Daily Struggles
thusspakezuska | April 27, 2007You'll recall I posted about fellow Scibling Shelley Batts's run-in with Wiley over fair use of a figure and graph from a journal article. This incident created quite a firestorm in the blogosphere. You'll find a good summary and a nice link roundup provided by Bora over at A Blog Around The Clock. It's a big deal because it gets to the heart of science blogging and science reporting.
It generated enough attention that both Nature and Scientific American posted about it.
Now Nature's blogger reported on the issue as follows:
A few days ago Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle reviewed a…
thusspakezuska | April 6, 2007Bora at A Blog Around the Clock alerted me to an article in Science Daily titled Power And Sexual Harassment -- Men And Women See Things Differently.
Issues of power, workplace culture and the interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication associated with sexual harassment were the focus of a study by Debbie Dougherty, assistant professor of communication in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Working with a large healthcare organization in the Midwest, Dougherty examined the question: why does sexual harassment occur?
Dougherty's findings show…
thusspakezuska | April 2, 2007Well, just when I think I might be getting the migraines under control, I go and lose a whole week due to some mystery illness. It wasn't a cold and it wasn't the flu, but it sure did nail me to the floor for a week. I'm just getting back on schedule in my life. I'll try to get the Joy of Science summaries posted tomorrow but discussion posts may not be till Thursday.
Anyway....I wanted to call your attention to a nifty post on the "life as a leak" subject over at Fairer Science. And back on March 20, Science Woman wrote a post on Why We Leave that is very good. The discussion in the…
thusspakezuska | March 23, 2007X-Gal Meg Murray hasn't completely leaked out of the pipeline yet. She's taken a lectureship instead of a tenure-track position, and she writes this in a column titled Too Few Choices:
Defining success is a tricky thing. Would I consider myself successful if I had moved my family across the country for my career, making my husband miserable and decreasing our standard of living? We now have a high quality of life (income aside) in a location where our kids are happy and where my husband (who provides the bulk of our income) has limitless career opportunities.
Is that success? I don't know. I…
thusspakezuska | March 22, 2007This post has gotten so long I'm going to have to break it into pieces. Here's the first installment.
You've read a million stories about the leaky pipeline. They all start out more or less like this:
It is no secret that women are under-represented at every level of the science and technology (S&T) system. Statistics clearly show that, much like a 'leaky pipeline', women steadily drop out all along the system.
Nor is it difficult to identify the causes of the leaks. They range from gender-based biases in hiring, evaluation, and promotion; to inadequate institutional support for…
thusspakezuska | March 21, 2007I've been planning to write a post about leaks in the pipeline - specifically, what it's like to be a leak in the pipeline. I've been thinking about this post in my head for a long time, and have even talked about it with a few people via email and face-to-face, but I'm finding it extraordinarily difficult to write it. It's the same with posts that I would like to write about the two most recent X-Gals columns (here and here).
And everything else that I might want to blog about seems locked up behind these things that I want - need - to write about. I wrote a bit yesterday about gender…
thusspakezuska | February 22, 2007Perhaps you will recall a somewhat controversial post awhile back delicately titled The Origin of "Puke On His Shoes". In that post I described the persistent, annoying, unwanted attentions of a male passenger on an Amtrak train, despite my (what should have been obvious) signal that I was completely uninterested in him: I was reading a book, and continued reading it as he yammered away, hitting on me.
Women commenters more or less completely understood my tactic, whereas some male commenters felt this was unfair and I should have been more straightforward. I suppose they were suggesting…
thusspakezuska | February 15, 2007You absolutely must read these two posts:
Tara at Aetiology writes about There's No Crying in Academia!
Her post was inspired by Am I A Woman Scientist? who wrote That Little Sucker Just Saved Your Life.
Both posts are about crying in the workplace - women do, men don't (usually). Men think women are weak when they do. But women are usually crying not because they feel weak, but because they are frustrated and/or angry. Am I A Woman Scientist? writes:
I have cried once in a professional setting, and come close to crying twice. All three times, it was a stress release, because I was quite…
thusspakezuska | February 10, 2007Young Female Scientist asks, Is Science A Free Country?
It seems that those who criticize the scientific system are assumed to be bad scientists.
Surely, goes the assumption, they are not successful, and that has made them bitter. Their concerns are irrelevant.
I highly recommend her brief, eloquent essay addressing this topic. She locates scientists inbetween anti-scientists and science-worshippers. Anti-scientists are obviously problemmatic; science worshippers are a tad unrealistic. But do scientists get it just right, like Baby Bear's porridge for Goldilocks? Not quite. I won't…
thusspakezuska | January 29, 2007Female Science Professor describes the amazing (and amazingly depressing) power of invisibility women in science seem to possess - at least when Distinguished Schmucks are visiting the department:
A male colleague and I walked up to the Distinguished Visitor in the hallway, and the visitor stuck out his hand at my male colleague and gave him a manly handshake; they introduced themselves to each other. For some reason, I assumed it was my turn for a handshake and introduction. Social horror! He ignored me. I dropped my hand, but I introduced myself anyway, saying something like "I'm on your…
thusspakezuska | January 25, 2007Dr. Free-Ride has graciously put the slides from her talk at the Science Blogging Conference on the conference wiki, so I'm thinking I can go ahead and blog about the stuff I thought I couldn't blog about in my earlier post.
Specifically, Dr. Free-Ride spent some time talking about conversations that happen in the blogosphere that might not otherwise take place. She enumerated and categorized these. Her basic categories were as follows:
Educational Conversations
Political Conversations
Conversations About the Scientific Literature
The Virtual Scientific (or Lab) Meeting
Conversations…
thusspakezuska | January 24, 2007I think my favorite part of the day at the Science Blogging Conference was when Dr. Free-Ride gave her talk. It was titled "Adventures In Science Blogging: Conversations We Need To Have, and How Blogging Can Help Them". I am hoping she will turn this into a paper and publish it somewhere so I don't want to steal all her thunder. But I do want to share just a bit of what she talked about.
Dr. Free-Ride talked about the need for community and communication as key ingredients for human beings to flourish. She also drily noted that since, when she last checked, scientists are still human…
thusspakezuska | January 18, 2007Everyone says "encourage your daughters to stick with math and science". And you want to do it. You're proud of your daughter, you want her to have every option in the world open to her. But what do you do when she resists?
A worried dad recently wrote with just such a dilemma:
Slightly off-thread but my daughter is determined, against the evidence, that she's no good at maths. She mentions this from time to time, for example when she's doing her maths homework.
"I'm no good at maths"
"Your teachers seem to think you're doing rather well. Your last report was excellent"
"[changes…
thusspakezuska | December 14, 2006So I'm cruising about Scienceblogs to catch up on my Sciblings and I come across this on Aetiology:
So, razib relates a recent observation of the apparently rare species hottus chicas scientificas at a local wine bar. Shelley's ticked:
Not sure whether to be more irked that Razib suggests that smart women aren't hot (and vice versa), that hot women don't like sci fi, or than sci fi somehow denotes intelligence. Booooooooo.
While razib tells her to "focus on the science fiction part. not the intelligence," I agree with Shelley's later comment that who cares exactly whether he was talking about…
thusspakezuska | December 6, 2006The latest installment in the X-Gals series is out: Life As A Mother-Scientist. Subtitle: The X-Gals, a group of nine female biologists, see a direct correlation between their productivity and their child care.
Note that last phrase: the link is not between productivity and having children. It's between productivity and child care. Access to it, quality of available child care, sudden unpredictable collapse of previously arranged child care, difficulty of obtaining child care for very young infants or sick children, and so on. When good child care arrangements are in place,…
thusspakezuska | December 4, 2006Occasionally one of my (usually male) readers will take me to task for what he considers to be my unwarranted angry - dare I say, strident? - tone of voice. Can I not be more polite? More reasonable? Would I not catch more flies with honey? Only speak sweet reason, dear crazy bitch Zuska, they plead, and we will assuredly attend to the substance of your message. But not while you rant and rave so. No indeed. That can only turn us off.
Well, as someone I knew once said, I don't want to catch flies. I want to kill them.
I told the story of the origins of the "Puke On His Shoes"…
thusspakezuska | November 21, 2006Jokerine wrote in respone to Let Her Eat the Oppressor's Cake:
had a discussion in my group today about affirmative action. One of the guys comented that if we promoted women in male fields soon all groups on the fringes of society would ask for prefferential treatment. I couldn't figure out what was bothering me for a while, but wait a minute since when are women a fringe group. And this from a man that considers himself liberal and progressive. Poor Rachel, one day her eyes will open and she will see how much worse she is off as a woman. I'll be there for her to come crying to.
No indeedy,…
thusspakezuska | November 20, 2006Joanna Russ wrote a wonderful book in 1983 called How to Suppress Women's Writing. (You can purchase it on the internet here or at your local bookseller or at amazon.) Sadly, you could read that book today and apply its insights directly to science and engineering.
So, with an acknowledgement to Joanna Russ:
She didn't do science. (But if it's clear she did the deed...)
She did science, but she shouldn't have. (It's science with a political agenda, it's actually masculine thinking.)
She did science, but look what she researched. (Technology of household equipment, domestic architecture…
thusspakezuska | November 15, 2006It's been a migrainey sort of week here at Chez Zuska, so in lieu of something new at the moment, I'm giving you a "best of Zuska" from the old blog site. By coincidence, it's also trash and recycling night here in my hometown. Read and decide for yourself.
Shake Off The Dust Under Your Feet
And as a follow-up to my last post, take a gander at what Female Science Professor has to say:
At my university, there has never been a woman department chair in science, engineering, or math in the entire history of the university. A dean recently told me that it will probably be another decade or so…
thusspakezuska | November 12, 2006Female Science Professor has the most wonderful story to tell about a career forum at her university. Organized by a junior female faculty at her school,
There is typically a panel with representatives from various types of academic institutions (small colleges, research universities, medium-sized universities), from industry, and from government agencies. The panel members speak briefly about their jobs and then there is a lot of interactive question-answer time with the audience. After,there is informal social time for additional interaction between students and the panel members.
What's…