“I have heard this comment, which was one of the most hurtful things anyone has ever said to me, from someone who later apologised for thinking it, as he hadn’t realised affirmative action didn’t apply to foreigners.”

Heh. I have had lots of Americans sneer at me because they thought I didn’t have to pay tax, being a foreign student.

Just to make things clear - I have never had any problems with any American graduate student - in fact, they seem quite willing to listen to others.

I do not agree that Asians like being with other Asians only. I have noticed that there is a significant number of Asian graduate students who look for like-minded company, not necessarily Asian.

I am not in favour of affirmative action. I am greatly in favour of changing attitudes at the primary school level and with parents, who knowingly or unknowingly discourage little girls from seeing science as a career; I am greatly in favour of a society with less economic and social disparity for certain minorities who may consequently be discouraged from science; I am in favour of better provision of childcare, and for educating boys from a young age to see themselves as equal partners in raising children. Maybe blind admission/refeering/hiring processes can help correct subconscious prejudices. However I never want to hear anyone say that I got somewhere because I got a helping hand that my academic and research record didn’t deserve, that I wasn’t “good enough”. I can stand on my own two feet. I have heard this comment, which was one of the most hurtful things anyone has ever said to me, from someone who later apologised for thinking it, as he hadn’t realised affirmative action didn’t apply to foreigners.

Its wrong to think that every female or minority person has a monolithic opinion on such issues.

It’s a complex issue. Probably the best approach is to resist the temptation to view them as a homogenous mass. Easy to say, but sometimes hard to do.

The insular tendency is natural when you feel like you’re on another planet. I spent a brief amount of time doing research in Europe. I tried not to “bunch up” w/other anglophiles. Unfortunately, it happened anyway: the Americans, English, and Irish tended to cluster and just English, and thus mutually reinforce our feeling of alienation from the general population. We were hesitant to speak the local language for two reasons: 1.) their English, when they wanted to speak it, was flawless so the conversation was more efficient for everyone when carried out in English; 2.) we were too chicken and were a bit nervous about being laughed at. So, I imagine w/students from Asia, it’s way way harder. At least we all spoke Indo-European languages.

As far as possible discrimination; it seems some do quite well in Academia (e.g. prof positions at good research institutions). Yet, I agree it sometimes doesn’t look too good at the grad-student/post-doc level. It seems there’s a bit of a disconnect. I do know that the Asian students I’ve encountered need to understand the “self-promotion thing” better. Aggressive (although not necessarily arrogant) self-promotion is clearly a key to success in our system. Of course, there are always exceptions, but generally the Asian students need to be more aggressive and question others more often, instead of taking the more traditional passive aggressive appoach. A slam one often hears is that ” Oh those Asians score well on tests and work long hours; but they’re not very creative”. The shuffling, non self-promoting attitude unforunately fuels this rather ridiculous statement.

What can American students do to help Asian students? In my experience, I have found most of the Asian students very insular with each other, and not particularly interested in talking with the non-Asian students.

Clearly, this is a reaction to the attitudes expressed in #50, but what are others to do? I try to be friendly and listen when I can, and have gone as far as to make hotel reservations over the phone for a Chinese student. But, at the same time, I don’t know exactly what to do, beyond this, to help, really.

What you describe is not a physics culture problem, but instead is a U.S. culture [1] problem. There is a strong pressure from the U.S. society-at-large to be ‘the same’ with little respect for differences. I was born and lived for 37 years in the U.S. before I moved away 8 years ago, and it is this particular facet of the U.S. that drove me away the most. When the society-at-large of this particular group of people, which comprises 6 percent of the world’s population, learns to relish and delight in the diversity and richness of the human race, then I think that the problem that you describe will disappear.

[1] Yes, I do know well that the U.S. ‘culture’ is not ethnically homogenous, but instead is a hodge-podge of groups.

As for getting permanent positions, I must say that the best option for the likes of me is to get back to our respective home countries…and keep visiting the US to keep our collaborations going. Work will be slower, and we will face a huge number of problems (e.g. politics in departments), but it will be much better than getting frustrated here…

Don’t get me wrong - I am glad I came to the US. It is just that I don’t think my work and I are appreciated any more here than in my home country. Some universities are definitely much better than others, but this severely limits my options when it comes to looking for a job…

-Rob

From an early age, girls are given pink barbie dolls to play with. Ovens to play cooking, baby dolls to play as mothers. House toys to take care. And driven to be more interested in their dressing and hair than anything else.

Boys get the best and most interesting toys: cars, planes, spaceships, toys with great movements and lights, animals, thinking toys.

I never played with those pink barbie dolls (hated them); my best friends were boys, and I played with them with spaceships, playmobile, and animals. I had good friends (boys) that enjoyed to play with me, although I was a girl.

At 11 I knew I wanted to be a scientist. While most of my colleagues (girls) were thinking about boyfriends as adolescents, I had other concerns. (No, that’s not what you’re thinking, I am *not* homossexual. Today I have a happy marriage — with a man, and I am mother of a boy).

When my mother would give me money to buy new clothes, I would immediately go to the next bookstore to by a book instead.

I do not mean that a woman to be a scientist must not be feminine. But the incentive to be, in my opinion, *overly* feminine since an early age, and not to exercise thinking, is a major problem for girls. If they try to be different, their families or friends might look at them suspiciously.

I’ve never had a *major* problem in my career because I am a woman (yes, some little incidents happened), but I did (and do) have other difficulties that equally apply to men.

From the comments here, I tend to believe that being a woman in the sciences is much more complicated in the US than here in Brazil, although my country is quite a sexist one.

I am male, and have never seen this sort of behaviour first hand so it is not that I have had clear and specific chances to intervene, but I know that many of my close female colleagues have had unpleasant experiences of one sort or another. These can range from being asked out on dates by their senior collaborators, through to situations that are potentially criminal, rather than merely inappropriate.

I certainly do not want this to be misconstrued by any young women considering a career in physics who might be reading this (what do I know, anyway?) as I know that many women in physics can and do succeed. However, if we don’t tackle this issue as a field, it provides a concrete reason why women will be less likely to stay inside physics.

Some of this behaviour is perhaps merely clueless (I know it is another stereotype, but lots of scientiests *are* somewhat maladroit socially), and is probably exacerbated by the way that science can be more than just a job — we don’t make the same clear distinction between the personal and professional spheres that might apply in other professions.

However, a lot of the worst stories I have heard revolve around the same fairly small number of men. One specific horror story concerns a man who has made life miserable for a number of his female colleagues. The irony is that I was recently asked to suggest people who might want to apply for an open position at his institution (a place that is good, but not great). My first thought was that while a number of the people I might suggest were female, it was not at all clear to me I would be doing them any favors by encouraging them to work at a place where this person would be one of their senior colleagues (the upside is that this story is *so* widely known, I doubt this could happen to you by accident.) However, the fact the person concerned still draws a salary probably reflects a shortcoming of academia as a whole, rather than physics in particular.

But if we want to address issues of gender equity in the field, this is something concrete we could try to fix…

What is much worse is that despite this domination, foreign, especially asian scientists, are facing much more difficult time of getting leadership positions later in their careers - getting tenures, etc. And their work ethic, drive to succede, analytical skills, number of hours per week spent in the lab, publication records etc. are far more superior to the people who do get the jobs.

I am not an asian myself, but I think there’s a lot more injustice happening in these areas, especially if you look at the number of people from those categories who DO apply for grad schools and for faculty positions, compared to women or minorities. But we don’t seem to like to talk about it because it appears sciences are already dominated by asians, and because - let’s face it - it is very difficult to distinguish one from another with similarly sounding names, similarly looking faces, excellent scores and working harder than most american-born students.

The science departments may not be kind to women, but they are much more so unkind to foreigners - especially coming from completely different cultural background like students from China or Korea or Japan, where it’s often impolite to ask a question during seminar or respond to a question with “no”.

So the real question - do we want physics department to be more equally represented by various ethnic and gender groups, resembling a random collection of people from planet Earth, or do we want to make sure that decisions on hiring/admission are made without unfair or discriminatory bias? Those two are completely separate issues. If we eliminated any discrimination, by for example adopting some sort of utopian blind program in accepting students or making tenure/hiring decisions, what would be the distribution of students/faculty? Without waiting for decades or changing society norms in how children of different genders are raised, I doubt the female fraction will be 50%, even in absence of discrimination. Plenty of departments are actively seeking female grad students or faculty applicants, but can’t find qualified enough people, the same goes for minorities. On the other hand, I strongly believe that a blind merits-only system that eliminates cultural bias and “old white men’s club” mentality in departments would result in many-fold increase of representation of asian (including India) or eastern-european scientists…

These are the real discrimination issues that nobody wants to talk about.

It’s a nicely done series, well done enough, and groundbreaking enough, that it has has several sequels, the last of which will be broadcast in America next month. No doubt it helps that Helen Mirren plays the central role.

Where am I going with this? The place of women in science, and of science in society, might be improved if we had a TV show like that about a woman scientist. Although we might have to advance a ways before such a thing would even be considered. Maybe Jana Levin should work on it.

I am a graduate student. Last year I experienced sexual harassment at school from another graduate student to the point where I was unable to work safely in my department. Eventually, he was expelled (after threatening to kill my closest male friend). However, the way that my original harassment complaint was handled confirmed my every fear about lodging one in the first place. I was told that I should’ve been nicer to the man and made him feel more welcome, and he wouldn’t have resorted to inappropriate sexual comments, gestures, and more. When I lodged the complaint, I specified I wanted anonymity: instead, the very night I spoke with the appropriate person I was identified by name as a complaintant to that man!

This was not the first or only experience I had with sexual harassment at my school, but it was the one of greatest degree, and the only one I complained about. I complained because I was affected to the point I could not come in and work nights or weekends and had to work in a locked office, and yet things were still tolerated and I was made to feel that it was all somehow my fault (at least until over a dozen undergraduate students verified that they’d been harrassed as well). I am determined to make it through my program, but the experiences have left me very frustrated and feeling alienated. I want to be positive, and work towards the thing that we’re all there for in the first place.. science!

I just don’t know how I’m expected to be a fully contributing member of the scientific community when I’m challenged not for my scientific thinking or contributions, but for the fact that I have a vagina and breasts. Crude, but there it is. I know from talking with other female scientists that my experience is not unique. I’m not saying every woman experiences direct and traumatic harassment, or even necessarily being dismissed (every?!) . However, it is very common, a dirty laundry secret that we, the women involved, don’t like saying anything about because we know that we will be labeled and dismissed by many. And nobody likes a whiner.

Saying that the statistics look better and women are being recruited heavily won’t address the problems that drive women out of science. It’s like putting your fingers in your ears, crying “lalalalala” and then “I can’t HEAAARRR YOU”. Don’t say anything when a male colleague shoots down everything any woman says, regardless of the idea. Allow your TA’s to make sexual jokes in the classrom (maybe just because you aren’t supervising them at all). Smile when someone has the “guts” to say ‘that bitch” when a woman speaks. And watch the women leave science the farther they get, because its just too much to struggle with the math and physics and chemistry and astronomy AND have to deal with garbage you could’ve faced working at McDonalds. I take that back, McDonalds actually enforces their sexual harassment rules.

Please don’t get me wrong. I LOVE MY RESEARCH. I want to be a great scientist and a great teacher and a great person. I’ve done well, gotten awards, been noticed, had wonderful mentors and help along the way. I appreciate all of this. But graduate school is hard enough without this kind of garbage. Garbage that has not been swept away because the issue was not fully laid open, examined, and honestly dealt with. Garbage that stinks, and i’m going to keep saying it stinks until its gone.

There have been a number of comments contesting my assertation that other difficult, lower-level science courses have a more encouraging environment. However, these contests seem to amount to “well, I’ve seen encouragement in physics….” But is there MORE encouragement in physics!? Comparison is the point here, I’m not at all interested in personal anecdotes. And of course, we will never agree to anything here because where are the facts? There are none, at least none available to me: we can only look at general culture differences between the disciplines, and in how students perceive their courses.

Looking at the perspective of a freshman or sophomore undergrad, why would someone who already feels marginalized in a field choose to pursue that when there are a number of other equally challenging fields that DON’T marginalize them? I can’t stress how damn important that is, especially from a student’s perspective, because most students are not 100% sure they want to stay in the fields that they take their introductory courses in! And encouragement in those introductory courses are pretty damn key. What role do their fellow undergrads play in the game of marginalization? (Because from my experience, a number of students already try to marginalize everyone else based on things as evasive as “perceived intelligence”. How can a culture that propagates THAT attitude possibly NOT be as shamefully conservative as physics has become?!)

But, alas, these are my perceptions, and the only people who will even consider them are those who have something to gain from them…

(Clearly, though, “facts” seem to have the same effect)

I got stuck on “first lady” for the 8-years-in-mansion one, because my first thought was “POTUS, but there haven’t been any Presidents named Lisa”. My first thought for the second one was “Queen Elizabeth on some kind of tour”, which is why I was looking for actual historical figures. I’m a dork.

—-

A man and his son are taken to the ER after a car accident; the man is DOA but the son is wheeled into theater, where the duty surgeon takes one look and declares that it’s against regulations to operate on your own son — what’s going on here?

(I’m inordinately proud of the fact that I got that one right, first time, no hesitation.)