Awards--Where Are the Women?
On the wall, the American Society for Microbiology will post huge pictures (at least five times life size) of all of their major awardees. I will cringe in late May as I approach this display, because only the award FOR WOMEN and the award FOR MINORITIES and the award FOR TEACHING have a good chance of being women. It's not just the microbiologists either. This situation even exists at the American Society for Cell Biology, which I think of as my most woman-friendly society.
What's wrong with this picture? Do women not do cutting edge research? Or is this just more of that same old issue: the people who nominate awardees look like young white males, so that's the type of person they tend to come up with? Or what's going on? I have nominated women for awards, and I believe the Women's list serv at ASM regularly suggests that those who want to help women should nominate them for awards. But nothing changes. Is it any wonder that the Swedish Academy doesn't think of many women, when we, who are out here in the real world of science, are challenged in awarding women's accomplishments too?
What do you think? Is this due to sexism, conscious or unconscious? Or is it due to lack of achievement by women? Or is it even worth worrying about? Should we worry more about increasing the number of women in the field and forget concern about awards?
NOTE: Coming up on a TV near you between April and June, please see "Naturally Obsessed" and be ready to comment. A thread is going up next week for commentary on this film. You may also want to read "Learning to see inequity in science" by Kimberly D. Tanner in Cell Biology Education--Life Sciences Education volume 8, 265-270 (2009). She discusses this film in detail in her article.
Dear BioSciProf,
Yes, I agree there's an old boy club (I'm told men call it that, with no 's on boy) that makes a lot of choices, invites and selects people, puts forward the best names in field X. We need to get more active in that arena, in some way. But I imagine one woman on a committee of male in-guys would feel rather intimidated.
cheers,
Laura
Hi Helen,
I rather like that the postdoc ended up at a liberal arts college; since I did that myself, I think of it as a welcoming environment. She must have been pretty traumatized, as you must have yourself. But you probably had a more sympathetic mentor, to say the least.
I don't feel like money is the only driver here, in the liberal arts college environment. So maybe things got much better for her, as they did for you.
cheers,
Laura
Thanks Laura:) That postdoc went to a small liberal arts teaching college after that and switched fields. The whole episode upset/affected both of us in a way that was really unnecessary.
What's interesting is that I meet some very talented men that are also in the "quality not quantity" mindset. And they face the same issues that women with that behavior face. So I do realize that it's not a gender issue per se. It's the behavior that gets rewarded that's the problem. And that's what I'd like to see change over time. As scientists we need to set some objective goals for ensuring the quality of scientific training and execution and have funding agencies patrol to make sure that the really important outcome--money--rewards according to those standards. If you could manage that, there would be real change. Because the whole motivation behind funded science is the money after all.
Make Noise suggests that women should speak up more. That reminds me of that January "Rant About Women" that Clay Shirky wrote. It made me mad but in a way, he was saying the same thing Women need to speak up for themselves. But not in a jerky way. That's where he went wrong.
Hi Helen,
What a hair-raising story. Sic-em pregnant postdoc...not a pretty picture. Well, I am glad you survived. I think the idea that anyone "owns" a research area is against all the best visions of what science should be, but the old ego-mego comes along, with urging by some Y chromosomes, and there you have it.
I agree too that longer, better quality papers come often from women's groups, less often from men's. One of my good friends always says her major work was scooped by another male friend, who has often told her "you did it right, I did it quick and dirty." Yeah, but he DID get the credit.
cheers,
Laura
I think the previous posters made several good points. One I'd like to add is quality vs. quantity of publications. Women (in general) tend to have fewer publications that are higher quality. This naturally puts them at a disadvantage come awards time. I have observed several women, myself included, who when confronted with resistance to their paper's publication buckle down and put more work into it. Those are the rules, we follow them. While several of my male colleagues when I was a postdoc recruited faculty to help them push the paper through "as-is". They needed the pub for their job search, and this was unfair! And you know what, it worked for those men. Their papers got forced into Science or Nature and they got those jobs and a place on the fast-track of entitlement to an award one day!
Women are also less likely to "claim" an area of research for their own and scare off competition. When you are known as "the guy" in whatever field being reviewing, you are more likely to win the award in question. I remember giving a poster on some work I was doing at my first Keystone meeting when a powerful mid-career PI came up to my poster, asked me a few questions, and then asked how I "presumed" to step into his area of research without his permission?! It was a battle for publication at that point and he siced one of his postdocs onto the same project as mine. Fortunately I won that battle (she went into labor early...), but it was one of the many experiences that made me get out of academe!
Dear Loves to Collaborate,
YEAH! We do tend to share the credit unlike you-know-who! I heard a Caltech prof talking about "his" research recently and was quite surprised when he showed a photo of his lab at the end and had quite a few women working there, none of whom was mentioned, but then neither were the men. It was HIS!
I have to contrast that with a woman I heard talk a month ago, who showed a picture of each postdoc who worked with her, just as she was about to describe his or her data. I don't want to use the male model, but it makes it easier for the award committees for sure!
Laura
Men are more likely to "play the game", currying favor, going to the right meetings, engaging in aggressive self-promotion. And they are more likely to have patrons who support them who are in the club already. Who are usually male (there are few women in the club).
Women tend to be less comfortable with self-promotion, and less engaged in hierarchy.
I also observe that women are more likely to put a student's needs first, even if that slows things down, or fulfill administrative or teaching responsibilities, because it's the right thing to do, even if it slows them down.
As long as we have one definition of success, which is papers in Cell Science and Nature by a subset of young investigators at certain institutions who are currently "annointed" as stars, we will continue to see this relative absence of women. (There are of course a few exceptions of women who happily play the male game, and do it well. but more do not.)
But many other promising women will continue to reach a sad point in their mid-career where they wistfully think, "I coulda beena contendah."
sometimes when women accomplish things they give too much credit other people. they show a pattern of this through their careers that eventually doesn't position them for these awards down the line. anyone agree?
Women need to speak up more. We need to train our students to do so too!
I think the gender of the selection committees is problematical. Even if they have a token woman or two, unless she's an amazing saleswoman, she probably can't get a woman chosen.
