).
But then I realized I could use the public databases of my experiment to check the results. And the best thing was that using those databases meant that the results would be free of survey bias. And the databases were public. Anyone could confirm the results of the study.
A sociologist I consulted with told me that in the study I had to determine if a) the women deserved to get conference talks, and b) if a dearth of conference talks impeded career advancement prospects. The database study showed that the males indeed got significantly more talks than the females even without taking into account any kind of productivity measure that determined who potentially deserved to get conference talks, but my sociologist friend was correct that the study would be more rigorous by taking publications into account.
I don't look for gender discrimination. The unfortunate thing is that if you even take a sideways glance at peripheral issues (like reasons people have for leaving academia), gender inequity jumps out at you. And that wasn't the only result out of the original survey that showed gender inequities; women were far less likely than their male peers to be asked to peer review journal articles. And this was true even when corrected for seniority. I have no idea how to confirm that result in a way that is independent of a survey, because physics journals do not have to make public their records of who they ask to peer referee articles.
Do shrill harpies, raving lunatics, and/or people with no scientific integrity critically look at their survey data (which is potentially prone to survey bias), then try to find independent ways to confirm or disprove the results of those intial studies in a way that is not prone to survey bias? Is cross-checking a result that seems at first too egregious to be true the sign of an unbalanced mind?
But why even point this stuff out. The people who refer to me as a harpy, a raving lunatic, or whatever, are surely not going to be swayed by any kind of reasoned arguement. All they do is Hate.
9:50:53 AM
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Wednesday, April 23, 2008
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Monday, April 21, 2008
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Today I serendipitously found all those really old posts that RadioUserland had "disappeared" for some reason. They were the original posts written in this blog, and included descriptions of Title VII, Title IX, a discussion of the pros and cons of suing if you've been discriminated against, etc.
Even though they weren't in RadioUserlands cache, I discovered they were still in my local cache, such that I could view them in the editor. So I tried viewing them in the editor and re-posting them. It looks like it worked.
Now at least the links in the right hand navigation bar will work again...
9:51:10 PM
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I just came across this at Kay Weber's website. It is her supervisor's response to Kay's grievance that she filed in early 2004. The subject of the e-mail from her supervisor to the Fermilab Equity Office is "Response to Grievance Letter". He had been asked to come up with an "action plan" in response to Kay's grievance.
The letter then simply states that he had requested permission from the DoE to layoff Kay, and that someone named Kay V. was in agreement with this "action plan" to respond to Kay's grievance.
Holy crap. I mean...holy crap. That e-mail alone just floors me (forget about the rest of the horrific details of her case for the moment). The email says, in no uncertain terms, that the plan they had to respond to Kay's grievance was to lay her off.
For those readers who haven't been following along closely enough, Kay used to be a senior engineer at Fermilab. She got condoms and jockstraps in her mailbox. When she complained about it, she got demoted. She complained about the demotion, and further harassment and discriminatory crap that went on, and she got demoted again. She complained again, demoted again, and so on and so forth. Until Fermilab came up with the brilliant "action plan" outlined in the e-mail above. Kay was in fact ultimately fired, and that is why our tax money is currently being spent in great quantities to defend Fermilab in the Katharine Weber v Fermilab lawsuit.
9:26:00 AM
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Sunday, April 20, 2008
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I came across this today. It says that my recent paper can be used as a roadmap that tells postdocs (either male of female) how to "play the system" to ensure career success.
It's an interesting way to look at the paper. But you can't necessarily "play the system" when things like conference allocations are important and junior researchers have absolutely no control over whether or not they are allocated a conference presentation.
12:10:21 PM
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© Copyright 2008 Absinthe.
Last update: 5/16/2008; 8:59:56 PM.
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