13 ms·

I Didn’t Want To Lean Out

149 points by ISL 13y ago

Geekette 13y ago
Wow. This stuck out so much: "My mother, who'd earned degrees in physics and electrical engineering in the 70's, cried when I told her that I was leaving and why but she never blamed me. She'd hoped that my generation’s experiences would be better than hers."
- DaveWalk 13y ago
  A great point you brought up. I know someone whose mother, by all intents, was cleared to get accepted to a PhD program in the sciences...but unfortunately, they didn't allow women into the program at the time. It was "simply not done." And this was a decade after the Civil Rights Movement!
  - HillRat 13y ago
    Back in the 70s, my father ran a state government agency staffed primarily by economists, statisticians and modelers. One economist was a woman who was very highly credentialed -- multiple Ivy Leagues, quant-heavy background, extremely knowledgeable in her particular field. He tendered her an offer, expecting her to take over a fairly critical position within a week. He immediately got a memo from the governor's office tersely informing him that he would need to submit to them her husband's notarized approval in writing before they would allow him to hire a woman. To contextualize, this was a few years after a flurry of state ratifications of the Equal Rights Amendment. A kind of proto-"Mens' Rights Movement" had, by the mid-1970s, coalesced against the ERA and legal protections for women in the workplace. In this state, a fairly prominent state politician had publicly taken the lead in trying to roll back protections for women (in part by arguing that the ERA would require public swimming pools to be topless!), and the liberal(ish) governor was fighting a conservative cultural backlash from constituents. As a result, political agencies were deluged with a series of ad hoc restrictions that basically made it impossible to hire or promote women unless they were in "traditional" roles such as the typing pool. (To his credit, my father fought through the strictures, using the same kind of cussedness that led him to take long road trips with African-American fellow military officers through the Deep South of the 1960s, in which they found out that, black or white, a military uniform didn't protect you from redneck sheriffs.) If you think about the sweep of history, four or five decades ago is a very short time, and even though gains for women and minorities have been very real and tangible, it's all too easy to see how fragile they are. Today, racism and sexism are generally more tacit than explicit (and often supported by decent people who simply aren't aware of, but can be educated about, the superstructural biases of their organizations), but the results are just as pernicious for those operating on life's higher difficulty settings.
rdl 13y ago
I thought the "you need a PhD to do anything real in chemistry/bio/etc. research" was well understood. I guess SM + MD would be fine too. (Chem Eng and industrial chemistry seem fine with an SB, and maybe an employer-provided SM, but that's not research.)
- doctorcroc 13y ago
  I agree, there are a lot of options in industry with a BS in ChE, but not so much in Chemistry. You're pretty much expected to get at least a Masters...
  - jey 13y ago
    I wonder why this is so different in CS, where it's much more feasible to get a senior highly-technical job without formal credentials. What's the source of this cultural difference?
    - rdl 13y ago
      Jobs are in big organizations, and you have expensive multi-year projects which might be your first project, and highly conservative funding/approvals boards.
    - ksk 13y ago
      (Note: I have assumed you mean CS as in programming) Because programming is not science. In fact its not even an engineering discipline from what I can see. The process is not rigorous enough and few programmers can even hope to attempt something like formally proving that their code works. We need less people writing code, not more. And those fewer people should be held to a much higher standard than 'Bob's cousin once read a book on sharepoint so go ask him if he can create a cake ordering website for you'
      - jey 13y ago
        You're right that programming isn't science, but parts of it are complicated in a way similar to math, with many intricate components that interact in complex ways. People with only a BS (or no degree) regularly get jobs writing this complex code. I'm thinking of things like browsers, databases, and video codecs.
jorleif 13y ago
My own experience from academia tells me that a big part of the problem is the fact that everyone is competing for a small pool of faculty positions and those positions are filled based on individual performance. This means you can never win as a team, only as an individual, and everyone needs to get their share. Only a professor can build a team, but even those teams are temporary. Add to this the fact that only new things count as science, which means that good work can easily turn out worthless if the desired results are not achieved. For this reason, science then is naturally elitist, and has big differences in the status of participants (tenured vs not), and heavy competition. Might it be that this environment breeds nasty behavior such as misogyny and bullying? If a professor treats a student badly (I don't mean harassment, I mean overwork and bad guidance) then that is rarely punished in any way, it is probably beneficial for his career.
- chalst 13y ago
  I think it's easier to have such an exploitative regime in sciences that depend on "big lab" research: a higher body of graduate-student subordinates trying to get PhDs makes it easier to treat them as interchangeable components; the success of the lab depends on maximisation of (competent) labour hours put in; the lab equipment is seriously expensive and a high return on the costs must be shown to justify the next round of research applications; the graduate students are rather more dependent on the PI's goodwill to get the research done for their PhD.
  - jorleif 13y ago
    I agree, my own experiences in CS are not at all as bad as those of the OP, but still it took a long time for me to figure out how the system works, and why senior people might choose to leave students to their own devices when the student clearly does not know what to do, and how to be productive.
- Fede_V 13y ago
  A very famous Harvard Nobel prize winning scientist had a phd student commit suicide while in his lab: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-chemistry-at-harvard.html http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-chemistry-... Still there, still incredibly famous, still untouched. Oh, and speaking specifically of chemistry, who can forget this brilliant gem? http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/a40kI.png http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/a40... That's real by the way.
jpeg_hero 13y ago
>and whom I heard joke about “finishing up some chromatography” (chromatography is a purification technique that usually involves flushing a quantity of liquid through a long, narrow column) when we paused our consulting session for a bathroom break. Is it offensive to make a chemistry joke about taking a piss?
- jforman 13y ago
  That's the one thing you decide to make a comment about?
  - rjknight 13y ago
    We were only given two facts about the person in question, and that was one of them. It stood out to me in the original post, because it highlighted the fact that what actually upsets people and what a disinterested observer thinks should upset people are different things.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - a8000 13y ago
    It was definitely also one of the things that stood out to me as being an odd example for inappropriate behaviour.
  - phazmatis 13y ago
    Other topics have been covered already, duh.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  I assume it's more of a "straw that broke the camel's back" in a constant barrage of problems. Dick jokes in a toxic environment only make the environment more toxic. Which is sad, because it was a funny line.
  - EC1 13y ago
    I do not ever want to work with a person that does not see a joke as just that, a joke.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
not_paul_graham 13y ago
This comment is a bit off topic, but one of the ways to keep underrepresented minorities and women engaged with computing at the undergraduate level is through constant encouragement. Research [0] from some computing professors suggests that: "Without encouragement even high ability women and under-represented minorities were unlikely to persist in computing." And this really sucks because one of the professors from this referenced research has said that CS access in High School is limited to affluent students (who are mostly white and asian) and the only place in the education pipeline where the playing field is even is in college, but without encouragement a lot of women and members of the minority community lean out. The second issue is the fact that these fields are dominated by men and you can't control everyone's behaviour. Sure we can figure out clever ways to encourage and engage when this group is most at risk of leaning out, but once they are already in the field, I'm not sure what can be done on a larger scale? [0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2361276.2361304&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2361276.2361304&coll=DL&dl...
thebooktocome 13y ago
It's getting harder and harder for me to rationalize staying in STEM. I'm currently ABD, hoping to graduate next spring. My boyfriend of two years has an amazing job, and I have trouble finding it fair to force him to move around with me should I bounce from postdoc to postdoc for the next three to five years, especially when we currently live close to both of our families. When I started my Ph.D., I was out to my peers because I figured anyone who was this high up in academia wouldn't care. I chose my adviser carefully, and we have a good working relationship, but I still haven't come out to him, or my coauthors. It just seems like too big of a risk when the rest of my career is on the line. At the same time I have no idea what I'd do if I left. It's not like my programming knowledge is solid enough to pass a technical interview. Blerg.
- bpodgursky 13y ago
  > It's not like my programming knowledge is solid enough to pass a technical interview. Don't convince yourself of that. A ton of companies are looking for smart people with good number and data skills who are able to expand their programming skills as needed. Being able to learn new skills IMO is a lot more valuable than being a 10 year expert in a particular language.
- WalterSear 13y ago
  There are chopshops here in silicon valley that are taking entirely non technical people and placing them in jobs after a nine week crash course. I wouldn't recommend the 'schools' or their 'graduates' to anyone, but the fact that they exist and are placing people demonstrates the demand there is.
  - thebooktocome 13y ago
    Neither of us wants to move to the valley. I've seen startup culture before; it's not for me.
    - WalterSear 13y ago
      I don't think the demand is just here. If anything it's probably greater in areas where there are fewer techies, but harder to find.
Theodores 13y ago
Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford and became a proper scientist working for a proper company before starting her political career. This was during a time when equal opportunities for women was a controversial idea rather than a right. One of Thatcher's more notorious beliefs was that there is no such thing as society and everyone had to be out for themselves. After reading this article I can see that she might have got this belief from academia where the culture is competition rather than collaboration.
- hardlianotion 13y ago
  Of course, the notoriety of the 'belief' is due to its deliberate and extensive misquoting.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- iMark 13y ago
  "And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."
  - humanrebar 13y ago
    In other words, entitlements come from somebody else (or many somebodies), not a magical cornucopia called "society". That quote is an attempt to humanize the source of government resources.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      >There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation. In other words, people who don't work don't eat, except through the charity of people who have decided that they've earned enough to take care of themselves and their families.
watwut 13y ago
"Diversity is good. This woman is adding to diversity in STEM. Her leaving decreases diversity. Therefore, she is bad to leave." That sounds ridiculous.
- jey 13y ago
  Not to me; I parsed it as "she shouldn't leave so that she sets a good example for other women" or "by leaving, she's not doing enough to support the cause".
  - watwut 13y ago
    Staying in job that treats you badly and pay less when you can get better one is not "setting a good example for other women". Your second parsing is what I find ridiculous. What is the cause here? Why should she sacrifice her career and personal happiness to your goal of diversity?
    - jey 13y ago
      I agree that's ridiculous! But it doesn't seem ridiculous that she actually hears that message.
    - makomk 13y ago
      It is ridiculous - and yet you still see arguments like this, or like that article in the NYT which spun exposing a pyramid scheme as racist because most of their low-level distributors (read: scam victims) were poor ethnic minority individuals. Basically, using the facade of fighting for equality to screw over the very people who're supposedly being helped.
al2o3cr 13y ago
They also don't tell you we're currently significantly overproducing PhDs: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_07_06/caredit.a1200075 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...
- 1stop 13y ago
  How do you 'over-produce' phds... Society is getting 'too intelligent'? wtf?
  - watwut 13y ago
    Of course, when you are dumb as a brick, you will not finish PhD. However, finishing PhD will not make you "more intelligent". It will make you more knowledgeable in whatever you finished PhD in and it will make you prepared for doing science. And if society needs 5 new highly knowledgeable scientists a year, then producing 100 new PhD holders a year is over-producing them.
    - 1stop 13y ago
      you miss my point to argue semantics. What if the PhD is the ends (in and of itself), not just the means to some other end?
      - unmei 13y ago
        It's not. If it were, it wouldn't be called "training".
      - mattlutze 13y ago
        It's an academic credential to show an ability to do research, and to present that research, in an academically sound and rigorous method. I would be quite surprised if the overflow of PhD holders in science spent that extra decade of double hours and crappy compensation just to say they did it, and expect that percentage is in reality negligible. If more people are granted PhDs per year that want to do research than are needed, then there are too many produced. It's really that simple.
fleitz 13y ago
Academia for the most part sounds horrible, when I found out what string theorists get paid I was astounded, it was only slightly better than a tech support job I had 12 years ago.
- jorleif 13y ago
  Ideally you get to work on "what you are interested in", which is the key appeal. Money-wise it is often a game for suckers.
duochrome 13y ago
I witnessed a lot similar stories in software companies.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  Agreed. OP's story is terrible, but I see that sort of thing happening in the private sector all the time as well. We need to have a broader discussion about closing the labor law loopholes that have been carved out over the years by special interests.
- rwallace 13y ago
  The story in software companies is utterly different. The software industry is a healthy market where if your boss is an asshole, you can say "bugger you, your loss," and go get a job someplace where the standards are better. Academia is a deformed industry where funding is inadequate, too many people are encouraged to try to crowd into the field, and the setup puts all the bargaining power into the hands of employers at the expense of employees, so if your boss is an asshole, there's very little you can do about it.
Malarkey73 13y ago
OK this is a shame... but a quick look at the authors CV (on her webpage) shows that she graduated in 2007 and has two scientific publications, neither first author... which is OK for someone who appears to be 2 years into a PhD. But reading her story I got the impression that she had been ground down or had been unfairly stepped over for years and was leaving in despair. I got the impression she chose to do an MS and PhD because she was being unfairly ignored despite a shining academic record ... but she started them in 2010 just 3 years after graduation. So it reads like she has made a possibly sensible choice that academia is not for her. But it also seems graceless given here lack of experience to smear everyone around her.
- vlasev 13y ago
  What do you mean exactly by "graceless" here?
- wisty 13y ago
  I think it's interesting to hear from people like her with both experience in academia, and industry experience (especially from people who went back into academia, not the ones who got industry jobs then never wanted to go back). If you ask someone who spent 30 years in the Catholic church whether the priesthood is a good move, you'd expect them to say that the good outweighs the bad. The same is true of people who spend 30 years in the education sector.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  I think it's great of her to detail her experience, which must be a difficult process. She has made the choice that academia is not for her, yes, but that was not for any academic reason: if we have any interest in improving academia, we should look at those reasons and see if we can't be more supportive to human beings in academia.
  - Malarkey73 13y ago
    It must be a difficult process for her readily identifiable adviser to realise he has been labeled a sexist all over the internet by someone who has been in the lab for a couple of years. That said I'm all for a better deal for PhD students. They have a terrible deal.
seanccox 13y ago
It's interesting that the author describes an alienation from work that sounds exceedingly Marxist and appears to be the result of failed bargaining power. This isn't an article about the pressures of academia, but about how those pressures mount when universities wield disproportionate power over graduate students' unions, which reflects the overall defeat of unions in the US. It will be interesting to see how long and how inhumanely elite, highly qualified professionals will allow themselves to be treated before there is a collective response.
- 001sky 13y ago
  This is a bizarre comment given that the problem with science is that the funding model is coming from the government (NIH, NSF) and non-profits (ie, 501c3s).
  - Malarkey73 13y ago
    They are wrong because graduate students have never had any relation to the unions or collective power. You are wrong because academic science is indeed a profoundly and increasingly competitive business with insufficient places for all to succeed and dog-eat-dog competition for funding and fellowships. Regardless of where the money comes from most scientists are like small businesses trying to expand or startups seeking investment. If anything the pursuit of short-term wins gets in the way of free thinking or risky projects.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      "You are wrong because academic science is indeed a profoundly and increasingly competitive business" How is a government funded a non-profit anything like "business"? Its a political process, fundamentally. Politics is also competitive. I think the economics analogy is quite flawed (in th GP's comment).
      - arh68 13y ago
        Business is political. Non-profits are political. That's the connection. What do you see as the difference here?
collyw 13y ago
She complains a bit about supervisors /PI's /consultants not graduating female students, without actually specifying how many females had the potential to graduate with the supervisor. To me this just comes off as some feminist whining, until you have actually shown that there is some sort of bias. If no females ever applied to work there, how could he / she graduate any females? I am guessing that (like CS) chemistry is a fairly male dominated subject. I am not saying that the sexism doesn't exist, but please demonstrate it exists properly before complaining about it.
- EC1 13y ago
  Do you realize how silly you sound?
  - Pacabel 13y ago
    Why is asking for more information considered "silly"? Why is trying to get a more complete view of the situation considered "silly"?
  - collyw 13y ago
    I suggest you have a look at this if you think my comment sound silly: http://vudlab.com/simpsons/ http://vudlab.com/simpsons/
allendoerfer 13y ago
I see how being one of the first, who succeeds leading the others is to hard to do for most people. What i do not get is, why she does not use her flexibility as a weapon against the unfair system. She obviously planned to change it, why not attack from another angle? Why not consider switching to another university or even take the chance and visit another country. There must be a competent professor in organic chemistry with more divers graduates somewhere in the world, where she could have an unfair advantage. Get a Phd there, gain superpowers, come back and defeat the evil villains.
- wisty 13y ago
  If you work 3 years in IT, and switch jobs, you get a raise. I don't think a PhD works the same way.
Fuxy 13y ago
Is it just me who doesn't see the sexism? This is the typical experience of every student regardless of gender, it is messed up but working harder doesn't defeat the system it validates it you should never let yourself be manipulated into working more than you wish or can without endangering your health or passion for the field. Even if you choose to leave you don't have to give up on your passions. I for one would never give up chemistry if i really loved it, sure it would be a lot harder without getting a PHD but who the hell cares I'm doing it for myself and will do whatever it takes to get what i want without endangering my health or love for the field. If it takes me building my own lab and my own company to support my financial needs then so be it.
- hpriebe 13y ago
  There are two types of sexism at play here: One is blatant - i.e. sexual harassment, prejudice, and discrimination. The second is latent - i.e. the "typical experience of every student," as you put it, impacts people differently depending on a number of things including their gender. By not taking those individual differences into consideration, the culture of STEM forces women to work harder to fit in and balance their gender-specific circumstances.
DaveWalk 13y ago
I'm shocked by the sexism evidence in this article, and I respect the author for removing herself from such a place. I often wonder how this hostility compares to other institutions, and other labs in the same institution (forgive the scientist in me). I think it speaks volumes about the unevenness of higher education across universities, and where each PI can rule his fiefdom with whatever mercy he chooses to provide. I believe the pyramid-like structure of academic research combined with the winner-take-all nature of publishing results is a toxic mix for exploitation, and sexism would make it all the more unberable. For women in the biosciences, I strongly suggest tapping into a network of support from other successful women such as Women in Bio (http://womeninbio.org/ http://womeninbio.org/) and AWIS (http://www.awis.org/ http://www.awis.org/).
bovermyer 13y ago
This is horrible. It's also far from the first time I've heard of things like this happening. My dad is a professor. I'm intimately familiar with the politics, backstabbing, and petty bickering that permeates academia. My dad survives by being positive, supportive, and staying out of the fray as much as possible. I made a conscious choice to not enter academia. My degree is a B.A. in History; the only obvious career choice for that degree is to go through the hell that is history academia. I opted to fall back on my web development interests rather than use my degree or the network I'd built up. Academia is abusive. The current state of things, as evidenced by the linked article and my own experiences, is holding back the real purpose of academia: a quest for knowledge. I will reiterate: academia is abusive. The problem is so systemic that I don't think there's any way to fix it. We need a new model, a new community.
untilHellbanned 13y ago
cue the downvoting of anyone critical of the OP....

149 points by ISL 13y ago

Wow. This stuck out so much: "My mother, who'd earned degrees in physics and electrical engineering in the 70's, cried when I told her that I was leaving and why but she never blamed me. She'd hoped that my generation’s experiences would be better than hers."

DaveWalk 13y ago
A great point you brought up. I know someone whose mother, by all intents, was cleared to get accepted to a PhD program in the sciences...but unfortunately, they didn't allow women into the program at the time. It was "simply not done." And this was a decade after the Civil Rights Movement!
- HillRat 13y ago
  Back in the 70s, my father ran a state government agency staffed primarily by economists, statisticians and modelers. One economist was a woman who was very highly credentialed -- multiple Ivy Leagues, quant-heavy background, extremely knowledgeable in her particular field. He tendered her an offer, expecting her to take over a fairly critical position within a week. He immediately got a memo from the governor's office tersely informing him that he would need to submit to them her husband's notarized approval in writing before they would allow him to hire a woman. To contextualize, this was a few years after a flurry of state ratifications of the Equal Rights Amendment. A kind of proto-"Mens' Rights Movement" had, by the mid-1970s, coalesced against the ERA and legal protections for women in the workplace. In this state, a fairly prominent state politician had publicly taken the lead in trying to roll back protections for women (in part by arguing that the ERA would require public swimming pools to be topless!), and the liberal(ish) governor was fighting a conservative cultural backlash from constituents. As a result, political agencies were deluged with a series of ad hoc restrictions that basically made it impossible to hire or promote women unless they were in "traditional" roles such as the typing pool. (To his credit, my father fought through the strictures, using the same kind of cussedness that led him to take long road trips with African-American fellow military officers through the Deep South of the 1960s, in which they found out that, black or white, a military uniform didn't protect you from redneck sheriffs.) If you think about the sweep of history, four or five decades ago is a very short time, and even though gains for women and minorities have been very real and tangible, it's all too easy to see how fragile they are. Today, racism and sexism are generally more tacit than explicit (and often supported by decent people who simply aren't aware of, but can be educated about, the superstructural biases of their organizations), but the results are just as pernicious for those operating on life's higher difficulty settings.

rdl 13y ago

I thought the "you need a PhD to do anything real in chemistry/bio/etc. research" was well understood. I guess SM + MD would be fine too. (Chem Eng and industrial chemistry seem fine with an SB, and maybe an employer-provided SM, but that's not research.)

doctorcroc 13y ago
I agree, there are a lot of options in industry with a BS in ChE, but not so much in Chemistry. You're pretty much expected to get at least a Masters...
- jey 13y ago
  I wonder why this is so different in CS, where it's much more feasible to get a senior highly-technical job without formal credentials. What's the source of this cultural difference?
  - rdl 13y ago
    Jobs are in big organizations, and you have expensive multi-year projects which might be your first project, and highly conservative funding/approvals boards.
  - ksk 13y ago
    (Note: I have assumed you mean CS as in programming) Because programming is not science. In fact its not even an engineering discipline from what I can see. The process is not rigorous enough and few programmers can even hope to attempt something like formally proving that their code works. We need less people writing code, not more. And those fewer people should be held to a much higher standard than 'Bob's cousin once read a book on sharepoint so go ask him if he can create a cake ordering website for you'
    - jey 13y ago
      You're right that programming isn't science, but parts of it are complicated in a way similar to math, with many intricate components that interact in complex ways. People with only a BS (or no degree) regularly get jobs writing this complex code. I'm thinking of things like browsers, databases, and video codecs.

jorleif 13y ago

My own experience from academia tells me that a big part of the problem is the fact that everyone is competing for a small pool of faculty positions and those positions are filled based on individual performance. This means you can never win as a team, only as an individual, and everyone needs to get their share. Only a professor can build a team, but even those teams are temporary. Add to this the fact that only new things count as science, which means that good work can easily turn out worthless if the desired results are not achieved. For this reason, science then is naturally elitist, and has big differences in the status of participants (tenured vs not), and heavy competition. Might it be that this environment breeds nasty behavior such as misogyny and bullying? If a professor treats a student badly (I don't mean harassment, I mean overwork and bad guidance) then that is rarely punished in any way, it is probably beneficial for his career.

chalst 13y ago
I think it's easier to have such an exploitative regime in sciences that depend on "big lab" research: a higher body of graduate-student subordinates trying to get PhDs makes it easier to treat them as interchangeable components; the success of the lab depends on maximisation of (competent) labour hours put in; the lab equipment is seriously expensive and a high return on the costs must be shown to justify the next round of research applications; the graduate students are rather more dependent on the PI's goodwill to get the research done for their PhD.
- jorleif 13y ago
  I agree, my own experiences in CS are not at all as bad as those of the OP, but still it took a long time for me to figure out how the system works, and why senior people might choose to leave students to their own devices when the student clearly does not know what to do, and how to be productive.
Fede_V 13y ago
A very famous Harvard Nobel prize winning scientist had a phd student commit suicide while in his lab: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-chemistry-at-harvard.html http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-chemistry-... Still there, still incredibly famous, still untouched. Oh, and speaking specifically of chemistry, who can forget this brilliant gem? http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/a40kI.png http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/a40... That's real by the way.

jpeg_hero 13y ago

>and whom I heard joke about “finishing up some chromatography” (chromatography is a purification technique that usually involves flushing a quantity of liquid through a long, narrow column) when we paused our consulting session for a bathroom break. Is it offensive to make a chemistry joke about taking a piss?

jforman 13y ago
That's the one thing you decide to make a comment about?
- rjknight 13y ago
  We were only given two facts about the person in question, and that was one of them. It stood out to me in the original post, because it highlighted the fact that what actually upsets people and what a disinterested observer thinks should upset people are different things.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- a8000 13y ago
  It was definitely also one of the things that stood out to me as being an odd example for inappropriate behaviour.
- phazmatis 13y ago
  Other topics have been covered already, duh.
Pxtl 13y ago
I assume it's more of a "straw that broke the camel's back" in a constant barrage of problems. Dick jokes in a toxic environment only make the environment more toxic. Which is sad, because it was a funny line.
- EC1 13y ago
  I do not ever want to work with a person that does not see a joke as just that, a joke.

deleted 13y ago

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not_paul_graham 13y ago

This comment is a bit off topic, but one of the ways to keep underrepresented minorities and women engaged with computing at the undergraduate level is through constant encouragement. Research [0] from some computing professors suggests that: "Without encouragement even high ability women and under-represented minorities were unlikely to persist in computing." And this really sucks because one of the professors from this referenced research has said that CS access in High School is limited to affluent students (who are mostly white and asian) and the only place in the education pipeline where the playing field is even is in college, but without encouragement a lot of women and members of the minority community lean out. The second issue is the fact that these fields are dominated by men and you can't control everyone's behaviour. Sure we can figure out clever ways to encourage and engage when this group is most at risk of leaning out, but once they are already in the field, I'm not sure what can be done on a larger scale? [0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2361276.2361304&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2361276.2361304&coll=DL&dl...

thebooktocome 13y ago

It's getting harder and harder for me to rationalize staying in STEM. I'm currently ABD, hoping to graduate next spring. My boyfriend of two years has an amazing job, and I have trouble finding it fair to force him to move around with me should I bounce from postdoc to postdoc for the next three to five years, especially when we currently live close to both of our families. When I started my Ph.D., I was out to my peers because I figured anyone who was this high up in academia wouldn't care. I chose my adviser carefully, and we have a good working relationship, but I still haven't come out to him, or my coauthors. It just seems like too big of a risk when the rest of my career is on the line. At the same time I have no idea what I'd do if I left. It's not like my programming knowledge is solid enough to pass a technical interview. Blerg.

bpodgursky 13y ago
> It's not like my programming knowledge is solid enough to pass a technical interview. Don't convince yourself of that. A ton of companies are looking for smart people with good number and data skills who are able to expand their programming skills as needed. Being able to learn new skills IMO is a lot more valuable than being a 10 year expert in a particular language.
WalterSear 13y ago
There are chopshops here in silicon valley that are taking entirely non technical people and placing them in jobs after a nine week crash course. I wouldn't recommend the 'schools' or their 'graduates' to anyone, but the fact that they exist and are placing people demonstrates the demand there is.
- thebooktocome 13y ago
  Neither of us wants to move to the valley. I've seen startup culture before; it's not for me.
  - WalterSear 13y ago
    I don't think the demand is just here. If anything it's probably greater in areas where there are fewer techies, but harder to find.

Theodores 13y ago

Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford and became a proper scientist working for a proper company before starting her political career. This was during a time when equal opportunities for women was a controversial idea rather than a right. One of Thatcher's more notorious beliefs was that there is no such thing as society and everyone had to be out for themselves. After reading this article I can see that she might have got this belief from academia where the culture is competition rather than collaboration.

hardlianotion 13y ago
Of course, the notoriety of the 'belief' is due to its deliberate and extensive misquoting.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
iMark 13y ago
"And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."
- humanrebar 13y ago
  In other words, entitlements come from somebody else (or many somebodies), not a magical cornucopia called "society". That quote is an attempt to humanize the source of government resources.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    >There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation. In other words, people who don't work don't eat, except through the charity of people who have decided that they've earned enough to take care of themselves and their families.

watwut 13y ago

"Diversity is good. This woman is adding to diversity in STEM. Her leaving decreases diversity. Therefore, she is bad to leave." That sounds ridiculous.

jey 13y ago
Not to me; I parsed it as "she shouldn't leave so that she sets a good example for other women" or "by leaving, she's not doing enough to support the cause".
- watwut 13y ago
  Staying in job that treats you badly and pay less when you can get better one is not "setting a good example for other women". Your second parsing is what I find ridiculous. What is the cause here? Why should she sacrifice her career and personal happiness to your goal of diversity?
  - jey 13y ago
    I agree that's ridiculous! But it doesn't seem ridiculous that she actually hears that message.
  - makomk 13y ago
    It is ridiculous - and yet you still see arguments like this, or like that article in the NYT which spun exposing a pyramid scheme as racist because most of their low-level distributors (read: scam victims) were poor ethnic minority individuals. Basically, using the facade of fighting for equality to screw over the very people who're supposedly being helped.

al2o3cr 13y ago

They also don't tell you we're currently significantly overproducing PhDs: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_07_06/caredit.a1200075 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...

1stop 13y ago
How do you 'over-produce' phds... Society is getting 'too intelligent'? wtf?
- watwut 13y ago
  Of course, when you are dumb as a brick, you will not finish PhD. However, finishing PhD will not make you "more intelligent". It will make you more knowledgeable in whatever you finished PhD in and it will make you prepared for doing science. And if society needs 5 new highly knowledgeable scientists a year, then producing 100 new PhD holders a year is over-producing them.
  - 1stop 13y ago
    you miss my point to argue semantics. What if the PhD is the ends (in and of itself), not just the means to some other end?
    - unmei 13y ago
      It's not. If it were, it wouldn't be called "training".
    - mattlutze 13y ago
      It's an academic credential to show an ability to do research, and to present that research, in an academically sound and rigorous method. I would be quite surprised if the overflow of PhD holders in science spent that extra decade of double hours and crappy compensation just to say they did it, and expect that percentage is in reality negligible. If more people are granted PhDs per year that want to do research than are needed, then there are too many produced. It's really that simple.

fleitz 13y ago

Academia for the most part sounds horrible, when I found out what string theorists get paid I was astounded, it was only slightly better than a tech support job I had 12 years ago.

jorleif 13y ago
Ideally you get to work on "what you are interested in", which is the key appeal. Money-wise it is often a game for suckers.

duochrome 13y ago

I witnessed a lot similar stories in software companies.

humanrebar 13y ago
Agreed. OP's story is terrible, but I see that sort of thing happening in the private sector all the time as well. We need to have a broader discussion about closing the labor law loopholes that have been carved out over the years by special interests.
rwallace 13y ago
The story in software companies is utterly different. The software industry is a healthy market where if your boss is an asshole, you can say "bugger you, your loss," and go get a job someplace where the standards are better. Academia is a deformed industry where funding is inadequate, too many people are encouraged to try to crowd into the field, and the setup puts all the bargaining power into the hands of employers at the expense of employees, so if your boss is an asshole, there's very little you can do about it.

Malarkey73 13y ago

OK this is a shame... but a quick look at the authors CV (on her webpage) shows that she graduated in 2007 and has two scientific publications, neither first author... which is OK for someone who appears to be 2 years into a PhD. But reading her story I got the impression that she had been ground down or had been unfairly stepped over for years and was leaving in despair. I got the impression she chose to do an MS and PhD because she was being unfairly ignored despite a shining academic record ... but she started them in 2010 just 3 years after graduation. So it reads like she has made a possibly sensible choice that academia is not for her. But it also seems graceless given here lack of experience to smear everyone around her.

vlasev 13y ago
What do you mean exactly by "graceless" here?
wisty 13y ago
I think it's interesting to hear from people like her with both experience in academia, and industry experience (especially from people who went back into academia, not the ones who got industry jobs then never wanted to go back). If you ask someone who spent 30 years in the Catholic church whether the priesthood is a good move, you'd expect them to say that the good outweighs the bad. The same is true of people who spend 30 years in the education sector.
ronaldx 13y ago
I think it's great of her to detail her experience, which must be a difficult process. She has made the choice that academia is not for her, yes, but that was not for any academic reason: if we have any interest in improving academia, we should look at those reasons and see if we can't be more supportive to human beings in academia.
- Malarkey73 13y ago
  It must be a difficult process for her readily identifiable adviser to realise he has been labeled a sexist all over the internet by someone who has been in the lab for a couple of years. That said I'm all for a better deal for PhD students. They have a terrible deal.

seanccox 13y ago

It's interesting that the author describes an alienation from work that sounds exceedingly Marxist and appears to be the result of failed bargaining power. This isn't an article about the pressures of academia, but about how those pressures mount when universities wield disproportionate power over graduate students' unions, which reflects the overall defeat of unions in the US. It will be interesting to see how long and how inhumanely elite, highly qualified professionals will allow themselves to be treated before there is a collective response.

001sky 13y ago
This is a bizarre comment given that the problem with science is that the funding model is coming from the government (NIH, NSF) and non-profits (ie, 501c3s).
- Malarkey73 13y ago
  They are wrong because graduate students have never had any relation to the unions or collective power. You are wrong because academic science is indeed a profoundly and increasingly competitive business with insufficient places for all to succeed and dog-eat-dog competition for funding and fellowships. Regardless of where the money comes from most scientists are like small businesses trying to expand or startups seeking investment. If anything the pursuit of short-term wins gets in the way of free thinking or risky projects.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    "You are wrong because academic science is indeed a profoundly and increasingly competitive business" How is a government funded a non-profit anything like "business"? Its a political process, fundamentally. Politics is also competitive. I think the economics analogy is quite flawed (in th GP's comment).
    - arh68 13y ago
      Business is political. Non-profits are political. That's the connection. What do you see as the difference here?

collyw 13y ago

She complains a bit about supervisors /PI's /consultants not graduating female students, without actually specifying how many females had the potential to graduate with the supervisor. To me this just comes off as some feminist whining, until you have actually shown that there is some sort of bias. If no females ever applied to work there, how could he / she graduate any females? I am guessing that (like CS) chemistry is a fairly male dominated subject. I am not saying that the sexism doesn't exist, but please demonstrate it exists properly before complaining about it.

EC1 13y ago
Do you realize how silly you sound?
- Pacabel 13y ago
  Why is asking for more information considered "silly"? Why is trying to get a more complete view of the situation considered "silly"?
- collyw 13y ago
  I suggest you have a look at this if you think my comment sound silly: http://vudlab.com/simpsons/ http://vudlab.com/simpsons/

allendoerfer 13y ago

I see how being one of the first, who succeeds leading the others is to hard to do for most people. What i do not get is, why she does not use her flexibility as a weapon against the unfair system. She obviously planned to change it, why not attack from another angle? Why not consider switching to another university or even take the chance and visit another country. There must be a competent professor in organic chemistry with more divers graduates somewhere in the world, where she could have an unfair advantage. Get a Phd there, gain superpowers, come back and defeat the evil villains.

wisty 13y ago
If you work 3 years in IT, and switch jobs, you get a raise. I don't think a PhD works the same way.

Fuxy 13y ago

Is it just me who doesn't see the sexism? This is the typical experience of every student regardless of gender, it is messed up but working harder doesn't defeat the system it validates it you should never let yourself be manipulated into working more than you wish or can without endangering your health or passion for the field. Even if you choose to leave you don't have to give up on your passions. I for one would never give up chemistry if i really loved it, sure it would be a lot harder without getting a PHD but who the hell cares I'm doing it for myself and will do whatever it takes to get what i want without endangering my health or love for the field. If it takes me building my own lab and my own company to support my financial needs then so be it.

hpriebe 13y ago
There are two types of sexism at play here: One is blatant - i.e. sexual harassment, prejudice, and discrimination. The second is latent - i.e. the "typical experience of every student," as you put it, impacts people differently depending on a number of things including their gender. By not taking those individual differences into consideration, the culture of STEM forces women to work harder to fit in and balance their gender-specific circumstances.

DaveWalk 13y ago

I'm shocked by the sexism evidence in this article, and I respect the author for removing herself from such a place. I often wonder how this hostility compares to other institutions, and other labs in the same institution (forgive the scientist in me). I think it speaks volumes about the unevenness of higher education across universities, and where each PI can rule his fiefdom with whatever mercy he chooses to provide. I believe the pyramid-like structure of academic research combined with the winner-take-all nature of publishing results is a toxic mix for exploitation, and sexism would make it all the more unberable. For women in the biosciences, I strongly suggest tapping into a network of support from other successful women such as Women in Bio (http://womeninbio.org/ http://womeninbio.org/) and AWIS (http://www.awis.org/ http://www.awis.org/).

bovermyer 13y ago

This is horrible. It's also far from the first time I've heard of things like this happening. My dad is a professor. I'm intimately familiar with the politics, backstabbing, and petty bickering that permeates academia. My dad survives by being positive, supportive, and staying out of the fray as much as possible. I made a conscious choice to not enter academia. My degree is a B.A. in History; the only obvious career choice for that degree is to go through the hell that is history academia. I opted to fall back on my web development interests rather than use my degree or the network I'd built up. Academia is abusive. The current state of things, as evidenced by the linked article and my own experiences, is holding back the real purpose of academia: a quest for knowledge. I will reiterate: academia is abusive. The problem is so systemic that I don't think there's any way to fix it. We need a new model, a new community.

untilHellbanned 13y ago

cue the downvoting of anyone critical of the OP....