Choosing the Advisor
I've been searching for data on a question raised by Phoebe of AWIS: do graduate students and postdocs prefer male mentors? Do the best ones, and more of them, choose male faculty to work with?
I finally have connected with some data on actual counts, thanks to Jennifer Sheridan and Eve Fine at WISELI. (http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/) The National Academy of Sciences have completed a study on "Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty" and a prepublication is available on their National Academies Press page here.
In that document, there is an interesting appendix table, # 4-6, entitled "Distribution of Number of Graduate Thesis or Honors Committees for Research 1 Tenure and Tenure Track Faculty". The % women faculty and the % men faculty is compared for biology, chemistry, matnematics, electrical engineering, physics, and civil engineering and tallied alongside "theses supervised", etc. (N.B.. I found it puzzling that the "total" added up to more than 100% along several rows.)
There were some interesting trends. In Physics for example, the category "0 theses supervised" contained 15.4% men and 29.9% women. The category for Physics, "1-3 theses supervised", contained 61.5% men and 50.4% women. Category "4 to 5 theses supervised" was similar for both genders. Category "6-10 theses" showed 5.8% men, 2.6 % women. The top category, "11-30 theses", had 1% for men and 0 for women. I do not know how they chose to parse these categories, but it does give a distribution to compare across disciplines.
In Biology-- the field a lot of our commenters belong to -- the category "0 theses supervised" contained 9.3% of men and 5.1% of women. In "11-30 theses supervised", there were 10.2 % men and 14.4% of women. Not much of a trend here. But perhaps there is a quality trend that isn't visible in this kind of a measurement. Quality control: The text of chapter 4 suggests there were not sufficient data collected to be sure the trends are robust. The footnote to the table also says the data were insufficient. Though ambiguous, the data are still somewhat interesting, I would argue.
What do you think? Do these data match to your experience? What you have seen?
And a bit of self-reflection, how did you pick your advisors along the way?
Hi Phoebe,
You raise an important issue. On one level, I'm tempted to say, just say no when the associates of unhelpful men come calling with their problems. But of course, we all want to see women succeed in science, so we can't do that and sleep at night. Perhaps it would help to find some way to document this extra work women are doing, but I am not sure. Guilting the male advisors into taking it on probably wouldn't work either, because they would not do it with any sympathy. I'm stuck for a solution here.
cheers,
Laura
The article you cite, Ilona, is on an interesting topic, but it doesn't seem to come to any definite conclusion, because it talks on both sides of the issue.
I think that's reality: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And the responses to this question suggest something else: due diligence beforehand is not necessarily going to get you into the right laboratory, because one person did that and didn't get what she expected at all.
I do think basic personality doesn't change much, so if all the students and postdocs say the leader of the lab is a good mentor and cares about her/his associates' futures, that must be a good sign. Busy, probably. I am glad people want women's voices on committees that make decisions, but it can be a real pain at times.
cheers,
Laura
Anyone seen this article?
"Are Women Better PIs?" http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57475/
In many departments where women are a minority, they are overextended with committee work because there is an effort to make sure committees are "representative". The very fact of trying to improve the position of women in the institution leaves less time for their own work as advisors (and scientists). I do wonder if this discourages the savvy grad student from choosing the seemingly overextended woman as an advisor.
I picked my advisor purely by looking for the person among all the most established labs who had had the least conflict with others and the highest manuscript yield per year. That was a man. However, there were lots of conflicts in the lab and not much paper output during my years there, not at all what I expected. I actually became a smoother-down of conflict, fulfilling the gender expectation I guess. I also felt that in retrospect I wish I had chosen a woman PI because the women PIs in my department were much more interested in promoting their students' career and integrating everyone's ideas with the lab goals. My PI was not, and often made me feel like my ideas were not worth much (the lab was as all men). I thought all these men were right, that I didn't have the chops, until later when I had more evidence for my own ideas being worth something. For example, a single refusal from my PI to pay for a reagent for a new set of experiments I wanted to do set me back 2 years--if I had tried those experiments when I proposed them I would have found my answer a lot more quickly, and known that it was me who got me there. THEN, my postdoc mentor was a woman who had only women postdocs at the time and I have never had a more productive and fruitful experience in my life. We regularly had meetings about ideas, good and bad, and were constantly told that we had to contribute ideas to be respected in the lab. I think this comparison is an important one, even though I know there are a lot of reasons things like this happen to people in labs that don't have to do with gender. My lab now is modeled after my postdoc mentor's leadership.
A comment on having a separate mentor and thesis advisor- from the viewpoint of women faculty:
I agree that we all need multiple mentors, and that there is often a conflict of interest if a thesis advisor also serves as a mentor. But- It is all too common for grad students to choose a male thesis advisor (with clout) and turn to female faculty (with compassion and more willingness to listen) for mentoring. Thus, the women faculty end up spending an excessive amount of time supporting the students of their male colleagues, without ever getting any credit or publications from it. Anyone have a solution?
Phoebe
I like the idea of separate advisors and mentors. As you describe it, the functions seem very different. I tried to keep mine together, but as my dissertation advisor and I grew apart in interests, things didn't work out so well.
There were no women faculty in my graduate department or postdoc department. I did have a good relationship with a woman I'd known at Woods Hole and Yale (as a research associate), Beatrice Sweeney (later at UC Santa Barbara). She was brilliant and got such joy out of science that she made me think it was possible to love a career in the field as a woman.
cheers,
Laura
It's always tough when there aren't enough women in a department to get good numbers. I chose mine based on their science and what I felt I would learn in their labs. None of them were "sensitive" guys you could say.
I did avoid women advisors because I had some bad experiences with the ones I did interact with.
In neither case did I think of my advisor as my mentor however. I had several good women mentors. My selection criteria were completely different for an advisor and a mentor. For advisor, I wanted someone who would go to bat for me (I batted 700 on that one!). For mentor, I wanted someone who would always give me good guidance.
