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.

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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.