Encounters
Oct. 9th, 2018 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livLast 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-10 08:01 am (UTC)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.