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
There was an enormous spike in traffic on this blog today. I've turned comments off for the moment because I've got a really bad feeling that an Invasion of Trolls might be about to descend on this blog (especially once the Nature article runs). Back in 2007 a particularly nasty pack of trolls got me so discouraged with life in the blog-o-sphere that I quit blogging for several months, and I almost gave up blogging entirely. I don't need harassment like that in my life, and neither do the people who come to this blog for information. So I have a policy now of turning off comments when trolls attack (or are likely to attack). Not surprisingly, trolls go away when you don't give them a public soapbox for them to anonymously pontificate upon.
Anyone needing to get in touch we me can do so via the tiny envelope icon in the left hand navigation panel.
I'll turn comments back on when traffic slows down to its regular levels of people mostly hitting this blog looking for information on how to file EEOC complaints, etc. In the meantime, I've been busy checking old posts for language content (if you've hung around this blog long enough, you know what I mean)...some search engines won't hit blog items that have certain words in them, and I want all the old posts freely accessible to anyone who might be searching about information about Fermilab or the Department of Energy. While doing that, I came across this post, which I had forgotten about. It made me laugh...
7:40:41 PM
arXiv.org released my paper on endemic gender inequities at Fermilab this morning. They cross-posted it in some different subject areas that I had not listed the paper under when I filed it with the preprint server...clearly someone at arXiv gave the paper more than a passing glance, and decided it needed much wider distribution.
I have received a number of extremely enthusiastic e-mails from people this morning about the paper. The topping on the cake is that a reporter from Nature wrote me to set up an interview.
Oh, so sweet.
The ATLAS experiment, which will be starting up in a year or two in Europe, has apparently already taken the message of my paper to heart, and I've been told in one of the e-mails I got today that they are going to set things up in their conference allocation process to try to avoid the autocratic procedures that resulted in the endemic discrimination at Fermilab. ATLAS is an enormous experiment (I believe they have in the neighborhood of 2,000 collaborators, compared to 700 on my old experiment), so a lot of women will be affected by the policies they set up.
So, even if Fermilab and the Department of Energy steadfastly refuse to abide by the laws of the land when it comes to discrimination at our national labs, at least my paper will have had some positive effect on the future of particle physics. It's a shame that it might very well have no positive effect on the women performing research at Fermilab though (if anything, my complaint seems to have entrenched the lab and the DoE into the attitude of "we are right...we are always right" and "she is just one lone whiner...ignore her long enough and she'll go away").
