"This first blog post of the New Year (whee!), I will be blogging on the idea that women have a special capacity for being hellion bosses. It’s been idea rattling around and my head and I was reminded of it while I was twitter terrorizing tweeps yesterday (Which is a font of knowledge about my nutella eating habits, fyi. Talk about science? Pssssh). Because everyone knows under the glitter, sparkles, and pink things wimminz be like, crazy, dawg..."
Your favorite D-List Monktress solicits opinions on making official complaints in academia.
...because none of her minions OR muffins submitted ANYTHING for the horde takeover of mai blogz. I said I would blog about anything y'all wanted for one whole month in celebration of our pwnage of donor's choose and you snubbed me.
WTF muffins, you know your d-list famewhore does not like being ignored during her famewhoring.
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So go submit some topics for me to talk about! Pronto! Srsly!
Your D-List Monktress shares her advice on how to properly write teh emailz.
New, interesting tidbit from The Chronicle of Higher Education (emphasis mine):
"White students make up 62 percent of full-time students enrolled in four-year colleges but receive 76 percent of institutional merit scholarships; and white students are 40 percent more likely to receive private scholarships than minority students are."
I look forward to the excuses explanations for why white folks are so much more deserving. Perhaps they will take inspiration from the recent NIH kerfluffle that makes my teeth grind to just to look at the various analyses, cries of indignation, and self-satisfied bigotry.
For example, one brilliant comment at The Chronicle (with 39 likes) elucidates the inherent inferiority of black applicants, which is 100% (NOT) confirmed by the actual fucking study. Italics are the comment, quotations are data from Ginther+'s study
Black investigators may be the result of "special initiative" graduate and postgraduate training programs that provided poor preparation for a competitive research career, leading to poorer quality proposals.
"Model 4 included controls for previous NIH grants, NIH review experience, and NIH institute, and while it reduced the award differential for blacks and Asians by 1 percentage point, the differential was still significant (P < .001)." -Ginther et al Nature 2011
Black investigators are more likely to come from predominantly minority institutions, which rarely (if ever) offer infrastructure necessary to support cutting edge research, leading to poorer quality proposals.
"...when we added controls for education and NIH training in Model 2, the marginal effects did not change in size or significance. Model 3 added controls for employer characteristics, which reduced the significance of the marginal effects for Hispanics, but not for Asians or blacks (P < .001), compared with Model 1." -Ginther et al Nature 2011
Black investigators have available numerous "minority candidate status required" research support initiatives which are reviewed only against other minority candidates, and this experience denies them the opportunity to hone proposal development skills, leading to poorer quality proposals.
"For all applicants who received F or T training, blacks were 27.4 percentage points (P < .001), Asians were 6.9 percentage points (P < .01), and Hispanics were 9.5 percentage points (P < .01) less likely to ever receive an R01 award compared with whites" --Ginther et al Nature 2011
Another bit of brilliant flamebait:
Has anyone considered this perspective: Minorities have received preferential admissions treatment for admission to college, graduate school, for academic positions, and for tenure...
"Out of 69,300 science and engineering full professors in 2006, a mere 600--less than 1%--were African-American women." -ScienceMag
"Nationwide, blacks make up 5.3 percent of all full-time faculty at American colleges and universities. But a more accurate picture is obtained when we eliminate from the count the nation’s predominantly black colleges and universities. With that adjustment... nationwide, blacks are slightly more than 4 percent of the full-time faculty at predominantly white institutions of higher education." -JBHE
"None of the 28 other high-ranking universities (Ed: out of 30) have a percentage of black faculty that is equal to the national average of 5.3 percent. At Rice University, Stanford University, MIT, and CalTech, blacks make up less than 2 percent of the total faculty."-JBHE
FYI, we're almost 13% of the American population. Maybe the commenter meant the mythical fairy job they did not get last application cycle. But before my Caucasian readers dissolve in a puddle of white guilt, fear not! There are those wise ones that point out the "myopic view" of the study, for example:
"I think the data paint a fairly accurate picture of the current state of efforts to increase minority representation in the sciences – highlighting remaining challenges, but also noteworthy accomplishments that the paper and discussions about it have completely ignored." -Michael Eisen
Yea, we should have had a paragraph congratulating white people for accepting desegregation, allowing us to vote, and that super sweet moment when we got to be outside after 10pm. Whee.
Look, I'm sorry to break it to you, but every black person already in science knew this. They knew it, but couldn't get 100% incontrovertible evidence for it, so they never brought it up to you because you would scoff and say the anecdotal data of their getting slammed every review cycle while you sailed through was just their being a sore loser. When institutions devoted to minority issues start sniffing out the same problems, they are promptly ignored because everyone knows that minorities can't be objective about problems concerning them. That's for the big boys.
And then when some nice white people come do an in-depth study and publish it in a respectable place that other white people can go to without feeling uncomfortable, we must then listen to the neverending wail of excuses. But we are totally making progress! I, and none of my friends, would never have that kind of bias EVER, so it can't be possible! There must be some magical other variable that addresses this because scientists can't be racists! I totally made a rocker launcher for 4th grade science fair and the black kid won with a poster on diabetes so it's just SCIENCE KARMA!111!!!
Seeing cold, hard , numbers to confirm what we already knew is not going to scare the poor widdle minorities away, don't worry. We have actually been secretly indoctrinating our children that we have to be twice as good as the majority to hit the bottom rung, so it appears we were overzealous. The idea that this will frighten minorities away into some fictitious career where things are not exactly the same fucking way is at best, epically condescending. What makes me, personally, want to quit is when overeducated buttholes who are completely logical about everything else promptly shut down their brain and turns into the stereotypical Tea Bagger they like to make fun of whenever race comes up.
In summary,
Muffins & Minions, your favorite D-List Monktress is SUPER EXCITED to display the results of her newest She-Woman Baby-hating carnival extravaganza! Muahahahhahaha, Oh, don't be silly, it just my Q&A where I don't allow baby-oriented questions. Babies justify their existence just by providing such fat little nommy baby feet, but the monktress likes to pretend her heart is made out of the $1.2 million dollar ring on Kim Kardashian's finger.
So you all went and outdid yourselves by asking so many excellent questions that I felt even more power-trippy than usual when I selected the questions to be answered by my PANELS OF AWESOMESAUCE. In fact, I got so many that I decided to split my ladyprof panel in two, Solomon-style, so that I could get more questions answered! Don't say your Monktress never loved you.
Your monktress commands you to go forth and shower love and gratitude upon my participants because they were all totally fantastic for engaging in my shenanigans. I will be updating my links throughout the day as answers come up, all posts will be tagged AcademicsansBabies, just as before, so you can find them later. Flying Spaghetti Monster knows that's the only reason you'll be coming back to this blog years from now.
(Geek Mommy Prof, Professor in Training, Dr. Sneetch Q 1,3,4, Q2, KJHaxton, Micro Dr. O, *special bonus appearance by* NicoleandMaggie):
1. Are there any suggestions about how to look professorial as a young (and young looking and smallish) TT faculty?
2. For those of us who like things like pink, skirts, baking, sewing, knitting, heels, makeup, and other things girlie, how important is it to not do / wear / talk about these things lest we be seen as fluffy girls who can't do Science?
3. What can we do when other women deny there are problems being a woman in science?
4. It seems to me that often women don't have as strong professional networks as men - the kind that gets built over shared interests (sports or drinking). People seem to gravitate towards others like them. What specific advice do you have for establishing and maintaining network with men as well as other women?
(Female Science Professor, Kate Clancy, Arlenna of Chemical BioLOLogy, Prodigal Academic, Pascale Lane Q4):
1. It seems to me that often women don't have as strong professional networks as men - the kind that gets built over shared interests (sports or drinking). People seem to gravitate towards others like them. What specific advice do you have for establishing and maintaining network with men as well as other women?
2. Early on, what was your "Oh @!#$%" moment and how did you recover?
3. How do you deal with female health issues (heavy periods and period pain that lasts for a week, heavy migraines that strike suddenly, etc.), when you are in a predominantly male environment?
4. How do you balance "assertiveness" and "bitchiness" - in the sense that it's harder as a female (than a male) to "get away with" being protective of your time, stating your opinion, and so forth?
(Nina of Kiwihorizons, Dr. Zeek, Canadian GirlPostdoc, *special bonus appearance by* Pika of Academic International) :
1. When you were looking for your post-doctoral position, how (if you knew) did you know that your PI would treat you fairly?
2. It seems to me that often women don't have as strong professional networks as men - the kind that gets built over shared interests (sports or drinking). People seem to gravitate towards others like them. What specific advice do you have for establishing and maintaining network with men as well as other women?
3. Early on, what was your "Oh Fuck" moment, how did you recover?
4. For those of us who like things like pink, skirts, baking, sewing, knitting, heels, makeup, and other things girlie, how important is it to not do / wear / talk about these things lest we be seen as fluffy girls who can't do Science?
More advice on choosing the site of your future lab servitude.
