Absinthe
Living my life as an exclamation, not an explanation...
It should be noted by readers that Absinthe is not a lawyer,
and anything posted in this blog should not be used as a
substitute for professional advice from a lawyer
When I worked at Fermilab I knew too many unhappy women. I mean some of them were really, really unhappy. Unhappy because of subtle or not-so-subtle discrimination they were having to deal with on a continual basis, or the not-so-subtle discrimination they had to watch their female colleagues deal with, while they had to watch silently from the sidelines because they knew that speaking up about it would just make them a target.
It should be noted here that I don't think every single woman at Fermilab is unhappy, and I certainly don't think every single woman at Fermilab has been a victim of discrimination. I'm just saying that I knew way, way too many women there who had been discriminated against for my tastes.
There was a monthly Fermilab women's luncheon that was meant to bring the women at the lab together to form some sort of support structure. But when I used to attend these regularly I noticed that talking about actual specifics of workplace misery was verboten. The conversation was almost universally kept to much more genteel topics.
There is a strongly ingrained culture of not talking about the 800 pound gender-discrimination gorilla that some females know to be stomping around the lab. Because of the culture of silence, the scope of the unhappiness of my female colleagues took even me by surprise when some of them privately approached me after I was fired to share their own stories. Especially the women with kids. I mean, you would not believe the crap some of these women have gone through. And yet they suck it up, put their game face on, and try to move along in their career. And their game face was so convincing that even someone like me was completely unaware of the crap they had gone through.
And the reason they suck it up and put their game face on and never complain is because they know the consequences of complaining. In fact, now more than ever they are acutely aware of the consequences after they saw me being blackballed from the field after I complained to my university about the things that happened to me after my baby was born (I cannot discuss the details of what happened to me in this blog because of the gender and family-status discrimination lawsuit I subsequently filed).
Now, if I never saw past the game face facade of these women, do you think the males, 95% of whom really don't give a crap about gender-issues in the sciences, are going to clue in to the silent suffering of their various female colleagues? Not.
For instance, when I started to speak out publicly about the plight of the women at the lab, senior physicists (even those who knew me for years, and held me in the highest professional regard) simply would not believe the problem at the lab for females was as bad as I was painting it to be. They accused me of exaggerating the situation, and/or of having a skewed view of the lab environment just because of what had happened to me.
They would even point out several specific examples, like "well, look at Jill Doe...she had a baby a couple of years ago and she didn't have any problems and seems happy". What they didn't know (and still don't know) is that "Jill Doe" had written me a letter upon my exit from the field describing a situation after she had her baby that was similar to mine. She never complained about it, sucked it up, and for fear of losing her career she didn't rock the boat (and so was able to move onwards in her career, although emotionally scarred by the whole experience).
I didn't blow Jill Doe's cover, since the letter Jill had written to me was private, but the point is that by not saying anything to anyone about her situation, the males at the lab thought Jill was "happy". And, as mentioned, there was more than one Jill Doe who talked to me about their situation, and more than one of them has been held up as an example of a female who is "happy" at the lab.
Oh yeah, and when I pointed out to her senior male colleagues that my survey of Fermilab physicists showed that over 60% of females with kids said they had experienced gender discrimination at the lab, the comments I got back were "well, everyone knows that females tend to complain more than males about things...it doesn't mean they were discriminated against" and "just because they think they were discriminated against doesn't mean they were discriminated against". I think the first comment was meant to be funny. Ha ha...ha.
Isn't the entire situation almost too screwed up for words to describe?
11:58:01 PM
I hate the new line of Subway commercials. For instance, the one where a woman is flying in the air like a superwoman saying "Look out world, here I come!". Then a light comes on below her illuminating her family sitting at the dinner table, and her husband says "Honey, where's dinner?". And then she deflates.
My daughter asked "why doesn't the Daddy make the dinner?".
That's my girl!
10:37:27 AM
Many people are not aware of how aggressively a national lab like Fermilab controls the information coming out of the lab to ensure that the work environment there is painted as a bunch of happy shiny physicists, all holding hands and working together harmoniously in an egalitarian and utopian work environment.
I've talked about this in a couple of blog postings, like my Quantum Diaries post, which describes how the lab runs a web site that hosts blogs of physicists based at the lab. As mentioned in that post, the lab makes sure that only happy posts are allowed by bloggers.
Another previous blog post regarding Fermilab and information control is this one here. Scroll down to the part where I talk about the female physicist with kids who was used as slave labor at the lab for years (literally), then was asked to frolic with her kids for a photo-op for Symmetry, the lab's magazine. The photo-op and associated story were meant to paint a picture of how "welcoming" and "nurturing" the lab is to women with children. Another case of the happy shiny people at the lab. Just don't scratch the shiny facade the lab shows the world...you'd be surprised at what you find under the surface.
Other examples of the information control at the lab can be found in the federal court filing of Katherine Weber v Fermilab...the lab put a trace on her computer. And I can verify that what she says in her court complaint is true; males at the lab put all manner of non-work-related crap on their web sites and the lab doesn't blink an eye. But if the lab is looking for an excuse to fire a woman because she has been rocking their white male boat by complaining about sexual harrassment, then they put a trace on her computer, and voila! off with her head! Yes, they literally fired her over it. Her case appears to be in the discovery process now, on its way to trial.
I have personal experience with traces on lab computers, and how they are sometimes used to keep the women at the lab in check; last year I posted a link to a news story about her lawsuit on my lab website. Within one hour the lab revoked my computing and internet privileges...permanently. It is stunning how closely the lab appears to monitor the activities of its women. It's like they are afraid the outside world might find out what really goes on sometimes at the lab.
Anyway, after many months of wrangling to get access to my computer files, Fermilab recently forked them over. What is even worse is that when we were going through that wrangling I pointed out to Fermilab that they were holding hostage my physics statistical analysis software package that was used by various physicists worldwide, and had been distributed as freeware off of my Fermilab site; they told me that they were finding someone else to take it over, and I had no right to the files as they were now lab property. I pointed out that I wasn't a Fermilab employee, and it was my intellectual property, developed on my time, and that development had started long before I came to Fermilab. They had no right to just steal the files and hand the package over to some guy at Fermilab to take credit for, just because I posted a link to a news article. Yet another fine example to add to the extensive annals of Absinthe, Fermilab, and theft of female IntellectualProperty
I can anticipate that some people are going to post comments here saying that if women are posting things on lab web sites that might violate lab policy, they should expect to get fired (or have their computer privileges revoked). However, under the law (ie; Title VII and Title IX) applying "lab official policy" regarding computer usage disproportionately to females vs the males is illegal (as an aside, from what I've read, "lab official policy" for computer usage doesn't include firing someone or permanently revoking their computing privileges at the first minor offence). As described in the Weber v Fermilab link above, and as I can attest, the written Fermilab internet and computing policies are applied way differently to males. Thus, Weber v Fermilab is an example of a Title VII "mixed motives" case.(that is of course assuming she did anything wrong with her computer in the first place, which she contests).
2:31:22 AM
Readers should not think that my experiences centered around the birth of my child when I was a postdoc are unique only to me.
Denial of the legal entitlement of 12 weeks of childbirth leave happens fairly frequently in particle physics, in the sense that most women are allowed to take at least a few weeks off but not much more than that. A "great" employer in physics is one who "lets" you take six whole weeks off after having a baby. An employer who actually lets you take your full legal entitlement is rare. And one who lets you take your full entitlement, and doesn't give you some kind of career grief over it afterwards is even rarer still.
In fact, in a 2004 survey given to physicists based at Fermilab (ie; most were not employed by Fermilab), I asked the females how much childbirth leave they felt they could take without suffering permanent damage to their career (except for the slight delay in their career path due to taking the leave). Females without kids thought they could probably take at most around 10 weeks of leave (in the event they decided to have a child), whereas females with kids on average felt that they could take at most between 6 to 8 weeks without suffering permanent career damage. Just to clarify: we are talking about permanent career damage over taking about half the length of legally entiltled childbirth leave. And note that the women with kids gave a shorter leave estimate than the women without. Which group do you think has more practial experience with how much childbirth leave you can actually take before you totally derail your career?
The lab environment to new mothers is not good; I noticed at the lab that my fellow co-workers (both male and childless female) would at times make pissy comments when a woman had a baby and took any kind of significant leave, or suffered any kind of hiccup in her productivity. Stuff like "she had her kid three weeks ago now, and noone has seen her in the [experiment] control room since" (yes, that is an actual quote, and no, it was not said as a joke).
It is perhaps no surprise that my 2004 survey of the physicists based at Fermilab showed that over 60% of females with kids said that they had experienced gender discrimination while based at the lab, whereas only 25% of women without kids said they had been discriminated against (although the 25% figure is hardly something the lab should be proud of either).
More on hostility-to-new-mothers-at-the-lab: one of my female colleagues was working with a large group of people on getting a paper ready for publication . It was an important paper for the experiment, and people were stressed out about it. The woman had a baby right around the time they wanted the paper to go to the journal. Despite the fact the group had known for months that she was going to have the baby, and despite the fact that there were at least a dozen other people working on the paper, a number of people in the group told her that if the paper didn't make it to the journal by the specified date, it was going to be her fault. So she took no childbirth leave because she was terrified that her career would be ruined if she were to be blamed for the paper not making it to publication. And the fact that she was unable to take childbirth leave cuts her to the core to this day.
It mystifies me as to why the lab environment is sometimes so hostile to new mothers. How and why are people threatened by a woman taking her legally entitled childbirth leave? Is it just another way that some males can work on ousting females from the field when the females are at their most vulnerable, and therefore unlikely to resist the onslaught?
Not all males who collaborate at Fermilab discriminate against new mothers or create a hostile enviroment for them. But enough of them do it (and do so unfettered by the lab) that it makes things pretty miserable for many women who have kids (like, apparently 60% of them).
