"Silent Technical Privilege" (Slate article by MIT alum)

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>The issue of the impact of child-rearing on the careers of women in STEM fields is a really difficult one. If a woman chooses to remain childless, then she mainly has to deal with attitudinal and cultural barriers, but those can be overcome [to some extent, anyway] by a woman with great personal strength.</p>

<p>However, if we as a society set the expectation that a woman in a STEM career must choose to remain childless in order to be competitive, then I think we would be committing a great harm.</p>

<p>In my opinion, people who have not reared children think it is considerably easier than it is. This also tends to be true of women before they have children–we were all so easy to bring up, right?!</p>

<p>I have one child, QMP. For most of QMP’s school years, we hired an in-home nanny for 50 hours a week. Suppose that QMP averaged 9 hours of sleep a night. How many hours per week did that leave me in charge? Try guessing before you do the math, unless you already knew before you got to this sentence. Actually, this is a trick question, because one or two of the hours that QMP was sleeping were times when the nanny was there, not I. So, actually the time amounted to 60-65 hours per week of responsibility for a child. An exceedingly small fraction of those hours could be spent on work. You might also think it was a trick question, because I asked about leaving <em>me</em> in charge. But I know very few families where the responsibility for child-rearing is divided anywhere near to equally between the adult partners. The responsibility also curtailed my academic travel substantially, relative to several of the men in my (approximate) career cohort. It was truly impossible for me to travel as much as they did. There are career costs connected with this. Then, put this in a context where my faculty colleagues imagine that delaying the tenure clock for a woman by one year is a fair trade-off for the time demands of child-rearing.</p>

<p>Of course many women in STEM want to have children! Some of them want children very badly! It’s not something that it would be beneficial for society to foreclose, as a possibility. But I had a long period when I had to shift from doing “my best work” to doing “the best work that is possible under the circumstances.” </p>

<p>I would not choose differently–absolutely not!–now that I understand the circumstances better. Having a family has many very deep rewards. But it is decidedly a challenge.</p>

<p>One remark not connected specifically with the remarks above, but with one of JHS’s comments: I chaired our department for a number of years. The Dean (male) remarked to me once that the chair of another department (also male) met with him one-on-one for lunch once a week. He thought it would be better if we did that, too. Um, no–that arrangement is really not workable in our area. (It would probably be ok elsewhere.) Too bad, but no. </p>

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<p>I agree with all of this, but I just want to point out that women shouldn’t have to average higher in personal strength, compared to men, to be in a technical field. Unfortunately, that is the current state of things.</p>

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<p>My spouse is a programmer. Most of the women he works with are great. But he supports me a LOT more than their husbands support them, so he and they are all out about the same time regarding child care issues (it’s not like I can just bag out on teaching a college class…). So most guys don’t miss any time due to child care issues, and he and the ladies occasionally miss a half day and sometimes miss a full day due to child care. However, all of them make up their 40 hours per week by working late some days, or using vacation for a few hours. There are married guys with kids who never ever miss even an hour due to going to their kid’s game or picking up a sick child. IMHO, that’s their problem.</p>

<p>The thing is that when a guy is obnoxious, people tend to be “yeah, guys are like that”. But if a girl is obnoxious, it’s more “put a woman in power, and she’ll be a beech”. He has multiple managers, and people hate this one female manager. She doesn’t know much about programming, so doesn’t have respect. There is talk that she was only promoted to manager because she didn’t know programming and because they needed a woman in management. This happens with men too, but it seems like every woman in a field where there are few women becomes the positive or negative example for the gender.</p>

<p>The reverse is true, in that many men are offended by no one remarking on well-behaved non-sexist behavior, but draw attention to the few idiots out there. There is an age issue too, sexism seems to be less prevalent with the younger generation (gasp - I’m in my 40s so part of the “younger generation” I am talking about).</p>

<p>And I will agree with one thing - lots of “non-superheroes” program. And we are very lucky that my spouse <em>is</em> a programming superhero, has saved his companies’ jewels multiple multiple times, and he is well-rewarded for it. This is not always the case, sometimes the people who do all the work get ignored but put up with it. He has been able to hire programmers and also they have a “rank your fellow employee” program (ugh) where he is brutally honest. Anyone who is not extremely competent moves to other groups.</p>

<p>I have experienced some of what is mentioned in the article. I have even experienced sexism by students in my classes. One student actually was going on about “the girls in the class wouldn’t do well on the exams if you didn’t make them so easy”. “Easy” by the way was including concept questions as well as mathematical questions in a senior level course. Apparently, he felt perfectly fine denigrating them based on their gender (yet one of the girls was the best student in the class and only two had trouble in the class - the class was half girls and half boys, and three boys were having trouble).</p>

<p>Good article.</p>

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<p>“I chaired our department for a number of years. The Dean (male) remarked to me once that the chair of another department (also male) met with him one-on-one for lunch once a week. He thought it would be better if we did that, too. Um, no–that arrangement is really not workable in our area. (It would probably be ok elsewhere.) Too bad, but no.”</p>

<p>I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you have met a colleague one-on-one for lunch? Was he asking you to have an affair, or was he asking you to lunch? </p>

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<p>He was asking me to lunch–no problem–but weekly–problem (in our area, probably not in yours). A group of 3 would have been okay, but not one-on-one. I am more than a decade older than you are, PG, and I live in a more conservative area (and probably a lot more gossipy one).</p>

<p>Let me add a comment for the benefit of PiperXP, since I think she and I are close to 100% agreement on the overall topic, though we might differ on this specific issue:
I am not mentioning age here in the context of “age brings wisdom, blah, blah, blah,” which I know PiperXP hates (and sometimes with good reason).
I am mentioning it to try to clarify for PG, who has posted her age elsewhere, that in my region and age-cohort, things are a bit different from her normal experience (which is probably more normal than mine).</p>

<p>Also, since PG is here (unexpectedly to me), let me add that I am not claiming any special difficulty for women in STEM. All women in demanding careers face the same problems. A lot of women who are on the fast track, in careers that pay 10+ times what an academic career pays, encounter the same difficulties, and maybe even worse, to the point that 60 hours a week of child-rearing is completely impossible for them. A lot of women have to resign, or go part-time. I really hate hearing this called “going on the mommy track,” as if a happy choice is being made to scale the work effort back, rather than having that be an absolute requirement. No matter what choice a woman makes, there is no question that she loves her children, and that if she had to give everything up for them, she would do it willingly. I had a long time to contemplate that before becoming a parent. Yet, it is difficult to let go of some of the things one must let go–for quite a few years.</p>

<p>Something else that I know would not bother PG, but does bother me–it was hard (for me, specifically) to handle a career in a region where there are a lot of stay-at-home-moms. I encourage the choice to be a stay-at-home-mom, for the women who want to do that; and I certainly understand the heart-tugging that would make that the right choice. Still, the scene in “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” where the woman is poking holes in a store-bought pie to make it look home-made when she takes it to school the next day really resonates with me. I always wound up baking cupcakes until 2 am, no matter what I promised myself. Most of the time that I spent with QMP, the stay-at-home-moms and their children, I really felt like a fish out of water. </p>

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<p>Do we really need to defend one half of campus by denigrating the accomplishments of the other half?</p>

<p>It’s not at all clear that affirmative action helped a significant portion of females get into MIT; nor is it clear that the females who got in were the victim of bias at all. The social forces which may still exist now and are responsible for gender disparity are not universal, some may be indirect (e.g., societal expectations on childrearing responsibilities), and others may have disparate impact but not be discriminatory really (e.g., women who are good at math and science choosing medicine over science, or alternatively, women are less likely to speak up in class so that may impact recommendations). Speaking of MIT specifically, one poster said women don’t apply to MIT who have scientific potential because they aren’t encouraged to pursue technical careers. I went to a math and science high school where many of the top girls had no interest in MIT because it was seen as an unpleasant bootcamp. Instead, they were more interested in majoring in science at Harvard and Stanford. The bootcamp image I think played better with the males. It may also be that more males are better at the “fake it till you make it” projection of confidence in skills they do not yet have, a skill which may help you secure internships and/or succeed in them. Reading the blog and the article linked in the original post, it certainly seems like the author gives off that vibe.</p>

<p>Back to the first point about non-universality of discrimination, rather than assuming that the top women at MIT in math would have made the MIT putnam team if not held back by social forces, it may be that women that would have made the Putnam/IMO team did not even end up as viable candidates for MIT, and the women actually at MIT didn’t experience any discrimination at all. In other words, pockets of discrimination may deplete the talent pool, affecting the overall achievements of the top females, without it affecting the women who made it to MIT at all.</p>

<p>I would completely accept a blanket statement of how the “privileged” gender did not earn their accomplishments completely compared to the unprivileged gender if it was from a person from Quantmech’s generation, but these days such a generalized pronouncement is completely inappropriate. If such forces are so pervasive, then why is the average female SAT score in the U.S. higher than the average male SAT score? Why are significantly more women going to college compared to males? Who is the privileged gender here? </p>

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<p>Understanding that this is not a simple awesomness binary is not denigration. </p>

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<p>Have you managed to read any stories from MIT women talking about gender bias (at MIT or otherwise)? They abound on forums like blogs, Quora, even the Tech on occasion.</p>

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<p>What do you think caused the bootcamp image to play better with the males?</p>

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<p>These are definitely issues worth examining, and there are certainly pockets of experience where women have the gender privilege (ie, taking dance). I don’t think that changes the fact that society, overall, is harder on women than men. </p>

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<p>Well, I’ll defer to @quantmech here, who we can agree dealt with the brunt of gender-based discrimination among all participants in this discussion. Would she have felt more comfortable in her own application to college and grad school if they relied <em>less</em> on performance in class, in standardized tests, and on objective test-based competitions (AMC, usamo, scholastic bowl)? What more subjective measures (recommendations in lab, class) would she have needed an artificial boost. What artificial boosts does she think she would have needed today (as opposed to yesteryear)? And remember, we are talking pre-grad school and pre-college. </p>

<p>My own assessment is that throughout history, you know who the privileged class is because they are the ones who don’t want things to be performance-based. Or they want their own background built into the assessment of performance. </p>

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<p>In my opinion, I was very little affected by any gender discrimination at the high school or college level. I think that experience was general in my era. When I was in junior high, I was worried whether some of the colleges that I might want to attend would go co-ed soon enough to be open to me. MIT was co-ed, and had been for many years. But if I had been born just a few years earlier, there would have been a number of other top schools that were closed to me, due to gender. In the end, I selected a college that had been co-ed for many years–longer than MIT actually, I believe.</p>

<p>A generation further back, my mother had a different experience–she faced out-and-out gender discrimination in high school. She was not permitted to take physics, because the physics teacher had a “no-girls” rule. Never mind that she was at the top of the class, despite having skipped two grades before that, and she was quite good at math. She took calculus in college (and did well), when that was rare for women of her era. Instead of taking high school physics, she took bookkeeping. She placed first in a statewide bookkeeping competition–but it wasn’t really a substitute for physics. </p>

<p>Actually, timing-wise, I think that I was fortunate. Many opportunities were opening up for women as I was reaching college and grad school, and the anti-feminist backlash had not set in yet. A while ago, there was a post on CNN by Meg Urry (Israel Munson Professor of Physics at Yale), on gender issues:
<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/01/opinion/urry-women-science/”>Why bias holds women back - CNN;
This drew a number of really rather vicious comments by (presumably) men or boys, who wanted to deny Meg’s claims. CNN removed the comments and shut down the opportunity for anyone to post about the article. I worry that it might be more difficult for a young woman now than it was for me–because a small, but vociferous minority of boys seem to hold intensely negative attitudes toward young women in STEM fields.</p>

<p>I had one college math prof who told me that I needed to “think like a man.” But I understood what he meant by it, and it was good advice, as opposed to rampant sexism. More troubling were the pages taken out of Playboy or similar magazines and posted on the walls in the organic research labs–something that continued until really quite recently. By the time I showed up for a graduate physics course my senior year, and the other students in the class wanted to direct me to the class they supposed that I was really looking for, I just found it amusing. But I did have quite a few classes where I was the sole female, or one of just a few.</p>

<p>One graduate fellowship competition was not open to me, due to gender. Aside from that, I did not run into any difficulties with graduate applications. My research advisor in grad school started out by telling me that there were many fields that needed well-educated people, aside from academia. He mentioned telecommunications as one. By the time I was finishing my degree, he told me that he thought I could get a faculty position at a research university, though probably not at Princeton. I am not sure whether this view was gender related, or not. Possibly not. I was very fortunate to have a distinguished woman in my field on the faculty (in grad school) and to encounter others at conferences.</p>

<p>collegealum314 knows that I am a proponent of a very heavy weighting of academic merit (as traditionally defined) in admissions. I favor opening opportunities fully for women at each stage of education and career, so that gender-based boosts are not needed. I tend to think that inequalities that may be observed at the college admissions stage now represent inequalities of opportunity, or else opportunities that were available, but not taken for some reason (which could include cultural issues).</p>

<p>The issue of whether or not to offer gender-related boosts is a really, really tough one for me. I hope to live long enough to see a time when none are needed.</p>

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<p>A couple of additions to this. I perhaps over-stated the lack of influence of gender discrimination during my high school and college years. I did not directly experience much discrimination. On the other hand, when I was in high school, all of my science and math teachers were male. They were wonderful! Without exception! But there were no women in the group. Most of my other high school teachers were also male. </p>

<p>In college, I took approximately 60 different courses. I had no women professors in science or mathematics. There were some in the university, and I took very little biology, where I might have encountered a few. My future husband took a course in mathematics that was taught by a woman professor, but I was taking different math courses. Out of the 60 courses, I had two women professors, one in history and one in philosophy. I also took 5 introductory language courses (2 different languages) and had 2 women grad students as the instructors out of that set of courses. So there was a considerable shortage of role models. </p>

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<p>When it comes to admissions boosts at the point of college entry, I think that there are significant inequalities of opportunity, for many African Americans, Latinos, and people in the lower socioeconomic groups (just based on the quality of some of the high schools and limited outside enrichment opportunities). In my opinion, this inequality needs to be addressed, and opportunities for an extremely high quality college education need to be made available to promising students from all demographic groups. Gender-based disparities could be handled at the same time.</p>

<p>I think that MIT and similar schools ought to follow the model of the military academies in just one regard: The military academies offer admission to their Preparatory Schools (MAPS, NAPS, probably something similar for the Air Force) to students they want to admit, if they think that limitations in the students’ high school preparation will cause the students to struggle with the curricula, which have a lot of math, science, and engineering courses in common, for most students at the academies. (It is true that the military academies use MAPS, NAPS, etc. partly for recruited athletes, which MIT could avoid doing.)</p>

<p>There are multiple advantages to having post-high school college-prep schools, from my point of view. The students are admitted to the academies, if they succeed at the preparatory schools. They no longer need an admissions boost, because the preparatory year gives the students the opportunity to play “catch up,” which they need to be on par with the better prepared students who will be in their classes. They don’t get stuck in a sink-or-swim academic environment that they are not really ready to handle. There is no element of “let’s pretend” that the students can do just as well as others, who are several years ahead of them in understanding of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. They are admitted at the point when they can really profit from the normal academy curriculum. MIT might need a two-year prep course to be available for some students, given the wide separation of pre-college academic opportunities in the US.</p>

<p>A key feature of the preparatory schools is that they are free to the students. There is a cost, of course, in terms of career delay. On the other hand, the prep schools contribute significantly to the later success of the students. So there is somewhat of a trade-off.</p>

<p>In order for this to work for a place like MIT, you would need funding for it, first and foremost, so that it could be free to the students. I think that the Gates Foundation and other similar foundations should consider whether they might be willing to cover the costs for such a program. I think you would find a sufficient number of faculty members (some hired from outside MIT, probably) who are sufficiently concerned about existing inequality of opportunity to make teaching at the prep school attractive to them. </p>

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<p>Actually, it still continues, but the pictures are different now. In one of the labs I worked in, someone had one of those “sexy” calendars of half-naked men. When our group took out a visiting male professor to dinner, this woman made a sexual comment to the professor who she apparently liked. Another woman in my group had a crush on one of the men in the group (who had no interest in her at all). She decided to draw a picture of this guy on the hood with no clothes on except for a strategically placed heart. A third woman actually mentioned that this person was sexually harassing the guy at one of our group meetings, and our advisor awkwardly said, “Uh, we don’t want sexual harassment here.” The picture of this guy remained on the hood for as long as I was there. Maybe it’s still there. </p>

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<p>An excerpt from the question on Quora: “How are women treated at MIT”:

<a href=“http://www.quora.com/How-are-female-students-treated-at-MIT”>http://www.quora.com/How-are-female-students-treated-at-MIT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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I totally agree with this. I think the trouble is that these inequalities of opportunity are additive, and they are especially problematic when the differences between candidates are very small, as they often are in undergraduate admissions.</p>

<p>This is, of course, not at all restricted to issues related to gender. I am fully aware that my undergraduate performance at MIT gave me an advantage in graduate school admissions (partly earned, of course, but partly unearned), which allowed me to get into Harvard, which gives me an additional partly unearned advantage. And then I did my PhD in a lab with a very good reputation in my field, which gave me a partly unearned advantage to get into one of the top labs in my field in the world (department chair, HHMI, etc.) for my postdoc. All of these tiny partly unearned advantages can snowball into something much more, once you have a couple of levels’ worth of them. I’m not saying I don’t deserve it, just as I’m not saying that men at MIT don’t deserve what they have. But I don’t automatically deserve it more than somebody who did her academic work outside the Boston research juggernaut, either. </p>

<p>Hence, “when people with privilege of all flavors assume they got where they are by being awesome, and that people without privilege are just inherently less awesome, they are wrong.” I did not get where I am merely by being awesome, and people with less privilege than me are not just inherently less awesome. I don’t see how this denigrates my accomplishments. Being awesome is not the hard part – being recognized for being awesome is, and it’s easier to be recognized for being awesome if you fit a certain mold.</p>

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<p>If a female will not have a one to one meeting with a male who is a colleague, boss or even works for the female, that is a problem since that means it excludes a legitimate and valuable venue to discuss issues. Does his mean you can’t be in a room without third in there with the door shut? How on earth can you speak privately? that’s ridiculous, IMO. I had to speak privately with males quite often when I worked, my DH does with females, always has had to do so. </p>

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<p>^I can see how going to lunch would be viewed as more likely a social event and possibly an indication of a romantic couple than a meeting in someone’s office. I don’t think quantmech was implying that meeting one-to-one would have been taboo. But I think this is tangential to the main discussion.</p>

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<p>Wow! Maybe I should just not read any more of this thread. Perhaps it could be moved off of the MIT folder? First, I do not at all agree with @PiperXP’s presumptive basis “fact” that “I don’t think that changes the fact that society, overall, is harder on women than men.” I think there is plenty of proof that society is much harder on men than on women, and plenty of proof that society is harder on women than on men. But to state either case as an irrefutable fact that is obvious to everyone? Not so much.</p>

<p>I can tell you there are many graduate fellowships open to women (as “URMs” in STEM) and not men; I have not seen this one that @QuantMech mentions that is open to men and not women. Here is just one random list grabbed off the internet. This list has five (5) fellowships (Microsoft, Schlumberger, AAUW (x2), and SWE) that are open to women only, and NONE closed to women. <a href=“Graduate Fellowship Opportunites”>http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~gradfellowships/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>In reading this thread in the MIT folder, you may come to the mistaken impression that there are not many female role models at MIT, based on @QuantMech’s (#70) detailed enumerating of her undergraduate experience AT ANOTHER INSTITUTION! There are women represented at MIT all the way up to the President of MIT (not currently, but recently). While YMMMV, it is a bit harsh to apply an experience at one institution to judge another.</p>

<p>MIT’s first graduating class was in 1868, the first woman graduated from MIT in 1873, five years later. Wherever @QuantMech (#69) went to school must have “gone coed” prior to that? <a href=“http://libraries.mit.edu/mithistory/community/notable-persons/ellen-swallow-richards/”>http://libraries.mit.edu/mithistory/community/notable-persons/ellen-swallow-richards/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>As to @QuantMech’s suggestion to develop feeder PG schools, MIT has renowned summer courses for URMs (MITES) and for women (WTP) <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-technology/146919-wtp-summer-program.html”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-technology/146919-wtp-summer-program.html&lt;/a&gt;
but not for men. Many prep schools also try to prepare students, including women and URMs, to be candidates for MIT. So, if MIT felt that it is part of their mission to close the gap for UR populations, working with the existing infrastructure may make more sense than opening their own feeder schools.</p>

<p>As far as I know, MIT has never given women or minorities an “admissions boost” in terms of lowering standards; perhaps they have in terms of selecting from the already-qualified pool; but who besides admissions employees would know?</p>

<p>I understand wanting to discuss the gender issue, and to posit that “it must also apply to MIT.” However, doesn’t that do a disservice to those who come to the MIT board to really understand specifics ABOUT MIT? Especially when presented with input like that in post #73?</p>

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<p>cptofthechouse, #75: certainly I met with the Dean one-on-one a number of times, and I meet frequently with other (male) colleagues one-on-one. It was the idea of weekly lunches (just for two) that for me seemed over-the-top.</p>

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<p>ItsJustSchool: The Rhodes Scholarships were not open to women when I was about to graduate from college. The Rhodes Trustees were not permitted to spend any of the funds of the trust to challenge the conditions of the will. After enough money had been raised from Rhodes alumni, the Rhodes Trustees were able to get the conditions of the will changed, to permit the election of women. </p>

<p>I agree, there are now scholarships and fellowships that are open only to women, or under-represented minorities, and I know of hardly anything that is exclusive to men. Deep Springs College would be an example of male exclusivity at present.</p>

<p>Yes, my college was co-ed before MIT. A lot of colleges were.</p>

<p>It was not my intent to give the impression that there are no female role models at MIT. Of course there are. And quite a few of them. There has been quite a lot of press about the research space allocations to women professors at MIT, which on the face of it, appeared to be unfair in the past.</p>

<p>ItsJustSchool, you might have missed the point that I am among the older people on the forum. Part of my message is how much things have changed. It is still possible for a young women to get through my university without ever having a woman professor in math, physics, or chemistry, but it’s considerably harder than it was when I was an undergrad.</p>

<p>With regard to prep,
a) MITES and WTP are both too short to compensate for educational differences accumulated over many years.
b) White males from rural areas are also short-changed educationally at the high-school level. Some of the schools not so many miles from where I am now do not offer high school physics, for example.</p>