I haven't abandoned you, dear readers, I've just been attending to some tasks in the three-dimensional world. In the meantime, I want to recommend some great posts on other blogs. While some may leave you feeling reasonably good about doings in the world of science, I'm afraid others may break your heart. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read them.
- At ChemBark, Paul Bracher muses on the ethics of doing science on someone else's dime. He notes that when the context in which you're doing the science is academic, your obligations extend to students as well as the entity funding your research and the PI in charge of the project. My favorite part of the post is the kind of reflection that ought to be a regular part of a scientist's inner life:
At the end of the day, my guiding principle is simple: If reports of my behavior were to become public, would I be embarrassed? If someone were to step forward and describe my actions that day, in explicit detail, would I be proud of myself? Could I defend my conduct without feeling dirty or guilty doing so?
It's tempting to get that put on mugs (with Paul's permission, of course!) and distribute them at major scientific meetings. Anyone want to fund the project?
- In the process of considering her job offers (yay!), Dr. Shellie muses on another sort of integrity:
... is the truth consistent, I wonder? Though my blog is anonymous, I try to write only things that I could stand behind, if someone asked me about them in person. Sometimes I have deleted a few posts afterwards because I didn't think they met this criterion. So I think my blog is roughly consistent with the real me... not a complete picture, but consistent.
I'm a firm believer that reflecting helps us figure out both who we are and who we want to become. Bloggers like Dr. Shellie do a nice job of modeling that process for other people who are in the process of simultaneously figuring out how to be scientists and how to be themselves.
- Doing that is not always a walk in the park, though. Just ask YoungFemaleScientist, whose anonymous commenters seem always to be telling her to put on a happy face. She responds to this advice:
We actually want our own labs. And some of us actually want to change the system when we get there. So, you're just wrong. I'm not wasting energy complaining. Sometimes I think blogging, and having things to blog about, is the most important thing I can do, because it's one of the only things I can actually control.
What's the point in willfully putting yourself in situations to be exploited if you aren't going to document all the abuse?
Recognizing that certain parts of the existing system are broken is a necessary step in believing they can be different. Getting pissed off can (if properly harnessed) help you actually make them different.
- Sometimes, the change seems very slow. Consider Zuska's commentary on a married couple on the same experiment who received differential treatment -- and recognized it themselves -- but decided they didn't want their names attached to a discussion of it on Absinthe's blog:
The kind of attitude displayed by the husband is the kind of attitude that helps to support continuing gender inequity. I am not saying he is directly responsible for his wife's poor treatment. I am saying he is responsible for being willing to tolerate it to the extent that he doesn't even want it discussed in a blog. Attitudes like that implicitly convey to others that inequitable treatment will be tolerated by other members of society, so go right ahead, discriminate your hearts out. ...
"I support gender equity in principle" is not good enough. Being privately supportive and lending a listening ear to your beleaguered spouse is not enough. Being a private and personal "nice guy" will never do anything to effect real change. "Nice guys" who listen to and console the victims of gender bias are one step better than those who don't believe it occurs at all. But they don't go far enough.
- Near the end of Absinthe's post about the husband whose open commitment to gender equity was wavering is a paragraph that I think challenges scientists' view of themselves as creatures of perfect objectivity and rationality:
I wrote a recent journal article regarding gender discrimination at our national laboratories (it is currently undergoing peer review). In it I point out that even the most rigorous statistical data analyses that show appallingly significant evidence of gender discrimination will be unlikely to sway the opinions of those who simply wish to believe that gender discrimination in the sciences does not exist. Similarly, any study which shows that there does not appear to be significant evidence of gender discrimination in the sciences (of which there are very few) will be unlikely to sway the opinion of someone who firmly believes that gender discrimination is endemic in the field. What percentage of scientists fall into these two extreme categories I wonder? Does anyone out there have any idea?
- Possibly trying to reconcile an idealized picture of what a scientific community and academic life is supposed to be like with the reality of the lived experience could help us understand the conditions that brought environmental scientist Dr. Elizabeth Sulzman of Oregon State University to her apparent suicide earlier this week. As Sciencewoman notes, we can't be sure what led her to this decision, but female academics at a certain career stage are all too familiar with the pressures that likely bore down upon her:
Were the pressures to continually get funding and publishing results too much? What about the desire to produce outstanding classes on top of her other commitments? Was there a problem in her relationship with her husband? Did she feel guilty about lack of time with her daughter? Did she miss having "free" time? Was it years of sleep deprivation, mother guilt, and impostor syndrome? I am left wondering what could drive a woman to despair so deep that she'd leave behind her daughter.
I am left wondering whether the life she led was "worth it" while it lasted. I am left wondering whether there is something wrong with "the system" that puts so much pressure on individuals to constantly perform. I am left wondering about the expectations that we have for our selves - to succeed at so many endeavors simultaneously. I am left wondering about the extra burden we carry as women - primary caregivers facing an unequal playing field at work - and the chronic pressure that adds to our loads.
For what it's worth, scientists, academics, parents, whoever, don't let anyone convince you that being aware of the pressures or being bothered by the pressures is something wrong with you. Don't let anyone convince you that you're the only one who feels them -- there are others! (In cyberspace, sometimes they find each other and form communities to support each other.) Do your best to take care of business, but don't forget to take care of yourself in the process.
Don't resign yourself to the world always being this way, but don't feel either like you must shoulder the burden of fixing it all by yourself.
What have you been reading this week that made you think?
Readers should be aware that the couple about whom Absinthe posted have objected, in comments on Zuska's post, not just to having their names included in the discussion without their permission, but to Absinthe's apparent mis-characterization of both her relationship to them and her communications with them, and also to her characterization of their situation. I am hoping that Absinthe will address these objections herself.
"properly harnessed" is the rub now, isn't it? the gender equality in science/science careers thing gives perhaps some good lessons for fighting the ethics fight. it is all very well to rant. feels good, vents steam. cool. but in the end one needs to keep one's eye on the prize. this whole Absinthe/Zuska out-the-science-couple thing is just a train wreck. how does any of this analysis advance the cause? I just don't see it...and that is what I find to be other than "uplifting"
thought experiment for the science ethics readers. suppose...
I know a grad student [give name, give lab] who is being screwed in her work because the postdocs [give names] faked data [cite figure, papers] all with the certain knowledge of [cite PI]. But that student is not really committed to ethics because she's not going through the channels to bust 'em, just keeping her head down trying to get a PhD and get outta there. hey, blogosphere, shouldn't we all shame her for her enabling of the system!
...not a model to follow if you ask me.
This is what happens when I have dozens of open tabs and haven't hit "refresh" on a bunch of them in a while.
I had assumed, as seemed reasonable to me, that the use of real names in the initial post was with the agreement of the involved parties. If not (and if their situation was not, say, the subject of a news article being analyzed in the post), that's problematic.
The situation (or a blogger's take on it) could well have been framed as a hypothetical with no identifying details, where analysis might have been useful -- possibly even illuminating to people in similar situations.
Drugmonkey: while I don't disagree, by the same token what your hypothetical student is doing is -- not so much wrong as sub-optimal. It's important to discuss his/her case, in order to figure out what has to change about the system so that he/she would be able to blow the whistle without getting screwed. It's just that it's pointless, counter-productive and mean to blame the student for his/her response to a lousy system.
At the end of the day, my guiding principle is simple: If reports of my behavior were to become public, would I be embarrassed? If someone were to step forward and describe my actions that day, in explicit detail, would I be proud of myself? Could I defend my conduct without feeling dirty or guilty doing so?
A guiding principle for scientists? Sure. Seems to me that should be a guiding principle for humans.
Never do anything in public you wouldn't do in front of the kids. And many of the things you would.
Janet and Bill: Bill should know, if Janet does not, that Absinthe was originally commenting upon a news story about the husband and wife that appeared in a publication, Symmetry, that Fermilab puts out, and that she contextualized her comments with statistical data that was also available in the public record. So she was not "outing" anyone or putting names out in public that were not already out there. She was commenting on a news story, which is something bloggers routinely do.
Absinthe has been out of town; I have spoken to her on the phone this evening, just after she has returned. She has promised to send me a communication after reading my post and the comments on it. She assures me, however, that what is available on her blog about taking down the original post is accurate.