Tag: Academia

Where are the women in STEM?

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The “Women in Science” debate has been raging on in a variety of ways, from wondering why there aren’t more of us to whether or not a mixed-gender lab is too distractingly sexy.  The amount of women in science, the pay gap, and career advancement potential varies wildly by country and research field. So does public opinion about whether or not there is an actual problem, what might be causing it, and what we might do about it. In 2011, women only earned about 18% of undergraduate computer science degrees, down from its peak of 37% in 1985. The percentage of women earning graduate-level degrees has been slowly increasing since 1970, with 28% of the masters degrees and 20% of the doctoral degrees (Ph.D ,s) being earned by women in 2011. Women make up roughly 41% of total STEM doctoral degrees earned; however, women only fill 24% of STEM jobs in the US, and only 25% of STEM managers are female. Universities are only slightly better, with 28% of tenure-track faculty positions being held by women in the US, but only 12% worldwide.

This debate isn’t just specific to science in academia, but a lack of diversity in the educational system can have interesting effects.  First, a lack of female (or other demographic) role models means that female children are less likely to go into that field: if they don’t see anyone paving the way, then the idea that they might also become a physicist doesn’t occur to them or doesn’t sound like an attractive career.  While boys and girls are taking math and science in equal numbers in grade school, this doesn’t translate into the same number of men and women in math or science undergraduate fields, where women only earn 18% of undergraduate  computer science degrees, down from 37% in 1985, and only 11.5% of software developers are female.  Part of this is the perception that men are better than women at math and science, even though women have been shown to be better at writing computer code than men, but only when reviewers did not know the coder was female.  Science faculty, regardless of their own gender, were more likely to hire a male applicant over an identical female applicant, and offered them several thousand dollars more starting salary for the same position. The male applicant was perceived as more competent, more hirable, and more in need of mentoring than the identical female applicant.

Another problem is that women are less likely to have people sponsoring or advocating for them in the work place (available here and discussed here).  People with sponsors were 30% more likely to be promoted or given raises.  As of 2014, only 23% of Americans polled preferred a female boss, which is and has always been lower than the number of respondents preferring a male boss, which may account for the lack of support women find in climbing the ladder.  Surprisingly, women were 13% more likely to want a male boss, which may be a reaction to fierce competition to become the “token woman” at a company or working group, as women or other minorities who advocate hiring another woman or minority are rated poorly.  There is also the perception among women that a female boss is less likely to promote you over herself, as she doesn’t want competition, known as Queen Bee Syndrome.  This too, has been refuted, as women are shown to be more likely to mentor and develop female employees lower down on the ladder (discussed here).

Finally, one of the reasons that women are not found in some fields or levels of management, which no one really wants to discuss, is the disparaging levels of sexism and harassment we may face.  For female graduate students, post-docs, or new professionals, sexual harassment at work can increase attrition rates.  Due to the close nature of the working relationship of graduates/post-docs with their advisors, many students feel they can’t report inappropriate behavior (of any nature) for fear of losing their position in the program.  As a student, you need your advisor to approve everything, from the courses you have taken to manuscripts before publishing, and a poor relationship with your advisor can make it nearly impossible for you to complete your work.  Tenured faculty who have been accused of harassment also seem to be acting with impunity, as it can be difficult, time-consuming, and costly to fire a tenure professor (in the absence of proven criminal activity).  In field situations, sexual harassment can take on a more sinister tone, as you may be the only female in a group and depending on your abuser to keep you alive.

So what can we do about this?  Because this isn’t just a woman’s issue.  That’s what I discussed here because I have some expertise with being a woman, but in general, diversity in society is a hotly contested issue.  It really shouldn’t be, increasing the diversity in a group can increase performance and improve decision making (discussed here).  Having a diverse group of people (in terms of gender, race, sexuality, education, economic status, birth order, pets owned, places lived, live experiences learned from..) gives the group a wider range of previous experience to lean upon when solving problems.  It’s why we evolved into a social society in the first place- it was better for survival.

The first step to solving our diversity issues is to let go of preconceived notions about yourself or others.  Stop thinking about life-related obstacles to your career trajectory, such as whether you want kids or having to relocate your family, and stop assuming that others might be better or worse at their job because they have chosen a certain family dynamic.  Stop thinking you might not get a job because of what the employer might thinking about women as bioinformaticians, and in turn stop stereotyping applicants based on your ideas of who they are and of what they are capable.

The second step is to be a role model, and to actively engage the next generations of computer scientists, astronauts, microbial ecologists, astrophysicists, and educators.  As a woman in science, it’s important to me to encourage other women and girls in science, because I would not be here today without the positive female role models I have had.  It’s important to support programs that encourage different minorities to achieve in fields where they are underrepresented, because it benefits all of us.

And the third step, perhaps the most difficult. is to have an open conversation about the difficulties and prejudices facing women, or anyone, in different science fields.  Often people can fall back on stereotypes or be sexist or racist without realizing it, and it’s important to speak up and have a conversation with them to come to a better understanding of how to get along.  When someone’s words or actions are creating a hostile work environment, tell them directly, as well as their supervisor or relevant reporting agency as needed.  If we don’t address the problem on an individual basis, then individuals will never amend their actions.  In addition, it’s important to validate the feelings of and listen to someone who has been the victim of harassment or a crime (of any nature), because it’s important to make them feel safe and believed.  Often, victims of sexual harassment state that not having their reports believed or treating seriously by supervisors was worse than the harassment itself.  And personally, I have plenty to do on a daily basis without having to deal with casual or institutional sexism.  Working women are simply too busy quietly doing well at ours jobs to deal with men’s feelings about us.

 

 

 

How is manuscript editing like roulette?

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Because you play another round until your number wins!

Manuscript writing seems like it should be a straightforward ordeal. You explain the current body of research on the subject and identify the knowledge gap that your hypothesis fills, explain the rationale and objectives for the study, describe all the methods you used, present the data results, and then interpret them in the discussion. Oh and don’t forget the bibliography. Simple!

Oh contraire. Many manuscripts grow and then end up splitting into two or more, or you add a collaborative project on after the fact using the samples you’ve already collected. Sometimes you just say “let’s test these and see what happens”, and you don’t have a specific hypothesis except for “it could be cool”. Moreover, when you work in a very novel, difficult, unpopular, or boring field, there often isn’t a lot of previous research for you to read up on.  It makes it more challenging to write what should be the easiest section, the Introduction, because you don’t have much background to introduce.  While this does justify your work and the need for more research, it also makes it difficult to plan an experiment because you don’t know what outcomes or problems will crop up, and it can make your interpretation of the data problematic.

Methods: probably the worst section.

Sometimes you end up with more or less data than you planned. And most often, you didn’t just use commercial kit instructionDSCN1272s, you probably had to piece together methods from two to ten different journal articles, many of which were not verbosely described to maintain a sort of proprietary hold on the procedures, until you end up with a heavily-citationed Frankenstein’s monster of a Methods section. Not to mention that you probably had to mess around with procedures to find just the right settings on your equipment, so you have to go back through your lab notebook and try to tease apart what you did months or years ago. My suggestion: write the Methods while you are running the experiment. Whenever you finish a procedure that worked, type it up, especially if you are stuck waiting for something to process or grow anyway.

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In 2015, I worked on the DNA sequencing section of a project that had begun four years earlier when the original animal feeding trials were run, and which had been sequenced nearly a year prior to my taking over the data. Not only did the original Principal Investigator (PI) have trouble digging up the project files from four years ago, but the technician who had sequenced the data was no longer a member of the lab. Between the two, it was very difficult to track down what had been done, and which sequencing file name corresponded to which sheep sample. Even if you think the project will never be published, TAKE GOOD NOTES. Really specific, legible ones, trust me- you’ll thank me later.

 

Results and Discussion: Let’s be honest, the only two sections anyone actually reads.

exopolysaccahride
Exopolysaccharide production (white) prevents colonies from being ctained by red dye in the media.

Results is the easiest section to write, but possibly the most difficult to make appealing and understandable to a general scientific audience. Naturally, you need to know how to properly summarize your data and how to graph it. Seems easy: something about means and standard deviations, liberally sprinkle in some p-values…  But in reality, there are lots of ways to statistically validate or measure something, and most of these are minor variations on each other to accommodate slightly different data or situations. Maybe your data has a bell-curve normal distribution like people’s height in North America; maybe it’s heavily skewed to one side, like my preference for maple-frosted donuts over celery. Or you need an ordination plot that takes non-Euclidean distance samples and graphs their relationship to each other by plotting one point, then rotating the axis and plotting another until you’ve plotted all your points. No matter how sophisticated your presentation techniques, if someone can’t look at your graph and the graph summary out of context and understand what you are measuring, you haven’t done your job well. I’ve heard many scientific authors complain that a reviewer demanded changes to the manuscript because they did not under the results or statistical analysis. That can be frustrating, and sometimes it feels like the reviewer is just being obtuse, but as scientific authors it’s our job to properly explain what we did.

acid production
Acid production from different carbohydrates by Streptococcus gallolyticus shown by a pink color change.

The Discussion section is always my favorite, because now you interpret your results into the context of other findings and speculations- in short, you finally get to tell the story of what is happening and why in a more interesting way.

The rest is just details. The Conflict of Interest section is always very interesting. Here you must disclose any conflicts you have, anything from a funding source that paid for your work and may or may not have had input in the experimental design (sometimes commercial companies will contract researchers to do a specific experiment that they more-or-less designed), or that the commercial lab you sent your samples to be tested at has you on the payroll. The Conflict of Interest is usually blank for studies coming out of academic universities, but it’s a good way to track down researchers who might be biased towards or against something.

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You have an acknowledgements section where you can thank personnel that may have assisted you in some small way, someone who you bounced ideas off of in planning and interpretation, someone who gave you samples to work with free of charge. In my case, I most often thanked the hunters who had dutifully collected a jar of rumen (stomach) contents, and sometimes colon contents, from moose while they were field dressing. Or the numerous undergrads that helped feed my newborn lambs five times a day until they were weaned.

Last but not least, the Bibliography or References Cited. Sounds easy enough. But you’d be surprised how pesky it can be. Different journals often want different formatting for your submission, some want authors lists to look like “Last, First; Last, First”, or maybe “Last, F., Last, F.”, or even “Last F, Last F”. Some want years in parentheses, others don’t. Some want issue number, or the journal name to be abbreviated, or a certain part of the reference to be bolded. Trying to reformat 50-100 references for submission to a different journal can be a nightmare. Luckily, there are plenty of citation managers that will create a digital library for your references, and allow you to search for citations while you are writing. Then, you hit “Insert Bibliography” and it numbers or alphabetizes it, and puts them into the desired format. That is, assuming you had put all the correct bibliographic information in. I like Mendeley because I can import references from my web browser; however, on older PDFs sometimes it can’t pick up the info it needs and you have to do it manually. I’ve gotten some interesting inputs for authors’ names when it gets confused.

Manuscript writing can take months, especially with complicated projects or those with many co-authors, as all co-authors need to approve the final version before it can be submitted. Once submitted, a Journal Editor will send the manuscript out to two or three Journal Reviewers, who are researchers in academia or industry that are in that field of expertise and can opt to volunteer to read and review the article. Nearly always, the authors do not know who the reviewers are, and in many cases the reviewers do not know who the authors are, although it is helpful for reviewers to see the authors’ names. If they have a conflict of interest with the author, such as they  don’t get along personally, they might be married, or they are currently working on another project together (anything that might bias them for or against), the reviewers are supposed to decline to review. Reviewers have two to four weeks, depending on the journal, but some will submit their reviews late. The Editor considers all the reviews and makes their final decision to accept as is, accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions, decline with major revisions (authors may edit and submit a new manuscript for consideration), or decline.  It takes a few weeks to find reviewers, several more to get the revisions in, and another one or two for the editor to make a decision, so this can take anywhere from six weeks to four months.

Often journals will decline without reviewing if they are not interested in the subject material or feel it is outside the scope of the journal. If you have revisions, some journals request that you submit two new versions of the manuscript- one with the changes highlighted. Additionally, you need to address each reviewer comment by explaining what you did. For spelling mistakes, this is as simple as writing “corrected” after the comment. For more complex things, you need to explain the change along with quoting the new text, or explain why you aren’t changing things. If the Editor and Reviewers do not feel that you made all the changes, they may reject the re-submission or send you more edits. Usually they send you more edits that they didn’t notice the first time.

Eventually, a journal might accept your manuscript, and then you only have to approve the author proofs – unless your figures don’t have 18746_603831005730_3060064_na high enough resolution, and then you need to remake them or figure out how to increase your dpi.  Typically it takes between six months to a year to complete the whole peer-review process, depending on the study results and the journal’s internal process.

While tedious and arduous, the manuscript peer-reviewing procedure works very well. Experts in your field can assess the validity of your work, and experts in related fields can give you an outside perspective, especially when you have gotten used to using a very specific jargon or not completely explaining things. Most importantly, it improves the quality of the writing and presentation, and it maintains a standard of integrity and excellence. By the end of the submission process, you are dizzy and you want to get off the ride. But by the time you get through the next project, or eat a soft pretzel, you’ll be ready to climb back on that carousel horse.

A Lady on the Streets and a Tiger in the Sheets of Paperwork.

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Stereotyping is a social adaptation which evolved to help individuals classify stimuli, and to make judgements about new, untested stimuli.  After all, once a crocodile ate your family, it was conducive to your survival to assume that all crocodiles were probably dangerous.  However, social interactions and the human sense of self is so much more nuanced today that stereotyping is no longer a valid social tool.  People make assumptions about others based on just about any aspect of their person, and this has very real repercussions for diversity and interactions in the workplace, though here I am focusing on preconceived notions of women.

Women often face a paradoxical set of rules for their personality and productivity, especially at work.  Sometimes we are perceived as being too talkative and willing to talk over others, yet a recent study showed that men do most of the talking in work meetings, and are much more likely to interrupt a woman and than man.  Women are perceived by men to be worse at problem solving, as being unreliable if they are working mothers, and as being worse team leaders or executives.  This is contrary to other studies which show women to be more effective leaders.  In that study, women were more likely to take charge, undergo professional development, be honest, and were better at communicative and collaborative skills.  Many women who were surveyed attributed their success to having to work much harder than their male counterparts in order to prove their competence.

Women are encouraged to be more feminine from many angles, such as societal norms, or product marketing and advertising, often with the perception that you will be more attractive and better liked if you exhibit predominantly feminine qualities (warmth, nurturing, patience). However, the perception of working women used to be (in 1984) that they were more masculine, and prior to that working women were seen as selfish, unfeminine, and cold.  While in 2014, working women were categorized as equally feminine and masculine, being more “masculine” (self-confident, self-promoting) is shown to increase your chance of promotion.  Women are also often expected to do workplace “chores” or to be altruistic (staying late, helping other employees, etc. at no personal gain) in ways that men are not.

Another problem is the perception of working women and their relation to their family, which has improved in the last century but still lags behind the times. It’s still assumed that women will at some point temporarily or permanently leave work to raise a family, and working mothers are commonly perceived to be unreliable in terms of performance and time spent at work.  There can still be negative attitudes towards women who work instead of staying home to raise children, even though countless studies across the globe have shown that working mothers (who want to be working) have a more positive attitude, act as role models, and reduce gender inequality in future generations (data from here and summarized here).

This also ties into theories about whether or not a woman should earn more that her man (arguments which ignore same-sex couple earning dynamics). However, this leads to the idea that women don’t work to financially support their families, but to feed an ambition, yet why can’t both be true?  Men responded that when jobs are scarce, men have more right to them than women, and were less likely to respond that a job was the best way for a woman to be independent.  Thus, women’s careers are incorrectly perceived as superfluous to supporting a family and leads to the idea that we don’t need to make as much as a man, who may be supporting his family.

I can personally attest to this.  For several years, I was financially supporting my ex-husband during his arduous job search following the 2008 recession.  It didn’t bother me, as I was applying to graduate school and preparing for the financial tables to turn once I transitioned to a student stipend.  However, our financial roles came as a surprise to many people, in that the thought hadn’t occurred to them that I was the prevailing breadwinner.  This was again reflected in people’s perceptions about what we would do after I graduated.  When I announced my interest in finding a post-doctoral position on the opposite US coast or internationally, people were surprised that I would ask my man to give up his job, start over in a new place, and move away from his family.  However, I would have been expected to do the same if our career roles had been reversed.

Luckily, attitudes about female bosses are changing, even if our paychecks aren’t.  Today fewer men responded that they would prefer a male boss to a female boss, and more had no preference, than they did 50 years ago.  Only 23% of Americans polled preferred a woman, which is and has always been lower than the number of respondents preferring a male boss.  Gender preference was also linked to the gender of your current boss, so it likely that people are as unsure of change in hierarchy as they are of specific genders in charge.  Surprisingly, women were 13% more likely to want a male boss, which may be a reaction to fierce competition to become the “token woman” at a company or working group, as women or other minorities who advocate hiring another woman or minority are penalized.  There is also the perception among women that a female boss less likely to promote you over herself, as she doesn’t want competition, known as Queen Bee Syndrome.  This too, has been refuted, as women are shown to be more likely to mentor and develop female employees lower down on the ladder (discussed here).    Interestingly, companies with higher numbers of women in leadership roles consistently do better financially than companies with low number of women in leadership roles.

So how do we act more confidently without being arrogant or dominating, prove that we are great at math and science without being narcissistic, or have a family but not make a big deal of it?  The best way to change public misconceptions is to prove them wrong.  My advice, for women, for everyone: just be yourself.  Be your best self. Be friendly and open, but judiciously say “no” to demands on your time.  Remember who you are, where you want to go, and be comfortable in your skin. Feel free to be feminine, masculine, or whatever (just remember to be professional).  As you work your way through your career, you should remember to be humble; after all, there is always someone out there that knows more than you do, but you also need to remember that you are intelligent, hard working, and you deserve to be where you are.

The Reluctant Interplay of Science and Social Media

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Recently, I had another in a long series of conversations with scientists about how they got into science so that they wouldn’t have to use any of their rusty social skills, only to find that social interaction, meetings, and now online communication were a huge part of their daily routine. The myth of the curmudgeon scientist holed up their lab seems to persist despite the current age of social media, perhaps because we scientists don’t seem to understand the appeal of Twitter (how do you include the p-value when you only have 140 characters?!). But in reality, a great deal of our time involves communication, and having practiced social etiquette can make or break you in an interview, at a conference, or at a project pitch meeting.

Many researchers wait until they are hired as assistant professors before they reluctantly make a website, start a blog, or even set up an email account for the lab. How disappointing it must be to wait all those years as a graduate student and a post-doctoral researcher, only to find that a website with your last name has already been taken! And what a hassle to have to generate blog posts, update project and personnel pages, and keep up with social media when you have just landed a professorship and are swamped with grant proposals, manuscripts from old projects that keep hanging around, comparison shopping for equipment to set your lab up, generating coursework for one or several courses, recruiting students…. It’s such a hassle that a friend of mine created an entire business around helping new professors create and manage an online presence: Tenure Chasers.

It really got me thinking, shouldn’t I be starting this?  It’s a little preemptive, after all, I’m a post-doctoral researcher without a lab of my own.  But it makes sense to start it now; for one thing, I have the time to devote to creating the mainframe.  For another, as a new researcher, I sometimes need to prove that I exist.  It seems like a silly thing to think about, but sometimes you need to prove that you are, in fact, a real researcher will real work experience and not just an email scam targeting disused academic email servers (happens quite often).  And hiring someone is a serious consideration, as research funds are limited, indirect costs for personnel make total personnel costs high, you are trusting this person with your research and your career reputation, and you may need to work with this person for several to many years.  It’s a commitment to hire a scientist, and you need to be sure about them.  Thus, having at least one thorough online profile, or better yet- connections to other well-known researchers, can give employers more confidence in you.

Finally, having an online presence improves your communication skills, and shows a commitment to outreach, which is a component in any career level of academia.  It helps to get your work out to other scientists, especially those outside your field whom you wouldn’t run into at a conference or seminar, and more importantly, it disseminates it to the general public.  Graduate school and post-doctoral positions are designed to teach and refine skills, and the skill of communication is no different.  So don’t wait until you really need it, start early and improve the quality of your social media presence, before anyone is paying attention.