Harvard Prez has foot in mouth disease

Parents Forum
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<p>It would be interesting to see this extended down to pre-college. I believe the percentage of females decreases pretty steadily at every step starting from about age 11 and going all the way up. If that's the case, then the problem is not some glass ceiling effect that kicks in at the faculty level, nor is it adult concerns like family-responsibilities. We might be back to the trucks that got the Harvard prez in trouble to begin with.</p>

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<p>Well, I think there is good day care and bad day care. What you also see in some enlightened countries is that the government helps to provide day care so that people have more options. Day care does not have to mean a string of different people who hardly care about you. </p>

<p>I really agree with what Blossom said. Kids do NOT need the full-time attention of a parent. Parents, you are not such an incredibly good parent that your kids will not benefit by being away from you some of the time! I suspect that a lot of people who think their kids need them so much are just in denial about the fact that they themselves need and use their kids far more -- to justify their own existence as an unemployed person. </p>

<p>I think that I belong to a new generation where many people make the decision to be "stay-at-home moms" (i.e., housewives) not selflessly, as Woodwork suggests, and not because their kids need them that much, but just because they prefer not to work -- it's easier! I get really sick of unemployed parents talking about how parenthood is what makes the biggest contribution to the world, parents are such heroes and martyrs, etc. Defensive much? Ugh. My mom worked full-time, and nobody is going to convince me that being a stay-at-home mom is anywhere near as difficult or important.</p>

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<p>does level of difficulty=positive value?</p>

<p>A good parent is not a martyr, a good parent is simply a good parent.</p>

<p>Although, I agree that the abscence of a bad parent will be to the benifit of a child.</p>

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<p>I hesitate to comment on this topic but August, I can assure you that when I made the decision to resign an executive position to stay home with my children when they were young, it was NOT an easy decision or "EASIER" in ANY way. For me personally, it would actually have been much easier to continue working.</p>

<p>Each family makes the decision they think is best. No one can - or SHOULD - judge another family's or individual women's choice on this issue because outsiders simply do not have all of the pertinent facts that go into making that decision.</p>

<p>I hope we can get back to the topic at hand - women in science - instead of letting this thread deteriorate into a shouting match between mothers-who-work-outside-the-home and stay-at-home-mothers. That is a discussion best moved to the Cafe.</p>

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<p>Texas137, I think that even if the percentage of girls/women does decrease steadily as you describe (and I wouldn't be surprised if it did), that does not mean that glass ceilings and adult concerns do not play a role at all. As I mentioned, my desire to have a family some time before menopause was part of what made academia less appealing for me. I can't believe I'm the only one. Also, I don't know any female mathematicians who have had kids while in graduate school or while postdocs, even, while this is not that uncommon for men. It seems to be hard for people to escape from traditional gender roles in raising children even if they might want to.</p>

<p>Although you do run into overtly sexist people in some departments, most people are not overtly sexist and even may not realize what they are doing. I was reading somewhere recently about a conference of women mathematicians at which a letter of recommendation that had been sent on someone's behalf was read aloud. The writer of the letter apparently had good intentions and described this woman, who was applying for a research job in academia, as very friendly, marveled at how she balanced her career with child-raising, and told of how she always brought home-made cookies to the departmental tea. The conference attendees were asked to imagine a man receiving this kind of recommendation for a job in academia, and this raised a laugh from the audience. It was inconceivable that a man seeking a serious job in math would be described in this way. Research mathematicians don't care about cookies and babies and are just not going to take seriously an applicant whose recommendation letters focus on that kind of thing!</p>

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<p>Of course not. But it means we have to consider that other factors may also have a role, which was the point the the Harvard prez was making at the outset.</p>

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<p>There's another factor that we haven't really touched on. Tenured faculty positions are limited to begin with --- usually landing one requires moving to another geographic area or state, and often there is a move if tenure isn't granted. Often there is very little opportunity in college towns for other types of jobs/careers. How many husbands are willing to uproot their own careers in order to follow their wife across country for the possibility of tenure? </p>

<p>Even if both husband and wife are academics, it is very difficult to land joint tenured positions at the same school or in the same area. I have seen this with two friends of mine who both hold doctorates (one astrophysics, one math). Both are married to fellow professors and have tried to arrange tenure positions at the same schools over the years. In both cases, universities were willing to grant a tenured position to only one person in the couple, leaving the other partner to decide whether to follow. A few universities did offer a position to the other partner as a sort of "bonus" to the person they were offering the tenure-track job to, but in most cases, those jobs were not tenure track. My one friend gave up her teaching job to follow her husband and has worked part-time since then. My other friend was the one offered the tenure track job and her husband did follow her but has not been able to land a teaching job in the universitys local so he is working in industry.</p>

<p>Neither had children at the time these choices were made. So, I think it's fair to say that there are other issues in academe besides women taking time off to raise a family - they sometimes have to choose between marriage and career.</p>

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<p>August -- That is a great example of what I meant when I said that discrimination in academia exists, but can be subtle. For example, I know this advice has been given to women seeking tenure: they should inform those writing recommendations for them to avoid references about personality. Positive comments in this regard on behalf of a woman are interpreted as meaning the letter was written by a friend, in which case it is dismissed. Similarly positive comments written on behalf of a man are often received as evidence of collegiality, which is accepted as a good. Of course, comments in a letter on how a woman looks are the kiss of death.</p>

<p>There was a female math professor at Berkeley who eventually got tenure only after a long and bitter lawsuit.</p>

<p>I see Summers is still swimming in hot water over his comments. Another long article about it today in the New York Times.</p>

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<p>Thought-provoking article by a (male) physics professor who is co-chair of Harvard's committee on faculty diversity: "Is there unconscious discrimination against women in science?"</p>

<p><a href="http://schwinger.harvard.edu/%7Egeorgi/women/backpage.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~georgi/women/backpage.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Although, I congratulate any parent that chooses intimacy with their child over career advancement.
Maybe women are also genetically more compassionate among other possibilities.</p>

<p>Wow! I put both my kids in full day day care from the time they were 2months old and happily returned to my career advancement. BUT I do not feel I have sacrificed intimacy with my kids at any time. My kids attended a day care whose motto was: It Takes a Village to Raise a Child (that was before Hillary Clinton got so much flak for quoting it) In much of the world, in fact, children are raised by many people other than their mothers: grandmothers, older siblings, aunts, uncles, neighbors... </p>

<p>As for women being genetically more compassionate than men, isn't it as sexist a remark as saying that women are not as bright as men?</p>

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<p>Carolyn:</p>

<p>The dual career academic couple has become a real problem. I actually know of three couples in which the wife got the more prestigious tenure position. I also know of young academic couples in which the husband is at a more advanced stage in his career than his wife. In all the cases, their departments are in dread that even though the husbands have tenure, they will follow their wives if the wives land jobs elsewhere. </p>

<p>August:</p>

<p>I read some comments by academics commenting on the difficulty of increasing the ranks of female faculty. Quite often, members of selection committees consciously or unconsciously try to reproduce themselves; and since they are still dominated by men, they look for traits which they themselves possess</p>

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<p>The Feb 2005 issue of Scientific American--which I notice is not yet available online--has an interesting article, the premise of which is that one researcher has shown that a group's performance will decline according to how they are told they will do. Women who are told they are being tested for innate gender differences in math will do poorly relative to men; they will do equally well if told gender differences have been found to be irrelevant.</p>

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<p>I think my husband is just as compassionate and nurturing as I am. However, I was the one who opted to work part time for many years after the kids were born. I realized that I did not want us both working 70-80 hours a week, and travelling frequently on the job, while raising kids. So, which one of us would cut back? There were gender-related elements to this decision, but they had nothing to do with which one of us was genetically more compassionate: he was in a field that made much more money than I did, the career penalties for a man trying to go on the "mommy track" were much larger (and probably still are) than for a woman, my work was much more conducive to part time opportunities.</p>

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<p>Marite -- interesting point about the committee members trying to duplicate themselves. I have a sense of science as "clubby" beyond what is true of some other academic endeavors. Lots of conferences and meetings of scientific societies, lots of sitting around tables at the bar with colleagues and competitors. Part of the reason they may not be able to imagine a scientist who takes time off to have kids or shares a job or re-enters the field at a later age is because they've never known anyone with a scientific career who has done that.</p>

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<p>Sac:</p>

<p>One hopeful sign: the spread of group work in the sciences and of study groups, where collegiality and cooperation are valued over the Lone Ranger attitude. </p>

<p>My H works for a company full of younger, mostly unmarried people, where the workaholic boss has no compunction calling a meeting at 5:45pm (the 9 to 5 job is a fiction in that company). On the other hand, we used to have meetings that lasted some time beyond 6pm until some younger colleagues pointed out that they needed to pick up their kids from daycare before 6pm. We now break up at 5:30pm. It took only a couple of colleagues with young children to change the culture.</p>

<p>I am currently trying to do some research and I am finding that not being one of the boys, drinking beer, is a real factor. I have actually witnessed a drinking match which one person told me was the sine qua non for being able to do business. I sat nursing my coke while the men tried to drink one another under the table. Eventually, they got up, red in the face and none too steady on their feet, and said, "Okay, let's continue tomorrow." The next day, apparently (I was not there), they proceeded to discuss real business, stone-cold sober, over tea.</p>

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<p>" am currently trying to do some research and I am finding that not being one of the boys, drinking beer, is a real factor."</p>

<p>Wow, doesn't that sum up what I have felt for a long, long time. This Saturday, I'm off to Mystic CT for a meeting that I don't really want to go. I instead want to go to Swarthmore to drop something off that my son forgot. Instead, I have to attend this dull meeting (where of course, alcohol will be served) and return late late Saturday night!! Story of my life.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
The Feb 2005 issue of Scientific American--which I notice is not yet available online--has an interesting article, the premise of which is that one researcher has shown that a group's performance will decline according to how they are told they will do. Women who are told they are being tested for innate gender differences in math will do poorly relative to men; they will do equally well if told gender differences have been found to be irrelevant.

[/quote]
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<p>That's why I am so disappointed that Summers would speak thoughtlessly (he should have known the chance of taking his remarks out of context). Surely there will be plenty of close-minded, old-fashioned people who repeat his remarks, out of context, to young people who will unfortunately take them to heart.</p>

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<p>Texas137 wrote
[quote]
It would be interesting to see this extended down to pre-college. I believe the percentage of females decreases pretty steadily at every step starting from about age 11 and going all the way up. If that's the case, then the problem is not some glass ceiling effect that kicks in at the faculty level, nor is it adult concerns like family-responsibilities.

[/quote]
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<p>Or the problem could be the steady attrition which comes from both direct and subtle forms of discrimination and negative messages that girls and women get along the way. It's not a matter of a single, big barrier that needs to be overcome .. it is the net effect of all the barriers. </p>

<p>Just the idea that we have been discussing that math/science tenure tracks require that one devote one's whole being to working insane hours all through the normal child-bearing years is one aspect of the discrimination: make the road to "success" so difficult that it will discourage women who want families. The same thing was once true with law -- and is still the norm at many large firms -- but part of the process of opening up the profession to women was also the development of some alternative tracks, so that job-sharing, part-time work, and full time work with reasonable hours (like 40 hour work weeks and weekends off) became more common. I mean - a lot of the insane hours are spent doing fairly nonproductive work: attending meetings and conferences, for example. We now live in a world where a good deal of research, writing and communication can be done via telecommuting - there really is not a need for anyone doing work that is primarily intellectual to be physically present at an office or lab all the time. </p>

<p>But going back to the premise: if as a young woman grows up and considers career choices, she continually receives negative messages from the very people who ought to be mentors and role models... it is natural to start considering other options. The underlying message received becomes, "even if I complete all the educational requirements, I will constantly have to be proving my worth to these jerks, and I will probably encounter prejudice in hiring and promotions... do I really want to subject myself to this?" If a woman is stubborn enough, gets angry enough, and above all is extraordinarily committed to pursuing a career an an area in which she is passionately interested... she'll make it. </p>

<p>But in the meantime the women who aren't quite so sure are being undermined.... whereas for men, there is rather intense pressure driivng them toward careers in math and sciences. I mean, how many parents strongly encourage their sons to study science or engineering? How many daughters are receiving the same parental prodding? I mean -- shifting back to my own history as a lawyer: I became a lawyer because I wanted to, despite all sorts of discouraging messages about what a difficult path I would face; my ex-husband became a lawyer because his parents forced him to go to law school. </p>

<p>Now the barriers have come down in law and medicine, but they still exist in science. To propose an innate gender difference is not only one more example of continuing discrimination -- it is also really bad science. There ARE gender differences that have an impact on learning styles, but they don't affect overall abilities. That is, a "typical" girl might approach a problem in a different way than a "typical" boy -- but that doesn't mean that she can't solve the problem. In fact, the anecdote of the toddler and the truck illustrates this (though it is also bad science to use the anecdotal experience of baby to draw a conclusion about the aptitudes of a generation of adults) ... the baby girl played with the trucks in a different way than the baby boy, but the point is - she still was playing with the trucks. She knew that they were trucks - she just thought about them in a different way. </p>

<p>Mathematicians and scientists who think about old problems in new ways have a tendency to make great discoveries... so if anything, the difference in approach should be a reason to encourage them to enter these fields. Maybe they'll discover things their rigid-thinking male counterparts have missed.</p>

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<p>Two teachers at the Baldwin School in PA (an all-girls school) did some research about five years ago in which they found that about 25% of the girls who graduated from all-girls schools majored in math, science, or engineering, while only 6% of the girls who graduated from co-ed schools majored in math, science, or engineering.</p>

<p>I think what you <em>expect</em> from people has a lot to do with what you get. Shades of Jaime Escalante.</p>

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<p>Why can't we all just admit that boys and girls are different in some ways?</p>