Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Joyeux 4th of July, mes amis américains! I am checking in from Montréal, a temporary stopover on the way back to the U.S. of A. from a brief visit to Quebec City. I was there for Renaissance Weekend, an occasional (five times per year) gathering of the important, demi-important, and merely interesting and/or well-connected to get together and talk about stuff.

I had a great time, and I would be happy to tell you all about it if RW goings-on were not strictly off the record. (For example, I could reveal the amusing story behind how nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler met his wife Rosa Wang, or how I took down a huge pot from Scripps College president Nancy Bekavac when my quad tens demolished her ace-high flush, but rules are rules.) But I am perfectly within my rights to share things that I said myself. I gave a few mini-presentations, among which was one in a series of two-minute lunchtime talks on “What I Would Do If I Could,” a rather free-ranging topic if ever there was one. Other people suggested banning torture, printing people’s phone numbers on their license plates, or moving to a chocolate-based economy. Here was my little spiel:

If I could propose one thing, it would be to do everything in our power to encourage young girls to get excited about science, math, and technology.

As a physicist, I know that my field is only about ten percent women. There is a theory on the market, occasionally suggested by people in positions of power and influence, that an important contributor to this imbalance is a difference in intrinsic aptitude. The technical term for this theory is “bullshit.” I say this not as a starry-eyed egalitarian, but as one who has looked at the data. This is a theory that makes predictions, and its predictions are spectacularly wrong. If they were right, the fraction of women that dropped out would rise at the higher ranks, as the competition for positions became more fierce; that’s not true. The percentage of women scientists would be basically constant from place to place; that’s not true. The fraction of women getting physics degrees would be stable over time; that’s not true. The truth is that women drop out of science between high school and college (and, tellingly, disproportionately more women try to specialize in physics later in college than those who choose physics as a major during their first year). And they do so because they are discouraged by a million small signals that add up to a powerful cumulative message.

We shouldn’t encourage girls to be enthusiastic about science, math, and technology because we need more scientists, mathematicians, or engineers. We should do so because many young girls are potentially interested in technical fields, and this interest should be celebrated, not deprecated. Support to pursue one’s passions is something that everyone deserves, regardless of their chromosomes.

Let freedom ring, everybody.

Newsflash: gender equality in science not yet quite achieved.

• Joolya from Naked Under My Lab Coat notes how the “Dr.” honorific seems to mysteriously disappear when it’s attached to a woman’s name.
• Dr. Free-Ride, with an assist from Pandagon, suggests that women can be nerds, too.
• Nerds or not, though, I’d suggest treating them with politeness. Otherwise they will kick your ass.

Well, as the really sharp ones among you may have gleaned from a careful reading of my posts on this blog, I like to make sure that there’s a bit of fun mixed in with the work whenever I can. Makes the work better, overall. For example, today I got up early, dashed to the top of neighbourhood geographic highlight, Mount Hollywood (ok, I used one of the upper trailheads), and back down, did some shopping at Trader Joe’s, and then from 10:15am to 1:00pm brainstormed with three of my students (Arnab, Tameem and Veselin) on campus. (We think we have discovered a new phase transition! Hurrah! More later.) Then in the afternoon, I seem to have done nothing but laundry and floor-sweeping….

Ok, wait. Stop. That last bit’s not so fun….. Day not ending well. Hmmm. It’s Saturday night, so I think I’m off to either see a movie or go contemplate life (and maybe a bit of physics) in a local bar (probably scaring the clientele). Decisions, decisions.

Well, while I figure that out, why don’t you verify that I’m not the only one who likes to mix work and play. Happens all the time, you know. Here are hilarious pictures of Alice Shapley (Princeton Prof. of Astrophysics), Chung-Pei Ma (Berkeley Prof. of Astrophysics), and Alison Coil (Arizona Astro postdoc) showing how it’s done, during a long night of a Keck observing run. (I found the link by accident while preparing an earlier post.) The Paris Hilton impressions are uncanny!

Perhaps we can get them to come and tell us what they were up to, physics-wise? Looks like fun too!

[Update: Alice, in the comments, says, "I should mention that in addition to wearing such "fashionable" observing clothes and napping on the sofa in the Keck Observatory Remote Operations room, we were trying to learn about the physical conditions in star-forming regions in galaxies 8-9 billion light years away. The galaxies we targeted were drawn from the DEEP2 redshift survey (a project led by University of California astronomers), which has mapped out a chunk of the Universe at z~1 and is telling us about galaxy properties at that earlier epoch. We were attempting to measure the relative strengths of rest-frame optical emission lines from Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, which are produced in the regions of ionized gas in which stars form. In such high-redshift galaxies, the lines which have been targeted by traditional optical astronomy for decades get shifted to the near-IR region of the spectrum, and we then use the KeckII near-IR spectrograph (NIRSPEC) to measure them. The relative strengths of these lines can be used to infer the degree of chemical enrichment in the gas from which the stars are forming. But, in turns out that the line strengths we measure actually follow a significantly different pattern from those of galaxies in the nearby universe, which may tell us something very interesting about star formation in the early universe (we're still working on exactly what...)"]

-cvj

P.S. Looking at the dialogue (who writes that stuff? – It’s great!) in the captions to the Astrophysics party (more…)

Here at CV we occasionally pat ourselves on the back at the high quality of some of our comment threads. So it’s only fair that we acknowledge our dismay at the depressingly consistent character of the discussions about women in science; posts by Clifford and me being just the most recent examples. What a depressing exercise to poke a finger into the turgid world of pseudo-scientific rationalizations for inequality that people will believe so that they can feel better about themselves. Among other things, it makes it nearly impossible to have a fruitful discussion about what we could realistically do about the problem; it’s as if Columbus were trying to equip his ships to voyage to the Indies and a hundred voices kept interrupting to point out that the world was flat.

There’s no question: a lot of people out there truly believe that there isn’t any significant discrimination against women in science, that existing disparities are simply a reflection of innate differences, and — best of all — that they themselves treat men and women with a rigorous equality befitting a true egalitarian. A professor I knew, who would never in a million years have admitted to any bias in his view of male and female students, once expressed an honest astonishment that the women in his class had done better than the men on the last problem set. Not that he would ever treat men and women differently, you understand — they just were different, and it was somewhat discomfiting to see them do well on something that wasn’t supposed to be part of their skill set. And he was a young guy, not an old fogey.

Who are these people? A lot of physicists grew up as socially awkward adolescents — not exactly the captain of the football team, if you know what I mean — and have found that as scientists they can suddenly be the powerful bullies in the room, and their delight in this role helps to forge a strangely macho and exclusionary culture out of what should be a joyful pursuit of the secrets of the universe. An extremely common characteristic of the sexist male scientist is their insistence that they can’t possibly be biased against women, because they think that women are really beautiful — as if that were evidence of anything. If they see other men saying anything in support of women’s rights, they figure it must be because those men are just trying to impress the babes. They see women, to put it mildly, as something other than equal partners in the scholarly enterprise.

These are the same people who used to argue that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, that African slaves couldn’t be taught to read and write, that Jews are genetically programmed to be sneaky and miserly. It’s a deeply conservative attitude in the truest sense, in which people see a world in which their own group is sitting at the top and declare it to be the natural order of things. They are repeating a mistake that has been made time and time again over the years, but think that this time it’s really different. When it comes to discrimination in science, you can point to all the empirical evidence you like, and their convictions will not be shaken. They have faith.

The good news is that they are on the losing side of history, as surely as the slaveholders were in the Civil War. Not because of any natural progression towards greater freedom and equality, but because a lot of committed people are working hard to removing existing barriers, and a lot of strong women will fight through the biases to succeed in spite of them. It’s happening already.
Get used to it, boys.

Blogging to you (semi-)live from the on-going women in physics conference being held here at USC this weekend. It was concieved and organized by two of our department’s graduate students Amy Cassidy and Katie Mussak, and the conference webpage is here.

Here is a quote from their motivations:

The low representation of women in physics is an issue of international concern. This disparity points to an untapped resource of talented women who could contribute to future developments in science. The percentage of degrees awarded to women in physics in the USA is much lower than in some other countries. In the AIP report, Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2005 the US ranked 12 out of 19 countries for percentage of PhDs awarded to women and 11th out of 20 countries for percentage of Bachelors awarded to women.

….and further:

To help undergraduate students from USC and other schools in Southern California to successfully make the transition from undergraduate to graduate studies in physics.

To foster a culture in Southern California and at USC in which women are encouraged and supported to pursue and succeed in higher education in physics.

To strengthen the network of women in physics in Southern California.

Notable events (for me) so far:

**Excellent talk by Caolionn O’Connell (Caltech), on accelerator technology in experimental high energy physics. She focused on Plasma Wake Field accelerator technology, which she has described on her blog. Finally I actually got to meet her, having only communicated with her electronically in the past. I let her know that her blog is missed by many (the quantum diaries project has ended). (Note to self: Maybe I can convince her to start blogging again in a new project… we could form a joint blog where we can combine efforts in blogging about life and physics in the greater LA area….. Hmmmm.)

**Excellent talk by Nai-Chang Yeh, on experimental condensed matter physics, focusing on a variety of superconductors, magnetic materials, and superconductor/ferromagnet heterostructures. Find out more about her lab’s work here.

**Answering so many excellent questions from so many excellent students (Undergraduates from all over the map) about graduate school, physics in general, high energy physics research, string theory.

**We also had a very good lunch, attended by all the students and organisers, together with a number of the faculty, our department chairman, two of our Deans, and several other faculty who administer the Women in Science and Engineering program here at USC (a very valuable source of support for women in these fields, both colleagial, financial and otherwise). I remind you that it is a Saturday, but these folks turned out in strength, which was good to see.

There’s more to come. I’d better go back for the next talk, by Sheila Tobias.

-cvj

Each year publishing agent John Brockman asks a deep question of some of the world’s leading thinkers, many of whom are his clients (via Peter Woit). It’s what you’d expect: a mixture of quite interesting ideas and rampant nonsense. This year Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson says some misleading things about cosmology, which maybe I’ll talk about later; but the prize for the worst response comes from Steven Pinker.

To make a long story short, here’s Pinker being saucily provocative:

In January, Harvard president Larry Summers caused a firestorm when he cited research showing that women and men have non-identical statistical distributions of cognitive abilities and life priorities.

That’s what’s known in studies of rhetoric as a “blatant lie.” It’s true that Summers caused a firestorm; it’s also true that he cited such research. It’s just not true that it was the citation that caused the firestorm. The firestorm was caused when Summers suggested that differences in innate aptitude were more important than systematic biases in explaining the gender gap among professional scientists. He said this despite the existence of overwhelming evidence against it, including from the very sources he was citing. How loudly do we have to shout this? The “dangerous idea” is not the possibility of innate differences; it’s using them as an excuse to ignore the obvious and pernicious effects of discrimination.

You may not agree that discrimination is important; fine, we can have a reasonable debate on the merits. This does not give you license to misrepresent why people were upset about Summers’s remarks. I can see two possibilities:

1. Pinker is an idiot, and can’t understand the difference between suggesting that differences exist and claiming that they explain the gender gap.
2. Pinker knows exactly what he is doing, and is lying intentionally to score some points of his own.

I honestly don’t know which it is. But I agree that spreading these lies, intentionally or not, is truly dangerous.

This feisty blog has occasionally talked about issues of discrimination against minority-group members and women, in science, or in academia, or just more broadly. We have also, one must admit, occasionally taken the Bush administration to task for this or that example of egregious malfeasance. Thus, rigorously fair folks that we are, it’s only right that we also mention those instances when the administration takes time off from its busy schedule of intelligence-doctoring, operative-outing, deficit-growing, and hurricane-ignoring to actively fight the pernicious effects of discrimination.

So, here we go: the Justice Department is going to sue Southern Illinois University for discriminating against white males.

No, you can’t make this stuff up. SIU, like almost every university in the country, is seriously under-represented by minority groups among its graduate students; out of 5,500 graduate students, only about 8 percent are Latino or African-American (compared to over 20 percent of Americans). So they have a few fellowship programs that specifically target women and minorities, and help out a tiny number of people — perhaps 40 per year. The Bush administration, tireless warriors for social justice that they are, will stop at nothing to squelch this manifest anti-white bias:

“The University has engaged in a pattern or practice of intentional discrimination against whites, non-preferred minorities and males,” says a Justice Department letter sent to the university last week and obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

The letter demands the university cease the fellowship programs, or the department’s civil rights division will sue SIU by Nov. 18.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to discriminate against someone, I would be able to do a much better job than that. You know, like actually having fewer members of the discriminated class at my university than in the surrounding society, rather than significantly more.

Sadly, this is an issue that (even) scientists don’t always think very clearly about. There is a feeling in some circles that perfect fairness consists of taking the tiny part of society’s workings over which you have control, and pretending within that part that there is no such thing as race or gender, everyone should be treated equally. But in the real world, where we are not all born into equal circumstances and presented with equal opportunities, it makes perfect sense to recognize that and account for it when we recruit and train students.

Of course, people will complain that singling out minority-group status forces us to treat people according to some external characteristics rather than as individuals, and amounts to an insidious form of reverse racism, ultimately hurting the people it tries to help. This philosophically appealing position has the downside of being in flagrant contradiction with the evidence. Although it’s true that programs typically aim (small amounts of) resources at people because of minority-group status rather than a detailed understanding of their personal history in overcoming obstacles, the fact is that this clumsy strategy actually works. People gain access to education and training that they otherwise would not, and the result is that the pool of highly-educated and successful people grows more diverse, which helps both the people in those groups and the society as a whole. As crude as it is, the strategy of targeting fellowships at under-represented groups is both cheap and effective.

Deep down, nobody likes affirmative-action type programs. Nobody. We would all much prefer it if universities and other employers could truly ignore the race or gender of applicants and workers, because they were treated completely fairly throughout all of society. But that’s just not reality. And until it is, making a tiny little effort to help out people who have faced systematic bias throughout their lives — even if the efforts are clumsy and imprecise — is the least we can do.

While we’re on the topic of women in science and children, I thought I’d point to this special section on Woman and Leadership in Newsweek last week, which profiles women leaders in several fields, including Vera Rubin, who discovered some of the first evidence for dark matter, and Eileen Collins, who was commander of the space shuttle Discovery. Both of them mention the effect of children on their careers. Collins didn’t have them until 38, and Rubin had them early — and was described in the Washington Post article about her first AAS talk as a “young mother”. The series of interviews is pretty good for its diversity of viewpoints. Here’s what Rubin has to say about how much progress woman have made in the last few decades:

I’m also impatient about the progress of women in academia, which has been much worse than industry. The statistics for women scientists are pathetic. This is a battle young women may have to fight. Thirty years ago we thought the battle would be over soon, but equality is as elusive as dark matter.

This is a very, very serious question for female scientists. At least in the physical sciences, I can’t speak for other disciplines. It’s a question that I bet plagues everyone of us. And I also bet most of our male colleagues don’t give it the same degree of thought. In my view, it is the only gender asymmetry. And something needs to be done to accomodate it.

The question confronting women scientists is: Should I have a baby at this stage of my career, or should I wait?

I imagine all of us women scientists encounter this question. And once we make a decision, I bet we continue to question that decision. Caolionn O’Connell over on Quantum Diaries writes

I hate that I feel compelled to schedule a baby such that it would have the least impact on my experiment.

In a nutshell, that’s the problem. And the real question is: is their ever a time when a baby would not impact one’s experiment or career? My experience says no, at least not until it’s too late.

Some women scientists do manage to have both children and a successful career (although I continually hear them discussing guilty feelings for not having enough time to accomodate everything). Some get punished for trying it, as highlighted in the recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article entitled The Laws of Physics: A postdoc’s pregnancy derails her career. In this story, a woman post-doc in experimental particle physics had a daughter and was effectively denied her rightful maternity leave (as was university policy) by her mentor who threatened her with a poor recommendation letter. She is now a graduate student in statistics at a different univerity.

The article also contains a Table of numerically weighted job-related pros and cons for `Should I have a baby now or should I wait?’ as calculated by a woman post-doc (also in experimental particle physics) at the University of Rochester. The result was 71-53 in favor of not waiting, but perhaps she didn’t know about the experience of her colleague mentioned above. When people feel compelled to calculate such a Table, it shows there’s something wrong with the system.

The dangers of waiting are obvious: the career path is a long process and by the end you’re too old. That’s my story. As a graduate student I wasn’t ready, as a post-doc I had to focus on getting a tenure-track job, as an assistant professor I knew I would never get tenure if I got pregnant. And now, I go to the clinic and the doctor’s first statement is `do you realize how old you are? Do you realize the infinitesimal chance of getting pregnant and the infinite risks?’ Nonetheless, they are happy to help me try, but at this stage it costs $10k a pop and insurance doesn’t cover it.

It is a fundamental right of a human being to have children. And our scientific career path needs to accomodate that fact. Otherwise, we will never have equal gender respresentation in the physical sciences, and science will lose out on talented people with some brilliant ideas.

I was sitting on the bus this morning while it took me to work, and I was working out a computation on the back of the paper I’m editing, scribbling furiously, pausing every now and again to look around at the people. In other words, one of my usual morning activities….

I look up at one point to see a little African-American girl in a cute bobble-hat (I’m guessing she was about 6, or 7?) carrying a pencil and a large notepad, sit down next to me. When I look up again, she’s continuing whatever it was she was doing when she got on the bus wth her mom (sitting elsewhere) – she’s doing a computation! She writes (in really large, confident, pencil marks):

25 x 10 = 250

Then she thinks for a bit and writes:

29 x 10 = 290

Then she looks at what I’m writing for a moment or two, then turns back to her own (obviously more interesting) work and thinks for a bit more and writes:

24 x 10 = 240

At this point I’m feeling a bit self-conscious but very pleased about the picture the two of us must make, sitting at the back of the bus heads down calculating. I carry on. So does she. I notice after a while (I’ve got the corner-of-my-eye thing down to a fine art in case you’re wondering) that she’s decided that her multiplications need no further sharpening (or whatever she was doing) and turns to a new page and starts drawing a flower.

So now I’m frantically thinking of something to do to bring her back to the mathematics. (Nothing wrong with drawing a flower, but so much more unusual to see little girls absorbed in mathematics on their own like that) My stop’s coming up, so trying to start doing a silent reply to her work on my own page (perhaps a series of multiplications by 100?) -which would probably work eventually- would not work in time. Then I turn over my work to reveal a page which had one the paper’s figures on it. Her eyes flicker over to it for a moment and I see my chance. I tear out a square with the figure on the right on it and give it to her. Our silence is broken for the first time with a little “thank you” from her.

She immediately turns it over to the blank side and starts doing more multiplications by 10 on it.

My stop is really coming up now and so I just have to hope that she’ll eventually turn it back over and find something interesting about the other side. When I gave it to her, I was hoping she might have noticed how interesting it is that the curves all go through the same point. As I’m about to retrieve my bike from under our seat, she turns the square back over and asks me what she should do with it. So I point out the feature of the common point. So she says “oh, there are seven of them” and promptly draws a set of seven curves near the old ones, also decaying to the right, but now all going through the number 2!

* * *

Sorry if this is boring to you, but I just thought that was great! It really made my day, in fact. I’ve no idea what (if anything) will come of our encounter, and will not pin any great hopes on it, but it certainly is one of my favourite public transport conversations of all time….

-cvj