She was just invited because....

"As I seem to do at least once a week, I would like to point my readers over to a great discussion occurring at DrugMonkey."

That sentence was actually written for a post in Sept, but I've decided to just start using it as a heading to let people know this will be a DrugMonkey inspired post. So, once again, ladies and gentlemen, a DrugMonkey inspired post.

In Problem? What Gender Problem?,  DrugMonkey noticed at a scientific meeting that the representation of women was low. When I read his post this morning, I nodded my head sagely, thought "yep" and then spent the day working on a proposal and revising a manuscript. I had no idea that such a statement of truth could engender such a wild, interesting, and sometimes slightly bizarre discussion. Truly. I can't summarize it for you, you have to go check it out for yourself.

The truth of the matter is that the loss of women and minorities from the pipeline is a complex issue and I think the discussion over at DrugMonkey also shows that it is an emotional one for many of us. Many of us have heard, either leveled at us or at other women/minorities, "yeah, insert-name-of-speaker-who-does-not-look-like-everyone-else-here only got invited because....". Even when it's not explicitly stated, (shockingly many people do realize a statement that someone was only invited because they were female, black, hispanic, etc makes them sound like an ass), there are often enough undertones to make one seriously suspect foul play. I once had a reviewer spend the review explaining I wasn't as great as one might think from my CV....seriously, dude? The problem is, perhaps that asswipe does that crap to everyone, not just women, but there's no way to know so the recipient of such an interaction is left with the strong suspicion that this was motivated by other issues, which makes someone, like me, feel angry, betrayed, unsettled, suspicious, and worried this happens to everyone but I've become overly sensitive and unjustifiably paranoid. No wonder when those statements of "you're just an affirmative action placation invite"  come out clearly, we tend to go a little ape-shit.

But the emotional part for me is that the entire discussion made me a little sad. No doubts we've made some great strides in some areas, but as kiwi gal pointed out in her comment (#41) over at DrugMonkey:

In my field, ecology, we have a very large number of world class women scientists. At our national meeting in 2007, at an invited symposium reviewing progress in ecology over the last decade (to be published in a special issue of the journal etc etc), there was one woman speaker and 19 men.

Ouch. So much for my beloved ecology. The demoralizing thing is that this type of feedback (whether it is the review arguing why your record shows you are a hack despite how hard you worked to get those high profile papers or the lack of invites to give high profile talks when people of lesser records are praised like gods) reinforces the idea that you have to work twice as hard for half the credit.

I have to admit that after reading the discussion over at DrugMonkey, I was a little demoralized. I also have to admit, I always get demoralized when I get hung up on how I am perceived in my field, but - like always - I remember three things that make me feel better: 1) my science kicks ass. I didn't participate in the Scientiae  this month because every time I came up with something good it gave away my science (and thus me), but damn it my science is hot.  I routinely get it published in kick ass journals - despite some bizarre, occasionally angry reviews - and it is well cited for someone at my career stage.  2) I love what I do and I am a position where my gender might keep me from becoming a superstar, but it won't keep me from doing what I love. 3) I am deeply aware that I can say 1 and 2 because I was fortunate enough to have threaded some narrow, scary sections in the academia pipeline to be here today. Seriously, there was some major luck involved in my tango from undergrad to assistant professor.

So, I'm shaking off my malaise and tomorrow I'm going back to work to bust my ass on my proposal and my manuscripts that need to be resubmitted. Why? Because screw all those asses who want to come up with some reason why I'm not as good as I seem, who dismiss my speaking invites because I'm the "token woman", and my papers because its actually my co-authors carrying me, or whatever other excuse makes them feel better at night when they look at their own CVs. Besides, I have found that nothing pisses those people off more than a truly successful woman. And nothing would make me happier than to really piss them off.

Gender Ratio in Departmental Seminar series

So, ever since I wrote about Being on the Circuit, I've been wondering about the truth behind the General's Disarray new tactic for convincing me to actually get on a plane and give departmental seminar talks.

In my experience, invitations to speak at departmental seminars often arise from either a colleague issuing an invite and/or an internal nomination process with a committee (sometimes the committee is really just one person) deciding who to invite from the nominations. There are also other modes for generating speakers (i.e., press gangs roaming the department looking for students and assistant professors who may have promotion or Ph.D defense obligations), but General Disarray's argument has made me wonder what exactly is the proportion of women giving departmental seminars in a seminar series? Obviously, I have shown myself prone to obsessive compulsive data collection, but I thought this might be more fun, (and less detrimental to my tenure aspirations) if my readers helped me with this. So....if you have a few spare minutes (ha ha ha), and are also interested in this, feel free to send me the following information on whatever seminar series you tend to attend:

Number of speakers, number of women

It might also be interesting to know what the proportion of women is in the group the seminar is for (i.e. if it's a departmental seminar, then the proportion of female faculty -  I know, I know this ignores the grad students and post-docs but this can be difficult info to get) to get an idea if the gender representation of the seminar series represent the group for whom the seminar series serves (I actually suspect the gender ratio of those invited to speak is lower than the department's).... I could ask for much much more info, but its the end of the semester and I don't want to overladen people - besides this is just for curiosity. Feel free to either leave the info here as a comment or email me at river.tam16@gmail.com (as I'm warming up to the idea that the blogosphere actually likes to talk back - not in a pejorative sense - I've decided to experiment with actually having an 'official' email address for the blog. If I decide it doesn't freak me out too much, I'll make it permanent)

To lead the way, here's the info for the seminar I attend:

8 speakers, 1 woman, 29% female at host institution

Thanks for indulging me! I promise to compile and present in a future post!

Scientific Dress - Pt 2

Before I get started, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who commented on yesterday's post. I think it is safe to say that it is the most interesting discussion I have ever had here at Professor Chaos. Thank you all so much for thinking about what I said and sharing your thoughts and opinions on it. For those of you who did not comment, even if you did not like my post, please go read what these intelligent men and women are saying about the role of clothes in science - it is well worth it.

Because I had to be away from my computer last night, I didn't get to participate while it was unfolding, which left me in a position this morning where I could either leave a multi-paragraph comment on yesterday's post, or just write a new post. Because this is just my part of the discussion on yesterday's post, please leave any comments to this post on yesterday's post .

The first thing that I found really interesting about the comments I received was Rosie's null hypothesis: Many good scientists, male and female, have decided that putting more than a minimal effort into one's appearance is a waste of time that could better be spend doing science.

I agree that this is part of the reason for the similarity in dress, but I think it is clear - both in my experience and apparently in the experiences of various of my commenters - that what may have started as time-management has become de facto "uniform". If you have enough time to care about your appearance, you are not serious about science. For those who doubt this, I have two independent pieces of evidence aside from "I say so". If scientific attire was truly random drift, guided only by ease of choosing and dressing, I would expect a wider diversity of attire both within and across fields. For example, if it's really just about minimizing time expenditure and not about some uniform, we should also see men wearing this:

Ah, the velour jogging suit.  I'd pay big money to see a big name scientist give a seminar in one of these. Again, if people in your department tend to wear velour jogging suits, please let me know. I'll add it to Eugenie's clog story on the list of strange things in the world that convince me that life will always be interesting.

Yet, for ecologists, the predominant mode of dress is Tevas, fleece, and outdoor wear. This could be because our research constraints, such as those experienced by Silver Fox and Ecogeofemme, have directed our random drift through the universe of clothing. Those constraints are real. But, when ecologists show up at the annual meeting dressed like that and those ecologists include the theoretical crowd (some of whom I seriously suspect have never seen an organism in the wild and definitely do not have lab protocols to observe), I begin to suspect that our "careless attire" is not careless at all but a uniform. Second, go to school one day deliberately flaunting the uniform. Wear something different. It doesn't have to be flashy like those Naughty Monkey shoes, just wear something different. A nice long-sleeve shirt with a feminine cut, plain slacks, some nice feminine sandals and subtle jewelry would be enough for me to stick out in my department. How do people respond? Do they pass by without a glance or do you receive looks and/or comments? Better yet, do people keep asking you "what's the occasion"? Do they remember you because you wore something different? There is a graduate student in my program who wears heels - she's aware of the ecology dress code and refuses to submit and I love her for it - yet everyone, students, postdocs, and professors know exactly who is being referred to when someone describes "the one who wears heels".

I also want to assure JaneB and Becca that my argument is not that female scientists should be walking around looking like this:

I think Becca is right when she said: Another question is "If young women cannot see androgenous, or less-than-totally-hot women as living a life they would want, then isn't something terribly, terribly wrong?"

I agree, it would be just as bad for the recruitment and retention of women in science if we all dressed like Scientist Barbie. My point, which I apparently did not communicate effectively, was not that we all needed to doll up, but that we had allowed the androgynous look to become a uniform and it is not just our male colleagues that discriminate against women who violate it. If there really is no dress code in science (which I think is a concept we all find attractive), then why do we all look alike? Why do many of us feel like we have to follow some unwritten dress code to be taken seriously? I think it is explicitly clear from the comments by Yolio, Citronella, Zinjanthropus, and Peanut (I love the purple sequined flipflops), and implicit in some of the other comments, that I am not alone in this feeling.

I also did not mean to leave out my academic brothers. And I deeply thank Odyssey and Anonymous for pointing out that this is a broader issue. After reading my post, General Disarray came into my office to talk about how he loves wearing his $50 dress shirts (a huge splurge for an ecologist) tucked into khaki slacks, but he feels like he stands out like a sore thumb when he does, so he only wears those outfits when he teaches. He was so agitated about feeling like he was constrained by some dress code to prove he's "serious" as a scientist that he threatened to wear a suit today  to assert his independence (General Disarray may love his dress shirts, but he is most definitely not a suit-loving man).

Which brings me to my final point. I wanted to highlight a comment by anonymous: I don't want to "stick out" to the men in our department any more than I have to - they are the vast majority where I am, the ones with power eg to hire and fire, and the ones who most definitely judge female ability based on clothing and manner (not all of course, but there are enough. .).

I would never recommend that someone sacrifice themselves on the altar of couture. The point of this whole thing is that people should wear (and be) what they are comfortable with. Some of us may not be in a position to dress the way we want right now, but hopefully some day you will be. But some of us may feel that we are in safe enough positions in our careers, and have the inclination, to  "act out" a little. One of my clearest memories as a graduate student was sitting at the ecology meetings waiting for a highly respected young female full professor to give a talk. I had never seen her before, and when her name was called, down the aisle walked this woman in a black leather jacket, a black miniskirt, and knee high black boots. I was stunned. I thought, surely no one will take her seriously. You know what, years later she's still a highly regarded and respected female full professor. That moment made quite an impression on me, and I will admit, that this year I flaunted the ecologist code at Milwaukee as far as I felt comfortable. I wore embroidered, bright red Naot (Phagenista, I am totally with you on that one) sandals with a heel. They were quite....noticeable. I could have bought the brown ones when I was considering my summer footwear (I only have one pair of shoes for each season), but I deliberately didn't because I was feeling rebellious and I was tired of trying to "fit in". So this year, I wore bright red non-Tevas, with capri pants, and casual but feminine cut shirts at ESA and enjoyed every minute of it. Don't know that I changed the world with that decision, but damn, it felt good.

Thanks again, everyone, for the most interesting discussion I have had the privilege to be involved in, in a very long time!!!

The conundrum of being a female scientist

I am a slow thinker, so sometimes it takes me a few days (and an insightful conversation with General Disarray) to figure out exactly what I think about something. I've been watching and mulling over the extended conversation about Isis that has been occurring around the blogosphere. This conversation has inspired me to talk about an issue that I have been pondering for a while: feminine scientists. My thoughts on this should not be seen as a direct comment on what anyone has said - it is the equivalent to those soundtracks which contain songs "inspired by" the movie, rather than songs from the movie itself.

In my field, it is not uncommon for female full professors to look like men. I'm not saying they look like Pat from SNL, but they are often as androgynous as possible: boy hair cuts, no make-up, and nondescript clothes which frankly could have been bought in the boy's section at JC Penny.

 

For those of you too young to get the reference, this is Pat from Saturday Night live. The joke with Pat was that no one ever knew whether Pat was male or female.

 

I understand why these women look this way. They came through the ranks at a time when it was hard enough being a woman in science, god forbid you actually looked like one too! Those of us who grew up with this older generation as our role models have been inoculated with this belief that to be taken seriously means we need to look like our male colleagues. I made a joke in August about the hordes of Teva and fleece wearing ecologists descending on Milwaukee for our annual meeting. It was only partially a joke. There is a strong phenotypic convergence in the male and female ecologists. I suspect that this is true in other fields as well.

I suspect that the response to Isis by other women is confounded with this training so many of us have received (I have to admit to my own twinges of uncomfortableness on occasion with the Isis-persona for just this reason). How can someone who is so blatantly female be taken seriously? Doesn't she know she is breaking the unwritten code that men will pretend we aren't women if we dress like men? What if one of us is seen wearing Naughty Monkeys? Will this cause the rest of us to have our "honorary male" statuses revoked? Afterall, most of us do not work in a department where the men are strolling around in these:

(Though if you do, please let me know. That's one of those pieces of knowledge that really makes life worth living)

Will women dressing and acting like women erode the decades of progress we've made?

Let me pause and tell a story that at first will seem like I've had a seizure and lost the thread of my post. A few years ago, when I was a beginning assistant professor, a bunch of current female Ph.D students from my former graduate school cornered me at a bar. The program they were in (and I used to be in) was pretty seriously lacking in young female representation in the professorial ranks at that time. The full professor ranks had several women, all of whom fit the mold of the androgynously dressing woman with male mannerisms and modes of interaction. These young women were deeply concerned about what it took to be a successful woman in science and wanted to know if women could be women and still succeed.  They were all very very clear that while they had deep respect for the female full professors, this was not the type of person they wanted to be.

So, I ask again: Will women dressing like women erode the decades of progress we've made?

I think that, in the end, women being women is a necessary step to increase the number of women in the academic scientific ranks. If young women cannot see someone in the department whose life they would want, who is the type of person they would want to be, then why should they take this path? They can make more money and wear nicer, feminine clothes by going into the corporate world (a sad message, perhaps, but true). If the message we are sending is that the only women who can succeed are those who dress and act like men, then we end up with only a small subset of the female population who think they can be scientists. When young female students can see female scientists confident in being themselves, then they can see themselves in that role too. I think it is the responsibility of those of us who feel that we are in secure positions to start breaking down this old era of women pretending to be men. I believe, in some fields at least, there are enough young women entering the faculty for us to start doing this. I believe that is what Isis is doing. If women cannot be women and scientists, then we will always have a retention problem with women in science. Isis' message (IMHO) is that it is possible to be a successful scientist, a mother, and a woman who loves her shoes all at the same time. And when I came to all these realizations over lunch today, it almost made me want to apply for Isis' Naughty Monkey giveaway - despite the fact that I'm very sure I would break an ankle if I tried to walk in them. I guess I will just have to find my own way to make it clear that I am a woman and a scientist. Not all of us will have a hankering for glamorous shoes, afterall....and that's okay. In fact, that's the point.

So, you want to date my academic daughter

Ever since my conversation about the case of the disappearing women, I have had one thought going through my head: I am a very lucky woman. To General Disarray's amusement, this thought is often followed with me telling him how lucky I am to have married him. (Right after the fateful conversation, I think I was telling him this every hour on the hour. I've pared that back a little since then - it was starting to impinge on my strong, independent woman image).

Not everybody can have such amazing luck, and I have begun watching my talented female graduate students and wondering...what if they end up with jackasses? Every time boys come sniffing around, I wonder....are you good enough for my students? I've contemplated a variety of ways to protect my students. My first idea was to padlock the lab and keep my students cloistered from the world. This had the advantage of also reducing a variety of distractions and focusing them on their work. Unfortunately, the lab does not have a toilet and the firemarshal told me it was a safety hazard (General Disarray also may have mentioned something about 'kidnapping'...I figured that meant he would also not be supportive of the chastity belt idea). So, ixnay on the Cloister of the Pure and Promising Sisters of Ecology.

I also contemplated installing Homeland Security's facial recognition software that would discern between male and female faces and trigger a Tazer whenever any male attempted to enter the lab.

Figure 1. New motto of the Tam Lab

This has the advantage of allowing my students to go to the restroom. Unfortunately, there are men in the lab... I suspect I may lose a few male students this way. I also suspect that General Disarray would have a few stern words if he  got Tazed every time he walked through the door.

I've also thought about hanging out in the lab throwing knives at the walls - this would give my students the "crazy dad" protection (though in this case it's the crazy academic mom). Unfortunately, weapons are frowned upon on college campuses and flinging plastic knives at walls doesn't have the same effect.  Besides, the really nice building maintenance man told me bad things might start happening to my office if I put holes in his walls.

 

Figure 2. River Tam action figure with the bodies of her student's suitors at her feet.

So, here I am, completely stymied about how to protect my students and stay out of jail. I guess I'll just have to treat them like they're adults and hope everything turns out okay. In the meantime, I'm practicing a really mean evil eye....

Figure 3. River Tam giving the untazed, undeadified suitors the evil eye.

Disappearing women - Pt 2

(I tried initially to do this is a comment, but as you will see, my commenters gave me so much to think about that it quickly ballooned - I strongly recommend that anyone reading this entry, read the comments to "The Case of the Disappearing Women" first.)

First, I want to say thank you to all of you for your comments. I've been disturbed by the conversation I had last week about the disappearing women for days and hearing what you had to say meant  lot to me. I've spent all weekend reading and thinking about all your feedback. I found great comfort in the fact that the younger scientists aren't going through training with a sense of dread and hopelessness. I honestly believe that things are turning in ecology for women and turning for the better. The ranks of the young female assistant professors are increasing by the year and many of us are not okay with waiting to have a "tenure baby".

Having said that, just because things are improving does NOT mean that we don't still have a lot of work to do. I think the anonymous commenters highlight that very clearly. Before I go further I want to specifically tell anon #1 that your story breaks my heart. I wish I could say that your story was unique, but I would be lying. It is easy for those of us who make it through the system to get complacent ("well, I'm doing well, the system must be working), and I really appreciate you sharing your story. It reminded me that things are not "fixed" by any stretch of the imagination and that I and others who make it through the gauntlet still have work to do. I still feel optimistic about my ecology sub-field, but I have collaborated widely enough to know that this is not the case in many other ecology sub-disciplines.

I also think that anon #1 and anon #2 both have hit upon something important. One of the big battles now is for the "souls" of women who want both work and families. I don't think that the current "fix" of being able to pause the tenure clock is really working, at least psychologically. So, the question remains, what will?

Fia and anon #1 hit upon something I've been thinking a lot about this weekend - the importance of having a supportive significant other. Female Science Professor also hit upon this theme a few times in her blog (can't figure out which entries those were, but they're all a good read) and I couldn't agree more. If you have a supportive spouse who values you having a successful career and who splits domestic responsibilities equally, this is a much easier path to walk. If you have one that values your career, but doesn't split domestic duties, this is a harder but not impossible path. If you have a spouse that doesn't value you having a successful career, I think you're pretty much fucked. It was clear from my conversation last week, that many of those women had husbands who did not value them having a career - or thought it was okay as long as they didn't have to sacrifice anything for it. I feel very fortunate to have married someone who wanted a truly equal partnership as much as I did. If I had married some of my other (less equal partnership minded) boyfriends, I am very certain I would be divorced by now.

And finally, Fia - unfortunately the blogs are not here to motivate the next generation of female scientists but to openly share issues we're all dealing with. I can totally understand that sometimes this is less than motivational and is sometimes downright scary. But take heart that we (female assistant professors) exist, that we're struggling to make things better for ourselves and those who follow, and I, for one, would still not choose any other career path.

The Case of the Disappearing Women

Despite the discussion this week about ogling and more posts on breasts than I can fathom (in fairness, we really should have penis week to bring cosmic balance back to the blogosphere! And it looks like Isis has gotten Penis Week off to a rousing start), I've been feeling really good about the outlook for female scientists in my field.   Graduate programs in ecology are now pretty much 50-50 male/female....sometimes actually skewed towards female. When I left my post-doctoral institution to take this job, that graduate program had a huge group of gung-ho female grad students who were clearly on the fast-track to success. (They had an intense passion for science and the pubs to prove it.) Not only has our graduate representation increased, but it also feels like our faculty representation has increased. There are a large number of totally kick-ass young female ecologists that have been hired over the past couple of years. I mean, people who have wide-spread recognition as rock-stars. While I have run into some sexism in the older ranks, my male contemporaries (or at least the one's I'm lucky enough to hang out with) evaluate their male and female counterparts based on ideas and productivity, not body parts. So, I've been blissfully sitting here, watching the discussions occurring in the blogosphere, thinking 'thank god I'm an ecologist'.

Then reality struck on Friday night. I had a long conversation with an old friend from said post-doctoral institution. During this conversation, I did the standard "what's so-and-so doing", and I asked about all the young female graduate students who had looked to be destined for successful careers in academia. Each answer was grimmer than the last. Every single one of them has either left science, or it is difficult to see how they will remain in the game for much longer. Every single one of them apparently decided that it was impossible to have children and a successful career in science. Since having both is "impossible", they have made decisions for having the child that often preclude the science.  Every single one of them has a husband with a  job he could do in any city in the U.S., but she doesn't want to uproot him and the family when it "seems likely" they won't make it in academia anyway. Unless you're in one of the cities with multiple universities in close proximity, it's hard to get a permanent position in ecology when you're anchored to one location (we don't have the same industry options as the medical folks) and the funding situation at NSF makes the soft-money route even harder than it has been. While I hope that things will work out in the science arena for these women, I am not optimistic.

Obviously, for each of those women, the details of their situation is more complex than I've portrayed, but in complexity there is often still generality. A clear message I heard  was that these women felt they had no role-model of having a family and being a tenure-track professor. They didn't like the choices other women had made and assumed it was impossible to make different choices and still succeed.

And so, despite that fact that my post-doctoral institution had a 50-50 ratio in its grad population, it looks like from that group the number of women who will make it through the post-doc phase will be much much less. As an advisor, currently training a lab full of women, this revelation has me very, very worried. So, to all those rock-star young female assistant professors out there, keep doing what you're doing, sisters, because I think we desperately need you in more ways than one.

Why the focus on standardized math scores are a disservice to science

FSP's post this morning on an article last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education ("How our culture keeps students out of science" by Peter Wood) gave General Disarray and me a great deal to talk about this morning on our way to work. If you have not read either her post or the original article, I suggest you check them out. In short, there are a couple of paragraphs that re-raise the specter of gender differences in scientific abilities. One of the pieces of evidence that is generally brought up in this context (though not in that article) is this underlying assumption that standardized math scores are the hallmark of someone's ability to succeed at science. I know that not all the arguments about why the gender disparity exists in the scientific ranks are focused on the standardized test results but it does seem to keep rearing its ugly head.

Now, I'm no expert on any of this, but I have been a practicing female scientist for a number of years, so I like to think I may have something relevant to say on this topic. I will admit that my SAT and GRE math scores were not, shall we say, stellar. I can't remember what exactly they were, but I was always happy if I landed in the 80th percentile somewhere.  I struggled in math classes and got A's in college - though not in high school.  And I only did that through hard work and sheer stubborn determination. (I always felt like doing math was like writing with the wrong hand - if I focused really hard I could do it but it wasn't necessarily pretty). However, here I am: a female scientist with a good scientific reputation for a young assistant professor. And, I would like to add, with a little glee, more successful (in terms of number of pubs in high quality journals and in terms of citations of said publications) than a not small fraction of my male grad student cohort who undoubtedly scored much, much higher than I did on the math GREs. How can this be?

What I think we miss in this debate is that science is more than math and scientific ability is not quantified by how well one does regurgitating facts on some GRE subject test. Science is about synthesizing facts and ideas, formulating a concept of how the world works, and using logic to make testable predictions of what should be happening if that concept is correct. The scientific process requires creativity, knowledge, and logic.

When I was a graduate student I tried to be more like my male colleagues who had great quantitative math scores. I was bad at what they were good at and we all knew it. One day, I decided that I needed to stop being them and try being me and I knew I was really good at two things: creativity and logic. By logic, I don't mean math. Math is a codified form of logic, but it is not all logic. Much of the logic I employ on a daily basis has nothing to do with math and everything to do with a more verbal type of logic and afterall, isn't that  the core of science? If I think this is happening then I would predict that this other thing must be occurring because of X, Y, and Z. Once I embraced my strengths, my science fell into place.

I'm not saying that math doesn't have an important role in science. What I am saying is that there are many ways to be a great scientist. Insane math skills are only one route. In my short career I have met outstanding scientists who were mathematical geniuses, writing geniuses, conceptual geniuses, experimental geniuses, etc, but lacked strengths on some other axis. And, frankly, while being a genius might make you famous, you don't have to be a genius to have a great career as a scientist (and trust me, I know quite a few people who fall in that category).

The focus on math scores on some standardized test as a symbol of who can be scientists does a disservice to science, education, and our students. In my opinion, the diversity of ways we approach science and the tools that we use to address questions are essential to the scientific endeavor. This focus on mathematical scores is a selective force that focuses on only one type of "intelligence", to the detriment of all the others. It is also a huge disservice to our students who grow up thinking a) that they need to be in the 90th+ percentile on math scores to go into the sciences and b) that if they don't like math then they won't like or be able to do science.  No wonder we have a problem recruiting bright, motivated students. Once I focused on my strengths, I have never found that the fact that was not 99th percentile in math to be a hindrance to my career. Instead, as a scientist, I draw everyday on my abilities to write well, reason clearly, and look at disjointed pieces of the puzzle of life through a creative lens.  And with that, I will leave you with one last thought - we remember Einstein, not because of his sick math skills and 99th percentile score on the SAT, but because of his creativity. And isn't that great.

The Overt and Subtle Forms of Gender Discrimination

The focus of my blog is not on the gender aspects of being a scientist, but as noted by other bloggers the fact of being a female scientist sometimes makes this inevitable. There have been some interesting discussions at various blogs regarding issues facing female scientists (see: Female Science Professor, PhysioProf at Feministe, and DrDrA at Blue Lab Coats).

I think the recent airing of horrible things that we have all witnessed is healthy because it takes stories that are hidden in dark closets and publicizes that this behavior is NOT okay. I have my own set of stories that happened to either me or friends: sexist jokes told on interviews, statements to the effect that a male student is driving his own research, but a female student must just be her advisor's puppet, etc. But these more direct things worry me less than some of the more subtle, subconscious things. Let me demonstrate:

You are going to arrange a high profile symposium or workshop, you need to invite 20 people right now - make your list as quickly as possible (i.e., just like most of us do because we've got too much to do and so little time to get it done!).

Mine almost always ends up with all men. Unlike other fields, my field is not all male. In fact, there are a fair number of highly respected women and they are never represented in my instantaneous list in the proportions they exist in nature! I find this disturbing because it suggests that somewhere along the way I equated "distinguished" with "male". How can I get mad at men for ignoring prominent women when I do it myself? It's not just me. I have other female friends who have recently recognized that they do the same thing. I figure, as with most things, the first step is to recognize that you have a problem. Now, (after chanting, 'Hi, my name is River and I have a problem perceiving scientific gravitas in women") I make two lists: the original brain storm list and a "re-mix", where I use something other than my brain (i.e. Web of Science, journal table of contents, friends) to identify "silver back females" that I overlooked in my first pass. Like I said, it's the subtle things that scare me more.....