Encounters

[liv]

Last year, Ada Lovelace day was unbearable. A year on, it's still painful, but it's often productive to write DW posts about things I find difficult. You see, in October 2016, I was a woman-in-STEM being celebrated. As of thirteen months ago I'm a woman-who-quit-STEM, I'm the outcome that Ada Lovelace day is supposed to prevent. I still haven't posted about it publicly, and I think I have about half a dozen posts in me, though I don't want to be that cliché always droning on about Why I Quit Academia. I'm going to make a start, though, because I think I do have something to say.

I went to Sweden at the weekend and it was awesome and I'll talk about it soon, I hope. But I coincidentally ran into two people I really did not expect to see there. One was JS, who was a post-doc at the same time I was, my age, Jewish like me, and working in a field that to non-specialists looks like mine, but which is actually much more hard-sciencey, way towards the chemistry end of the life sciences spectrum. I was definitely not expecting her to turn up in the Stockholm synagogue, since she got promoted to professor at a prestigious American university and moved back there. And her husband got a faculty hire allowing him to pursue his own not-quite-as-impressive academic career. And she got millions of dollars in grants within a couple of years of starting her first faculty position, and now she runs a big lab with a dozen people and she wins innovator of the year awards for her genuinely world-changing work on developing new antibiotics.

I couldn't not be jealous, because that was supposed to be me. I sincerely don't resent her, because she really is brilliant, and also a lovely person, and I'm extremely extremely proud of her and glad that she's one of my two friends who has really made it in science. (The other is male and not necessarily relevant to this story.) I was absolutely delighted to see her, especially as I was expecting her to be in a different continent. Even so, the catching up conversation was quite hard. I mean, it wasn't a complete shock since I had read about her successes on FB, and indeed in the scientific press, she's that famous. And she was interested in and supportive of the non-science job I'm doing now.

The second was... my former PhD student, who just randomly happened to be on the same flight home. Her story is not mine to tell, but basically she very slowly and painfully dropped out of her PhD within sight of the final hurdle, over the course of three years or so. The last time I was in touch with her she was still telling me she was going to recover from all her troubles and write up her thesis, and then she disappeared again and the faint, faint hope that she might graduate after all dwindled to nothing. She did a double-take when she spotted me, and called me over and we hugged briefly and I asked her how she was doing (generally quite well, with a decent and science-related job that doesn't need a PhD), and we roughly apologized to eachother for messing up eachother's careers, and then we got on the plane. That's more like closure than the last in a long long series of emails pretending to eachother that she was going to restart her studies after weeks... months... years of being stalled.

And now it's Ada Lovelace day. I too have a decent non-science job that nevertheless builds on my experience of being a working scientist. And I'm a lot better off than my ex-student in that I have the title and some publications, which nobody will take from me. In a way I don't miss doing science, because I hadn't done any at all for a year before I formally quit my job, and for more than a year before that I was mostly dealing with PhD student problems rather than actually doing science, and before that I squeezed in only a very tiny bit of actually doing science between getting turned down for grants. The last time doing biology experiments was a major part of my life was probably in 2009. But I miss being a scientist, I miss that part of my identity.

I keep revisiting the question of whether I dropped out because I'm a woman, or whether I'm just a woman who happened to drop out for reasons that aren't really connected with gender. I can't really stop thinking about it, much as I would sometimes like to, because every time I meet someone I haven't seen for a few years, or need to talk about what I do for a living, I am confronted with people's feelings about women-who-quit-science. Lots of people think worse of me for it, and in some ways they're wrong to think that, but I can't be one hundred percent confident that I'm not a disappointment. Lots of people are righteously angry about how unfair it is that I didn't get to fulfil my scientific potential, and I'm grateful for that, but I don't know, I am very reluctant to blame sexism for what went wrong. Lots of people are supportive of things like having a work-life balance and prioritizing spending time with my family over career success. Again, I'm grateful for their support but it's not really what happened; I didn't entirely choose to quit science, except in as far as I chose to jump before I was pushed. I wanted to sacrifice family life for science, so I don't think I deserve the credit for failing to do that. Also I'm not meaningfully doing nurturing work; I am involved in my partners' children's lives but only quite peripherally, on a level that would be quite possible to combine with an ambitious career.

I read a good book, in fact written by an acquaintance, about why women quit science. My experience exactly matches the pattern that Hall presents: I have basically never experienced overt sexism, and have never been sexually harassed at work. Indeed, JS mentioned above has had it a lot worse than me, since she trained in America and in a more male-dominated field, and considered being groped by senior male colleagues basically inevitable until she experienced a few years working in Europe. (She's also more visibly Jewish than I am, both because of her appearance and because she's more observant and therefore less able to blend in.) Despite this, she's achieved stellar levels of success, which is the sort of thing that makes me think, surely the problem must be that I'm not good enough, not that I was blocked by sexism. I once wrote a speculative piece about how my life would have been different if I were male, and I felt then, and still do feel, that it probably wouldn't have changed much.

And yet. It seems very likely that I was given fewer second chances than my male counterpart would be; JS' success has depended on having a perfect career with no fallow periods and no failed students. I think the institution where I was gradually pushed out of science was a somewhat institutionally sexist place. Most visibly they discriminated against parents, but that means in practice that women tended to be held back, and that creates a nebulous atmosphere where expectations of women are lower and people are less likely to be supportive to female colleagues. I think there was sexism involved in the difficulties faced by my two PhD students, and ultimately the main thing that killed my career was having two non-completing students.

Is my female personality somehow to blame? I don't think of myself as particularly feminine, and I'm quite arrogant (but maybe if I were male I'd be more arrogant). I was ambitious, once (but maybe I would have been more ambitious if I were male). I get a lot of pleasure out of supporting and facilitating others, and in that sense my current job where I'm not trying to be a scientist suits me better. Perhaps if I were male I wouldn't have been drawn to helping roles and would have put more time and effort into advancing my own career and less into doing favours and completing necessary but low prestige work, and it's highly likely I would have been asked to do support work less often, especially if I never formed the habit of saying yes.

I think it's mostly bad luck that I'm sitting here feeling sad about Ada Lovelace day. But it's also a very specific shape of bad luck that women are much more prone to than men. And I'll probably never be sure, if I'd somehow done gender differently, could I have achieved launch velocity? As it is, I don't get to be a role model to girls who want to be scientists, because I didn't make it. I'm what everybody is cheerfully trying to avoid, and that hurts.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Hugs. I think there's a lot here to mull over, and the parallels of my vocation are also painful. But for now, know that you are loved, just as you are

[liv]

Thank you, that's a really kind comment, and thank you for calling me too, getting to talk to a friend is the most helpful thing when I'm feeling down.

The vocation thing is just a whole other scale of painful, so thank you for sparing sympathy for me. I mean, I don't particularly think God wants me to be a scientist; I was made to love, and what I do to earn my living is not especially important for that, and I still get to make the world a better place with education.

[sonia]

I am a woman who quit computer science, so solidarity there.

Also, I have Opinions about all this. Please discard if they're not helpful!

I have seen the pattern you're talking about a lot, and I am certain in a statistical way that your gender affected your career. I'm sure you've heard, "Give me the confidence of a mediocre white man." But it's not just the confidence, it's (as you mention) the second chances and the solidarity and the ability to fail upwards, where women (also as you mention) have to get it perfect the first time to make it.

A woman whom I mentored at a programming job a few years ago recently got fired from a job with very little warning. She believes that a positive attitude conquers all, so sexism isn't affecting her. I tried to tell her that when one is no longer junior, the pressure of sexism ramps up, but she said it was her fault for assuming that mediocre-white-man confidence and taking a job that was above her current skill level. I realized after we parted that we were saying the same thing, because it's sexism that makes that confidence not work for women.

Upshot in my opinion: It's not about personality or about how one does gender, it's about being seen as a threat as a successful woman in STEM. Not by all men (of course) but by enough to create significant friction. You'll never know about the opportunities men did not share with you because you weren't "one of them."

ETA: I'm in the US. Perhaps the UK is different enough that this doesn't apply. I'm guessing not, though, especially if you're aware of women leaving STEM as a pattern. That's not happening in a vacuum!

[hatam_soferet]

And there were all the times men got second (third, fourth) chances at your expense which I do not think would have happened if you had also been a man.

[green_knight]

Yes. I went to a department that royally screwed me over in so many ways while throwing opportunities at mediocre men with both hands and, if necessary, a JCB. I dropped out after the last pretence of support was withdrawn and my fledgling PhD went from 'just what I want to see, let's talk about external examiners' to 'totally unacceptable, nowhere near the standard' in the space of three weeks.

These kinds of stories seem to happen to women more often than to men (though not exclusively).


(I don't know how 'good' I was, but the topic of my PhD is still a cutting-edge research topic 15+ years later; it hasn't been solved. It's in equal parts satisfying and insulting to see other people discover the questions I was asking.)

[liv]

I am extremely vicariously angry that you went through that. That's the thing, lots of people have had far worse experiences than me with sexism and academia being generally a sausage factory. My two PhD students got lots of support from me, but very little from anyone higher up the tree and sometimes active hostility, and I'm reasonably convinced that some of that was sexism. But for my own part, I was a bit unlucky, and a bit not good enough (not at the science, but at everything else you need to succeed in science), and maybe a bit suppressed due to my gender but I don't really know. So it feels like I shouldn't really complain.

[liv]

Thank you for both solidarity and opinions. I think you're absolutely spot on that sexism is not only about women being less confident than men (on average). If it were that it would be relatively easy to fix.

I don't think I was really successful enough to be a threat. But I suppose getting a tenured position by the age of 30 counts as success, and just the potential that I might be successful may have triggered some fragility. Politically I don't blame women for being affected by sexism, so personally I shouldn't blame myself either.

And I'm pretty sure things are worse in the US than here. You have no federal Equal Rights Act, and no maternity leave, and an even more messed up system for graduate school than here. And every single female colleague I've worked with who has spent time in the US has experienced men in authority telling them women can't do science, and men in authority being sexually inappropriate towards them even if not outright assaulting them. That kind of direct sexism is pretty rare in Europe and not part of my experience at all. But there's a pretty big distance between the deeply misogynist society of the US, and an ideal gender utopia, and the UK is somewhere along that scale.

[sonia]

Yes, getting tenure counts as success!!

Strongly endorsing the idea of not blaming yourself for being affected.

Ugh, like a fish in water I didn't realize the US is so obviously worse than in the UK (and other places). In a way, I think the subtle version can be worse because it does come with a hefty dose of gaslighting and "if you were only good enough" and "Suzy over there is doing just fine."

[starlady]

I'm sorry that you're in this position. A decent chunk of your experience resonates with my own, as a woman who quit the humanities--particularly the part about not being given second (or in my case, first) chances. I too chose to jump before I was pushed, and I too strongly suspect that if I had been a man with the same interests and publication history things would inevitably have been different for my career.

I was ambitious, once (but maybe I would have been more ambitious if I were male).

This is the part I've been wrestling with--I was so ambitious when I was younger, and that's kind of drained away for a number of mostly external reasons over the past five years or so. I don't believe I need to be ambitious to lead a worthwhile life, but I still feel like I should.

Anyway, I don't think you're a disgrace to Ada Lovelace or to women in STEM. And one of the problems with some of the ways Ada Lovelace Day is discussed is the focus on the pipeline, rather than what happens to women in STEM once they have gotten into STEM.

[liv]

I'm so sorry you never got your chance to excel in your field, and that you have reason to suspect sexism. You're absolutely right that it's ok not to be ambitious, but having once been ambitious and having to give that up is hard.

It's a good point that a lot of women-in-science initiatives focus on encouraging women to do science, and not on fixing the barriers we face when we try to do it. I was never really bullied or excluded, though, and I feel that I'm somehow letting down women who succeed in the face of far greater obstacles than the ones that defeated me.

[hatam_soferet]

I think you are a splendid person, and I think science careers depend a lot on things going right at every turn. JS got lucky. You (and UD, for that matter) haven't. You've been more screwed over by little things that on their own can't be pinpointed as directly sexism, but in aggregate I think were more likely to happen to women. It has been infuriating watching you get institutionally shat on and I love you to bits and you are so many awesome things. Including being a scientist, you are not going to stop thinking like a scientist just because you are not making mice glow in the dark on a regular basis.

[liv]

You are so incredibly supportive, thank you for coming along to say exactly the right thing. I keep being surprised you have any anger left over for me, when you haven't had half the advantages I did, and you have had far worse experiences with men being directly vile to you and institutions (like the whole of Orthodox Judaism) disapproving of your gender. I mean, you broke into a field that was not only male-dominated but practically male-exclusive for a thousand years. If I have faced sexism, it's minuscule compared to your experiences.

It helps a lot to be reminded that you love me, and you're right, I'm still a scientist in some ways. I'm a bit teary but in a good way.

[flippac]

I'd talk about my own relationship with academia at present, but aside from the "why I dropped out" of it there's not a lot that's safe to talk about in public other than the chances I do get to talk.

Which I "should be glad for", but in another sense it's a pretty limited level of engagement, y'know?

My dropping out was probably inevitable as of 2000, but I'll never know for sure because transition (complete with its own short-term-disabling woes) was rapidly followed by finding myself a carer as well. The idea that's not gendered is bitterly hilarious, even if if "cis women and all trans people" is the right grouping.

It's weird just how infuriating it can all be years and years on.

Oh, right, did I ever tell you about the time the guy who coined "hypertext" saw fit to tell me what I should do with my genitals?... He though it was advice on getting laid more, but still.

[liv]

I am not surprised you're furious, and really, you don't have to be glad that you were forced out early on. It may only be one thing among many but it's utterly inappropriate for people to be giving explicit advice on getting laid in the middle of a professional context, I'm sorry you had to deal with someone so gross.

There are any number of groups academia is more horrible to than cis, middle-class white women like me. Carers, definitely, trans people, definitely, disabled people, definitely. I have seen cis men getting screwed over because they want to actively parent their own children, for that matter.

[flippac]

The bit I'm glad for is the people who help me to, as I sometimes quip, LARP a computer scientist. I gave a couple of talks in August, I'm due to give some next year, they're on novel stuff (even if some of it's "reinventing" 20 year old stuff through a convenient lens - I'm lucky to have friends who understand the narrow ledge I'm on between impostor syndrome and actual arrogance).

It could be worse.

In all honesty I think I have the same take on vocation as you? You've gathered what keeps happening to me over it though. I'm eating an awful lot of jam tomorrow and academia is pretty tied up in how a lot of that happened.

[ewt]

Lots of people think worse of me for it, and in some ways they're wrong to think that, but I can't be one hundred percent confident that I'm not a disappointment.

How very dare they!

I am entirely serious, here. To think less of you for career choices that were difficult, agonizing even, and that you made with your eyes wide open and knowing you would have mixed feelings, after several years of things not going well and not getting the kind of support you needed to thrive? Those people could go away and mind their own business. To think less of you for the same, given the wider context of institutional sexism and not being given second chances or appropriate mentorship? People who think you are in any way "a disappointment" are actively part of the problem and they should not only be keeping their problematic attitudes entirely to themselves, but going off and educating themselves about what the real world is actually like.

OK I probably fall into the "righteous anger" camp.

I'm off to submit my MPhil upgrade paper today. It's late, like an entire term after the proper deadline, because my supervisor and I accidentally played a game of Deadline Chicken for six months. But the Head of Department is going to accept it anyway, partly because he's my other supervisor. I know that HoD will have given my main supervisor a right bollocking over it, and that my supervisor is downplaying this (partly because it honestly doesn't bother him and partly because he doesn't want me to feel worse), but was absolutely willing to go to bat for me rather than shrug and say "welp, should've done your work sooner, then, I guess you fail now." And that kind of collegiality still exists further up: I'm sure if any man in this department had two failed PhD students in a row, especially starting out, it would be put down to bad luck or poor judgement on the part of the students. I'm sure that if anyone was doing so much teaching and support work that they didn't have time to do original research, the response would be to change the circumstances. Now, maybe it being a small-ish arts department helps with this and maybe it doesn't; and I note there aren't many women or people of colour, and the ones there are, I don't know well enough to be able to comment on their experiences here.

I guess what I'm saying is, having seen a small slice of what the system can be like, I don't feel like you failed at anything, I feel like the system failed you. And that is sad, especially given that science is so much a part of who you are; but the way the same system makes you feel like it's maybe your fault? That does make me angry.

[highlyeccentric]

I think the thing about mass gendered patterns is not just that women are likely to (do or experience x - in this case, leaving science) because of obvious gendered factors. It might also be that in the big picture, there are more women-shaped-individuals who (do or experience x) for reasons that are, individually, not about gender at all.

The wrong way to deal with this is to expect individuals to carry the blame (or the praise - cf 'of course you prioritised family over career') for aggregate patterns.

I know I came into my PhD with a set of specific intentions to /do better than my (female) teachers who dropped out/, and I pushed some of my former students to do better, aim higher than me. About halfway through the PhD I realised that the teacher I had in mind as Mistakes Not To Repeat was probably /happier/ than me by that time, raising kids and being financially stable. And some of the students I aggressively mentored ended up not pursuing overseas degrees and scholarships... and it would have been a net Bad for them to do so, given other factors.

If I end up changing course/dropping out now, I know it'll be Past Me with her grand intentions of Doing Better And Going Further whose disappointment is hardest to live with.

[finding_helena]

"The wrong way to deal with this is to expect individuals to carry the blame (or the praise - cf 'of course you prioritised family over career') for aggregate patterns."

This.

I think the system is messed up. Individuals are trying to do the best they can within it.

Interestingly, my husband's academic career went kerflooey for various reasons, and it's hard to tell what they are exactly, but one might be because he prioritized family. I did as well but I was able to salvage my career. But I'm not an academic.

The politics of the whole system are bizarro world to me.

[sfred]

*sympathetic thoughts*

I'm glad you got closure with the former PhD student.

The whole patriarchy thing is so interwoven in everything that I think it's more or less impossible to know how it's affected a specific case.

[wychwood]

I think it's mostly bad luck that I'm sitting here feeling sad about Ada Lovelace day. But it's also a very specific shape of bad luck that women are much more prone to than men.

I think this is very exactly what it is about - both your own struggles, and the ideas behind Ada Lovelace day. I'm sorry that it's so painful for you now - I remember how hard my own academic failures were, even though they were much earlier in the process when I had less invested. I hope it gets easier for you, as you thrive in your new role.

[emperor]

*hugs* :-(

[mrissa]

Oh my yes.

I am mostly through these feelings now--I think it helps that I sometimes write a kind of science fiction that is also a bit short on women, so it's not like I gave up the field of battle so to speak--but...I was groped, I was harassed, I had so many, SO MANY bad experiences due to gender...and I still did not see that as the reason I left. Except. It was almost certainly related.

I started being regularly sexually harassed when I was 11. That was the same year that I started being told that I was a role model for the younger girls in math and science. This combination could have been designed to break my heart and make me feel dreadful about myself, and it did.

[jack]

*cling* *cling* *cling* I think you already know what I think, but I am still so sorry :( Your life is great, but I wish you could have the science life you should have.

There's saying like, you have to be twice as good to get half the recognition. I think in academia it's not that stark in many ways -- but in other ways, when there's only places for very few people, even small biases have dramatic effects on who has the opportunity to succeed.

We've talked a lot about how one of the big privileges of being middle class is being able to make small mistakes and take them in your stride, rather than that being a disaster which completely destroys you. But the same applies when you're fighting to get into the top small percent, if you're incredibly good at science, and at running a lab without sufficient support, at standing up for your rights against obstinate management, and at persuasively raising funding, and dozens of other necessary skills, but you spend ten years making ALMOST no mistakes, and someone else completes the same run perfectly, or has a couple of mistakes but gets second chances, and there's only so many places.

But it's not only perfect people who deserve success, you can always be SO GOOD that you can succeed despite ANY obstacle, but you can't invariably make yourself that person and just as with everything else bad that might happen to someone, you can't blame yourself for not being so good that you can weather any number of bad things and have a perfect record of zero mistakes of any sort.

The idea that I wasn't 100% perfect but that doesn't mean I should blame myself is one it's taken me a very very long time to absorb and it's still very touch-and-go...

If I were assigning blame, I'd go something like 90% government for abandoning science funding :( 9% institutional sexism for not supporting junior academics enough and subconscious deprioritising women :( And 1% not-fighting-hard-enough. But I wish there were numbers that could fix it :(

[silveradept]

I'm inclined to say that I'm more glad you're happy doing what you are doing rather than having ground yourself through a system that definitely didn't want you, through no fault of you.

I suspect, like several of the comments here, that if you took apart the process and could look at it from an outside perspective, their be able to see some of the institutional barriers and practices that got in your way, or the advantages that someone else got (possibly because of their perceived gender) that you were denied. That knowledge would help provide certainty, but it might be just as sad or bitter-making because then you know.

[seekingferret]

I bailed on any thoughts of an academic career in science by my freshman year in college- I like making practical things too much, I think like an engineer more than like a researcher. But I still do science professionally. Research happens in my vicinity and I enable it and participate in it, and that doesn't stop because I'm not an academic scientist. And my cousin took his physics doctorate and got work as a patent writer, and my best friend took his virology doctorate and got work in pharmaceutical advertising, and they are still doing science.

And I understand the frustration of having a career ambition and not being able to achieve it because of factors not entirely under your control, and that sucks, and it especially sucks that there is a gendered component to it, but I would like to advocate for the position that "a decent non-science job that nevertheless builds on my experience of being a working scientist" still allows you to think of yourself as being part of science. I would like to advocate for the position of a different Ada- Ada Palmer- that teaching the student who'll manage the fact'ry is science, and clerking the office that handles the funding is science, and staffing the bookstore the carries the journal is science.

[naath]

Well that sucks. On one hand Science work seems to be damn hard for everyone, male or female, on the other it does seem to be noticeably harder for women, but I wouldn't really know because I didn't do well enough to get that far in S and am 'only' S adjacent.