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.
