Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

I read this moderately moronic column today. Steam immediately issued from my ears. Here is all of it that you need to read:

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members... But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be “Title Nined” say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s...

Here, can anyone spot the logical flaw? That's right. This entire argument assumes that the system is just fine as it is, and also equitable, and therefore only differences interest can account for the data. Good job, Mr. Tierney! Mooooooron.

(FSP has already eviscerated it quite neatly, as well. See also here.)

On Assumptions and Power Balance

We have two friends named Casey, as I've mentioned before. (They're engaged now. We can't wait to see if they'll be the Casey Parkers.) Casey 1 is a scientist; he wants an academic job. Casey 2 is a... let me make something up... a librarian, so she can work pretty much anywhere.

Casey 2 and I were chatting about marriage several months ago, before they were engaged. "You should protect yourself before you move across the country with him," I said. "I'm sure you want to be married first."

Later it struck me: I would never say that to a man. Why should marriage be protective? She's a highly trained paid professional! She's gainfully employed! She doesn't need protecting!

Casey 1 is getting first choice of geography and employment; Casey 2 is trailing, and so maybe she is giving up more in terms of ideal jobs and so on. As a woman, she will on average earn less than him, because even in the same jobs. women earn less than men. She is more likely to stay home or take leave when she has children, which will cut her future salary as well as, probably, her retirement fund.

On the other hand, why would marriage be a protective commitment for her? She can pick up and leave any time she wants. This is an outmoded social myth, and I'm ashamed of myself.

Children, now- is that different? Is marriage then protective for a woman who continues to work? After reading The Price of Motherhood, I'd say yes. Because women are more likely to stay home, they end up at a financial disadvantage; in case of a divorce, the woman's standard of living drops dramatically and the man's typically does not.

Do men who stay home need protecting? Do their future salaries drop out of proportion to their time out of the work force, as women's do? I don't know, but I rather doubt it. Their lifetime earnings, etc., will certainly drop nonetheless. Like women, the years they spent with children are years they do not get raises and bonuses.

So perhaps anyone who stays home with a child could use some financial protection: their own savings account, an IRA or two, an independent line of credit, some way to keep up their credentials if necessary. These things could minimize the financial impact on either Casey, even if they stay married- if, God forbid, one should die unexpectedly or become ill, the other would not be left destitute.

This is part of why it makes me edgy when my girlfriends stay home with their children. They're counting on their husbands staying healthy, married, and employed. I worry that the unexpected will happen, and they will be left in a bad position. (But if I end up doing the same, you can laugh at me.)

Encouragement Isn't Enough; Reality Interferes

Mr. S was recently at a conference. His field has many famous female scientists- in part because back in the day, it was considered trivial and boring. PIs kept coming up to him and asking what was he doing next year and was he looking for a postdoc? Maybe with them? And he kept explaining that he'd stay at Snooty U another year while I finished. And they'd say, 'Oh, is she looking for a postdoc too? I know those dual-scientist job searches can be hard.' And he'd say, 'No, she's not.'

To a woman, the female PIs said, in tones of horror, 'Oh no! You must encourage her to stay! Can't you change her mind? We need more female faculty!'

I think that many women, myself included, love research and want to do it. But we don't want it twice as much as our husbands. We don't want it enough to see women passed over or denied tenure because we took time 'off' to have a baby and didn't publish anything that year. We don't want it enough to earn $10,000 less than the male junior professor in the next office over.

Aside from the purely financial, childbearing is a very real barrier. When I see the obstacles, especially in academia, to having children, it does not make me want to postdoc so I can be faculty one day if I'm a very good girl. Yes, women have children in college, in grad school, before tenure, whenever. Sometimes it's fine, professionally. But especially at places like this, women with children pay a heavy professional as well as economic price for their children. This on top of the inherent disadvantages of being female in a world run by 60-year-old white men.

When I look at all these factors together, I am left with utterly no desire to be faculty. I, and all the women I know whose career plan is 'run away', have already eaten all the condescension and slights and obstruction that we want to for just now. We want to go somewhere else, where there is a chance for professionalism and respect. We already know what it's like in here. We don't want it.

I applaud the women who want more women to do postdocs and come to the academic-research world. It's wonderful to tell us we can do it and we should do it. Their encouragement to stay in the academy is lovely. But it's not what I need. I need things to change. Yesterday, ideally.

(P.S. Yes, my sister's baby is due like tomorrow. What? An obsession with offspring? Who, me?)

Continued Disturbance About Motherhood, Price Of

My dear spouse wants to teach and do research: he wants it passionately. He loves it. He wants a job that also happens to be a career. His academic life is laid out, one, two, three: grad school, postdoc, faculty job. Minivan, 2.5 kids, publish, tenure. A straight path with (supposedly) no interruptions.

I want... to not be here.

So what does this have to do with my price of motherhood? In my ideal universe the Scientist household will be blessed with little ones and I will work part-time. What a lovely picture it makes. (Also, if I stayed home full-time, I would lose my mind.)

Except it probably won't happen that way. Statistically speaking, I will be unable to find a decent part-time job. Even if I do, the ratio of my earnings to either what I would earn full-time or to childcare costs will be a small, small number. And I certainly can't get a part-time job being a professor and running a lab. The straight path doesn't work well with childbearing, and it doesn't work well with less than 60-hour weeks. At least not in my field.

(Incidentally, a woman who was on the 'Beyond Bias and Barriers' panel spoke here a while ago. A professor in my department said 'But I cannot work part-time and run a lab. I cannot work even forty hours a week, not if I want tenure!' And the speaker said, 'Why not?' Because it is that way, but it doesn't have to be.)

The dilemma is about guilt. If I can't have what I want- intellectually satisfying work AND children- I don't want to play that game. If I have to pay a high price for motherhood, especially in the academic world, I don't want to be there. But maybe I should. If we, as women, don't fight the good fight to make it better for the next generation in science, are we at fault? If we choose to leave 'science', i.e. the work of a PI in academia, is it because we don't want it enough?

Or not.

"You can say we actively chose to leave the academic path, and some of us never gave it a backward glance. We chose, but it was a choice with a lot of push behind it. And we were all aware of how we were viewed by those who stayed on the path - those who were still in the pipeline. We had leaked out through our own fault... If we had been good enough to become professors, we would never have wanted to do anything else." (courtesy of the excellent Zuska)

Academia tells me that I should stay and make sacrifices for the greater good. I should see the barriers in front of me, and they should be overcome by the force of my desire to be professorial. I should compare what I want to what I can have in academia, and give up what I want. I should see the price of motherhood in academia and elsewhere, and pay it.

I know that this kind of system benefits no-one: not parents, not single people, and certainly not single parents. At the same time, I have never once heard a young man in my class say 'I don't know if I could have children and tenure.' As long as women are asked to pay such a high price, the percentage of women scientists will creep up ever so slowly.... just like it's doing now.

scientiae-carnival

Not All Choices Were Created Equal

I just finished reading The Price of Motherhood, which everyone should read.

I am disturbed.

I am the very most disturbed by the chapter 'It Was Her Choice.'

This is what I have always wanted to have the words to say, about women’s choices to stay home:

'… The sidelined ambitions, the compromises mothers live with that their husbands never had to make, all justified on the grounds of women’s choice… If they do this willingly, there's no problem. It's their choice. No one "made them do it," so no one has to do anything about it.'

'The big problem with the rhetoric of choice is that it leaves out power Those who benefit from the status quo always attribute inequities to the choices of the underdog. The current rhetoric about choosing motherhood sounds suspiciously like the 1950s rhetoric about "happy" women…. The modern version of the old "true woman” argument—the true woman appreciates that her proper place is in the home—is the "choice" argument.'

The author goes on to point out that our country taxes a second, usually female-earned, income as part of pooled 'household moneys,' thereby raising its marginal tax rate much higher. At the same time, money earned by one person is treated in the tax code as the sole property of the earner. Second earners are treated as if all the family's money were one for taxes, but mothers do not get Social Security credits on half the family’s income. Why not?

If family members could file separately, rather than creating an artificial divide of ‘head of household’ versus his or her ‘dependents,’ second earners would have less of their earnings eaten up by childcare, and the option of satisfying work would be open to more people. If caregivers got Social Security credits on their household’s income, poverty (especially among elderly women) would shrink. If there were more and better child-care available, it would be less heart-wrenching to put one’s children in it. Rather than offering a false dichotomy and a false choice- family or work; be a good mother or have a career- family-friendly leave policies, better child care, and a larger market in part-time jobs could remove some of the anguish of these hard choices.

But these are not precisely free choices. To some extent, yes, we are all constrained by outside forces in our decisions, but women and mothers are constrained more. If maternity leave means no promotions, if having a child before tenure means no tenure, if even new female professors are consistently paid $10,000 less than their male counterparts- the choices are not equal for men and for women. We choose, but we cannot choose willingly, freely, if our alternatives are constrained by our gender.

(Next week: And I Do It Too.)
scientiae-carnival

Let's Play 'Sexist Ninny Bingo'!!!

(Also known by a less polite name.)

Scene: Belle is in the offices of her Department of Hermeneutic Predicative Poststructuralism.* Two male graduate students- hereafter Sexist Ninnies 1 and 2- are in the lounge.

SN1: Yeah, so Arla is out on maternity leave now. I guess she took a year off.
SN2: Did you hear? The chick they hired to take her classes was pregnant too. She had to leave before the end of the semester.
Belle: [Thinks: Maybe the baby was early! You idiots.]

SN1: That is sooooo unfair. I mean, she should have told them. It was so inconvenient for the department!
Belle: [Tell them? So they could not hire her? Inconvenient??? You idiots.]

SN2: Or she shouldn't have taken the job.
SN1: Yeah, it's already so hard for men to get jobs in Hermeneutics, Poststructuralism, and Predication. The departments always want to hire a woman.
Belle: [No, there are more female PhDs in HPP. You idiots.]

SN2: I can't imagine how hard it's going to be for us to get jobs.
SN1: It's so hard to be a man in this field.
Belle: [There are seven tenured profs here and ONE is a woman! You idiots!]

Fade to the sound of a head banging against the copier.

How many squares can we fill in here? Let's see:

• Pregnancies must be scheduled for the academic calendar.
• It's okay to discriminate against pregnant women.
• It's too, too inconvenient to accomodate biology.
• Pregnancies are always on purpose.
  
• Babies can be precisely timed to two days after finals.
• Maternity leave is like vacation.
  
• Men are so discriminated against in the academic market.
• Departments with more than 50% women can't be objective.
• Statistics are totally over-rated.

With a possibility of:

• Men get ahead/tenure because they're better/more qualified/their organs really help with Hermeneutical Stuff.
• Women are only hired for 'diversity'.
• 'Diversity' hires are less qualified.
• Women want preference, not an equal playing field.
• If a department has a woman or two, why does it need more?
• Women do too get tenure, lots. I know one!

Any ones I missed here?

Bonus!
Advisor in lab meeting: 'I just sent Ruth [who had a C-section 24 hours ago] back her paper- we need to get it out soon. I'm sure she'll be able to read it right away. There's really nothing to do the first few weeks anyways!'
Us, in the background: Major surgery... newborn... yep, that screams 'editing figure legends' to me!

*Belle dear, I hope you don't mind me relating this story all anonymous-like and liberally interpreted. It was too good to pass up.

(scientiae-carnival)