Some time back, I took issue with an article about “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to science that struck me as a little off. The author of the original post, Alexandra Jellicoe, has a new post on the same topic that she pointed out in comments to my original post.
I have two major problems with this article. One of them is a problem I have with the whole genre (as it were), and I’ll save that for another time, because it will be difficult to write. The bigger and more immediate problem that I have, though, is that I don’t recognize Jellicoe’s description of science. She writes:
The whole structure of science is biased towards this more masculine approach to problem solving. You have a professor looking for the truth in his chosen scientific subject and he commands his researchers to solitarily go out, find the answers and report back. As many people may be looking for the same truth, it fosters a culture of secrecy and competitiveness. Your work is only revealed when you have gone through the painful peer review process of publishing in a journal and beaten your competitors to the punch.
It’s kind of hard to imagine anything more foreign to my experience of science. There was never any point, from my undergrad days on up through my post-doc, when I felt that physics was a solitary endeavor.
As an undergrad, I always worked with other people on problem sets. In my first couple of years, I worked with a couple of guys who had lived in the same freshman dorm with me. After that, there was a group of 3-5 of us who used to get together in the Physics library and do homework. Talking through problems as a group helped us all understand things better than any of us could’ve done alone.
My undergrad thesis project involved another student in my class, who was available for moral support, lab assistance, and to beat my high scores on the freeware video games we had on the office computers. There were also other students doing research, and even the faculty were around to provide help and suggestions.
In grad school, I studied for my qualifying exams with the other students in my program. We used to get together a few times a week to work through some of the sample tests the department had made available, and generally try to soothe each other’s anxiety about the test.
After I was finished with classes, my lab work was done in the Laser Cooling Group at NIST, and I don’t think there was any period longer than a month or so when I was really on my own. There were always post-docs assigned to the same project I was, and the experiments were done as a team. I don’t think I ever wrote a paper with fewer than four co-authors, and none of them were purely courtesy authors– all of them had been in the lab, doing the work (or crunching numbers on the theory).
The larger Laser Cooling Group was also a helpful community. There were five different experiments running during the time I was there, each with a handful of post-docs and permanent staff. Whenever I had a problem in the lab, I had a large group of people to consult about solutions, and I was often dragged into debates about some aspect of another experiment (as the lone grad student in the group, I had a longer history with the apparatus than anyone other than the permanent staff).
After graduating, I was a post-doc on a project with two graduate students. Each of the four different sub-groups in my boss’s lab was organized the same way: post-doc, senior grad student, junior grad student. All of those people were around to talk to, ask advice from, or bounce ideas off. And there were two other atomic physics groups in the basement with us, who also provided helpful discussion.
There was never any point in my training when I felt like I had to “solitarily go out, find the answers and report back.” I was always working as part of a larger group working on similar problems, and the discussion with others was invaluable.
So, her description of what women want from science:
Women also tend to communicate more effectively than men, talking through issues and show empathy towards each other whereas men tend to be more task-oriented, less talkative, and more isolated. This is something I personally struggled with enormously whilst doing my own scientific research. My own method of problem solving is to talk to as many people as possible about a particular issue to assist in unravelling my own thinking. I choose people with relevant experience whose judgement I trust. Left to my own devices and without access to this tool I find reaching decisions enormously challenging and actually very stressful. I would much rather use the community brain to reach a collective decision to act on rather than have to make autocratic decisions on my own.
looks a whole lot like what my experience was. Which leaves me wondering where the problem is.
Now, I’m aware that AMO physics is an unusually collegial community within physics (we talked about this at a recent DAMOP, and one post-doc told a story of a European post-doc who came into the community from another subfield, and started engaging in some aggressive behavior at a conference. During the coffee break, he was pulled aside by a couple of the most prominent researchers in his country, who explained that We Don’t Do That Sort of Thing Here). But, honestly, I don’t get this war-of-all-against-all vibe from much of anybody in physics– some particle theory types are arrogant and prickly, but this is the community that gave us the arxiv, which grew out of community-wide discussion of preliminary results. This is such an extreme difference that it’s difficult to map onto my experience at all, and leaves me wondering whether Jellicoe just stumbled into a particularly pathological lab or branch of science.
If not, if this is really the norm in other fields, let me just say this: Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics is here for you, if you want to come somewhere with a saner community ethic. It’s not a complete utopia, but it’s not a Hobbesian state of nature, either.
leaves me wondering whether Jellicoe just stumbled into a particularly pathological lab or branch of science.
I’ve wondered this about enough blog posts about science that I’m forced to conclude either that many, many branches of science are pathological, or that people who find themselves in rare pathological areas are unusually likely to write blogs.
“You have a professor looking for the truth in his chosen scientific subject and he commands his researchers to solitarily go out, find the answers and report back.”
This actually sounds much more like studying in the Humanities department.
What you don’t appreciate is that it is more often like this for solitary women in science … women who don’t go to the pubs with the boys, whose advisors never discuss the science with them, whose advisors reward the young men who most resemble them … and so on. When this happens to you year after year, decade after decade, and you are not even allowed to mention it … yeah, science may be ideally a social subject, but it ain’t working for many women.
Chad, you are simply a feminine scientist 😛
But seriously, I don’t understand why you equate solitary with pathological. Plenty of research came out of solitary work. Besides in many areas once you specialize past a certain point you are more or less on your own locally.
@ Kea:
I’m a woman with a PhD in AMO physics, and I think I probably do qualify as “solitary.” I didn’t know anyone in the cities where I did my undergrad or graduate work, nor here in my new city where I am working at my first post-PhD industry job, and I’m an introvert by nature.
But even I got invited to the problem set discussions and qualifier reviews, for the most part. Because it wasn’t really a matter of friends getting together after beers. Those problems were *hard*, and each of us wanted all the help we could get. And its even more true now that I’m in the real world. Some times the groups get a little dysfunctional, but all of the science I’ve been a part of has been done by groups.
I have to completely agree with Chad, here. Physics, and in particular AMO physics, I guess, just isn’t like that. It’s too hard. If you try to do it on your own, you’re doomed.
(Although you’re right that it can be harder as a young woman to find an advisor who is a good mentor and is comfortable in that role. Then again, I get the sense that it’s not easy for anyone.)
What you don’t appreciate is that it is more often like this for solitary women in science … women who don’t go to the pubs with the boys, whose advisors never discuss the science with them, whose advisors reward the young men who most resemble them … and so on.
I’m not talking about pub-going after work or that kind of socialization– I did very little of that with people at work. Most of the people in the group were post-docs with families, and not that interested in boozing it up with grad students.
I’m talking about the “Hey, you got a minute?” questions in offices, and at lunchtime, and in the computer lab/ coffee room, where a lot of new results got discussed and debated by people who were procrastinating from other things. The business of doing science was always collaborative, in that there were always other people around.
But seriously, I don’t understand why you equate solitary with pathological. Plenty of research came out of solitary work. Besides in many areas once you specialize past a certain point you are more or less on your own locally.
It’s not the solitude per se that’s pathological, it’s that description, and the idea that that is what science is. If my education had been anything like what she describes, I wouldn’t be in science, either, and not because of my femininity.
Reading her whole article more carefully, I’m bothered by the sweeping claims of sex differences in the male and female brain, which aren’t consistent with my (admittedly fuzzy) awareness of research on the subject. I left a comment that’s in moderation over there now; it’ll be interesting to see if she has references to back these claims up.
In my experience also, the masculine model she paints, for example as “solitary figure spending a year in the library reading the literature, two years in the lab and another year secretly writing up their results for publication” simply does not exist. Maybe we don’t always succeed being a “group of people researching a broader topic using their considerable communication skills and inter-changing roles as appropriate”, but certainly this is the ideal any group of collaborators in my field (theoretical HEP) have in mind. Otherwise why would we have workshops and go and visit each other, and do video conferencing, and maintain all the rest of the structure we need to communicate with each other?
Which is a shame, there is probably something interesting to be said about the subject, but that would be quite a bit more subtle than the picture she is trying to paint.
Mary, I’m a theoretical physicist, and I’m sure I speak for a fair number of women in theory. The guys may have had group problem sessions, but I NEVER did; not once after my undergrad days … when I tended to help other people solve the problems.
Re: you gotta minute in the office …
Are you effing kidding me? After being treated like shit for 40+ years, one does not go casually knocking on someone’s door for a 2% chance that they have the ability to listen to your question … let alone consider that you might be correct and Big Dood might be wrong etc.
I am not agreeing entirely with the blog post that you are discussing … not at all, in fact … but Science Is Sexist … and blatantly so.
Ok, so… when did Kea get her PhD and when did Mary get her PhD? Are the differences in their experiences a generational thing? Or a geographical thing? Or a subfield thing? Or just due to the fact that the square root of 2 = 1.4?
Also, talking about Capital ‘S’ Science as if were some Borg-like, monolithic institution is pretty intellectually lazy.
Reading her whole article more carefully, I’m bothered by the sweeping claims of sex differences in the male and female brain, which aren’t consistent with my (admittedly fuzzy) awareness of research on the subject. I left a comment that’s in moderation over there now; it’ll be interesting to see if she has references to back these claims up
yep. if you made the author’s sex male he ould have ripped a new one and this wouldn’t be passed around twitter.
On the whole, I can’t sustain that my PhD experience was solitary. I frequently exchanged ideas with my colleagues and supervisor. Although, I must admit it often was confined to my closest collaborators. But this was due to the nature of my subject, a difficult highly specialized mathematical endeavour.
However, the closer the deadline of my PhD approached, the more solitary it became. I felt very lonely in that last phase, as there is nobody who can help you there.
I temped for a few months as a clerk in Oxford’s Earth Sciences. It was *department policy* that everyone in the building whose work was not critical and urgent took their coffee breaks (twice daily, ten to fifteen minutes) in the lounge all together. Seriously, my boss would go through the admin office shooing us out; even if you didn’t want a drink you still went out to chat. It was explicitly to provide an informal forum for sharing minor requests, and expertise. And it was excellent for those “this is too stupid to bother you with” moments, and for finding out what the heck was going on in the department. I’m not sure how much it was enforced on the academics (it could be awkward if you interrupted them mid lab-work; and anyone with a teaching load spent considerable time outside the department building), but I think I’d met everyone not overseas on field-work by the end of a month.
Short version: I suspect cooperativeness and communication vary a lot from department to department and between institutions.
Also, I find the assumption that cultural gender-stereotypes in intelligence are innate to be deeply insulting. It adds to the abuse you suffer if you’re not stereotypically correct.
I’m sorry kea, but, judging by your comments here, it really seems like your problem wasn’t so much about sexism but that you made yourself unapproachable.
It also seems like you hold a grudge to the males in your field. Yes, some PEOPLE can be gender biased. However, that’s a long way from saying that Science itself is sexist, or even that the males are being sexist. I have seen plenty of times where discussion groups involve a mix of males and females. I have also seen discussion groups that are male only and some that are female only, it’s just a matter of who is available at the time.
While you complain about nobody coming to you to discuss anything, you likewise (by your own admission) never went to others for discussion, based solely on a gender bias.
jasso, you are presuming way too much on too little information, and it is rude and hostile.
I wasn’t being rude nor hostile in my comment. Yes, I was making an assumption; however, that in itself is neither. In fact, none of my comment was rude, nor hostile I didn’t insult, demean, or threaten. I made an honest assessment on how you portray yourself in your comments.
Your comment #3 for example. You speak in terms of gender issue, when both genders have the same problems you mention.
Likewise for comment #9. Discussion groups don’t always include the entirety of a class/workplace, both genders from can be excluded, that’s just how things go sometimes.
You seem to take all your personal experiences of exclusion and essentially state that it must happen to females in far disproportionate numbers, when in fact, that is not the case. Usually that type of trait makes someone not easy to talk to.
Take a look at your comment #10. It has a very hostile “us vs them” theme to it, especially with the last line.
You talk about males as a group in a very adversarial fashion, use pejorative language, and display open contempt at males in positions of power.
If you want to talk rude and hostile, I suggest you take a look at your own comments. You used insulting language and react in a belligerent manner to someone disagreeing with you.
Oh wow. I apologize profusely to Kate for my last comment, I saw K and thought that you were kea (that’s what I get for working through the night).
However, I still don’t think I was being rude and hostile in my response to kea, but I also apologize if I came off as offensive (I can see how that is possible after I read back over it). My point was that the comments themselves were very gender biased and resentful.
Well, I think there is a lot to the idea that it’s a theory vs. experimental thing, too. I did have a friend who did a theory PhD, and though she was a more outgoing person than I am or was, I think her actual research experience was more solitary. She was, I believe, her advisor’s only grad student at the time, which was unfortunate in itself, and more common with theory students.
I went to a talk she gave, and was able to follow it only in the broadest outlines. If she ever wanted to come to me for help, there wouldn’t have been much I could do without probably a week of getting up to speed on what she was working on, at least. And to tell you the truth, I’m not sure if she ever graduated. Last I heard she was moving to another city and hoping to finish her dissertation remotely, because her fiance had got a job and would otherwise have had to move without her.
(I did also know a woman in a fiber-optics group who said her experiments were more solitary than ours, but hers was a large group and I still don’t think she’d recognize the description posted above.)
Also, Kea did mention 40+ years, whereas I just graduated in 2009, and that probably is a factor in our different experiences.
Ultimately I suppose it’s true that science isn’t monolithic and there may be people for whom the description in the original post rings true, but I certainly don’t think it’s a valid generalization.
Well, I think there is a lot to the idea that it’s a theory vs. experimental thing, too. I did have a friend who did a theory PhD, and though she was a more outgoing person than I am or was, I think her actual research experience was more solitary. She was, I believe, her advisor’s only grad student at the time, which was unfortunate in itself, and more common with theory students.
I think it’s also more true of biochemistry sorts of sciences, where the projects are more likely to be doable by a single person working with a small amount of space. I’m basing this largely on a movie about life in a protein structure lab that was shown at the Sigma Xi meeting last year, though. In the movie, at least, there seemed to be a bunch of people working under a single professor, but each of them were on their own self-contained project, and there didn’t seem to be much communication between them.
Although the discussion of sexism in the sense of women being excluded from the group is important, it doesn’t have much to do with the original article.
Jellicoe isn’t claiming that women are excluded from interactions (which is sometimes true), she’s claiming that interactions don’t exist because males don’t interact with each other (which doesn’t match my experience).
Well, I think there is a lot to the idea that it’s a theory vs. experimental thing, too.
This isn’t my experience as a theorist, or in any other branches of theory that I have contact with. I’ve never written a paper by myself; some people do, and I wouldn’t say it’s rare, but it’s definitely not a large fraction of the literature. Most theory papers in my field and in neighboring fields that I know about have anywhere from 2 to 5 authors, and even if people are largely working on their own, they’re often knocking on doors and talking to people about what they’re doing.
Definitely not a theory thing. Although there are single-author theory papers (I have one), and although those papers are prized, those papers don’t usually happen in a vacuum. The best single-author theory paper I’ve seen lately (by a woman, incidentally) thanked several other scientists for useful discussions in the acknowledgments. Besides, the crown jewels of theory are the theoretical institutes renowned for their tea times, wine and cheese socials, blackboards and couches in the hallways for discussions, and generally interactive atmospheres. In fact, the culture of theory celebrates papers that start off as equations on the back of a napkin over beers. I actually have a collaborative paper that started on the back of a lunch receipt during a visit to a mathematical institute.
Now, it is true that the daily work of a theorist might not REQUIRE as much interaction (we don’t need to say to a labmate “Hey, are you done with the soldering gun?”), but theorists do love their long coffee hours. (Experimentalists have even been known to mock us for it.)
And I say all this as a theorist who used to do experiment, so I have seen both sides, and as a theorist who is fairly solitary by nature. Being solitary and sometimes awkward, I’m keenly aware of all of the interactions that I _don’t_ get to enjoy while others do.
The strongest critique of science is not that men run it as a solitary endeavor, but rather that men run it as a collaborative endeavor and then leave women out. Kea is on point, but Jellicoe is completely wrong.
Oh, and biomedical papers generally have several authors, and their labs have shared equipment and other features that would natually lend themselves to a “Hey, can I ask you about this?” quick chat. In fact, biologists are fanatically insistent on learning techniques from others rather than figuring it out solo, to the point where they will ding a grant proposal if the proposer wants to use a technique that he/she hasn’t used previously and doesn’t have a letter of support saying “Yes, I will help the PI learn this standardized technique.”
BTW, Jellicoe claims that women are better at juggling multiple projects and ideas at once while grad school favors single-minded focus. Actually, grad students often have side projects (and even get second-author papers from side projects), and a typical week in the life of a grad student might include learning something new for use in the main project, tinkering on a side project, seminars, helping train a junior student in something or other, maybe some teaching (depending on how they’re funded) and maybe taking a class (depending on the stage of grad school). If anything, the biggest problem that a grad student faces is finding time to focus. (Sadly, this does not get any easier, as the demands only increase later in the career.)
Absolutely not a theory thing. As I pointed out, the fact that theorists need interactions is so well established, that large fraction of any budget allocated to a theory project is for that purpose.
I also noticed that while the original claims had to do with scientific research, most of the discussion had to do with the experience of grad school. These two are completely different animals. Just think about the claims about strict hierarchy, or having a single project at a time, or not seeing the big picture…All of those are more likely to describe the experience of a graduate student in a bad environment, rather than the typical way scientific research is done.
I’m a theoretical physicist, and it is a fact that theory and experiment are quite different, and not just because of the size of the research groups. This was quite clear to me when I was involved in collaborations with experimental groups.
However, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the only time my theoretical colleagues and I worked entirely on our own was when we were working on our problem before explaining our results to the group.
Further, since I would agree that I have encountered quite a few jerks, including a thief that I hold a grudge with, it is a misperception to attribute to sexism what is clearly a more generalized pathology in some subfields of physics.
Hahaha. I just recall my (male) high school maths teacher who told me I’d not succeed working in science if I don’t learn to integrate better into groups.
All this stereotyping isn’t good for anything. There’s no “feminine” or “masculine” approach to science. There’s problems that have to be solved, and there’s approaches that work better and others worse, and how well they work doesn’t only depend on the problem but also on the person trying to find a solution. Science is, in the first line, output oriented. You take whatever approach suits you, and we’ll see if it gets you anywhere.
The social integration, after-work activities, etc is a completely different topic. Problems occur at this point if you’re one of the solitary type (no matter what gender), but working in an environment where the after-work, outside-office, activities play an important role for information exchange. That can be very unfortunate. I’ve found this to be the case in some places more than in others.
The topic is Science with a capital S. Either Jellicoe is only looking at one aspect of science, or is more interested in making point than dealing with facts (perhaps she read ‘The Double Helix’, and took Watson/Crick and Franklin as two poles). My field (psychology) has undergone a strong shift in sex ratios since I started, going from majority male ot majority female. I’ve not seen any shift in norms of working, it’s always been a mix of solitary topics and open workgroups, depending on the individual and the field. I think their’s more electronic communication over the past 10 years – I now get to write papers with people from other continents who I’ve never met. Jellicoe’s presentation also makes me very wary – the neuromythology of sex differences is very strong, and usually misleading.
how exactly does stereotyping like this even work, i’m sure you can find men that are social creatures that work in a team and women that are individualistic and snipe eachother in an effort to get ahead just as easy as the opposite
someone just has a personal viewpoint bias to that article. most likely some superiority issues as well
I read the original Jellicoe ‘Science is Sexist’ article, and it is a complete piece of trash. Her primary complaint is that science requires one to back up one’s claims, and worse, other scientists will expect you to do so or shut up. Look at her opening anecdote about Jocelyn Bell, who like many scientists, male and female, had a strong intuitive sense. Bell may indeed have been shafted by the scientific establishment because she was a woman, but there is a big gap between having a hunch and having evidence. That difference bothers Jellicoe, but that difference is at the very heart of science: checking one’s answers against experiment and observation to produce an irrefutable, at least for a while, argument.
Then there is the psychobabble. Women, she asserts, are less likely to specialize or organize. That’s claptrap to start with. Then she argues that there is a neurological basis for this. I’ve talked to enough women and read enough girl fiction – Anne of Green Gables, Betsey-Tacey, Honey Bunch, and what not – to know that girls are just as likely as boys to specialize, lead, follow, coordinate and cooperate. Anne of Green Gables and Tom Sawyer had a lot in common. Arguing from neurology is ludicrous. That’s phrenology. We don’t know enough about neural structure or development to make any such type of argument. She’s as bad as those 19th century scientists arguing that women were stupid because their brains weighed less then men’s. They actually did. I’m not making this up.
There are a lot of feminists who dislike science. Like Jellicoe, who may or may not be a feminist, they dislike the snark, the need to prove things, but that’s what science is about. It is incredibly irritating, but you have to prove things with a combination of theory, interpretation and observation. Science requires snark to get at the truth. The Royal Society, perhaps the first scientific institution, was founded on one simple idea, nullus in verbum, words are cheap.
The thing is that science is fundamentally feminist. Society makes all kinds of assertions about women, and traditionally they have all led to women having to endure circumscribed roles and be denied the rewards, recognition and rights that men are granted. The feminist critique of our society has always been fundamentally scientific, put up or shut up. No, women have just as many teeth as men – count them. No, athletics will not make a woman unable to bear children, though serious training might shut down her period. No, women can handle the rigors of choosing candidates without having conniptions, and they vote just as rationally as men do. Maybe more so.
There is still enormous prejudice against women in science and technology, though things have improved in the last 50 years. Sex stereotyping is pernicious. I see it all the time. It starts with the ultrasound. On the other hand, the evidence has been coming in. Women can do science just fine. They can be as brilliant and snarky and logical and intuitive as anyone.
They can also write garbage, just like men.
P.S. Yes, I know this is harsh, but that article is AWFUL. It’s not just wrong at a few points. It’s wrong all the way through.
I don’t think it is a feminine vs masculine dichotomy as much as difference in sub field norms or local practices. I worked very closely with my advisor and was in a small theory group where we talked a lot, but then the advisor got a sabbatical at a well known research institute and only took one student with him. Two of us were told to stay behind and finish up our research. He was available for occasional consults by phone or email and there were no (major) hard feelings but it did feel like being tossed out alone with your incomplete thesis and it was done by fiat- “Did I remember to tell you I’m leaving next week?” The ironic thing was while cleaning papers out of his office in preparation for his year long move he was tossing into the garbage his notes and reprints of articles on material that turned out to be exactly what I needed to finish my thesis and go on to one of my first primary author papers. I spent a lot of the year alone following up leads scavenged from that “trash.” Other professors helped a bit and even they felt that my advisor should have dealt with the situation better but the leader of the group sets the norms in the group. Some advisors were better with people and others were on occasion clueless. Not gender as much as style.
read the original Jellicoe ‘Science is Sexist’ article, and it is a complete piece of trash. Her primary complaint is that science requires one to back up one’s claims, and worse, other scientists will expect you to do so or shut up. Look at her opening anecdote about Jocelyn Bell, who like many scientists, male and female, had a strong intuitive sense. Bell may indeed have been shafted by the scientific establishment because she was a woman, but there is a big gap between having a hunch and having evidence. That difference bothers Jellicoe, but that difference is at the very heart of science: checking one’s answers against experiment and observation to produce an irrefutable, at least for a while, argument.
our comment #3 for example. You speak in terms of gender issue, when both genders have the same problems you mention.
Likewise for comment #9. Discussion groups don’t always include the entirety of a class/workplace, both genders from can be excluded, that’s just how things go sometimes.
You seem to take all your personal experiences of exclusion and essentially state that it must happen to females in far disproportionate numbers, when in fact, that is not the case. Usually that type of trait makes someone not easy to talk to.
Take a look at your comment #10. It has a very hostile “us vs them” theme to it, especially with the last li