I think it worth emphasizing that the most important thing for everyone involved in the GCC is to ensure, by all means possible, that they bend over backwards so as to make sure that there is never any possibility that some Anonymous Internet Person might conceivably be offended at the suggestion that conference organizers anywhere—let alone conference organizers at an institution such as Oxford, whose commitment to gender equity and rejection of male privilege in education runs as far back as the High Middle Ages I’m sorry, I mean 1974—should risk feeling any twinge of private or, Heaven forfend, public embarrassment in the face of some no doubt imagined tendency to repeatedly organize conferences that feature only men on the program. We are, it is worth remembering, only in the second decade of the twenty first century. Mary Wollstonecraft is not yet cold in her grave. Surely Philosophy as an enterprise—nay, an endeavor; a vocation; the love of wisdom itself; a noble calling that grabs one by the testicles early in life and refuses to let go; perhaps indeed the last best hope of rationality and clarity of argument on this benighted Earth—can only suffer terribly if small, unfunded websites populated by aggressive viragos and their emasculated enablers insist on making a habit of pointing out the unfortunate yet, I am sure, entirely accidental Male Pattern Allness occasionally visible at conferences within the field. I should also like to remind the organizers of this “campaign” that a policy such as I have recommended—characterized as it is by polite deference, an unwillingness to make any person feel in any way even slightly out-of-sorts or unpleasantly compelled to recognize their so-called “privilege” on an otherwise perfectly pleasant sort of afternoon in the Junior Common Room, combined with a constant willingness to apologetically back down at the slightest suggestion that umbrage has been taken, or the first appearance of a convoluted description of an imaginary yet technically possible state of affairs wherein the observed outcome might not have been sexist in any way, shape, or form—has been shown by repeated historical experience to be without question the most effective means of effectuating change, especially the kind of modest, incremental and above all comfortably distant, blame-free social change that I am sure we all agree would be the best outcome in this case. Now if you’ll excuse me, my cocoa is getting cold and I do not want to have to ask my wife to heat it up again.

Via the always interesting New APPS.

So it’s great to see the National Science Foundation trying to do something to help. The White House just announced a major new initiative aimed at giving parents new flexibility in their careers. As explained in this press release, the general focus is flexibility, which is a great idea anyway: letting grant recipients defer for a year, and cutting down on the demands for investigators to travel to NSF headquarters when applying or renewing. (Via New APPS.)

These are tiny steps, and there are many other hurdles women face in academia other than the timing of their grants. But every little bit helps, and it’s certainly good to know that someone upstairs is paying attention.

The parody was “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Lab”.  The guys performing it did an impressive job of capturing the vocal stylings and presentation of the original, and their revised lyrics were clever.  But watching it, I suffered from a creeping feeling of “ick”.  Take a sec and watch:

So here’s the ick factor, for me.  The chick is just trying to do her freakin’ job.   I know that’s part of the intended humor, but it just hits a little too close to home for many women.  I doubt that there is any harm that has resulted from the video, and I’m sure the video’s creators had no intent beyond making a funny, well-done parody — indeed, the original video was taken down in response to comments, and replaced with a statement acknowledging how the video might have been interpreted, while opening up the comments to a discussion of issues facing women in science. (Graciously handled, although it now looks like the heavy hand of humorless feminists and political correctness run amok.  You just can’t win.)

That said, I feel like I need to explain a little why even a fairly easy-going viewer might be squicked out.  It’s like someone losing a loved one to a brutal clown attack, and having a hard time finding clowns funny down the road. (Ok, it’s not exactly like that, but you get the idea — sometimes your past experiences make it impossible to ever “lighten up”, no matter how innocently something was meant).   Now, killer clowns are thankfully not a common scourge, but it is a rare young women that hasn’t had to deal with someone being openly more interested in her sexual desirability than her job performance in a professional setting.

Just to drive this point home, this morning I ran across the following:

At a Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Pat Roberts (R., Kan.) was questioning a panel of experts on the tax code’s fairness. To kick off his questions, Mr. Roberts jokingly said he was conferring an “honorary doctorate of economics” on each of the four witnesses.

One of the witnesses, Aviva Aron-Dine, actually is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at MIT. Making nice with the senator, she said she appreciated the conferral of a degree, because she wouldn’t mind getting hers a couple of years early.

“I always heard a Ph.D. was a pretty hot Democrat,” Mr. Roberts replied.

“Pretty…sorry?” Ms. Aron-Dine responded.

“Somebody asked me what a pretty hot Republican was, and they said, `Nothing,’” Mr. Roberts continued. “So, you know, it’s an equal deal.” Then he went on with his questioning.

Feeling proud about getting to testify before the Senate as an expert witness, and one of the first things she has to deal with is some senator commenting on her being hot?  This crap happens to guhzillions of women in workplaces throughout the world, especially if they also happen to be in the top 3 of good lookin’ girls on the street (depending on the street).  And, it’s complicated, and frequently humiliating when it does.

Which explains why even well-intentioned clever YouTube videos can sometimes have a stronger reaction than intended.

After you read enough letters, they can start blend together. But, in a big stack of applications, there are usually a few letters that stand out as risible, causing a good chuckle and round of comment from the committee.

And they are almost always letters written on behalf of women.

In a standard letter of recommendation at the postdoc/faculty level, there is frequently a comparison to other successful scientists. The letter usually reads something like “reminds me of person X, Y, or Z at a similar level of their career” or “shows the same persistence and insight as person Q, and stronger big picture thinking than person P”. These comparisons are almost always favorable, saying that the applicant is in the same league as other people who are recognized as having had a significant scientific impact.

But, for some reason, some fraction of letter writers insist upon doing these comparisons only within a single gender, when the applicant is a woman. In other words, “(woman) X shows a similar level of insight as (woman) Y and (woman) Z”. I’m not saying that these comparisons are not favorable — they’re usually comparing a strong female applicant favorably with other successful female scientists. Their praise is genuine and well meant. However, one can’t but help perceive that they see women as somehow swimming in a different pool than the rest of the guys.

Now the good news is that most committees that I’ve been on have seen right through this. We note it, and have a small laugh at the letter writer’s expense. In addition, it’s not common — usually only affecting a couple of letters in an applicant pool.

So, if you’re writing a letter for someone in an underrepresented group, please save yourself from mockery by examining exactly how you perceive the applicant’s comparison sample.

———————————————————————————–

It came as quite a surprise in the 1950’s when parity was shown not to be a symmetry of nature, largely through the efforts of three Chinese-born American physicists: Tsung-Dao Lee, Chen-Ning Yang, and Chien-Shiung Wu. The idea of parity violation had been floating around for a while, suggested by various people but never really taken seriously. In physics, credit traditionally accrues not just to someone who makes an offhand suggestion, but to someone who takes that suggestion seriously enough to put in the work and turn it into a respectable theory or a decisive experiment. In the case of parity violation, it was Lee and Yang who sat down and performed a careful analysis of the problem. They discovered that there was ample experimental evidence that electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force both were invariant under P, but that the question was open as far as the weak nuclear force was concerned.

Lee and Yang also suggested a number of ways that one could search for parity violation in the weak interactions. They finally convinced Wu, who was an experimentalist specializing in the weak interactions and Lee’s colleague at Columbia, that this was a project worth tackling. She recruited physicists at the National Bureau of Standards to join her in performing an experiment on Cobalt-60 atoms in magnetic fields at very low temperatures.

As they designed the experiment, Wu became convinced of the project’s fundamental importance. In a later recollection, she explained vividly what it is like to be caught up in the excitement of a crucial moment in science:

Following Professor Lee’s visit, I began to think things through. This was a golden opportunity for a beta-decay physicist to perform a crucial test, and how could I let it pass? — That Spring, my husband, Chia-Liu Yuan, and I had planned to attend a conference in Geneva and then proceed to the Far East. Both of us had left China in 1936, exactly twenty years earlier. Our passages were booked on the Queen Elizabeth before I suddenly realized that I had to do the experiment immediately, before the rest of the Physics Community recognized the importance of this experiment and did it first. So I asked Chia-Liu to let me stay and go without me.

As soon as the Spring semester ended in the last part of May, I started work in earnest in preparing for the experiment. In the middle of September, I finally went to Washington, D. C. for my first meeting with Dr. Ambler. … Between experimental runs in Washington, I had to dash back to Columbia for teaching and other research activities. On Christmas eve, I returned to New York on the last train; the airport was closed because of heavy snow. There I told Professor Lee that the observed asymmetry was reproducible and huge. The asymmetry parameter was nearly -1. Professor Lee said that this was very good. This result is just what one should expect for a two- component theory of the neutrino.

Your spouse and a return to your childhood home will have to learn to wait – Science is calling! Lee and Yang were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957; Wu should have been included among the winners, but she wasn’t.

Richard did a remarkable job of focusing on his “assignment,” stopping only occasionally to help wire the computer room, set up the machine shop, shake hands with the investors, install the telephones, and cheerfully remind us of how crazy we all were. When we finally picked the name of the company, Thinking Machines Corporation, Richard was delighted. “That’s good. Now I don’t have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. I can just tell them the name of the company.”

But then there is this:

The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest “girl” and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. “Yes, it really annoys me,” she said. “On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it.” That was the essence of Richard’s charm.

“Charming” and “sexist” are not actually exclusive properties. We don’t have to say “he is sexist, but very charming, so it’s okay”; nor do we have to say “he is a brilliant and charming man, but incorrigibly sexist, and therefore cannot be admitted to possess any good qualities.” People can be talented and charismatic and warmly human, and yet have a looming blind spot when it comes to gender.

All of which is perfectly obvious, but worth reiterating because the pervasive culture of science is steeped in a sort of geeky pseudo-machismo that is handed down through the generations. Charming it may be, but far from harmless. The latest evidence to add to the teetering pile comes from a new study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, who looked at the career paths of women in science, engineering, and technology.

Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually leave…

They also do well at the start, with 75 percent of women age 25 to 29 being described as “superb,” “excellent” or “outstanding” on their performance reviews, words used for 61 percent of men in the same age group.

An exodus occurs around age 35 to 40. Fifty-two percent drop out, the report warned, with some leaving for “softer” jobs in the sciences human resources rather than lab bench work, for instance, and others for different work entirely. That is twice the rate of men in the SET industries, and higher than the attrition rate of women in law or investment banking.

The reasons pinpointed in the report are many, but they all have their roots in what the authors describe as a pervasive macho culture.

Engineers have their “hard hat culture,” while biological and chemical scientists find themselves in the “lab coat” culture and computer experts inhabit a “geek culture.” What they all have in common is that they are “at best unsupportive and at worst downright hostile to women,” the study said.

Too many scientists figure that, if someone leaves the field, it must have been because they weren’t good enough. There are other reasons. Providing equal encouragement to everyone entering into science would not only make for happier people, it would make for better science.

I think the essence of what determines your long-term success as a scientist is your ability to influence the scientific discussion. When you’re at a point in your career when people pay attention to your work, and want to know “What does <your name > think about this?”, you are on a near certain path to a stable position as a research scientist. Instead, if no one is reading your papers (to the extent that you’ve published them at all), or wants to hear what you say at conferences, or calls you up to ask you about your area of expertise, then you’re in danger of drifting out of the field.

Now, the factors that lead to having scientific influence are many. Among the most important are:

• Writing lots of papers
• Writing interesting papers
• Writing papers using novel or superior data sets
• Writing papers on a timely topic
• Being recognized as leading the above papers, rather than being directed by others
• Communicating your ideas with clarity
• Being socially well-connected in your field
• Being really, really, really, unusually smart and/or creative
• Having influential mentors promoting you

To be scientifically successful, you don’t need to have all of these factors, or even most of these factors. You just need to have enough of them, or a long enough suit in one or two of them, that people can’t ignore what you’re doing.

Of this list, there are at least half that are almost entirely under a student’s own control, no matter where they go to graduate school. You can pick inspiring mentors, write lots of papers on interesting, timely topics, and give riveting talks about them, no matter where you are. You can fail to write any papers (on topics boring or not) and give lousy talks, under the negative guidance of ineffective advisors, even if you go to a top-ranked school. Some of the other factors do probably have some correlation with top-ranked programs, in that such programs are more likely to have the luxury to admit only students with early evidence of brains and creativity, and they tend to have more of the resources that lead to superior data access, or a larger pool of productive theorists (postdocs & faculty). [However, in astronomy at least, there is sufficiently rich access to public resources (SDSS, NASA's Great Observatories, 2MASS, etc) that one can usually have sufficient access to create "novel or superior data sets" no matter where you are. For lab-based physics, this is likely less true.] In this list, the relative “prestige” of one’s graduate program has little direct impact on your eventual scientific impact. When I hire postdocs, or evaluate fellowship applications, I am drastically more impressed by what someone actually did, than where they went to school.

Besides the import for deciding where to attend school, the above elucidates why “climate” issues can have such a large impact on your eventual career success. If you’re at an institution that places obstacles in your path that make it difficult for you to write papers, to find good mentors, and to make scientific connections in your field, then you’ve got a problem. You’re going to be struggling uphill.

However, the same list also provides the recipe for climbing that hill, if you find that you’re on it. The number one thing you can do is to write papers (and preferably interesting and timely ones). People cannot ignore a large body of high quality work for long. Sometimes it takes a while before they notice, it’s true. But the more you publish, the more likely it is that people will begin to notice your work, and be influenced by it. As that happens, they will start noticing you as well, and will tend to deem you “someone worth having around”, whether as a postdoc, or at their conference, or as their next faculty colleague. This process is vastly easier with a good mentor behind you, but if you wound up without one (or gawd forbid with an anti-mentor), it’s going to be your only route out.

I think the clearest evidence of this is a relatively jaw-dropping preprint that was recently posted to the arXiv (h/t to Zuska). A former particle-physics postdoc (and current grad student in statistics) carried out a very detailed analysis of the productivity of postdocs on the Run II Dzero experiment, and how that translated into giving conference presentations, and being hired into faculty positions. The paper found that the postdocs’ success in eventually landing faculty jobs were highly correlated to productivity (as measured by internal papers), to conference presentations (which were awarded by the leadership of the project), and to the degree of “physics socialization”. These correlations are all what you would expect, and reinforce the above list of what leads to being scientifically influential.

The jaw-dropping aspect of the paper is that the awarding of conference presentations was grossly gender biased (as was the fraction of service work assigned to the women). The female postdocs had drastically higher levels of productivity (indeed, half the men were less productive than the least productive woman), but were allocated far fewer conference presentations than men with comparable productivity. (Note: this is a paper you actually have to read, rather than just flipping to the table at the end. It’s a very well-done piece of statistical analysis, and can’t be fully appreciated from just comparing two means in a table.)

In this exercise, we see the influence game writ large. You need to be productive and visible. If some sort of bias (against women, or shy people, or people from state schools, or whomever) is present that conspires to make you less visible, you’re going to have to be even more productive. It’s not fair, and people in positions to fight against the bias in their institution should do so. But, at least it’s something that you have a chance of controlling.

Indeed, a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).

Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17). Video posting was the sole area in which boys outdid girls: boys are almost twice as likely as girls to post video files.

The explanation offered for boys’ dominance in the video-posting category was that this was the best way to brag about one’s skateboarding prowess, although evidence for that hypothesis seems to be largely anecdotal.

Note that this phenomenon should not be taken as evidence that women are genetically predisposed to make Web pages (or to blog) — although, as you might expect, there is no shortage of just-so explanations bandied about. But it’s great that the internet has lowered the considerable barrier to young girls becoming interested in computers, and we can hope that some of them get inspired to continue onto technical careers.

Which doesn’t mean that he should be banned in perpetuity from giving talks to university audiences. A recent invitation from the University of California Regents has been rescinded after a group of UC faculty circulated a petition demanding that Summers be disinvited. Whether or not you had any sympathy for what Summers said at the NBER conference (I certainly don’t), he is a serious academic, and should be accorded the usual protections for saying what he thinks. Bitch PhD is wondering about the situation, and here’s the comment I left at her blog:

I think the disinvitation was a bad idea, on substantive grounds as well as for the bad image it projects.

For one thing, the proposition that innate differences play a large role in determining the distribution of genders (and races) throughout academia is certainly controversial — it’s not just a matter of scholarly vs. otherwise. There are smart and well-informed people who believe that innate differences are the most important thing suppressing the number of women in science; Stephen Pinker is an obvious example. I personally think those people are crazy and wrong, but won’t deny that they are smart and well-informed.

Second and more importantly, it’s just wrong to think of Summers as symbolizing prejudice. Although there are smart and well-informed prejudiced people per above, Summers was certainly not well-informed when he made his comments at the NBER conference. He has since apologized profusely and allocated millions of dollars toward making things better. It all may be perfectly insincere, but when there are plenty of actual sexists out there who are willing to defend such positions even when they are well-informed, it seems like a mistake to hold that the only possible role Larry Summers can play is buffoonish sexist. He does have other things on his CV.

Finally, I haven’t seen any evidence that Summers was actually invited to talk about gender or science or anything like that. If he were, that would be evidence of rank stupidity (of which the Regents are of course well-known masters).

Among the “image” problems alluded to above, stuff likes this makes it possible for conservatives to beat the drum of leftist intolerance of other people’s views. Ironically, the incident comes on the same week of a much more serious violation of academic freedom: UC Irvine’s withdrawal of a the offer of the job of Dean at its brand new law school, to Duke constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky. That act, which has apparently been reversed so that Chemerinsky can in fact be the Dean, resulted from right-wing pressure against a professor who they thought was too liberal. Becoming the Dean is a noticeably bigger deal than giving a dinner-time talk to the UC Regents. Nevertheless, the Summers flap has given conservatives the chance to argue that “the primary challenge facing academic freedom in American universities” is “the rise of an academic far-left establishment that seeks to use universities as a base for political activism, and is perfectly willing to violate accepted standards of academic freedom to achieve that goal.” And they’ve taken it!

Well, if we go around disinviting speakers because we disagree with their views, we deserve what we get. In the wake of Summers’s original speech, there was much heat, but also a good deal of light — data and arguments were produced that showed to any reasonable person that women interested in science face extraordinary amounts of discrimination at all steps of the process. Let’s stick with the “data and arguments” approach.

Myth 1: First-person pronouns are forbidden in scientific writing. I have no idea where students get the idea that all scientific writing needs to be in the passive voice, but probably three quarters of the papers I get contain sentences in which the syntax has been horribly mangled in order to avoid writing in the first person.

It’s not exactly right to call this a “myth”; as Andre from Biocurious points out in comments, the injuction to use the passive voice is often stated quite explicitly. There’s even an endlessly amusing step-by-step instruction guide for converting your text from active to passive voice. What would Strunk and White say?

The same goes for using “we” rather than “I,” even if you’re the only person writing. There are also guides that make this rule perfectly explicit. The refrain in this one is:

Write in the third person (“The aquifer covers 1000 square kilometers”) or the first person plural (“We see from this equation that acceleration is proportional to force”). Avoid using “I” statements.

Interestingly, these habits did not just emerge organically as scientific communication evolved — they were, if you like, designed. I learned this from a talk given by Evelyn Fox Keller some years ago, which unfortunately I’ve never been able to find in print. It goes back to the earliest days of the scientific revolution, when Francis Bacon and others were musing on how this new kind of approach to learning about the world should be carried out. Bacon decided that it was crucially important to emphasize the objectivity of the scientific process; as much as possible, the individual idiosyncratic humanity of the scientists was to be purged from scientific discourse, making the results seem as inevitable as possible.

To this end, Bacon was quite programmatic, suggesting a list of ways to remove the taint of individuality from the scientific literature. Passive voice was encouraged, and it was (apparently, if Keller was right and I’m remembering correctly) Bacon who first insisted that we write “we will show” in the abstracts of our single-author papers.

It always seemed a little unnatural to me, and when it came time to write a single-author paper (which I tend not to do, since collaborating is much more fun) I went with the first-person singular. I decided that if it was good enough for Sidney Coleman, it should be good enough for me.

Keller has a more well-known discussion of the rhetoric of Francis Bacon, reprinted in Reflections on Gender and Science. Here she examines Bacon’s personification of the figure of Nature, specifically with regard to gender roles. Bacon was one of the first to introduce the metaphor of Nature as a woman to be seduced/conquered. Sometimes the imagery is gentle, sometimes less so; here are some representative quotes from Bacon to give the gist.

“Let us establish a chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature.”

“My dear, dear boy, what I plan for you is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy, and legal wedlock. And from this association you will insure an increase beyond all the hopes and prayers of ordinary marriages, to wit, a blessed race of Heroes and Supermen.”

“I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.”

“I invite all such to join themselves, as true sons of knowledge, with me, that passing by the outer courts of nature, which numbers have trodden, we may find a way at length into her inner chambers.”

“For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again.”

[Science and technology do not] “merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.”

But, while Nature is a shy female waiting to be seduced and conquered, we also recognize that Nature is a powerful, almost God-like force. Tellingly, when Bacon talks about this aspect, the metaphorical gender switches, and now Nature is all too male:

“as if the divine nature enjoyed the kindly innocence in such hide-and-seek, hiding only in order to be found, and with characteristic indulgence desired the human mind to join Him in this sport.”

So much meaning lurking in a few innocent pronouns! We like to pretend that the way we do science, and the way we conceptualize our activity, is more or less inevitable; but there are a lot of explicit choices along the way.

Discussion at a faculty meeting:

Department Chair: Some of you may be interested in an upcoming visit to the university by a group from University A to share information about their program to increase the participation of women in science, engineering, and math. [hands around an informational memo, including the list of names of the visitors]

Young Male Colleague: Hey, I know X! [mentions name of one of the visitors]. What is HE doing going around talking about women’s issues? He’s a real scientist! And a guy!

Me: Men can be involved in helping solve the problem of the underrepresentation of women in science, engineering, and math.

Young Male Colleague: No, I mean, this guy isn’t effeminate or anything. He’s really a.. a.. a.. a guy!

Senior Female Colleague: Perhaps he is transgendered.

Young Male Colleague, missing the obvious sarcasm, and offended on behalf of the Real Guy: I can assure you that he is nothing of the sort.

Me: He must be a eunuch then.

[Chair steps in and changes the subject]

Although it hardly needs saying, I’d like to point out that my own occasional forays into “talking about women’s issues” are not evidence that I am not a real scientist, nor that I am not a guy. Quite the contrary, in fact; they are but a necessary corrective. My guy-ness is looming, unmistakable, and, frankly, intimidating. Take my word for it, hypermasculinity can be a curse as well as a blessing. So when I talk about how it would be nice if young girls were given the same opportunities and encouragement to pursue science as young boys, I’m doing it in large part to take the edge off of the fear that my unbridled manliness can strike into the hearts of lesser guys.

I’m not sure I’m going far enough, though. Perhaps I should start wearing more floral prints, or take up knitting.

The answer? Lots and lots of cash.

Courtesy of the always fascinating American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center’s latest report, if you major in physics and land a job in a technical (“STEM”=”Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math”) field, you’ll make nearly twice as much as you would have in a non-technical pursuit. Short term you’ll be screwed financially if you go on to grad school (see the “University” entry), but if you hold on for a higher degree, you’ll do even better:

Well that’s interesting, but what’s my point? Namely, that whatever your beliefs about why white straight men are overrepresented in science and engineering, you’d be hard pressed to deny the financial impact. When women and minorities are underrepresented in scientific and technical majors, they are necessarily overrepresented in the “Bachelor’s non-STEM” box in the upper left of the plot above. If more of them drop out while pursuing advanced degrees, they’ll never make it to the high Ph.D. salaries in the lower right. These differences can accumulate into more than a million dollars over a 20 year career, and make tangible differences in people’s quality of housing, childcare, and health insurance.

So, while the social costs matter, it’s the economic costs that worry me most.

Would it surprise you to learn that overtly sexualized images of women cause tangible harm to adolescents and young women? Maybe it would. Not that there’s anything wrong with sexy images of people of any gender in appropriate contexts, but in the actual context in which children grow up in our culture, the way in which these images appear enacts a vastly disproportionate toll on young girls.

Are you at all taken aback by the cover of the latest catalogue for Edmund Optics, purveyor of scientific optical equipment?

The same image appeared in ads in Physics Today. Which, by the way, is not a biker magazine.

This sales pitch has caused a bit of consternation, including a lot of conversation on the AASWomen mailing list. But it’s not just those uppity wymyn who are upset. Geoffrey Marcy of Berkeley has written to the company to complain:

Dear Mr. Radojkovic and Mr. Delfino and Mr. Dover,

As representatives of Edmund Optics, I hope you will pass the following message to the appropriate management at Edmund Optics.

I just saw the images from the Edmund Optics catalog that show a woman in a tight red skirt lounging next to some optical devices, some with the caption, “Red Hot”. I hope Robert Edmund and the board of directors of Edmund can be alerted to this problem.

As a scientist and professor at UC Berkeley I am embarrassed on behalf of the many female science students coming along. I wonder what message such images of sex objects in your ads send to bright young scientists
of both genders.

Moreover, after decades of overt discrimination against women in the physical sciences, including precluding their admission to the best universities and the denial of access to the world’s best telescopes, your ad represents a setback. It reminds us of a dark era of clear discrimination against women, a time that I’m sure Edmund Optics hopes is long gone. If so, you have made a very serious error that insults the scientific community.

As you can imagine, your ad has already generated extraordinary discussion in the scientific community, analogous to the discussion over the comments by Harvard’s president who implied that women might not have what it takes to be great scientists. In short, your company has left open the question of your equal and unbiased treatment of women in your company and in your contracts.

Sincerely,
Geoffrey Marcy
Professor of Astronomy, UC Berkeley
Elected Member, United States National Academy of Sciences

To which Bill Dover at Edmund replied, in a classic example of “not getting it”:

Hi Geoff,

Thank you for your feedback regarding the EO catalog and our recent cover. No need to be embarrassed for the many female science students coming along. Rather, encourage them to celebrate that another smart, young, and attractive female has joined the ranks of women in a technical field, which breaks the pattern of discrimination you describe. You see, the woman featured on the cover is a six-year employee of Edmund and our Trade Show Manager and Spokesperson. Over the years we’ve received numerous positive comments and she has proven herself to possess the needed technical and social ability to successfully coordinate our tradeshows that showcase our products.

The recent cover photo emphasized a new product launch by Edmund. Our Trade Show Manager coordinated the showcase of these products at Photonics West last month. Had you happened by our booth for a visit, you would have had the opportunity to meet and speak with her about our Kinematic mounts as well as receive additional technical information from two other smart, young, and attractive, female optical engineers present at the time. So that you know, this line of Kinematic Optical Mounts, Table Platforms, and Mechanical Accessories are technically situated to become the standard for optical positioning equipment in the marketplace. We are excited about the quality, features, and price of these products and know that they will be very difficult to compete with and we chose our Trade Show Manager to help commemorate their release.

Professor Geoff, please encourage ALL of your female students to join the technical, engineering, and science ranks. There are too many that fall prey to the stereotypical concepts of what a person should look like or dress like which keep them from significant contributions in our society. That said, we value the opinions of our customers and we evaluate the feedback in developing our future strategies. I appreciate the time you have taken to mention your concerns here. I hope you will take the opportunity to encourage your female students to meet our female optical engineers at Edmund Optics. I think they, and you, will be impressed with their ability to support and represent woman [sic] in engineering.

Best Regards,
Bill

As far as I can tell, he’s saying that “she” is smart (so smart that she doesn’t need a name, apparently), so it’s okay! This is America, so any talented and attractive young woman with an interest in engineering can grow up to be a Booth Babe. He forgot to mention that “Better Performance. Better Price.” is the kind of slogan that any female should be proud to be associated with!

Actually it’s not okay. We’re not going to see this any time soon:

A little parity goes a long way, though. I have a vision of the next catalog cover–it features a handsome young man, maybe in chinos or a nice pair of jeans, barefoot, shirt halfway unbuttoned, an alluring gleam in his eye. Maybe a caption like “Well Oiled Mounts.”

And even if we did, it still wouldn’t be okay. (Although it would be highly amusing.) These images don’t appear in a vacuum; as long as the way that women and men are put on display in a wider cultural context remains dramatically imbalanced, a little equal-opportunity cheesecake here and there isn’t going to fix things.

Feel free to email Bill Dover (wdover-at-edmundoptics.com) and VP of Marketing Marisa Edmund (medmund-at-edmundoptics.com) to let them know what you think. (Thanks to Chaz Shapiro for the pointer.)

As a female scientist, I explain my situation to my male peers with the following analogy: Why don’t more men knit?

Is it that evolution has denied most men the finger control, patience, and artistic vision needed to knit? Or, is it that a man who knits will spend all his free time engaged in a pastime of no interest to practically every other man he knows? That almost all the people he can turn to discuss his ideas and knowledge with will be women? Now suppose that knitting took years of advanced training, beginning in high school. How many teenage boys do you think would be eager to enroll in knitting classes? How long would it take for those young men’s skills to be viewed and judged neutrally, rather than being praised as “remarkably good knitting for a man”? How would they feel being one of very few men at every knitting workshop and conference they attended? Would others at the conference assume they were there as the spouse of a “real” knitter? Would anyone think to go to them for expertise unless they’d spent years proving that they were the Best Knitter Ever?

I am currently in a department where women are one-third to one-half of the undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and tenured faculty. Such bright spots indicate directly the primary role that a positive culture has on promoting women’s participation in science. (Same for minorities, but we’re way behind on that one.)

And yes, we have a number of men in our department who knit. You gotta problem with that?

Here’s a fact: among chess grandmasters, there are a lot more men than women. Chess is great, because it’s pretty much a meritocracy, not an old-boys network (colorful parables notwithstanding). There is a simple old-fashioned sexist explanation for this phenomenon, which is that women just aren’t as good at chess as men are. Back in the veldt, you see, when the men were celebrating a successful hunt by playing chess with sticks in the dirt, the women were busy washing the dishes, so there was no evolutionary pressure for them to develop those skills. These days, however, there is a more sophisticated new-fangled sexist explanation for these kinds of discrepancies, which invokes bell curves. It’s not, so the story goes, that the average woman isn’t just as good as the average man, it’s just that their standard deviations are different, so there is underrepresentation at the high end. This hypothesis suffers under the weight of making all sorts of predictions that aren’t true, but it’s kind of scientific-sounding, so it’s gained a measure of popularity in certain circles.

So now someone has looked in detail at the situation in chess. Jake Young at Pure Pedantry points to a study by Chabris and Glickman, “Sex Differences in Intellectual Performance: Analysis of a Large Cohort of Competitive Chess Players.” I noticed the link at Marginal Revolution, and I agree with Tyler Cowen about the most striking findings:

They found no greater variance in men than women. It had been suggested that since science selects for individuals at the upper tail of the distribution, a higher variance in men than women might explain their greater representation. However, the researchers found that — with respect to chess — if anything in most age groups women had a higher variance then men. Upper tail effects do not explain the differences in the numbers of grandmasters…

And:

If you look at the participation rate of women and relate that to performance, you find that in cases where the participation rate of women and men is equal the disparity in ability vanishes. Basically, this means that in zip codes where there are equal numbers of men and women players there is no great disparity between male and female ability — and certainly not a disparity in ability large enough to explain the difference in the numbers of grandmasters.

How about that? It’s not any differences in innate ability, it’s just that women are “choosing” not to play competitive chess. Choosing is put in scare quotes because there’s obviously going to be a great deal of influence from parents encouraging/discouraging their kids at a very young age, but whatever. It’s a shame if young girls who would have been enthusiastic about chess are pushed away by social pressures of one form or another, but for most people chess is not a central part of their lives.

It’s a much bigger deal when women (or whomever) are enthusiastic about choosing something as a career, and are pushed away by an impressive battery of systematic biases. Which is what is clearly going on in science, especially in physics. If girls are given just as much encouragement and opportunity as boys are, and nevertheless choose to become truck drivers or gourmet chefs rather than scientists, that’s fine with me — the goal has never been equal representation of the genders, it’s equal chances for everyone to do what they find interesting. But we have a long way to go before we get there.

A Canadian research group recently reported the results of their study on women’s expectations for solving math problems. You can find the article in Science (sorry, you need a subscription), and a report in the NYT. 220 women were divided into 4 groups and given math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. The women were given a GRE (Graduate Records Exam)-like math test, then asked to read an essay, and then given a second math exam. Four different essays were handed out. These essays argued that gender differences in math performances were due to (i) genetic (G), or (ii) experiential (E) differences between the sexes, or (iii) employed standard sexual sterotypes without mentioning mathematical abilities (S), or (iv) argued that there are no gender related math-differences (ND).

The results showed that the women receiving the (S) and (G) essays answered 5-10 out of 25 math questions correctly, while the (E) and (ND) essay groups answered 15-20 of the questions correctly. That’s a factor of 2 difference! In other words, the women that were told they would perform poorly because they were women, did.

The results do not seem surprising to me, but I am glad someone has quantified this. I would like to see another study with a larger statistical sample, and I would like to see the results of the first and second math tests to ensure the four populations were statisitcally even in their inate mathematical abilites.

The study was performed by Steven J. Heine, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and his PhD student Ilan Dar-Nimrod.

Rob Knop has an excellent post up about a presentation he just gave to his department at Vanderbilt (where I’ll be visiting Thursday). He was emphasizing that the department — much like the vast majority of physics departments — doesn’t always present a hospitable environment to female students and postdocs.

We have an issue in our department right now which has (tangentially) brought up the issue of the climate for women in physics. We have a serious problem with the climate for women students and post-docs (at least). I don’t really know if it’s worse here than physics departments elsewhere; I know the climate is globally bad everywhere, and maybe it’s worse on average, or maybe it’s better on average. But I do know it’s bad here, and unless we think about it, it will stay bad.

In a short presentation to the department today, I included a slide with this statement on it:

The biggest problem among the faculty is that we all allow things to slide. None of us speak out when we see and hear things that we should be questioning. We are all, constantly, guilty of this; I can name a few instances for myself, and doubtless have forgotten many more.

In retrospect, using the absolute term “none of us” was probably a mistake, but certainly it’s rare when people speak out. This statement was close to a direct quote from a female graduate student I’ve talked to; I asked her what she thought the biggest climate problem was, and it was this: the fact that behaviors are accepted, not questioned, evidently by all.

Amazingly, some of his fellow faculty members didn’t agree! Other people/places might have issues, but not them.

In fact, it wasn’t until I started blogging about it that I really understood the depth of the problem. I had long known that women faced obstacles, but I thought that the vast majority of male physicists were benignly clueless rather than actively contributing. But there appear to be substantial numbers of people at all levels of academia who are quite convinced that the present situation is determined more by genetics than by bias. Reading the comment sections on these posts, notwithstanding the presence of a good number of thoughtful and intelligent participants, is an incredibly depressing exercise.

But it’s still worth doing. Progress doesn’t happen automatically; it’s because people make the effort to cause it to happen. And when it comes to women in science, there are good reasons why men should take it upon themselves to raise a ruckus. (I suspect that analogous statements hold true for the status of minority groups in science, although I readily admit to being less knowledgeable about those issues.)

I recently had coffee with my friend Janna Levin, author (most recently) of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Janna recently wrote a provocative essay for Newsweek, entitled This Topic Annoys Me. The topic, of course, being the status of women in science.

But while earning my Ph.D. at MIT and then as a postdoc doing cosmological research, the issue started to loom large. My every achievement—jobs, research papers, awards—was viewed through the lens of gender politics. So were my failures. People seemed unable to talk about anything else. Sometimes, to avoid further alienating myself from colleagues, I tried evasive maneuvers, like laughing the loudest when another scientist made a sexist remark. Other times, when goaded into an argument on left brain versus right brain, or nature versus nurture, I was instantly ensnared, fighting fiercely on my behalf and all womankind. I was perpetually inflamed and exhausted. It permeated every aspect of my life. Take this very essay. Here I am, somehow talking about being a woman in science, trying not to even as I do so. Imagine my frustration.

The point is, it’s not easy to be a scientist. There is a great amount of competition (whether we like to think that way or not) for resources, especially jobs. Research is hard, as you are pushing with all your brainpower against some of the knottiest unsolved problems concerning the workings of the universe. Even if you did nothing else, being a successful scientist is a full-time job.

And then women, as a reward for making it through an already-difficult gauntlet made more harsh by lingering Neanderthal attitudes, are asked once they succeed to take on a whole new set of responsibilities — serving on extra committees, making public appearances on behalf of the department, providing a sympathetic ear to younger women. All worthwhile activities, no question, but not the kind of thing that pushes one’s research agenda forward. I admit that I had a certain initial reluctance to ask Chanda to contribute her guest post. She has something interesting to say (from a perspective I can’t possibly offer), and can certainly take care of herself, so in the end I felt quite comfortable making the request. But every minute spent on stuff like that is a minute that isn’t spent doing research. Women should be free to concentrate on thinking about black holes and the early universe, just like guys are.

It’s a balance, of course, and as a blogger I certainly believe that one can do research and other activities at the same time. But it’s completely unfair to expect women and minority scientists to do all the work in trying to eliminate the discrimation that they face. It is perfectly defensible, maybe even highly recommended, for any individual woman scientist to decide that the cause is better served if they concentrate on collecting data and writing papers rather than organizing conferences and raising consciousnesses. So, for the foreseeable future, it’s a good idea for the rest of us to put some effort into making the situation better all around.

In the meantime, how ’bout those Cards?

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A few months ago, Sean posted an entry on this blog addressing his concerns about Dr. Lee Smolin’s (then forthcoming) book, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Dramatically titled and well-hyped, Lee’s book was sure to arouse strong emotions and plenty of debate on publication. However, it managed to do that even before it was out, and the commentary on Sean’s entry included correspondence from Lee as well as several other great contemporary thinkers in theoretical physics. The dialogue was inspired, passionate, argumentative, sometimes rude, and always exploratory.

But something was missing. I wondered how there could be a discourse about the marketplace of ideas and about who gets to participate in science without a component that addresses the obvious (at least for those of us with some relationship to the US academic system): the community of scientists in the United States is overwhelmingly homogeneous, white (of European descent) and male. That sounds like a pretty narrow marketplace to me, given that over half of the US population is either female or a member of an underrepresented minority group or both. Surely this must mean that we are under-utilizing our potential talent pool in our drive to better understand the physical world.

As a member of the National Society of Black Physicists’ (NSBP) Executive Committee and Editor of their newsletter, I like to stay on top of the statistics related to these issues, so let me mention a few to satisfy those who like to see data. (All stats are borrowed from the NSF unless otherwise noted.) At the moment, only about 12% of doctoral degrees in physics go to women. The number going to people identified as Black/African-American hovers around an average of 14 per year out of an average 738 total degrees. That’s 1.8% despite making up about 12% of the population. Further investigation uncovers the (to me) monumental tragedy that almost no other field in science and technology is doing worse at diversifying than ours, physics. (See Dr. Shirley Malcolm’s symposium paper from AIP’s 75th Anniversary celebration.)

Knowing all this, I want to share with you how shocking it is to me when I have regular conversations with my peers who express to me that they don’t see a problem. And if they do express concerns to me, a lot of the time it’s guys who want more women in the field because they want to find dates. Sorry guys, we’re here because we’re interested in physics, not you, and on top of that, some of us like women better! And yes, sometimes it’s just a joke, but sometimes it’s hard to tell, and believe me, we’ve heard that one many, many times before. On the topic of seeing more people of color (Blacks, Latina/os, etc.) most often I am met with disinterested silence or an insistence (the knowledge base this derives from is always hazy, in my opinion) that there’s nothing the physics community can do to resolve the issue because the problem is in the high schools and has nothing to do with post-secondary academe.

This attitude is disappointing, to say the least. First of all, the numbers contradict these sentiments. While it is true that there are deeply troubling issues facing the K-12 education system in the US, especially in low-income neighborhoods which are disproportionately populated by people of color, women and other underrepresented groups fall out of the pipeline at all stages, from the post-baccalaureate to the post-doctorate level, and they do so at a much higher rate than white men. Clearly something is happening. What is happening is far too full a topic to tackle here, but perhaps I will be invited to say more about it in the comments section. I invite readers to participate in a knowledge-based discourse about this issue.

On the other hand, if you’re having a hard time figuring out why you should care about diversity, the President of Princeton can offer you a helping hand. In the 2003 Killam Lecture at the University of British Columbia, Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman identified four reasons for why we should care about diversity in science. I paraphrase them here:

1. If we aren’t looking at the entire talent pool available, scientific progress will be slower by default.
2. It’s possible that women and other underrepresented minorities will identify unique scientific problems that their majority peers might not.
3. Science will find it increasingly difficult to recruit the brightest minorities as other fields diversify and therefore look attractive to members of underrepresented groups. An attractive work environment is essential to competing on the job market for the best thinkers.
4. The scientific establishment ought to pursue diversification as a matter of fairness and justice.
   In a small (statistically insignificant) survey of various scientists and leaders in scientific organizations, I found that the question of “why is diversity in science important?” is addressed in these four points. While point four is possibly closest to my heart, I think that points one and two are two of the strongest arguments out there. (An aside: As I am tidying up this essay, one professor writes me and says that he finds four to be most compelling! I hope that others will agree.)

I would like to reflect on point one in the context of work in theoretical physics, specifically in quantum gravity and cosmology. If we are to take seriously the concept that what we seek in physics is truth and a better understanding, don’t we want to have the broadest pool of talent available to participate in the process? I think this applies to people and ideas alike. Until we have a theory that pulls out ahead of the others, what are we doing arguing about whose theory is doing better? Right now, neither loops, nor strings, nor triangles, nor anything else has ANY data to back it up, so perhaps the best thing we can all do on that front is get back to work.

An aside to that last remark: It’s hard to get to work when no one will hire you. It remains true that even if I do good work in my field, if my field is not strings, I will have a difficult time finding a job in theoretical physics. Some might argue that this is fair because I have made the foolish error of working on a silly (let’s say loopy) theory. But honestly, to those who like to toe that line, I’d like to say that since you don’t have the LHC data in hand or anything else that proves/disproves strings/loops/anything else, at this stage we’re all in the same boat. And what if strings is wrong? Has the physics community gained anything by suppressing and/or ignoring the alternatives?

To speak in more general terms, I could ask the broader question: what has the scientific community gained by choosing not to pro-actively welcome a broad and diverse set of people and ideas into the fold? Well, again there isn’t enough space for the details, but there is increasing evidence from research in science education that supports the point that diversity of perspectives accelerates problem solving.

Moreover, a fellow grad student and active member of NSBP’s sister organization, the National Society of Hispanic Physicists (NSHP), pointed out to me that we can definitely be aware of what the scientific community potentially loses when people from different backgrounds aren’t allowed to participate in science. Laura noted that our society has thrived on the contributions of women like Marie Curie (discovered radioactivity) and Emmy Noether (Noether’s theorem) and African-Americans like Benjamin Banneker (early civil and mechanical engineer, self-taught astronomer and mathematician). At this point, I think it is easy to ask and answer, “what would our world be like without the Marie Curies and Benjamin Bannekers?” Most likely lacking.

But another, equally important question isn’t raised often enough: What are we missing by living in a world where only the Marie Curie’s make it through? A few women and underrepresented minorities have always found a way to challenge the status quo. Let’s face it: physics is hard for anyone. It’s not hard to imagine that it takes a certain type of determined personality to overcome barriers and make new discoveries. What of the rest? The people who didn’t find the right friends and family to help them? The ones who never had a chance to learn physics? The ones who thought that people who look like them don’t succeed at physics? (And yes, they are out there; I’ve met some of them.) Might we be further along in our understanding of dark matter? Perhaps, perhaps not, but until we push harder to integrate, we’ll never know.

At this stage, it occurs to me that many of you will look at my definition of diversity and think it is too narrow. I’ve left out all of the international collaboration that goes on in physics, and surely, isn’t that a wonderful kind of diversity which is plentiful in our world? Yes! One thing that endeared the Perimeter Institute to me almost immediately was the fact that my peer group hails from all over Europe and Asia, and at the lunch table, as many as five or more cultures may be represented. But to me this highlights the problem — if the North American physics community has been able to welcome an international populace with open arms, why can’t they do the same with the diversity that already exists at home?

In the end, perhaps this is not a fair way to raise the question. International members of the physics community also have to confront issues of racism and discrimination. Racism is not a uniquely American problem, nor do people of color suffer alone from it in the US. But I still have a question, then: if the academy is ready to bring those of us who earn Phds into the fold, why isn’t it doing more to encourage more of us to reach that far? Those of us who do make it that far are left wondering why it doesn’t bother anyone else that we are more likely to see a German in our graduate classes than another Black person.

The challenges we face in confronting these issues are not easy. First we must accept there is an issue, a problem. Then there must be open discussion about how we understand the problem. I realize that it is difficult to step into someone else’s shoes and understand where they are coming from. But to an extent, like Albert Einstein before us, we must rise to the challenge of the barriers placed before our understanding and transcend them.

For my part, as a Black woman, I would ask my white (and male) peers to remember that many of us (though not all) experience our differences as a negative in this environment. Where I see it as a Black cultural tradition to lend a helping hand even as I continue to achieve my own dreams, others see my commitment to NSBP as a signal that I am wasting my time not doing science. Do my friends who play music in their spare time get this same signal? Moreover, many of us who are women or people of color or both are often involved in efforts to change the face of science. When we are challenged about that by our peers, not only are they standing in our way, but they are also failing to recognize that for many of us, this investment in the community is necessary to our survival, much like someone else might say playing music is for theirs.

Furthermore, where I wish to understand other people’s choices of identification, there are those amongst my peers who have felt they had the right to make my choices for me. I find myself now terrified of mentioning my Blackness in any way, lest I become dehumanized, my personal identity reduced to an object of debate. These are examples of the way my background has been turned into a negative for me. I know others have similar and worse experiences, and surely, this is one major leak in the aforementioned pipeline. My hope is that physics will evolve not only in concept, but also in its sensibilities about who a physicist is and what she looks like. What if we came to value our heterogeneity, to see it as an advantage?

It is important to note that there are white men out there thinking about these issues. I know Sean Carroll is one of them. For me, Professor Henry Frisch at the University of Chicago has been an amazing mentor. His father, the late Professor David Frisch of MIT, was influential in the graduate career path of Dr. Jim Gates, now an accomplished African-American theorist at the University of Maryland. People who take the time to be concerned, therefore, do have an impact. A common complaint that I hear from interested people is that there aren’t enough people with diverse backgrounds in the talent pool when they are choosing grad students, postdocs, and faculty. I believe that this points to a fundamental problem that physicists can help with: somewhere a pool of talent is getting lost, and we need to push harder to find it again by taking a pro-active role in education policy, mentoring (studies show this makes a big difference in minority performance), and anti-discrimination activism.

I hope that many of you will take this to heart and realize that for the sake of science, if nothing else, diversity matters. There’s a lot to be done to change things, and I encourage you to support work that is being done in your community, whether it’s by contributing hours designing a website or giving a tour of your department to local students who wouldn’t normally be exposed to science. Moreover, I strongly urge you, especially those of you who are not from an underrepresented background, to take seriously the idea that not everyone experiences the physics community like you, not everyone has the same ideas, that some people face real barriers to academic progress, and that we’re all better off when we make a genuine effort to listen to and understand the other side.

Before I finish, I’ll make a last comment on the science. One of the ways I’ve seen these divisions hurt us is the way in which we seem completely stuck on some pretty major problems. As it stands, we have a standard model of cosmology where we don’t know what form 96% of the energy of the universe takes, and we only know the barest of details about the properties of dark energy and dark matter. The model is also still hazy on many of the details of the first 400,000 years or so. This is where the quantum gravity community should rise to the challenge of seeking new and unique ways of approaching the problem since the old ones clearly aren’t working. This means we have to encourage new ideas. Even if they turn out to be wrong, we’ll probably still learn something. So to partake in some near trademark infringement, it’s time to “Think Differently.”

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein earned her BA in Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics (yes, it is gramatically incorrect on her diploma) from Harvard College in 2003. She went on to earn an MS in Astronomy and Astrophysics at University of California, Santa Cruz (2005), where she studied black holes in higher dimensions. She is now beginning a Phd under Dr. Lee Smolin in Waterloo, Ontario, recently dubbed the Geek Capital of Canada. A product of the integrated public magnet schools of Los Angeles, she is proud to be both a Black woman and a physicist.

But all that aside, I got a new one recently: “You seem too relaxed to be a physicist.” Now, that’s probably just because I took my first real vacation in years, and a proper time on Kaua’i followed by a move to a wonderful city will make anyone seem relaxed — people who know me well would hardly say that “relaxed” is my general demeanor, and I’m sure it won’t last. But I was surprised to hear that it was perceived by someone as the anthesis of being a physicist.

Actually, the one I have been getting most often recently since I acquired my new professorial title is “You look too young to be a professor”. Now, although I am 10 years out of college and older than these young humanities whippersnappers who show up to teach fresh from defending, since the average time that a professor spends on a faculty (or some combination of them) is probably of order four decades and I’ve been here a month, this isn’t too surprising of a comment. Regardless, I still haven’t come up with a witty comeback. Any suggestions?