A fable for today that may help our understanding elsewhere, at http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-perception-problem-of-large-felines.html.
1
Marginalization and hostility is what males everywhere are receiving every day from our delightfully "feminist" culture.
10
I respect the heck out this Beverly Emerson, she is out there actually walking the walk. It seems for every Mz. Emerson there are 10 "journalists" playing the victim and doing little more than whining about how hard they have it. The world needs more people that do something productive. Go build a bridge or something. The world needs good journalists too, but it seems good journalism is not rewarded. The awards go to whomever screams the loudest about the current, trendy, marginalized demographic.
7
The ratios in computer science in PHDs and in silicon valley are much worse. The female scientists at Salk weren't given full resources nor pay. Perhaps that explains their below average performance reviews. Some women collaborate with other women and are highly productive. CRISPR-Cas9, a powerful technology was discovered in 2012 by American scientist Jennifer Doudna. She patented it.
A retired University of Texas at Austin mathematics professor is the first women to win the Abel Prize in March, 2019, described as the field's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck was announced as this year's winner of $700,000 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo. With unequal pay or access to grants what took Emerson and Jones 31 years to sue? They should have raised the roof like Norma Rae. The bureaucracy , and blatent discrimination buried their potential.
15
"but her 66th birthday was coming up, and with it her contract with Salk would expire. To renew it, the Institute required that she have enough grant money to cover half her salary. She didn’t."
So the reason her contract wasn't being renewed was because she didn't raise enough grant money, not because she is a woman.
8
You did not read the entire article.
Women scientists were starved of resources first, then declared unproductive.
Male scientists are given private money and other resources the women never get.
It is like having one arm tied behind your back then being told the other guy got more done.
61
While we fault the "old boys network" for keeping women down and out, what this article makes clear is that they can't do this without the collusion of women who are only too happy to keep other women down and out in exchange for power and privilege. It only takes a few to preserve the status quo by riding roughshod over other women, particularly junior women. Female administrators typically turn out to be the worst.
26
I'm sorry ladies to pass along the honest truth, men don't like working with women! I have watched this for the last 40 years and nothing has changed and don't believe it ever will. It appears this country has and always will be run by men. Take a real honest look at the situation. As jobs become automated, who will get them. Back to traditional roles? You have been sold a pack of lies. You will be allowed to work yourself to death for some man's gain. You are smart.
Find another way to happiness.
3
I am in my 23rd year as a female professor in a male-dominated science department. My colleagues have been mostly great - it's the students who a) call me "Mrs" instead of "Dr" (they don't call my male colleagues Mr.), b) ask ME first for extensions and changing test dates; c) respond with negative evals when they think I'm not being "nice" enough; d) ask ME disproportionately for things like letters of recommendation. Finally, I didn't see it mentioned, but one area of inequity I see is that many of my male colleagues have stay-at-home wives caring for their every need. Two male professors told me, "I get home at 9 and dinner is in the oven and the kids are in bed." How many women are in that situation? So then if the productivity standard requires that you work every night until 9, despite changing expectations in marriage, a whole lot of women are going to be disproportionately affected.
49
@anne y mouse b,c,d really shouldnt be offensive. Not going to lie I would goto my female professors more for things because they were alot nicer on average and less pretentious about their position than alot of my male professors therefore making it less intimidating. And I know many who shared the same beliefs. If anything male professors should be offended over those 3 because they are viewed as stereo-typically intimidating. Unfortunately since I dealt with less male professors I did end up leaving less reviews. And as far as having a stay at home partner? That just sounds like needing to look for a partner that fits. I know alot of the younger generation coming into the workforce has no issue being the stay at home male to a working female partner I'm 27 and would have no problem taking care of the house the stigma is phasing out with the generation that used it.
5
@anne y mouse b,c,d really shouldnt be offensive. Not going to lie I would goto my female professors more for things because they were alot nicer on average and less pretentious about their position than alot of my male professors therefore making it less intimidating. And I know many who shared the same beliefs. If anything male professors should be offended over those 3 because they are viewed as stereo-typically intimidating. Unfortunately since I dealt with less male professors I did end up leaving less reviews.
1
@ Hop - Thank you for making my point for me. Many women professors are overburdened with these requests and they pay for it in lower productivity (measured in papers, grants, and prestige). These things are the basis for promotion, so many women in science find their careers stagnating.
22
What is most discouraging is that this is happening in a country where women enjoy more freedoms and advancements than the majority of, if not all other women of the world enjoy. I thank my lucky stars that I am an American woman of this 21st Century, but truly, we are still facing ridiculous attitudes and behaviors that destroy our success in most arenas.
28
I was a grad student in the lab of one of the big professors at the Salk named in this article. The conditions it describes ring so true. The atmosphere of constant sidelining and the feeling that you had to fight for the chance to prove your abilities was apparent even at the student level. The assumption was always that it would get better as you move up the chain - this article proves that it doesn't.
After I earned my PhD I struggled to find a postdoc position. The PI I worked for said he would give me recommendations, yet no offers came in. I found a position that was a lateral move. After I'd been in that field about a year, my new PI remarked that he was glad I had turned out to be such a good choice, since my PI had told them that I didn't do much work and wasn't very committed. One researcher hadn't wanted to hire me because of this but the other had. This is how they undermine women and others who aren't part of the club.
The state of California financed my graduate education, but in the end, I couldn't remain in the field. We all lose out when so many qualified scientists have to give up.
46
Every call for the equality of women in tech and industry seems to begins with a demand that men "step aside and make room."
Really? Why should that be necessary if women's workplace contributions truly were as valuable to society as large as men's are?
Why can't women simply create, develop and run whatever institutions they want, how they want, paying women what they feel they should, and promoting whatever corporate culture they like?
The constant feminist argument seems to be "Women could run the world if only men would let us."
You've had 200,000 years to come out on top, ladies.
Take charge on your own terms, or stop whining?
9
@Inge
Would you make the same remark to anyone of color who feels that institutionalized racism has held them back?
17
Does anyone in the article say what you just claimed, that men need to step aside and make room? I didn't see it anywhere. I think you have a deeply wrong conception of what is going on in this article.
25
This article exposes the Big Lie of meritocracy: the whole idea of it is -- one big, fat, lie. Women know this, people of color know it -- any group that can be marginalized, will be. And it will continue as long as women and people of color allow ourselves to be divided, and permit it.
35
The excellent NYT article by Mallory Pickett is eerily similar to my own career story at a leading atmospheric sciences research institute in the US and a Max Planck Institute in Germany. Climate and atmospheric sciences has an even lower proportion of women than biomedical sciences. In Germany only 2% of the professors at my rank were women. In the US, the percentage grew to 10% under inspired leadership. We too convened a group of women scientists inspired by Nancy Hopkins leadership at MIT. Women were allocated fewer resources and opportunities—space, finances and opportunities for promotion.
Yet, we, the few women scientists, continue to work together to lead by example. When I faltered, the others would reach out to push the door back open together. The 500 Women Scientist organization: https://500womenscientists.org/ , the Earth Science Women’s Network: https://eswnonline.org/ , the ongoing support of an inspiring group of women scientists around the world gives me hope.
I am now the only full time female professor at one of three regional universities in the world. I lead a group of more than 50% women. I am grateful to stand on the shoulders of the giants who have come before me and to work with a committed network of men and women to share the wonder of science. That wonder is what gives us the possibility of leaving the world a better place for my grandchildren’s great great grandchildren. Science needs a diversity of cultures, genders and viewpoints.
37
She was 66 years old. Time to retire and let younger minds work. If you haven't done it in the 31 years you were there, 10 more won't help either.
4
@tell you,
did U read the article ?
The reason she hadn't done more in 31 years is bec she was left out of the loop, got the smallest lab space, got her assistants cut and didn't receive funding like the powerful men at the institute. She didn't get the support she needed
33
@NCScientist
And she did it. Notice in their counterclaim the Salk Institute only listed three journals she didn't publish in: Nature, Science, and Cell. Three journals noted for being more interested in "new and extraordinary" results than in good science and (rightfully) subjects of Ioannidis' scorn (a whole series of articles starting with this one: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124). (I don't know why they didn't include NEJM as well.) She was also less productive with less funding and less help. NASCAR drivers with less funding and smaller pit crews win less often too. Surprise. Check out the relationship between baseball championships and payroll as well. Notice that we didn't get any information on productivity, or "bang for the buck". Again, surprise. (Well, life is complicated, I'm not surprised a reporter didn't think to ask these questions, or if so, know how to answer them. And the parties involved certainly saw no incentive to paint themselves in a bad light.)
8
I am a female full professor at a large public university.
Half the PhDs in Biology have been going to women for over 40 years.
The white men have all the power.
We have no minorities on the faculty, we have few women.
White men have all the power and they work very very hard to keep it that way.
The only solution is the courts, but that risks losing our labs, our students, our jobs.
We have been put in a horrible position.
This story shows that even when there is a woman at the top, women who speak out are fired.
In my department the new male assistant professor was given a very light teaching load, while the two female professors were given multiple large classes that meant new preps each semester.
When I spoke out, I faced and still face retaliation.
Last year we hired six new faculty, five men, none were minorities.
Just another day in academic science.
53
I am truly saddened by the suggestions, if true and as severe as suggested. I have never, and will never, behave in such an unprofessional and biased manner. Moreover, after over 30 years in professional and academic roles, I have only once witnessed an inappropriate set of behaviors; which, I remedied by having formal and successful interventions. What I do ask, however, is that the current and future parties in responsible and influential roles, act prudently, honestly, and without recourse to young men that had no responsibility for past failures of unrelated individuals.
2
I was in he STEM field for my entire life until my retirement. Durning those years the discrimination was apparent not only at women but also effecting people of color and even religion. It is deeply imbedded and is probably why many STEM organizations are run by white mails of christian faith. In order to get the best we can get into the STEM field there must be equal opportunity starting in elementary schools through college the college and university levels. If not, it will only discourage minorities and women from seeking careers in STEM careers.
In my career I hired women and minorities, sometimes over the displeasure of corporate leaders, who eventually went on to achieve significant levels in their organizations. I believe there could have been more had there not been the feeling of discouragement among many potential applicants. I hope the time for change has arrived.
20
One important point is this story is the perpetuation of this system via getting publications in high impact journals such as Cell, Nature, Science etc. These, and many other journals, are run by the old boy network who have a very vested interested in who and what gets published, including anything that might contradict or undermine their own publications/reputations. So it isn't just the institutions of science themselves
25
Time for talking is over. Unfortunately no one is listening. Need to donate to the female presidential candidates. Hold the media accountable for only focusing on Biden, Bernie and Pete B.
Time is up!
Kamala Amy Elisabeth - take your pick
This is the only way things will start to change
86
@Charles
Sadly, electing Kamala, Amy or Elisabeth as the 2020 candidate may be a good way to get Trump reelected. It pains me to say it but it may very well be true.
22
@Charles-Do that Charles and you will help re elect the ego maniac demagogue Trump.
Support a moderate progressive that is not identity obsessed and you will almost certainly defeat him.
8
@Paul...moderate progressive...ok, like Amy Klobuchar?
6
There are great biology research institutions all around the world, at least some of which are run by people who currently identify as women. If there are great scientists who identify as women who are being held back at male-run places, why wouldn’t they simply move to the female-run places and accomplish their world-changing research there? The NYT informs us that women can be hired for 70 percent of the cost of equally qualified men. So the female-run and female-staffed science labs should have a huge edge over competitors. (One part of the article that rings true is that success in academic science is all about the Benjamins!)
[Separately, for younger readers: remember that a medical school graduate earns vastly more than a typical PhD scientist!]
9
@Philip Greenspun
Sigh. I am weary.
You write:If there are great scientists who identify as women who are being held back at male-run places, why wouldn’t they simply move to the female-run places and accomplish their world-changing research there?
Some humans who identify as men will never get it.
72
@Philip Greenspun Why don't young male scientists move to female-run institutions and see whether they can compete on that playing field?
24
@Oneear I am similarly too exhausted to explain. @Philip Greenspun, your comment is so disheartening. I'll save my remaining energy today for research.
21
Haven't there been studies on people who transition? Male to female pay goes down. Female to male and pay goes up. Implicit bias? Or just plain bias?
17
This is another sad commentary on the "I want what you have" state of affairs in the US. Ms. Emerson is of retirement age and her science is not important enough to muster even tiny grant money despite her being in the game for 31 years, yet she expects to still occupy a scarce lab that could be used by a more qualified scientist. So EEOC lawyers use the limitless resources of the Unites States Government to coerce the Salk to divert money from its mission to give her an extra consolation prize.
13
@CB "Ms. Emerson is of retirement age and her science is not important enough to muster even tiny grant money despite her being in the game for 31 years..." LOL. There are boy wunderkinds at my top research university, widely lauded, who similarly struggled for years (involving over 10 rejections from NIH) to land any grant money, and no one questioned the brilliance of their science. Funding is horribly tight right now. Many established labs do not get their funding renewed. Funding has only a loose and weak correlation with research quality.
113
@Scientist: "Funding has only a loose and weak correlation with research quality."
And therein lies the biggest problem. Situations like that create fertile ground for sexual discrimination and related problems.
How do you align the funding with the quality and importance of the research? Fix that and the sexual discrimination will be greatly reduced.
17
@CB sez: "her science is not important enough to muster even tiny grant money despite her being in the game for 31 years"
Thanks for making the point for us here, CB. Who was it that decided her science wasn't important enough? That's the cycle: Men control the money, men get the money, men get credit, women stay in the background, working without credit or equal pay OR the opportunities that come with networking and sharing ideas.
How come you folks can endlessly come up with excuses for why women can't be taken seriously anywhere, but can't connect any of the dots to see a solution? Men who want to climb the ladder are considered admirably ruthless, no matter who got kicked off that ladder to make way. When women complain about being kicked aside, here's CB to chide them for saying "I want what he has". Just a sad state of affairs for you, that women don't like being patronized and used. They have, you know, WORKED, and not just so they can die in obsurity so a man can be puffed up in the history books. Get real.
72
I am an active scientist who has presented seminars at Salk but have no other connection to the place. The statistic that is missing here is data addressing the scientific impact of the various faculty mentioned in this article. The fact is that measured by their "h" index, the most widely accepted measure of scientific impact, Jones and Emerson rank far lower that say Evans and Verma. Thus, their work has been less important and it is therefore of less value. This has nothing to do with their sex, as can be seen with Blackburn, a woman who has a very high h index and was president of Salk when these issues arose. The requirement that faculty raise at least 50% of their salary is very common and many men who have failed in this regard have also been asked to step down.
15
@Bryan Two questions: (1) What gender were the people who decided what research was "valuable" and how the "h" would be awarded? And (2) How might a scientist actually be prevented from conducting the most "valuable" research? (Perhaps by being given fewer resources than other scientists?)
88
Do you not consider the effect of the limitations of the h index as well described in the article, Bryan?
41
@Bryan
You’re missing the big picture point. Allow me to #womansplain it to you.
When institutionalized barriers to access funds, hires and facilities are disproportionately levied against women they must work twice as hard to have impact. Applying basic math of course their H is lower.
Further, NSF grants during this time also disproportionately favored the entrenched male PIs and big male dominated institutions provided more administrative support to men submitting the burdensome federal grants thereby ensuring that male “authored“ submitted grants dominated the pool of total submissions and male dominated reviewer panels created a mutually reinforcing cycle of discrimination.
Learning from past mistakes NSF is now laser focused on grants for work that seeks to “broaden participation and promotes equity and access in STEM” . They have also greatly diversified the make up of the reviewer panels who inform what grants get funded. I know this because I am a reviewer.
201
Ok let's go over this for the umpteenth time, what the Neo feminists want and promoted here by their biased media arm, the NY Times.
If you feel you are discriminated against in any way, shape or form that can be proven by law, sue.
If not don't carp, scapegoat, social engineer, cherry pick, axe grind, intellectualize, rationalize, identity obsess or condemn today's man for five million yrs. of existence.
Don't demand 50%+ of everything because you are a woman whether you have earned it or even want it.
If you do you will help re elect the ego maniac demagogue Trump.
It was one of the reasons Hillary lost with identity obsession instead of addressing the issues Trump demagogued like blue collar job losses, common sense immigration policy etc.
4
@Paul I find it interesting that you are chiding women for wanting equality. And why are we making assumptions on whether women have earned it or not? Many men ride the coats with less accomplishments. Somehow we accept that as normal. That includes Donald Trump. However, we want to criticize women for wanting to be treated equally? Also Hilary won the popular vote. If not for the archaic electoral college, she would have been in the whitehouse. There are many less qualified me in politics today than women. But somehow getting qualified women elected is identity politics.
25
@Paul - identity obsession
It really seems to be Trump and his ilk who are obsessed with identify and finding endless ways to fault, blame, demonize those whose identity it not white male or white female deemed worthy by beauty and/or wealth. Otherwise it is ranting about those people. Pick any group.
As usual "identity politics" is projecting their reality onto what would be called equality or simply civility without the GOP marketing spin.
13
@Paul Your failure to understand the crux of the article and your obvious anger towards women places you in the lime light as a contributor to the existing misogynistic attitude prevalent not only in the world of science but in workplaces in general in the USA.
36
This makes me furious.
In a world of “data driven decision making” and supposed “meritocracies” of course egotistical men decided what data mattered and who was deserving of merit. The scientific cannon (indeed all of the STEM fields) is rife with mediocre (frequently white) men assuming all credit for discoveries and breakthroughs-but never the failures.
Imagine what discoveries have been delayed, derailed and destroyed by this institutionalized misogyny and discrimination?
I’ve been a reviewer for NSF grants and I’ve been at the table with 10 fellow reviewers with illustrious academic and research careers. I’ve also seen outright bias from some senior male reviewers in the discussions of what grants have merit to be funded (“I know the PI-he’s brilliant even if the proposal lacks clarity”) and which grants in their opinion lack merit (“I’ve never heard of this PI and she seems too young to pull off such an advanced concept even though the grant is well conceived”). Thankfully I’ve also seen these idiotic analysis rebutted because overall reviewers are more reflective of the real world (diversity and inclusion) and NSF program officers are laser focused on “broadening participation” and “equity and access” in all fields.
We are not there yet.
284
@JAS Yes. Yesterday, I sat in a Natural Sciences college meeting in which not a single chair or center department head was female - except for nursing and public health. That was the meeting to discuss new hires. It doesn't matter how many women matriculate and graduate in these fields, as the lawsuit points out, if all the other decisions - hiring, space, funding - are made by groups of senior white men. We will continue to have a version of science that does not serve the rest of us as well as it could because it does not capitalize on the talents of those most insightful but stacks the deck for a few because they're white men.
169
@JAS I've been on review sections too. I'm male and had my R01 proposal turned down, only to see more experienced scientists submit the same proposal (practically copied from mine) the next year and get it approved even though they had no qualifications in the area. I took this result very negatively and left the field, although in retrospect it was a mistake- failing to get an R01 at 35 is normal, the average age for first R01 is 45!!!
27
This report has the ring of truth, accompanied by the usual collection of denials. When I was a student at MIT, there were 4 women in my class and none on the faculty. I doubt that women have suddenly become much more intelligent. So while there has been progress, remnants of the old order linger on. There is obviously a strong complement of 'deplorables' even in the sciences.
67
How many diseases have gone uncured, how many scientific discoveries not made, because men's priority is their own power, and do anything and everything to hold on to that power and keep women down? They will never give us equality voluntarily.
540
@Anne...You were right on the money when you said..."men's priority is their own power, and do anything and everything to hold on to that power"...But then you said... "and keep women down?"....It was as if you think that they were specifically directing their efforts for keeping power only toward women. That's where you are wrong, because it is not just women they are trying to keep down, but other men as well. I worked in research all my life and in a group setting what women scientists bring to the table in addition to their science, is a sense of inclusion and cohesion as compared to the competitiveness of men. Women scientists make groups work better.
54
@Anne
"They will never give us equality voluntarily." I was with you until that last sentence.
2
@W.A. Spitzer
Since funding is limited, and it is believed that is important to fully fund the only the absolutely most promising areas, as opposed to distributing funding broadly in far smaller quantities, competition for funding is unavoidable and desired... if one wishes to stay in the field.
2
It is time for men to step down. It doesn’t matter if they feel themselves “more qualified”. This problem is not going to be fixed until more that 50% of leadership positions go to women for at least a generation. We need change, we need it now.
37
I read recently that, on intelligence tests, as a population, women test, across the board both verbally and mathematically, 6 percent higher than males. If true, not only is half the team being left on the bench but the more qualified half at that.
16
This is an absurd and prejudiced request. You're practically suggesting that we do away with any attempt at meritocracy and replace it with blind sexism. You are no different than those that you judge.
8
@Sally Coffee Cup
You need to examine the distribution of the of intelligence, not the average. It seems likely to me that the mean, median and mode of a graph of female IQs is 103 and the comparable number for men is 97. But the graph for men is flatter and wider. So when you are at the right hand tail, the number of men in the 1% outnumber women nine to one. There are also more men in the left hand tail, but they are not competing for the work requiring maximum cognitive powers.
This is a big red herring issue these days, used irresponsibly to inflame women about about an imagined inequity. Scientists and technology specialists whining about pay incredibly when neither themselves nor their male counterparts know how to analyze and evaluate earnings. These are the same folks who, when laypersons question the money they spend, cry foul that we know nothing about their noble but useless projects; the self importance of such is mind blowing to most everyone else. Check the current Census report on how women scientists/technologists vastly out pace earnings of women in all other occupational groups. Check how men are far more likely to die at work, than women. Check how men are 4x more likely to experience TBI and thus dementia and Alzheimer’s at a greater rate than women. This is a concern only for rich white women when all reliable studies in the past 20 years show the real priorities are child care, transportation, food, and healthcare.
7
Wrong on many accounts including relative risk of diseases including Alzheimer’s, but that aside, it is not just the paycheck; it is the lab space given by the Chair, the academic track, departmental money for research, and the ease of collaborations where women are still significantly disadvantaged in science. NIH grants are equitable but all of those little extras necessary for success have a long way to go.
46
@Dan Holton I'm not sure if Dan is merely opposed to woman getting equal pay and equal treatment or science in general.
16
@Dan Holton "Check the current Census report on how women scientists/technologists vastly out pace earnings of women in all other occupational groups". What does this have to do with anything? It needs to be compared with what men in the same jobs make, not what women in other professions make. Your logic and arguments don't make much sense. What does men getting dementia or dying at work have to do with equal pay and opportunities? What "reliable studies" show what the real priorities are?
24
Welcome to my life.
What is maddening (and I mean this literally; see "gaslighting") is that many male scientists claim that by virtue of their profession they are unbiased, objective and data-driven. In truth, their lack of self-awareness does not just lead to unjustly judging women scientists, it is a weakness in their OWN science. They are not rational observers of data, they are master RATIONALIZERS, able to twist facts to fit their pre-conceived beliefs be it about biologic systems or the quality of another's scientific output. We all suffer when important discoveries are left fallow due to this boys club mentality.
7
I work in a completely different profession than the emiment female scientists portrayed in this article. But having to deal with male colleagues has been the bugbear of my entire working life. I can't even enumerate the putdowns, the sly snotty remarks, the out-and-out questioning of my (proven) credentials. The facile insousiance evidenced by so many Caucasian men, who seem to know that promotion and advancement will come to them with even minimal talent. The outright hostility they evince when they realize my talent - some of them going out of their way to try to disparage it. There are exceptions, of course, men who "get it" - but disconcertingly, sometimes even the ones who mouth the right platitudes will later turn on you viciously. I feel so, so tired
7
I suspect these cliques don't only affect women. It seems to be one of the ignoble features of some cultures within the so-called "noble" field.
I understand and know this fury of being overlooked professionally because of being a woman. In my situation, there is actually a senior female complicit in holding back all the talented women, to advance the positions of the males. It's not just the males who sustain the "old boys club". In my male-dominated field, you've got a lot of ambitious and hard-working people all jockeying for power, recognition and increased salary. Initially I thought it was great that I was working under a senior woman, but it has been like working with the enemy. There has been zero benefits: she has stolen ideas and claimed them as her own, she has excluded the women from important social gatherings, completely for her benefit alone. Having a career is not just about skills, education, productivity and goals. It is a game of chess where you have to outsmart everyone around you. I don't have any answers to this but the only thing you can do, as a woman in the working world that prize males, is fight for EVERYTHING that you want and are owed.
4
Very good piece. Very disturbing. Hopefully the price these women paid we not be paid by the next one. But I remember when Larry Summers made that comment, he threw it out as a hypothetical possible explanation for disparities. He didn’t argue it to be true or even likely. To attack him for it or feel attacked by it as as the person mention did is absurd.
1
The giant thumb pressing down on futures, our collective posterity is no longer acceptable.
2
The discrimination documented in this article is wrong and unjustified.
So is gender based affirmative action.
Both are wrong and neither justifies the other.
1
Almost 20 years have passed, and yet this problem continues:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20001120&slug=4054420
We all hope that OUR lawsuit will make it better for the next generation, for our daughters, and yet nothing seems to change. So very discouraging.
3
What I’ve seen is that men are fair enough in mentoring young women. They love having women work for them! But if you’re actually the competition, then things become different.
Sadly it’s often the less ambitious and more traditionally ‘feminine’ women who end up judging the situation correctly. But a lot of ‘book smart’ girls, with the world in front of them, believe the press about equality and get chewed out — even get their lives destroyed.
I remember when I was a teen and there was so much talk about ‘careers’ and ‘anything is possible.’ I have at least three friends whose fathers I hold responsible for destroying their lives — because these fathers relentlessly pushed public achievement on their impressionable daughters. But these men never took the time to understand women’s experiences. Their ‘equality’ narrative was self-serving and worse than sexism.
Of my three friends, one flushed out of the hard sciences after 15 painful years; one competes against men in business, where she is not treated fairly and furthermore doesn’t have as much time because of motherhood; and another went into engineering where hazing, sexism, and maybe just not fitting in seemed to permanently embitter her.
I don’t know what the solution is. Women only have something like 1.5 kids now. That leaves time for paid work and the life of the mind.
Honestly, what has worked for me is lowered expectations. Sexism doesn’t preclude making a little money and having fun.
16
This behavior is EVERYWHERE. It is plain and simple -- it is discrimination. It is why women need to step outside the current structures and focus their efforts and their money on building new structures -- business, science, and eventually politics. The only way to change this is by women focusing on creating their OWN wealth and creating a forcing function from the outside. The current structures will not change from the inside -- at least not in our lifetimes. At the current pace of women becoming CEO's of Fortune 500 companies, it will be another FOUR CENTURIES before we reach parity.
12
@GirlAuthentic
(Sarcasm alert!) What's four centuries in the grand scheme of things? We'll be under water in one century and civilization will be gone. One billion years later, paleontologists will argue over whether the sixth Great Extinction took place over 100 years or 100,000 years.
1
@Thomas Zaslavsky
It was caused by a comet. It's the only thing that could happen that fast.
2
This also happens in academic medical hospitals where promotions and tenure are based on research. More research time is given to men, and more clinical duties/administrative tasks are given to women whether by choice or not. The promotions end up going to the researchers instead the clinicians, and the female physicians are left as assistant professors for years despite working the same number of hour or more and seeing more patients/running more departments. Academic institutions should all have clinical only promotion tracks to help with this trend. Many places around the country are changing this, but not so much in NYC for some reason.
13
I am sure the way is hard, but I have followed the steps of that great and strong woman in telomere research in my own height and scope, and I think many others will also do it.
3
Men, the biggest obstacle to success women have seen.
19
I have felt the reverse of this -- but considering the case this advocate has laid out, it stinks.
1
I wonder how much good has been lost in this world by not allowing women to reach their full potential in all fields.
19
How do you know she hasn’t reached her full potential?
Looking at every objective parameter reported in the article and publicly available, she did.
@Kara Ben Nemsi
How did you find the time to look into all those details? You looked into the filing? Checked the sourcese? The twitter feeds? Other articles?
And how did you determine her full potential? Do you know something about human productivity the rest of us don't? She wouldn't have, well, whatever full potential is, but let's just say gotten more results if she had more adequate lab space and some lab assistants? I've never even heard of a PI who doesn't have a lab assistant.
4
In the early 1970’s at the University of Chicago I had close friend who was an information sciences PhD. candidate. He was already getting published pretty regularly in the top journals, when he told me that he felt that his papers were getting published less frequently as he became better know in the field. The problem was that he was one of the few African-Americans in information sciences, and that his name (and race) were becoming generally known. I was dubious. They were scientists...how could they be so stupidly prejudiced? Ignoring my naive view of the situation my buddy started submitting all his papers anonymously which solved his problem and opened my eyes to the reality of race prejudice and sexism.
28
Anonymously?
Explain to me how that is supposed to work.
3
@Kara Ben Nemsi Yes: - in close to 50 years of scanning the scientific literature I recall only one anonymously published paper in a peer reviewed journal. (Effects of Sexual Activity on Beard Growth in Man, ANON, Nature volume 226, pages 869–870 (1970)). And in that case Nature was well aware of the author's identity.
1
I dont dispute anything in this article except that the battle for funding, relevancy and access to scarce resources is pervasive.
It effects every person. Plent of geniuses unlucky enough to have used the wrong combination of wording on grant applications, had the application read when the evaluating body's attention was not ideal, or put in front of a donor who did not really seem that interested in the particular type of research being done, simply because their ideas about science are inscrutible.
What this article says is that this paradigm is worse for women.
I believe it, although it would be interesting to see how *failure rates* differ from the success rates discussed in the article. (Eg how many well qualified women FAIL to receive grants or jobs vs men, white people vs south asians, etc)
7
@Jarl
A well judged comment. Funding is scarcer than it should be, big funding is scarcer still, and yet discrimination by sex or race makes things worse.
3
Thanks for this excellent article shining light on the struggles of women in science. Progress is just too slow. Academia and research institutes need to step it up.
9
It is very disheartening to read this - women in science are often paid less, given less lab space, passed up for grants, denied publications in high-flying journals - the gender bias in all this is well-documented. Many years ago, women faculty at MIT began to notice that what they thought was particular to each individual (smaller lab space, for example), was actually true of the majority of women. The Dean of the School of Science commissioned a study on the status of women faculty, led by Prof. Lotte Bailyn, and the resulting report published in 1999 led to systemic changes at that institution (read report at http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html).
In many places overt bias has given way to the far more insidious implicit bias. Workplaces need to be pro-active about making it clear to all what metrics they will be using for evaluating people - and then applying those using well-defined rubrics that reduce shifting standards for different individuals.
16
@S.T.
In principle you're right, but it's hard to evaluate research by "objective" standards. This is an inherent difficulty. Some try harder than others to overcome it. Some places count publications; I consider that the basement level of decency.
Grantmakers could change this overnight by forming their own consortium for rule-making and compliance standards. Discriminate in any way, and the funding is forfeit. Any portion spent must be repaid. Independent outside investigative body to be set up and funded by grantmakers. Investigative access to all witnesses to a complaint is a condition for receiving a grant. Publicize any punitive actions taken. Exert social pressure on funders to participate. Use the power of the purse.
13
This article documents a lot of vague discrimination complaints, but I don’t see anything tangible. As a scientist, I can attest that that our workplace is as full of imperfect people as any, possibly as an alternative explanation for their experiences. What’s important to know is that grant funding is the most important commodity in research. And Salk is notoriously competitive, and when one’s funding dries up, even senior faculty are unceremoniously jettisoned.
7
@CS If Salk - an institution represented by lawyers - decided to settle the lawsuits, then it's more likely than not there were tangible discriminatory acts backed by evidence. Research institutions are subject to the law.
29
If the Salk settled, it was not a wise decision. Unless she was physically assaulted, I do not see a case here.
@CS
I noticed tangible measurements of lab space. I noticed failure to connect female professors with funders.
3
My younger daughter has seen this (astrophysics)
10
read The Anatomy of a Scientific Discovery by Jeff Goldberg, about the discovery of endorphins in Aberdeen, to see science at work and discrimination across scientific cultures. Disappointing that there's been so little change.
4
What I suggest is that whoever pursues such lawsuits, have some confidence in your suit, and do not ‘settle’. Because settlements are always accompanied by clauses limiting your ability to speak out. Stop doing that! I faced a similar situation once, and was fired from my job for no good reason, other than the owner had mismanaged his business affairs and needed to cut back his staffing, and as a professional, I drew one of the highest salaries (although, like at Salk, I arranged more than half my pay by scientific research and experimental development tax refunds). I could have been simply laid off, my boss chose not to do it that way. I sued for wrongful dismissal, so my boss offered an out-of-court settlement including a provision that I could never speak about it. Not a chance!
I pushed for a court decision, which was decided in my favour, with absolutely zero stipulation against my freedom to speak on any topic I choose. Forever.
15 years later, I’m a successful professional in my field, and my former employer had sold off all his business interests and moved away back home to Germany.
If anything like that ever happens again, we’ll you can bet there’s no chance I would ever allow myself to be bound by any non-disclosure term, for something not of my doing.
If there’s something rotten going on, and especially if I was a woman facing established sexual discrimination, there is absolutely no way I would ever agree to any term limiting my ability to speak about it.
35
@Grunchy
Yes, the non-disclosure angle is a VERY important point--I am glad I waited for someone like yourself to comment here from the perspective of not agreeing to never speak about it. The information you will be able to share is going to undoubtedly advance others and realistically inform the complaint process and help bring an end to discrimination in secret.
5
@Grunchy
Exactly!
I am actively contemplating suicide because no matter how smart I am, no matter how much education I have, no matter how hard I've worked, no matter how pleasant and supportive I've been, I've been the first one laid off when money got tight, I've been the one that has been passed over time and again for people of meager talents, and well, you get the drift. Why are we alive if our talents aren't used to make the world a safer, more productive place for all of us? Why do we have to be demeaned and discarded? And it's not just by men...I've rarely had a woman be supportive of my career goals. It's demoralizing ...
11
@No Trace it is because of your gifts that your life is valued. Life has more meaning than what you could ever find in a test tube.
3
@No Trace
Please don't do that! Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Changing a system is like dragging a mountain; progress is slow to nil. Make a shift in your own direction. Drop the "never enough" mantra; it's not true. I wish you all the best.
4
Please contact the national suicide hotline.
tel:1-800-273-8255
There are people who care about you and want to help!
8
Thank you for the thoughtful article. It is impossible to write everything in one piece and this really fleshed out the thousand injustices that make up the thousand pounds of feathers. I worked in tech and experienced the exact same treatment around not being heard despite outstanding achievement in sales which is a very clearly numbers measured job in many ways. You get invited in, but then you stop getting invited back after you rise to a level where real independence is earned in terms of money and power. That’s when the blank looks, the personal credibility gets questioned, management abandons you instead of rallying around difficult choices and you get isolated and shunned, the impossible inflexibility around parenting juggling acts set it, did I mention the mental wear and tear? You just get tired and you’re doing your best to keep your ship afloat but the thousand pounds of feathers handicap you to a crawl instead of a skip or a run. Sorry to mix the metaphors but hope the meaning comes across.
12
The vast majority of commenters have never spent a single day in the sciences, academia or earning a PhD. The article describes complaining about a system that affects BOTH men and women. In case you didn't know, moving ahead in the academic science world is 85% politics and back rubbing and 15% science. You think if you lose grant funding and don't pull any in that you'd be fired because you're a woman? HA! That happens to male professors ALL the time, and it devastated the lab I used to work in where the male PI couldn't pull any grant money in and was subsequently let go by the university, ironically by a female head of the department. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of grants available to women and underrepresented minorities only. In fact, right before I left, the department started becoming increasingly hostile to candidates for being male, especially white and male. The department was run by females. One female professor was also a terrible PI, and her students would constantly complain behind her back that the PI was never around in lab because she was too busy rubbing shoulders with industry execs trying to get money and doing consulting gigs on the side. Welcome to how the world works. It is never about just doing hard work, rather, it is about playing the politics and being good at back stabbing. Moving up in academia is like the military. Grunts have to put their time in even if they are geniuses. That goes for both men and women.
11
@John Stanley
I'm sorry for your experience, but you don't have broad enough experience to know "the way the world works". The world works in many different ways. The point of this article is that, while research funding is scarce and uncertain, it is more so for women, in particular (the focus of the article) at the Salk Institute.
5
Silence is what kills women. One of the reasons women’s groups are ineffective is because they are simply ignored. There is no power in numbers if there is no consequence to those in power. We have this article in NYT, you might think, that’s something. But if those who have the power and money toss it in the garbage, nothing changes. When women show their power by not giving it away at half-price, only then will women be given their due. Women must strike, that’s the only way there will be change.
15
@Mindful
You said it!
I agree with the general comments about sexual harassment and discrimination. I am a MIT graduate. I'd also like to add a story I heard about MIT, from good authority. A white male nerd, maybe somewhat autistic, worked at MIT for his entire career, doing specialized lab stuff. He never ever worked anywhere else. He was not well paid but was totally dedicated to his job and MIT. Months before he was due to be vested for a pension he was laid off and has been unemployed ever since.
It's possible that dealing with general worker issues would help everyone. Have you ever wished you had a union rep you could call in a workplace dispute?
20
As I read this well researched article on the persistent and purposeful discrimination against women by the Salk Institute, my heart sank, and sank, and sank. I am a man, and not very proud of my gender at the moment. I also have a daughter, and feel sad that she will have to contend with such blatant injustice in a world managed by thoughtless, careless men. Boys, really, not men. The behavior seems so prevalent, so pernicious, so... frankly, I feel almost speechless.
23
@An Ordinary American - It's not as if these examples of sexism in the workplace can be chalked up to the kind of cluelessness we saw 35 years ago. Women are as smart and as capable as men but instead they're being pushed aside and dismissed by their male colleagues.
I know a woman who went to Harvard at the age of 16 and attended medical school there. She's devoted her life to helping people, on the side she does in vitro surgery, but she's still treated as an inferior in her lab, even by her own male assistant.
6
@An Ordinary American
Glad to see that there are a few good men out there.
2
@An Ordinary American My interview at a New England college in 1970 went like this: “So are you here to find a husband?”. Sad that so little has changed.
1
Life is unfair, but we're all responsible for our life choices. The lesson here for young women, and young men, is be prepared to move on if you find your work is not appreciated.
8
This, and a string of consistency sexist male science teachers in K-12, is exactly why I decided not to pursue science in college 50 years ago. I knew what was coming. PHD coffee girl, grunt jobs for male colleagues, research appropriated for male career benefit, low pay, career invisibility, and being sidelined in every way. No thank you. Not worth it. I have a good mind to share, but if society doesn't want it, no worries, I'll keep it to myself. It's not going to cause the death of humankind. It's not fair, it's not smart, and it's not right, but it's real.
12
The Salk is a high power research institution that demands exceptional research results and quality from its faculty investigators. According to Medline, she survived there for 33 years with an exceptionally low rate of productivity.
I am surprised she lasted that long. None of her male colleagues, who she detests so much, would have been able to pull that one off.
10
@Kara Ben Nemsi
The fact that she was there for 33 years makes the assertion that she had a low rate of productivity rather suspect.
2
@Momo
It's not an assertion, it's a fact. You can look at her publication record in PubMed. It is about 10-15% of what someone in her seniority should have produced on average at an institution like that. Meager, even for a postdoc.
Seriously, if you can't produce in the best environment, you have a problem and it is not the environment. The Salk does not keep someone around on a welfare role. They gain nothing from it. There was considerable good will towards her, before she started suing for no apparent good reason.
@Momo
Yeah. She was there right up until she filed a sex discrimination lawsuit. Then all of a sudden she had a low rate of productivity. Hmmm. Too bad the case is sealed so we can't see if the plaintiffs added "retaliation" to the lawsuit.
2
I can only add that I saw some of this too, even in the humanities, and I think it actually broke my heart.
It was a lot more subtle than what's being described here. I believe it was mostly unintentional: an extra dollop of shine for the boys, a little skepticism towards the girls. It didn't come exclusively from male professors. But the disillusionment was crushing.
My feeling now is that I was a little weak-spirited, but I do think it would have been better to have been warned in advance. I would have appreciated the fair-minded more, and been bothered by the imperfections less.
11
@Patricia
The disrespect and bias come from the students, too. They see a lecturer who is 5’ 2’ and female, and they don’t see a Scientist. They’re much more likely to call me by my first name, as though we were casual acquaintances, instead of “Dr.” - a title I earned after being a first-gen college graduate and years of blood, sweat and tears. They have a way of knowing where the power is...
After a while you’ve taken so many hits over the years you just get tired. A lot of us, I suspect, have some form of complex trauma disorder.
I’m almost 65. Still working but downshifted significantly. Things are changing, but with so many scientists competing for grants, in some ways it will get worse.
20
@LadyProf
Thanks for chiming in, I appreciate it a lot. Also I believe you. If it's any consolation, some of them probably grew up to regret it.
I think the best thing we can do is lavish respect on each other. Thank you for sticking it out. Student me was not a scientist, but if I'd been one, I'd have needed your example, whether I knew it at the time or not.
5
Wow. I spent some time very briefly at the Salk many years ago. What I remember most about the experience was learning of a colleague’s experience there. She told me she left after being repeatedly sexually harassed. She described raising the issue and then feeling forced to leave. It was hard to know then what really happened, but given the description of the institute described in this article, it sounds like her story was in character with the nature of the place.
I think the experience of the senior female scientists described in this article are common to women across many industries. A generation ago we thought that once the legal barriers had fallen, we could be included and measured by our contributions. Clearly, the situation is more complicated that that and I hope the older generation continues to share their stories, so that the next generation can face the institutional barriers with open eyes.
29
This really makes me sick. I have two little daughters (3 1/2 and 1 1/2 tears old) and I really wish this would be over when they grow up. Of course it won't, so I'll do my best to equip them with the "tools" (whatever they might be, I lost the instruction manual) that will increase the chances that they feel free to pursue the paths they choose.
I'm ready to fight for this. My wife and I are paying attention at how they are talking at preschool, for things like which roles they play. This is going to be a never ending battle, with invisible nudges everywhere --also from friends and family-- that will steer them towards traditional women roles and hierarchy levels.
Don't get me wrong, we don't have anything against what would be considered normal for a woman to do. What we do think is terrible is shaping their imagination in such a way that they only imagine those options as a real or reasonable.
I'm an electronics engineer, and I have worked in a business career for a while, so I know how a male-dominated field looks like and how power is held and used in it.
This has to end and we have to actively play a part in it. Not just for equality and women, but for the well-being of all mankind. As others have pointed our, how many discoveries were delayed or not made because of this? How many lives would have been saved, or spared suffering and despair?
48
Patriarchy is literally destroying us.
10
@Jaime Alvarez
You think the differences between men and women are going to "be over" at some point? You might want to take a biology course or visit a farm where there is livestock or even a bar or night club. Study the statistics on what females spend on clothes, perfume and other cosmetics.
1
@Jaime Alvarez
Forgive me, but I get the impression you didn’t think much about this issue before you had daughters. That is why this problem persists.
3
The reason change is so slow in coming is that it needs to come from within. So long as those running the organization benefit from the culture, there is no motivation to change. Clients, customers, agencies providing funding for the grants, etc. need to demand better of these organizations by making it economically unattractive to continue the behavior. Only then will it stop.
The consuming public needs to open their eyes and realize that they need to be the driving force for change. Retaining the attorney who practices discriminatory behavior, or buying the products, or using the services of a company that condones or promotes such behavior, not only makes it possible for such circumstances to continue, it mandates that it will.
10
@kimj So the sick should stop using treatments developed at the Salk Institute? I don't think so.
As many commentators have stated. Grantors have to pay attention to their awards. Of course, grantors rarely know enough to intelligently discriminate between competing proposals, so they award to men they are comfortable with.
I think this is a really good article. I also think that when brilliant people are restricted for any reason, all of society loses.
So this is an important article. Sometimes it takes a lawsuit to speak truth to power.
It was good to read in some of the comments about women scientists who were mentored and encouraged by male colleagues.
24
OMG, I read this and felt a wave of familiar feelings as I read on. I had to take a break, come back to the article and start from the beginning just to concentrate on the details of their stories rather than the sadness that is so familiar to these circumstances. This is so common in science and medicine....and women are forging ahead, seeking to make advances in their fields, raising their children yet relegated to the sidelines by the entrenched power structures. You can do everything right and exceedingly well but still be sidelined. How tragic for society! We could attain so much more were the power establishment altered. Last month, I was in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and noted large banners saluting women in science (sponsored by the L'Oreal Foundation). I was so thrilled I snapped photos of them. I salute these women and I admire their courage in filing lawsuits. This is the only way change is going to be made, it appears.
PS. Verma repeatedly had "no recollection"....perhaps senility is setting in?
64
@A doctor in the Americas
Fully concur. So discouraging, but essential journalism. Thanks NYT.
6
We all know why Verma didn’t remember, it’s just a plausible way to not cooperate without being overt. By the way, I’m mildly offended by the offhand joke about senility - not very sensitive to an actual medical condition, which may or may not actually be relevant.
Anyway, yes we are all disappointed and discouraged by the Salk foundation. I’m slightly miffed that these women didn’t do more to seek correction during the time the offences were happening: do it while the evidence is fresh, and before the like of Verma can claim memory loss. Also: Never agree to any non-disclosure term limiting your ability to speak out against injustice, like Salk imposed on these women in their out-of-court settlements!! If you’re the one in the right, never give up your basic human rights! No matter how much cubic money offered to you.
I never would.
4
@Grunchy
My apology for "senility"...it was a poor attempt at sarcasm....of course Verma remembered. He simply lacks integrity (and that is a character flaw).
Regarding non-disclosure agreements, I agree & laud your success. It is difficult in any field - to be well trained, hard working, dedicated - and try to alter the entrenched interests in many work places. It takes enormous stamina to focus on your work and realize you have little voice at the table despite your experience and/or great ideas. Rather than promote opportunities, decisions are often made behind closed doors; the "good ol boys" or those very like whomever is in power are most often beneficiaries. You don't have to be female to experience this...it happens to men as well. Most people give up on pushing back. It can be easier to look for a new position - & depending on how specialized you are & the position of your partner/family - it can be hard to pick up and move. $$ is also a factor...it costs a lot to pursue a legal battle.
Ultimately, the inability to promote excellence & ideas from all of the well trained people in our society is what is going to doom this country. Travel outside the US & you realize we are slowly dropping behind. In the sciences & medicine, N America is not doing as well at innovation as it used to. Heading slightly off topic....the myopia about immigration/refugees, education, and so many other areas emanating from the Trump presidency isn't helping.
7
A decade ago women faculty (science and other dispiclines) at Williams College argued that they were not being paid the same as men. When that argument was put to the test and results revealed the inequities, women faculty salaries were equalized with the male faculty.
I was a senior administrator and a woman. I asked to meet with the director of human resources, a woman, and pointed out that difference might appear in our salaries if studied as they had in the faculty salaries. The HR woman's reply, "I'm not going to go there; I'm not going to touch that." So much for women being supportive of other women.
One of the best ways to correct for inequities is to make public the salary ranges for each job and what the ranges depend on.
49
Outstanding article! Wait, wait don't tell me that the grants are governmental and some through NIH. Congress needs to investigate this discrimination and the grant process.
Perhaps Blackburn had "internalized misogynistic abnegation."
That term was quoted in the arts section of this paper! It is my new go- to term! I do continue to hope for equality, but women just keep shootin' down other women!
14
This is a poor quote to use as a title
11
I am a female physicist and the first in my family to go to college. Apologies for being a bit off topic, but I am just feeling very grateful for my mentors who believed in me without thought to my gender or my background. My advisor and postdoc mentors were all male, but they were also relatively young. Perhaps that played a role in how I was treated. Maybe it's because they have wives in academia and research, or daughters that they hope will follow in their footsteps. Regardless, I do believe the culture is changing.
That being said, I do not want to minimize in any way the experiences of the women profiled in this article. I think it's worth noting that none of my professors were female. None of my mentors were female.
At the same time, I have firsthand witnessed men in science who have stood up for their female colleagues. It makes me uncomfortable to demonize men as a monolithic group overwhelmingly opposed to women because I don't see this view as being true, and it won't help manifest positive change. I would rather focus on the the fact that science is under attack in the United States. The future of science depends on all of us- women, men and everyone in between- working together.
42
@cf I don't think this demonizes all men - it's very clear who and where the men are/were
36
@cf I was a (male) physicist. Twenty-five years ago, I left science for another profession.
Why? I made some poor career decisions. I was naive. Perhaps I didn’t have enough talent to succeed. But my mentors share the blame, too.
In graduate school, I chose a young professor as my PhD advisor. He was a careerist. To protect himself, my advisor forced another student to leave his laboratory (and graduate school) after he failed to build an expensive instrument on the cheap. My thesis committee criticized my advisor for giving me poor advice (I didn’t prepare well for a preliminary examination). In retaliation, my advisor said he would guard his reputation by giving me a lukewarm recommendation for my next job.
Nevertheless, I found a good postdoctoral fellowship. Although I was happy with the outcome, I witnessed unprofessional behavior. My supervisor bragged about his attempts to damage the career of a junior colleague who refused to collaborate. The sabotage failed.
My next position was my last. Six months after I started, my supervisor forced a long-term collaborator in his group to leave. Six months after that, he damaged and ruined my career. Two years later, he did the same thing to another group member. It was common knowledge that my supervisor mis-managed his research grant and did not support his staff. But he was connected.
I deplore sexism and discrimination in science. But science is a human enterprise conducted by human beings. Life is unfair.
6
Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions seems to apply equally well to cultural revolutions, and there’s no question that in the past half century the changes in women’s rights have been revolutionary.
One of Kuhn’s more depressing claims is that rather than change their views, the pre-revolutionary old guard will cling to their old belief systems, which means that a revolution is not complete until the old guard literally dies off and is replaced. But these days people live long lives, and as a result there’s been a recurring cultural pattern of high-profile old guards (Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and evidently Inder Verma) who to varying degrees of justice get called to task for their their old-guard behavior in a new-guard world.
24
There are no faculty at the Salk, Scripps Institute, or LCRF ----(all institutes in San Diego), where faculty are allowed to stay if they do not pull-in at least 50% salary support.
No science faculty at U.C.S.D. are tenured if they are not pulling in at least 50% salary support. The money a scientist can raise is pretty much everything, and it is only moderately related to the quality of the science.
At the same time, the NIH grant review panels are approving less than 10% of submitted grants for funding, and the panels will not approve grants where >= 50% salary is supported by a grant. This means faculty must secure funding from at least 2 NIH grants to keep their jobs, with the odd of failure for each grant being about 90%. So most labs are on the edge of failure most of the time. It is no longer a viable career for a starting-out scientist if you have to flip two ten-sided coins and get heads continuously or get fired.. you cannot meet life's expectations of job, marriage, children, college tuitions, retirement contributions with this type of security.
As to women at the Salk, I suspect there may be bias in the distribution of private institutional funds and space allocations. But if she had brought in the grant money, she would still be working there.
22
@Scott. Indeed, and I would add that at some institutions ,
failure to meet that bar could also mean loss of institutional housing.
1
The stupidity of the waste of 50% of humanity’s intelligence gifts cannot be over estimated. The loss of all this intelligence may yet cost us our very life on the planet.
72
“Here I was measuring the goddamn laboratories,” she says, “and I brought him the measurements, and he wouldn’t even look at them.”
Infuriating, indeed. It may be worth noting, though, that that's a common occurrence for men too. On several occasions I collected data to make a point, only to have managers or administrators refuse to look at it. It seems to be endemic to managers.
26
@Thomas Yes. Intentionally poor listening skills and miscommunication is a useful tool for those who like to win at all cost.
2
The SALK should hang its head in shame.
And start counting the real $$ cost of lost opportunities/income when top talent is left scrabbling for petty cash, scrounging space, losing staff (and even worse, time) in the basement.
32
All these men who can't remember saying anything they shouldn't have said...Sounds familiar.
So does the assumption by young women graduates that gender discrimination will just go away naturally. It won't happen to them because they're well-qualified, and time is passing so things will evolve etc etc etc...
Ummm....
When I was a lawyer, gender discrimination in the legal profession was blatant, and I ran smack into it.
I changed to history of art for health reasons, anticipating less hassle because the majority of art history grads. were female. But for gender discrimination, art history left law in the dust.
And unlike in law, the problem wasn't even discussed. Without dragging this problem out into the open, nothing will change.
53
"The Salk Institute was established in 1960 by Jonas Salk, MD, developer of the first safe and effective polio vaccine. Salk selected world-renowned architect Louis I. Kahn to design the research facility he envisioned would contribute to the betterment of humankind"--from the Salk Institute website
Louis Kahn must be turning over in his grave to see his democratic architecture, open to the ocean vistas, used in a discriminatory way. When women are not allowed to hold up our half of the world, the world teeters. Brava to the accomplished and courageous women scientists whose lawsuits are cracking this particular glass ceiling, and to the writer for her careful analysis. This story is inspiring to women in every field.
47
Really disappointed to hear about Verma.
The fact that he can have 56 former postdocs and students sign a letter of support is not surprising if you know how the academic system works. They need his recommendation letter to get ahead in their career.
45
I find it interesting that Ms. Emerson was asked to resign by another woman at the institute. This greatly weakens her claims of discrimination.
6
@joe depends on time/tenure and age of woman doing the dastardly deed.
3
@joe No. It doesn't.
6
Please!
Look at her productivity.
Then you will see that there was no discrimination.
In 1974 my only sibling killed himself at age 15. I was going to The University of Colorado at Boulder and dropped out of school. My major had been in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. Dropping out of school saved me from being an underpaid woman in the advanced sciences. A post-grad working for nothing in a lab forever.
I should have gone to medical school but I went to nursing school and it was an insult to my intelligence. Women now have more choices but pay us what we are worth as equals.
11
@Annie. You say nursing school was an insult to your intelligence. I am a retired physician and have worked with nurses and other health care professionals for 35 years. Their training is rigorous and their hours punishing. Their intelligence and compassion have saved many a patient from physician errors, including my own. Your dismissal is unjustified.
38
@Annie I'm really sorry your brother killed himself but I reject that you went into nursing and it "insulted your challenge" because of your brother's death. You sound like you still have a lot of anger which is understandable but probably hurting you every day.
10
@Open Mouth View
No, her dismissal is not unjustified (female student who regrets nursing instead of medical degree). She knows her abilities far outpaced the career she ended up in. A worthy and honorable profession is not the same as a career that's intellectually satisfying and appropriate to one's abilities.
Ask yourself if you would have been satisfied being a nurse all your life, instead of a doctor, someone who took orders and obeyed, and little more beyond competence and compassion with patients. You could have found meaning and honor, but you would have been less than you could be, and given far less to the world than you were able to.
Women often live with a lifetime sentence of losing and devaluing. It's hard every day to make peace with that, if you're one of those women, and there are a great, great many.
I can't see that this serves anything but male ego. Its a blight on our society. It cripples what we could be collectively. Apparently, we've collectively decided the loss is still well worth it to satisfy those egos. I cannot imagine why. It's like deciding all people with dark skin should be janitors and cleaning ladies. It's outrageous and offensive. It needs to stop, and we need effective laws with teeth to do that.
13
In 1986 I designed the lion’s share of a complex integrated circuit that went on to become a patent of the year at a major electronics company. Of course there was a team, me and 3 male colleagues. The senior colleague went to the manager about filing the patent claims. The manager explained that his name (the managers!) needed to be on it, because “it was all his idea” (he was at the level of: let’s build a spaceship to go to the moon. No further ability or contribution). Then this man argued my colleague for 30 minutes about Why Nancy needed to be on the patent. I was just the implementer, he said. Fortunately my colleague prevailed but guess who’s name is listed first.
66
As a group, women can fight for fairer practices. Even if it doesn't happen in time for them to reap the benefits, at least their daughters may. As an individual, find a satisfying path. Career satisfaction rarely satisfies completely. So I hope women ( and men) also find other means of satisfaction esp when one has to work harder to settle for less. No doubt these smart women can figure out how much to give to this fight but many do get swept into a competitive frenzy only to win the wrong prize
4
That glass ceiling is not made of glass but cement. A secretary from HR made the mistake of leaving the salaries of all employees of a major multinational company on the photo copying machine where I found it. Not only was I paid less than my male counterparts but that was true for all women in the company - whatever their level.
I returned the document to HR...
56
Men have to earn more, income defines their "fitness" in the eyes of women. Don't like it, start by teaching girls to value men differently.
7
@W
Circular arguement if women earned more, that “fitness” you presume means something to women, would be rendered worthless. If men want to be free of the “provider” role, it’s super easy, make sure people are paid equitably.
25
@W good grief - you found a way to blame women for making less than men - ever hear of a false dichotomy?
32
Equal opportunity - that is all we ask. But it must be truly equal. The older we get, the more we see the small knocks and bruises make a difference. Each one. And then the men are ahead and the women behind. It becomes nearly impossible to bridge the gap. But we never stop trying.
30
@Terry G Some do stop trying, leaving the rest of us wondering sometimes which way is better when it's written on the wall that principles don't count.
6
@Ann
It's good to keep trying, even better to speak out. Because bias is such an important concept in science, it will always stick out in heavily biased situations, like how women are treated. We need to keep talking, too. I abhor bias in science, it is real. Since we have the abilities to assess it, let's acknowledge it and work it into our equations of success as well as guidance markers for those who follow us.
2
"A famous 2012 experiment, in which equivalent résumés with male and female names were evaluated for lab manager jobs, found that the man was rated as more qualified and offered a higher salary."
So why does the author of this article report the findings of this 2012 experiment but not experiments by Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci in a 2015 study in the same journal finding that faculty showed that faculty had a 2:1 preference for women on STEM tenure track?
So tell me why it isn't a violation of journalistic ethics to selectively report research findings about topics like this. If the author can't take the trouble to do a serious review of all the relevant research, why don't they find another job where the ethical standards are lower?
13
@Ian Maitland Big sigh. Journalistic ethics pertains to "news", that is, what is "new", not to surveys of the literature. However, it's possible that there are comments sections at other internet media outlets with lower standards for relevancy and snarkiness.
6
@Ian Maitland Thank you for making the author's point in two ways. First, this story is wholly inconsistent with her narrative, which is about post-tenure women and most particularly how they come to believe pre-tenure that their generation's experience will be different. Second, you've used a biased interpretation of the findings of the Williams/Ceci study against the author's narrative. Or perhaps you simply did not read the whole piece.
21
As a female scientist who has worked at both highly prestigious and middle-of-the-road institutions, I can say that the kinds of problems described here are pervasive. Women are disadvantaged at every step in science, and then the results of the cumulative disadvantages are held against us and are used to argue that we're just not as good as our rock-star peers.
If you measure my accomplishments against the meager investments my institution has made in me, my lab, and my career, I've done astonishingly well. If you measure me against my male colleagues who've been given lighter teaching loads, better space, more money, you could argue that it's a real shame that I just haven't achieved the success so many people expected to see when they hired me more than two decades ago.
144
@Heather
Exactly!
21
I have a question. Do women get less pay than most men, or do they get less pay than the average man? This makes a difference because the average can be deceiving. A few high-preforming alpha males might get a whole lot more than anyone else, skewing the average in favor of males, but not helping ordinary males a bit.
Next question: Do women who play the game like alpha males keep up with the alpha males. Would Safra Katz fit in that category?
4
@mlbex Most of us who don't operate a lab don't understand what it means to have more square footage, exposure for funding, etc. The article makes it clear how "playing the game" differs at this unique institution, as compared to the usual research/teaching school. The article also makes clear how it's possible for a smart person to be deceived about this difference over the course of a professional career.
"High-preforming alpha male" is an excellent typo that illustrates the article's conclusion. They are not "performing" but "preformed" for the institution in which they are made to succeed.
18
@mlbex What's an alpha female, in your book? A woman who imitates an alpha male?
9
@mlbex studies show that between men and lesbians there is no "pay gap".
I just received the following from Liz Blackburn:
STATEMENT BY THE SALK INSTITUTE December 4, 2018
"It is especially unfortunate that the Institute’s statements were attributed personally to Salk’s president at the time, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who has affirmed she did not instigate the statements and did not have the opportunity to review and approve the specific language of the statements prior to their release to the press"
If not Liz Blackburn, who else is responsible for the statements issued by Salk? How can a director not take responsibility for statement issued by her own institute. Own it.
28
@French Mom
Read some more about how Liz Blackburn handled this when she was president. She did not do a good job with this situation.
6
I am not sure who wrote the the headline this article but it seems completely our of sync with the intent and spirit of the piece This article is a serious study of gender inequities that still do manifest in the world of scientific research. It is about fundamentals - consideration and respect. The title trivializes the story and its subjects' legitimacy. Dr Emerson and her colleagues are owed an apology by the person or persons who manufactured this headline and approved it for publication.
19
@Ruth E The headline I see references "a few million dollars." That seems exactly right: it is a matter of money, how many people you can hire, and the article makes this problem explicit. Yes, respect, "find out what it means to me." It means whether you can carry out your research.
14
I am a female faculty at a famed University for 23 years. The situations described in the report are familiar and still rampant. Inequality that we female scientists have to face and fight through not only exist but also routine. They always find a way to justify why you do not deserve equal pay using subjective measures. To survive and strive in acedemia as a woman, you have to be smarter and more excellent. And even so, the leadership roles and real power do not come our way, at least not automatically. The important things, such as salary, space, and resources, are not allocated equally. Recently, I have been repeatedly asked to lay off my key lab staff, even though we have sufficient funding. We still have a long way to go to achieve real equality in the working world.
76
Read this https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/remembering-the-transgender-scientist-who-changed-our-understanding-of-the-brain/549458/
(Ben Barres transitioned from female to male)
"He most famously talked about those barriers in a searing 2006 opinion piece, published in the prestigious journal Nature. In it, he lambasted several academics for suggesting that “women are not advancing in science because of innate inability,” and spoke of the actual reason for their hindrance: discrimination, both conscious and unconscious.
[Ben] Barres amassed data and evidence to support his stance, but he also spoke from experience. Born in 1954, he transitioned in 1997 at the age of 43. Before then, as an MIT undergraduate, he solved a hard math problem that had befuddled the rest of his virtually all-male class, only for his professor to suggest that his boyfriend must have done the work. As a Ph.D. student, he lost a fellowship competition to a male peer who had published a sixth as many papers. And as a Stanford professor who had recently transitioned, he heard a faculty member say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”
59
Barbara/Ben was exceptional, irrespective of gender.
I saw no discrimination.
It should be pointed out that Prof. Lundblad was awarded membership in the National Academy of Sciences, which is a great achievement but also another case where there is considerable inequality in who gets in and who doesn't.
15
Without detracting from any initiative aimed at greater equality of opportunity, it would probably be more constructive to talk about the original and transcendent contributions of scientists despite very adverse conditions than focusing on sex, the area of available laboratories, or differences within the institutions of privilege to those who proudly belong as a limiting factor of their professional performance
1
@Jorge Herkovits
And would you read it? I don't understand the criticism, this isn't about 'sex', it's about gender inequality.
While reading this article the radio was on and I heard about a lead scientist (female) from the University of Minnesota discovering a new insight to a childhood disease.
9
@David
Apologies, when I wrote sex I actually referred to gender that is the subject of the article (I think it was understandable from the beginning of my comment). With respect to the substantive issue that I have raised, I recognize that it is an incomparably more complex challenge. Who would be interested? I suppose that many who want to live in a world with more equal opportunities, including those who worry about gender inequalities
1
When someone says, "I don't recall," THAT many times and he's a genius, it's legalese for, "he's lying."
He knows exactly what he's doing. It's called tanking a colleague's career.
Then when you realize he's be playing non-consensual grab-fanny with the women he works with for decades... you know EXACTLY WHY his memory is SUDDENLY SO BAD.
He's covering up for his own appalling behavior.
SHOCKER.
48
Read this:
Budden, A.E., et al. 2007. Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors. TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution Vol.23 No.1
29
"and has since produced a statement of support signed by 56 former students and postdocs."
This is the equivalent of producing all the people a dog didn't bite.
(And how many of those 56 were beholden to him for employment or career advancement, or not having their careers sabotaged?)
Ridiculous.
40
@68Rocket I was once involved with a grievance towards a university instructor, all of the class signed the grievance letter except 2 Nigerian grad students that agreed with the concern, but were afraid of being executed when they returned home.
18
I read this obit today and immediately thought of this article. Indeed, some things never change.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/jerrie-cobb-an-aviation-pioneer-and-advocate-for-women-in-space-has-died/
7
Reading the comments my STEM writing is coming along nicely.
2
The story indicates that there is a large and growing pool of well qualified, underpaid, and under appreciated people out there, ready willing and able to apply themselves for an unbiased employer.
If men are too biased to tap this pool, then women should do so by starting a company with unbiased hiring. Why is this not happening?
8
@emullick With what funding will these under appreciated people start this company?
23
@Reader In Wash, DC. Really? Men also write the history...how about women stepping up?!?? You can't be serious...if you are, you are severely lacking in your ability to comprehend what this article was about. Read some more, Reader in Wash, DC.
17
@emullick when women get more early stage funding than the 2% of vc funding they reaped in 2017/2018? Ya think?
1
The biggest issue in bioscience academia is that your research does not directly create value (unlike in industry, where research directly creates value for the company, and your position depends on whether your research output creates more value than what your salary and laboratory costs). Therefore, jobs in academia are artificial and driven by available grant funding. This creates situations like the one described in the article, where powerful people can build infrastructure to support themselves and their loyalists (because who controls where grant funding is distributed also controls who has a job or the resources to be "productive").
Unfortunately the answer to all of this is unclear. The biggest issue is that there aren't enough jobs created by grant funding to absorb all of the young bioscience trainees. Industry can absorb some scientists, but that too is constrained by investors and market forces. More transparency on these institutions by grant makers and the NIH will be a good thing -- I'm sure that the Gates Foundation doesn't want its money to be squandered by sexist pigs like Verma. I think, the best solution is to make sure undergraduates thinking about a career in science be aware of the issues involved.
20
@Local Labrat You are pretty naive if you believe this is the sole criteria on which your career advances in industry.
"in industry, where research directly creates value for the company, and your position depends on whether your research output creates more value than what your salary and laboratory costs"
1
@Local Labrat This is surely not true, because we know that there is no magical correlation of work to value in "industry". The article is simply about equity narrowly defined, in a workplace which is also narrowly proscribed. If you can't get it right there, where can you? And why should I allow any of my money support such an institution that gets it so wrong?
1
Rosalind Franklin.
How could the author mention Watson and Crick, without attribution to her for her essential photograph of the double helix?
32
@MB This is exactly what I came to this comment thread to say - thank you for beating me to the punch!
18
@MB For better or worse, science rewards the interpretation of data more than the collection of data. Erwin Chargaff (Mr. A=T G=C) died a bitter man because he got upstaged by Watson and Crick. When Mark Twain said of science "you get such a wholesale return of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact", he may have got the relative proportions wrong, but his business analogy is otherwise valid.
@MB
Rosalind Franklin died two years before the Salk Institute was founded in 1960. She could not have been recruited along with Crick even if Jonas wanted her to join. Maurice Wilkins isn't mentioned in this article either. Find bias where it exists, not where it isn't. Only Dr. Franklin has a medical school named after her among the four, and well deserved.
5
Working at a medical scientific institution this is so familiar. However in this otherwise excellent article Liz Blackburn gets off the hook. She was one of the problems at Salk if you read other articles about her tenure there. She tried to minimize the women's problems. She is now back at the University of California, San Francisco which has a huge problem as does the whole UC system with regard to this kind of behavior or worse.
22
I think a key piece of this article is when one of the women scientists note that junior female scientists don't notice discrimination as much and dismiss what older female scientist face. The tide is gradually turning but I find that attitude to be very common among some younger women. You don't see or feel the discrimination or disparities when you are not yet in a position where you threaten the status quo or the men around you. But if you stay long enough, you'll see it.
84
@ms
Bingo!
8
I wonder if Ms. Pickett, that writes
"The numbers from other elite scientific institutions suggest they’re not alone."
has read the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that states the women for tenure track position are preferred, with exactly the same CV, except for gender indicating name, 2 to one over males
"National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track"
PNAS April 28, 2015 112 (17) 5360-5365;
"The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, "
The suggestion is false.
11
@John
A friend of mine who owns a technological services company told me the same, female candidate CVs are given an extra boost. However these facts are irrelevant in ideological discussions.
5
@John
But I wonder if this "research" holds up in *actual* hiring numbers. Last I heard, the pipeline is as leaky as it ever was.
At one NIH institute, the scientific director has had multiple EEO complaints by women against him (it's common knowledge) and nothing has been done to remove him. Some older women are forced out and he takes their research funds for his own lab. The pusillanimous NIH administration doesn't care. It's still an old boys club.
33
@Dalgliesh
I'm a 60 something year old guy, thank god I'm not an 'old boy', I'd be embarrassed. Though-out my working life the women I've known have always been interesting, challenging, and a joy to be around...old boys, not so much.
8
as it has been and ever shall be, as the PhD in molecular biology can attest.
6
As a minority woman in IT, and especially being a woman of a certain age, I have "3 strikes" against me. Being a woman, a minority, and older.
Iam surprised that NY times has not highlighted this issue more. Women of a certain age are practically invisible.
At work, my minor mistakes are highlighted, my significant accomplishments are minimized. Even when the customer requests me by name on projects, they are told Iam busy and someone younger is assigned to the task. Iam brought in when mistakes are made, to do the clean up work. If the clean up succeeds, it is seen as a win for the team (my name is never mentioned). If the clean up does not succeed, Iam sure to hear about it in my performance appraisal.
Why do I stay in this job you ask? Where else would can I go? It is the same everywhere.
33
@Desi ette
Women of a certain age are practically invisible.
Lucky you. Men are despised and sidelined.
2
@Desi ette
There are a lot of cases in which women are brought in to clean up messes and so the PR can point to the woman CEO and say that the institution is not discriminating. Liz Blackburn for Salk, the CEOs of GM, Lockheed, etc.
Once the mess is cleaned up, the men will take the credit and take back the power.
7
@Desi ette Document this junk and contact the EEOC.
4
When I graduated college in 1983, computer science was heralded as the one area which would not have a gender problem, since it is an intellectual career and not labor intensive.
Ironic that the big tech companies are being sued for gender discrimination.
I dealt with gender discrimination, sexual aggressiveness and was talked over many times. I was told by an executive that I was as good as the men around me, but I was missing that “extra something” to make me a star. I always figured it was that physical “extra special” appendage.
But, the women I worked for were the worst, emotionally abusive and vindictive. One told me I had it easy and it was up to her to ensure I was tough like her, that is why she ripped my work apart in front of others and expected more from me than the men in my department. It was a hazing.
Just as debilitating is agism in tech, which is being ignored by society. Companies say they want more visas to hire talent they can not find. No, they can find the talent, it’s just not young enough. See ProPublica articles on IBMs ousting of 20,000 older workers.
34
@S And IBM's female CEO gushes about AI cutting their HR staff by a third! But she's made her billions so she does not care.
4
@S As a 60 something worker in the technology field it's interesting to see that as the compensation for people in this field rose, how the gender mix began it's inexorable change.
6
@S, yup, some women can be extra hard on other women. I has seen it happen to friends and colleagues and have experienced it myself.
1
The other thing that really galls-- beyond the obvious wasted potential that sexism causes-- is how often a clearly sexist employee (like Dr. Verma) is also a liability for more serious charges. Like, hello institutions, nip your tolerance for sexist behavior in the bud and you'll have have far fewer lawsuits around e.g. sexual assault later. But of course, the lawsuits are not going to undo the damage. ugh.
19
For the sake of completeness in reporting, it might be worth mentioning that one of the world’s foremost plant scientists, Dr. Joanne Chory, is a long-time senior faculty member at the Salk. She has just garnered 35 million dollars worth of funding for her work developing plants that can sequester carbon with great efficiency, potentially mitigating climate change. Dr. Chory is a gifted, brave, and very prominent scientist, and it seems odd that her achievements at the Salk are not mentioned. For those who are interested in her remarkable work, she was profiled this week in the Guardian.
17
chory has HHMI support, which is different. it means she doesn't have to rely on the Salk for money because she has an independent stream. it means she has the HHMI 'seal of approval'. HHMI investigators are royalty and the few women who get it are allowed into the old boys club.
previously, HHMI had very few women - a whole other discussion- but now that Erin O'Shea is in charge, perhaps it is changing.
15
@Edna
Mentioning Chory would not fit the NYT's agenda.
4
The song One Fine Morning by Lighthouse is all that needs said. They've aged but the work goes on. Anyone whom states "you have no power," now understands power has boundaries--the human body. The Gnostics win.
2
First, as a scientist/engineer who is 70, I find the concept expressed by the author that science is a meritocracy quite naive. Yes, to some extent, but please read the history of science and it’s egos. Not strictly a meritocracy by any means.
Having said that, I saw first hand how women scientists were relegated to lesser roles in research than males in some instances. Typically in the earlier days that was acceptable to those women though very unfair. I never felt good about it. Hopefully today things are changing. Unfortunately brash egotistical men in any field tend to be rewarded regardless of their true measure of success.
And that hurts both women and men, though men typically do not tell their stories.
As to the supposed 6 per cent advantage in intelligence women may have, even if true, that in know way translates to scientific capability. It is much more complicated than that, as it would be in any field of endeavor.
13
@Wilmington Ed
.. As to the supposed 6 per cent advantage in intelligence ..
I wonder how "intelligence" is measured, what is the uncertainty of this six percent figure, and how one can consider "scientific" blank statements like that.
2
@Wilmington Ed..."First, as a scientist/engineer who is 70, I find the concept expressed by the author that science is a meritocracy quite naive."....I disagree. The goal of science is to discover truth, and when it comes to the truth, the science doesn't care who you are. Now if you are talking about the funding of science, that is quite another matter.
3
@W.A. Spitzer. Right...but if grants awarded to Salk are more often shared with males than females, who will be making the discoveries?
1
I've been in scientific academic circles for 40 years and I think gender neutrality has improved, especially in the last decade, but it is not yet a level playing field. Academic politics is fraught with pettiness at all levels, even amid brilliant thinking, sincere attempts at meritocracy, and noble dedication. There is a mixup between competitiveness and competence, with men often holding an advantage from the former--even if they are weaker in the latter. Further, many successful women know they must be highly competitive in personality to survive and do well, and shear brilliance is not quite enough.
When I hear about the case of Rosalind Franklin, as one comment here brought up, I recall the story of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Berkeley Ph.D., and Manhattan project scientist, whose experiments helped break the notion of the parity law back in the mid 1950's. She originally went to Berkeley for her Ph.D. as women had to use the backdoor to the physics building in her first choice, Michigan. Her theory colleagues got the Nobel (and were deserving) but she got hardly a mention for her groundbreaking (and confirming) work. 20 years later she received the first Wolf prize in physics recognizing her contributions--finally. Justice delayed is justice denied. And there is a lot of denied justice to the women of US science.
51
@Glenn Waychunas
There are men scientists that have been sidelined too, for instance, the GHK (Guralnik, Haggen and Kibble) co-discoveres of the "Higgs" theory. While widely acknowledged to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Scientific recognition is not a fair business, both for men and woman. Cherry-picking will get you some "recommends", but it does not prove anything.
6
It's gender and not just in academia. But it's also age. As was subtly pointed out several times in the article, support is increasing, but for younger women. And some of the senior women noted that - they want what the senior men get, but it costs more.
26
Whenever I hear a story like this, I often think that the issue is not one of 'gender' but rather of 'age', and specifically, the age of the people using their power inequitably.
The more I work with younger people, the more obvious it becomes that these kinds of deeply irrational, highly discriminatory attitudes towards gender, race, and sexual orientation are simply evolving out of the culture. To be clear, plenty of other irrational, reactionary, learned/unthinking biases persist, and some new ones are being birthed as well, but by and large I see the kind of progress and change that gives me great hope.
Change of the magnitude we're wanting is multi-generational, it is slow and happens in fits and starts, and often the people who work the hardest to birth it do not live to see the benefits of it. But I do believe we're getting there, and most adults I know who are connected to the youth of our world see it too.
Chin up everyone, we really are getting there, but if you spend too much time observing older adults you might miss the evidence.
8
@Gregory Scott,
you might have a point if not for the fact that these women were fighting for equality since they were YOUNG.
6
@Gregory Scott
... observing older adults you might miss the evidence
Older adults? Come again? Age discrimination is the only discrimination being considered OK by the PC crowd.
You should hang around more with the certaily less pretty older adults. You may learn something.
2
@Gregory Scott A key theme in this article is that as young women, these scientists believed that this time it would be different; but that it was not. And that probably goes, whether you are on the giving or receiving end of discrimination.
7
Thank you for publishing this article. This kind of discrimination is still pervasive, and people in all professions need to read about it, and think about it, and realize that if they choose to engage in it, they won't get away with it forever. The culture must change, and public examination plays an important role in shifting the consensus of what is acceptable.
29
The best article yet on this topic, thanks.
It should be passed out to all graduate students.
The perceived nature of science being only about data, and a belief in the inherent objectivity of science are two of the problems that support this sexism (and racism).
Graduate students and post docs, choose your mentors well.
28
@Kathy Barker
Amen!
2
@Kathy Barker
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25870272
1
@Phillygary It is not clear to me from browsing this study that the results and conclusions are not affected by desireability bias or response bias. The 5 experiments indeed used candidates with varying levels of experience, education, marital status, children, etc. but is not clear that the candidates' sex was kept unknown from the putative hiring decision makers. If sex is not hidden, then responders could be answering favorably merely because they are doing what it is expected of them, i.e. what they think is the "correct" or "socially acceptable" answer. In fact, if the purpose of the project is made clear to responders, there might be those who are biased and would answer specifically the opposite of how they would respond in real life to counter the effects of the study.
3
This is precisely why I left academia after completing my post-doc in neuroscience. Academic research institutional culture makes it difficult for females to have thriving careers.
29
@Annie - This culture is practically everywhere. I am so grateful that we are creating the vocabulary for discussion!
3
Is there anyone left in science who actually believes that one's scientific status is achieved by one's skills, and not by one's "connections"? If so, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that is for sale.
35
This is a striking article that shows the duplicity of males who are in power toward the women of equal stature. The men deny and obfuscate to ensure their continued power. It is a hard, hard problem for women to rise above and succeed. I wish all of these women scientists good luck and keep the faith!
35
@Interested...."The men deny and obfuscate to ensure their continued power.".....True, but why do you think that it is only directed against women and not other men as well?
4
@Interested
Including Francis Crick in the faculty of the newly formed Salk Institute. considering Crick's and Watson's treatment of Rosey," should have been a forewarning of the fate of female scientist at Salk.
3
Only have to look at the comments hear to understand how mysogynistic the world still is and how many men still believe that they earned their power because they are smarter, more competitive, more focused, ruthless, etc and not because they have been blessed with laws, rules, traditions and cultures that favor their transition to power--reminds me of the way plantation owners used to think that they owned plantations and slaves because God made them smarter. There probably would be more cures if women were treated equally--probably they would do more work for less money and would spend more time doing research and less time thinking about their egos.
31
@Anne
Well, duh! Good things happen to me because I'm smart and hard working. (Good looking is an added bonus but not part of my value structure.) Bad things happen but only because they were unforeseeable and bad luck happened.
You aren't quite as good as I am, and so have to rely on some lucky breaks and sometimes make mistakes, but you're doing the best you can. That guy over there? Part of the out-group. Everything he has is as a result of a handout. All the bad breaks are his own doing, the result of poor choices. (I also watch, well, to be honest, pretty much any tv news every night to strengthen these beliefs.)
“I know a lot of men who sincerely promote gender-equality opportunities for women, but all their efforts are devoted toward younger women,” Emerson says — because it’s less costly.
No! Absolutely not. It's not at allabout cost.
It's about competition and ego.
Younger women don't threaten the resources or power structure of senior men the way senior (read: equally deserving) women do.
80
@Shiloh 2012 Better decoration, too.
8
Sad and infuriating to read this - but it is so true. The glass ceiling in Corporate America becomes a cement ceiling in research. Double standards flourish in a smorgasbord of infuriating hurdles. Women have to work 2x as hard and get paid half of a man's salary. Apart from that, when a company goes public - brains are out of the equation! Many times. as long as a woman is cute,blonde and social in her ways- she gets more stock options! Most women scientists are brilliant dedicated women who want to and DO CONTRIBUTE so much to a scientific process or thought- but are never rewarded. It is very heartbreaking.
28
Women are in a double bind. If they are good at networking and playing the game they are described often as too aggressive or worse trying to "sleep" their way to the top. Men often assume that even smiling at them is a come on and unprofessional. If you are too introverted and not into networking you are not a team player. I wonder if any woman has ever learned to play this game to her advantage.
34
@Just paying attention
She can learn to stop caring whether people thinks she's too aggressive or using her sexuality or whether they like her. She can value power and prestige over being liked. You know, like most men at the top do.
It certainly won't make her a better person, but may very well make her successful.
1
Watson and Crick are archetypical examples of male chauvinism, who refused to give Rosalind Franklin any credit for her role in discovering the structure of DNA. Every time I hear their names in a positive context, I want to scream. They are where they are only because they stole Franklin's work and claimed it as their own.
34
@Leonardo.....I grant you that Franklin did not get the recognition she justly deserved for her technical expertise, but neither did she make the required leap of imagination that revealed the double helix. In the end, Watson and Crick diminished their own discovery by not properly recognizing her contribution.
8
@W.A. Spitzer
Also, the Lorentz transformations describing the contraction of space at higher speeds were known well before Einstein's special relativity. In science a contribution, even a great contribution, is nothing more than a contribution.
2
@W.A. Spitzer
So, the little lady could do the manual work, but didn't have the brains?
Please stop "helping".
3
'In 2005, she attended an invitation-only conference in Cambridge, where Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s president at the time, wondered aloud whether the scarcity of female scientists at elite universities might be a function of “intrinsic aptitude".'
Boy, I sure wish I could have wondered allowed right back at him (very loudly) in the middle of that conference that perhaps instead it was because of intrinsic bigotry and prejudice against female scientists that caused that scarcity.
45
@Mary
However there are people in this forum that mention a "study" showing that women are six percent more intelligent than "males". Are you going to get "right back at them very loudly" (in your own words), or do you accept "intrinsic bigotry and prejudice" against "males"?
1
The behavior described in this article is cheating. The excuses from the Salk Institute are the excuses of cheaters, transparent and thin. Academia should prepare students to expect cheating in all of its forms and arm them with the weapons they need to root it out, with the support of the institution and the government, where it supplies the funding. And please, no more of this self-serving talk of "meritocracy," which is a bald-faced lie and always has been. Gaaaah!
24
This is why I left basic research for medicine. After the medieval training period, it is slightly less inequitable.
I doubt there are many women in any field who have not suffered the casual assumption of superiority by male colleagues, no matter how mediocre; the appropriation of money, space, and ideas; the silencing at formal meetings and the exclusion from informal ones; last but not least, sexual harassment until one is, thankfully, too old to be visible.
I sometimes wonder if a single violent rape with lasting physical scarring would be easier to recover from than the constant accretion of "a ton of feathers".
21
@mignon
That is truly strange comparison.
1
All this is a little too true.
I’ve faced this all my life especially because I work in medical subspecialties where there are fewer women.
But, let me also tell you, when women get to the top, eg, head of the department or CEO etc, you would think they would understand what they had gone through and would be cognizant of this for other women... Hades, no!
They can be worse than an old-boys club.
Unless, women themselves stand together against male marginalization and misogynistic attitudes... we would get nowhere.
37
Discrimination against women happens across disciplines. One of the biggest obstacles to progress is our legal system, which hinders the ability of women to seek redress. When plaintiffs sue, claiming discrimination on the basis of race, religion, disability, etc., the legal test for assessing the legality of the discrimination is called “Strict Scrutiny.” The Strict Scrutiny standard requires that the discrimination be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest. With gender discrimination, the courts apply lower levels of scrutiny. Women have been repeatedly fired for being “too attractive” and this is routinely upheld by courts. When such discrimination is permissible, it is not only difficult to win in court, it also effects settlements and makes it difficult for women to even find an attorney willing to take such a difficult case. The possibility of trying a gender discrimination case before an older misogynistic male judge does not help the situation. Until an Equal Rights Amendment is passed, women have little hope of achieving equal access to the upper echelons of any profession.
11
Years ago I was told that most of the workplace should be reserved for males supporting families; that women in the workplace debased salaries, and they should be confined to female occupations.
15
@Liz 25 years ago, a male colleague and I in the same position at a large entertainment company were promoted at the same time to the same position. I learned his pay was increased $100 more a week than mine. Bringing it up to the executive who made that decision I was told “He has to support a family”. I replied “Well, I’d like to have one to support-and it would help if I made the same salary!” He just laughed at me.
12
The reaction to reward inequality is pretty basic. See this video clip of an experiment run by Franz van Waals and his colleagues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg&feature=youtu.be
4
"A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste"
Apropos then, apropos now...
7
As a non-scientist, I was always vaguely impressed when I even heard the name of the Salk Institute. As of today, that is over. Hearing about the egregious treatment of female scientists there disgusts me. I will never think of that institution in the same way. Shameful and pathetic! You are depriving the world of important talent.
27
Thank you to Mallory Pickett and the NYT for this in-depth, well-researched article.
30
My youngest daughter is entering her senior year in college. I am concerned that this situation will impact her as she pursues her career in science.
That being said, I do not see this as others might. I am in a career dominated by women and I have had my share of slights, misconceptions and bias. I have learned to roll with it but as I wind down my career I feel sorry for those who have missed out on my full potential. That is what saddens me the most about this whole situation. We do not treat people as people but as a symbol.
10
@Ed C Your statement of not achieving full potential echos my experience. Not being taken as seriously as the "boys" and the double standards of me needing more experience vs my male counterpart having great potential, for example. And as you note, all our efforts to promote ourselves and make headway for women, equality is still being denied to our daughters, now young women themselves.
9
Disheartening.
7
Dear allies expressing solidarity, please remember that the forces of inequality highlighted here are intersectional in nature and that there are more allies than you may realize, who face similar hurdles, albeit within a different context. Remember this when another article reveals persisting inequality faced by group whom you may not readily identify (on the surface) yet who share your concerns nonetheless.
13
The old boys club in science has morphed into a "Must have money or Go club." In order for Beverly Emerson to continue working at the Salk , "the Institute required that she have enough grant money to cover half her salary. She didn’t. "
Most medical schools assign and reassign research space on the basis of research dollar density. For each example, a square feet of space for wet lab research typically costs at least $600 plus $200 indirect cost. That means that the researcher must have a grant that can pay the institution at least $800 for every square foot of wet lab space that they have. In addition, research faculty must also pay for some fraction of their salary and benefits from grants , usually at a rate of at least 50% or more. Tenured faculty who fail to
secure grants to meet this bar, like Dr. Emerson are to an alarming degree these days, forced to close their labs.
Given the abysmal rate of success in securing NIH funding , it is not surprising that women are drowning in this environment. The NIH which is the major source of funding for biological research in this country can stop this toxic cycle, by prohibiting institutions accepting federal funds from closing labs down if they don't meet an arbitrary funding metric. The NIH needs to remind institutions that their investment is not just in the science, it is also in the individual.
25
@Irene Cantu Alas, most research institutions cannot afford to adopt this policy. Modern biomedical science is an extraordinarily expensive proposition, and most universities, medical schools, and research institutes do not have endowments that will allow them to maintain a research laboratory without the laboratory bringing in research grants.
3
@Zen Ah yes, this is the usual response.
And yet, they can continue to buy advertising,
expand their campuses and build new buildings.
Scientists did not go into science to make money for their employer. At some point, all that overhead is just a cash cow for the institution.
18
I've got a rather unique point of view. I am tenure-track at PI at an ivy league institution. My funding and publication track records are above average for my institution, for people at my level. I also have a lifelong neurological disability. I also have a speech impairment due to my disability. (I'm not complaining!!) I see how people treat me. I'm regularly mistaken for a patient, even though my disability is perfectly stable and needs no medical intervention. At conferences, I often have to prove to the AV staff that I'm visiting them at the pre-talk checkpoint because *I* am the one giving the next talk!
Colleagues are nearly always great to me - my work, leadership style, and collegiality apparently speak for themselves. Though I often struggle to be physically heard at larger institutional meetings. I carry around "cartoon bubbles" to write what I want to say, if my speech is particularly hard for someone to understand that day. It does feel a bit childish, but it keeps people comfortable, I think.
I definitely miss out on invitations to lecture, on institutional dinners, and probably promotions etc because of people's perceptions of my disability. It's not always easy. I focus on my science, hopeful that the quality of my work will carry me through.
45
Those commenters here who resent women wanting to use their brains like men do: Why would you cripple your nation by insisting that fully 50% of the adult population not contribute fully, as they have talent/skills/drive? Not enough to offer?
It's been pretty well established that women can become pilots, astronauts, Marines, scientists, on and on and on, and men haven't died by the thousands because of it. So can we stop with the "women want too much" now??
What is it about proud America that's so scared of women moving around as freely as men? Serious question. Why is a woman's contribution outside of the man-controlled boundaries so unnerving that we can't even agree to pay her the same! The ERA still hasn't passed, because men are still so scared from the 70's... It's just pathetic. Men want to tell women stuff, but not just be workers together.
92
Nice to know the nerdy, moneyed 1950s attitude, boomer male still holds away in science.
I pull the rip cord on research 1994 for similar issues in the research lab I worked. Better to reinvent myself, than deal with the attitude that women work as a "hobbie", until a hubby and or kids come along. "Isn't that cute? She's playing scientist." attitude has got to go.
Dimes to donuts, minority men aren't getting a fair deal over at Salk, either.
47
@Ford313
You are likely correct.
The experience of these women in science made me remember and mourn for Hillary. Agree with her politics or not, no one could question her credentials, qualifications, or suitability for the presidency. But she was judged out of office by a bunch of misogynist trolls, incels, and patriarchs (and the women who love them), who couldn't see anything other than an old scold.
71
@MP
Hillary's qualification were being Mrs. Bill Clinton.
How do you think she became a partner at the Rose law firm and member of the Walmart board? Insular Little Rock would not have given Hillary the time of day (her Yale degree not withstanding) had she not been the governor 's wife
2
I graduated from college summa cum laude in the 70's and was offered a teaching position I wanted only because, as the letter I received stated, the school couldn't find a "qualified male". Times don't seem to have changed much, other than such discrimination is no longer spelled out in writing.
65
@Suzanne....All what you say may be true, but I also know of a case in the 70's where a less well qualified women was offered the position because the University was desperate to establish a better gender balance in their faculty.
3
@W.A. Spitzer
Lost cause. I have also witnessed cases of positive discrimination from 25 years ago to now, but nobody seems interested in taking this into account.
2
It is 2019. I suspect in 20 years it will be very similar.
Rosalind Franklin is still left out in the mention of DNA and Watson and Crick. How appropriate.
Shame on the Salk institute, which I am very familiar with.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/rosalind-franklin-a-crucial-contribution-6538012
35
@Jack black south
When I was in high school biology 10 years ago in a conservative rural area we watched a whole movie on her. I think she pretty consistently gets credit nowadays.
I am a man who chairs a department and I don't care what race, sex, or religion my employees are. I only care about results. I see have heard stories of sexism, racism and witnessed it and reported it and those people lost their jobs at my institution. I can't control what is outside my sphere of influence, but in the niche that I have created and supervise, everybody is created and treated equally. I believe in servant leadership and a meritocracy. I am trying to mentor a female asian "star" and recognize that mentors are to be found everywhere these days, not just in my department. I work hard to create opportunities and network for them because that is how you build loyalty and a great place to work. The number one physician leader in our organization is female and of the top 5 leaders, 3 are female. One thing I DO discriminate against... people who are JERKS. NO JERKs allowed in my group!
31
@MVSABR
It's so great that you're the one person doing this and rather than contribute to the discussion of the systemic issue, you spend your entire response blowing your own horn.
5
Sexism occurs in science on occasion. There is no denying that there are still male scientists who don't value the opinions and contributions of women simply because they are women. I've seen it myself as have many colleagues. It is an injustice and should be stamped out. However, we do the cause of equality a disservice when we attribute every failure of a woman to advance, obtain funding, be recognized, etc. to sexism. Having ovaries doesn't guarantee that you are good at or qualified for anything anymore than having testicles does. When a man fails to advance, it is attributed to him not being good at what he does. The same is true for women in many cases. Sometimes it is due to sexism but many times it is based on performance as it should be. And the inference that any success a man obtains in science is somehow tainted by wink-wink backroom testosterone fests is offensive.
9
@Sci guy. The problem is that women are not recognised for the work they do, or the ideas they envision, to the same degree as men. Women are talked over, only to find their ideas repeated by men who subsequently get the credit for the idea. There is no "on occasion" about it. I have seen females, leaders in their fields, routinely dismissed by males and told there are no women qualified to present at a meeting. Yet these women are preeminent experts in their field. Attending the Nobel's in 2015, the economist honoured that year credited his wife, and partner in his work, to forwarding his career. Why wasn't she a co-awardee?
20
@Sci guy "on occasion?" On occasion??? come to any American tech center and look at the DATA of women in tech and science. The numbers are inexplicable except through sexism and racism. Get over yourself and start looking at the numbers and open your mind. You were born lucky: the odds of you having been able to write your letter had you been born a boomer female are very low single digit.
19
@Sci guy Laughable. Look at the demographic data. It's obviously not attributable to a failure to advance.
11
This happens in nearly every field that is dominated by men. Women are disparaged, overlooked, denied privileges, treated like excess baggage, and silenced. They are lied about. Their ideas are ignored. They are expected to be perfect while the men are allowed to make mistakes. They are accused of doing things they didn't do. It happens in the sciences, in IT, in every field where women are a minority or where women begin to threaten the mens majority.
I've worked in 2 male dominated fields. The consistent condescension, omission, and ignoring, as well as how it was done was more than frustrating. I watched men whose work was of a lower quality than mine were promoted, praised, and treated like gods. My rewards were nonexistent except for getting my name on several papers. Yet when I went on interviews I was asked illegal questions about my marital status, my age, or if I planned to have children. Now, because I'm 60 and don't dye my hair, when I go on interviews I'm looked at as an old hag.
All the qualities that men prize in other men they disparage in women of all ages. Assertiveness, courage to try, willingness to be wrong, curiosity, intelligence; none of those qualities are valued in women of any age in any field. I've been working for over 30 years and not once did I go a year without having a disparaging comment or three directed at me due to my gender.
I sincerely hope that God is a woman.
4/18/19 12:26pm
426
@hen3ry Amen, amen, amen.
24
@hen3ry
I watched men whose work was of a lower quality than mine were promoted, praised, and treated like gods ... Now, because I'm 60 and don't dye my hair, when I go on interviews I'm looked at as an old hag.
I am a man your same age. I could have written the sentences above.
30
@S.G. I am sorry to hear that you were treated as badly as I've been. Unfortunately it's more common for this treatment to be aimed at women. I know some men are treated badly at work. Sometimes it's because they are disabled, gay, too smart for their own good (i.e. they aren't one of the "guys"), or they treat women like real people.
What is truly horrible about this is that adults are supposed to have outgrown childish behavior. From all I've seen at work and on social media, too many adults don't. Men tend to be the worst. I'm not sure why. It could be our culture or it could be something else. But women and men are equal when it comes to bullying behavior on the job. My experience with bullies is that no matter what gender they are they destroy morale, hurt other employees, and are equal opportunity blamers.
34
A big problem w scientists of all genders is that they think they are entitled to research funding, especially from public sourcs. And this grievance varies little from those who get a lot to those who get little for their labs or their dreams.
There are differences, of course, but this professional plaint--"I did not get the funding I deserve"--sometimes sounds a lot like career military officers and defense contractors.
4
This article presents one of the many reasons why after graduating from MIT in life sciences, getting a PhD in molecular biology in the lab of a Nobel Laureate at Caltech, and then post-doc'g for three years, I decided to forego science and go to law school, which turned out to be one of the best decisions in my life. Practicing law, I advanced on my merits; I lacked confidence I could do that in science.
20
@Richard Since you're a man, it seems you would have been fine in most places. I think that's the point of this particular article as it relates to the Salk Institute. Men were valued and rewarded.
3
@Former diver
as a former scientist, you are wrong. The "right men" are valued and rewarded. Most of us poor sods are not.
4
@Richard Even though I maintain one foot in academic research, I saw early on that a lot of it involved politics, something I was and still am not all that interested in. Running a research group is like running a small business. Writing or pitching grants is like pitching a business proposal. I feel like if I want to do that as my major tasks, why do science? Why not go into business entirely? At least in law and medicine (my field) you can be judged and succeed or not to a large degree by how well you serve your clients/ patients instead of having layers of people judging you by factors other than your actual work.
1
Yes, but don't forget about age discrimination. At lesser institutions females do quite well but there is always an ongoing push for more support of females. There are creations of Women's studies and Women's centers with constant pushes for female salary increases. Look at citations and grant money and many of the claims are without substance.
2
@hd
Not only females. 40 is the kiss of death for any post-doc.
3
@hd At my institution, women's studies was nearly on the chopping block lately along with other programs. And in general, "females" like to be called women.
3
@hd. Aside from the fact that you are mixing things up—-women’s studies and women’s centers on campus does not mean there is an active effort to recruit more women to science or to eliminate gender inequalities—The existence of women’s studies programs is because of demand, yes. But the question has to be, are they treated equally? And the answer is a resounding no.
These departments are generally underfunded in comparison to other departments, state/campus boards if teview are dubious about their existence, faculty, students, and research, and institutions try to eliminate them regularly.
4
the old boys club is alive and well. This article doesn't even touch the bias evident in the vast majority of scientific meetings and this has consequences for all the issues raised in this article (funding, perceived prestige, publishing). Most speakers invited to present at meetings are men (most organizers fail to attempt to balance gender of invitees). A few societies are trying to improve these imbalances. Opportunities to present at national/international meetings has huge impacts to careers. This is a self-perpetuating problem that even women organizers fall prey to. For some reason or other, women scientists are invisible, even when their contributions and impact are as meaningful as their male peers.
65
@A J Most women who do get invited to speak at meetings are put into the last slot in the morning or afternoon session so the men can get to lunch or the bar early without feeling they've missed something worthwhile.
7
@mignon
You seem to to bother about overgeneralizing. I am a man. Last time I gave a scientific talk I was put the 7 pm slot.
2
@S.G. Fair enough.
1
There are so many issues women face in academic and private sector scientific research. I think one of the biggest problems for younger women in science, and many other fields, is the lack of mentorship. Most of us tend to associate with people like ourselves. Men are likely to be most comfortable with other men, so are thus more inclined to mentor other men. This segregation starts very early in one's career, often in college.
I've always tried to mentor younger women scientists and engineers. I hope I've been successful. My experience is that women scientists tend to be more thoughtful and considered when stating conclusions, men tend to be more forceful and argumentative. The former approach is better for doing good science, but the latter is more likely to get noticed. Good leadership and mentorship can make all the difference in these situations.
I have a good friend, a woman, who is a producer at a major film studio. She's very active in mentoring young women entering the profession. One of her female mentees, in her late 20's, won an Oscar this year. It's hard to overemphasize the importance of good leadership all the way up the hierarchy. This is a systemic problem, and needs a systemic fix.
60
@hammond
It should be clear from the article that mentoring is not the problem. By definition, the person being mentored is in an inferior hierarchical position.
The problem is an abusive hierarchy, controlled by a club of Neanderthal patriarchs. Note also that the problem is cross-cultural, as Prof. Verma's role indicates. It has produced a meritocracy of male dinosaurs. Note also that Salk Institute intends to do precisely nothing to shed light on the problem, as it exacted non-disparagement ( please read gag, rather than the euphemism) agreements in settlement of the discrimination suit. Louis Brandeis said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." The Institute doesn't want any.
10
@Howard Eddy While mentoring does not seem to be the focus of this NY Times article, it is a well-documented issues for women in science and tech. Mentorship makes a huge difference between making mistakes and taking a long time to get somewhere/ learn something vs. taking a much more efficient route with opportunities and funding available to you that you did not even know of. I have been the beneficiary -- as a woman -- of some excellent mentors (mostly male) and I see the contrast between myself and other peers who don't have it available to them. In my mid-30s, I was placed on an influential federal advisory committee because of one mentor and I was given a board position because of another mentor. I've also had lucrative jobs referred my way: while in training, I worked for 3 days/ month at a private practice and the pay was enough to pay my rent in LA for a month.
3
For most of my graduate career, I was completely unaware of the depth of discrimination in the sciences. It was only as a postdoctoral fellow, faced with an advisor who chronically undervalued his female graduate students, that I began to look around me more closely. The resources, freedom, and projects your advisor gives you can greatly impact your publication record. Discrimination against women at the graduate level therefore impacts the strength of their resumes when they graduate.
126
The patriarchy is infused in our society. Only when that iron fist grip is loosened can we make any headway.
36
Let me understand this - you love your job and want to stay but you file a lawsuit against them? What did you think would happen in just about any business, male or female? Every heard "don't bite the hand that feeds you"?
6
@David
How did you decide which words in the article to read?
32
The hand that feeds you scraps while others around are gorging on handouts? I say bite, and bite down hard. We are talking about great minds being limited by discrimination. Enough is enough @David
49
@David: Except that the hand wasn't feeding her, it was slapping her.
43
Shocking how men 'round the world treat women. As a female, it's hard to understand why men are so anti-women, but that they are is easily discernible. Perhaps it really is just time to stop trying to understand the overwhelming propensity towards misogyny and incel-ism and just demand that we be treated as if we are human and have rights.
PS I predict there will be a dearth of men writing in outraged at the injustice faced by women. Every time there's an article like this, the comments from men trend towards minimization, denialism and defensiveness: "Not *all* men are bad!!"
141
@Regina Valdez
I am in total sympathy with the plight of women around the globe; to be considered less than based on genitalia, skin color, bank account, etc. is despicable. Just so difficult to grasp/understand these prejudices; is it fear, pride, hatred, greed, tribalism, misogyny? Men, born of women, seem thereafter to hold it against them and be in constant struggle to hold them down. Once the patriarchal order of things in every endeavor is forever over, the world will be on a humanistic trajectory where progress, in every area, will flourish.
18
@Regina Valdez "Not all men are bad"
It isn't the bad guys who are the main problem; it's the men who are "not like that" who refuse to act against it by not enforcing existing rules, refusing to recognize the evidence, who gaze off into space, glassy eyed and slack jawed, pretending that the situation is just imagination on the part of childish, thin- skinned women. They don't act out in gender attacks against women, but o-o-oh do they love to watch it!
36
@Regina Valdez Your prediction is correct. The statement "Men are so anti-women" is an offensive generalization applied to half of humanity based on gender. The path to less discrimination is not paved with discriminatory over-generalizations. Using ignorant, sweeping, over-generalizations really detracts from the point you are making. Please stop.
5
Is this really about sexism, or simply the 'viability' of one's scientific merit, male or female? As ever, the New York TImes attempts to obscure an issue by proclaiming the 'scare' headline, only to reveal deep into the article certain fundamental truths----that it essentially boils down to economics (surprise) or marketability (surprise, again).
But it can be about sexism if you so want it or demand it. If you want to make it about being 'being female', then it is you who are creating the hostile work environment. And by the way, just what did you think was happening to men back in the good old days of the male-dominated workplace? Did you imagine that each man was privileged, that each of us were given the secret password and bestowed the key to the executive washroom? Did you think it would be easy?
Many men have lost status by being fired near retirement, so that the company could buy two or three post-grads for the same salary. Many men have had smaller offices than others; many have had to endure the very same scenarios as described in this article.
Face it, male or female, you are just another heartbeat in the workplace.
15
@David Bartlett The article reveals quite a bit about the misogyny at Salk, actually. The opportunities offered, or denied, to any particular scientist on his or her way to build a portfolio of research greatly matter in the "economics" and "marketability" analysis. If you are constantly hamstrung along your path and your male colleagues are given all the opportunities that you're not allowed then of course they will become more marketable. You've assumed an equal playing field where there is not.
101
@David Bartlett
What about the research that demostrates that when a man and woman with the same resume are considered for employment, the man is considered more qualified? What about the quantitative measures (lab dimensions) at MIT that showed that men's labs were larger than those of female faculty members. Your argument falls apart quickly when quatitative measures are considered.
41
@David Bartlett They addressed this in the article, perhaps you skimmed over it. The Times had statements from other male scientists who confirmed that there is certainly favoritism, that they struggled for funding too while the chosen ones got special treatment. But you cannot deny the fact that three of the five smallest (read worst) labs were given to SENIOR women scientists. The "least" of the senior male scientists had over 1000 sqft more than them. What does this tell us? "Women, you are not valued. You are an afterthought." It is exactly men like you who impede progress. You refuse to see things for what they are. I can only wonder why.
37
The discrimination disgusts me. Men are not superior to women and should not be treated as such.
Keep up the great reporting highlighting these injustices. We have a long way to go!
62
An excellent article, but not surprising. The arrogance of self-important male scientists has, and always will be, disgusting.
William Brody, when called out, is just another political hack who lies like a rug.
55
Thank you NYT for putting a spotlight on this issue - science should be the ultimate meritocracy, and what happened to these top women scientists for decades at the Salk Institute is a disgrace.
61
Thanks to NYT for publishing this article. And....UGH!
The old boys club lives.
It's better now than back in the 70s but still has a ways to go.
35
There’s a lot of discrimination at places like Salk that have a basis other than gender, although many probably indirectly result in gender disadvantage. These places should not be run as private clubs, as they were in the 1980s and as they might still be today. Fix the clubbiness mindset and have them run as true meritocracies and you will go a long way to removing many of the hurdles that these women faced. Leave them in place and no number of sex-discrimination lawsuits is going to get you where you need to be. To paraphrase Elizabeth Blackburn, a half-a-ton of feathers will still crush you.
16
We are a foolish people. Too often we devalue genius if it speaks with a high pitched voice or if its epidermis has a colorful tone. Most men can lift up heavier boxes than most women but women's cognitive skills are equal to that of the other gender.
25
I am so tired of being a female.
Is personhood too much to ask for?
128
@Gwe Best comment. I feel the same.
6
@Gwe
Sorry, according to Republicans, only fetuses deserve personhood. And even then, only until birth.
8
@Gwe
Me too. Me too. Me too.
1
It's disheartening to see that we as a culture haven't advanced much beyond the "He-man Women Hater's Club" tree house mentality.
32
I have three daughters. My great grandma had four daughters. My grandma had two daughters. I have one granddaughter.
Why do I get the feeling of sadness that things for any of us women have never changed in the work world that men run and/or that they will ever change?
24
When there is a finding of gender discrimination, the remedy should be that the victim should be allowed to start a company/firm/institute that is exempt from discrimination laws.
1
Women just have to understand that they are lacking in an important trait required to be accepted by entrenched male power... it's called hubris, "excessive pride or self-confidence".
While this trait in men has led us to many of the greatest disasters in history (Dick Cheney's influence over foreign policy comes to mind), our species seems to respond to it as something that inspires confidence.
The only problem is that we only seem to admire it when the trait is displayed by men. As the king of hubris now occupying the White House clearly demonstrates, it is clearly time to end our infatuation with male hubris in our leaders.
How much human talent do we squander by not adequately recognizing and utilizing the talent and potential in our women? It staggers the mind to contemplate.
Time to bring on an Icelandic feminist revolution in the United States!
91
@alan haigh I think it goes past hubris and into narcissism and toxicity.
What is amazing is that hubris, narcissism, and excessive pride are seen as signs of a good leader, someone who has such confidence in his research that he mustn’t be right. Filled with fear, people follow. Well, the men do, anyway.
1
@Kathy Barker, I wish it was only men who are impressed by hubristic male leaders- that would increase the odds of improvement.
In the last election about 47% of white women cast their votes for Trump and only 44% voted for Clinton according to the best available data.
I don't know exactly what that proves, besides the fact that Lincoln should have let the south start their own country after freeing their slaves.
6
@Alan haigh Yes...you are right...
For those who would like to explain away this blatant systemic discrimination by saying that the male scientists named in this story were conducting research that was recognized to be more "valuable" by the scientific community, I ask: How does one conduct the most valuable research when one is denied the resources needed to do so, and those rescues are controlled by people who have an interest in keeping you small?
65
This is clearly a civil rights issue, and this article makes it clear that we can talk about racism and misogyny as two sides of the same coin. If the patriarchy had been doing its job and paying attention to the ideals of equal opportunity, that would be one thing, but it's clear that that's not what's going on here. The only thing that saddens me is that there can't be any retaliation for any of this, which means that the men involved won't know how the women felt if they don't fall afoul of the #MeToo movement.
11
Scientist here. This article rings true for me. Salk does stand out for its reputation as a bad place for women. Of course, the cohort of silverback gorillas "leading" the place has certainly damaged many men's careers as well. Most important is the generality, not the specifics. A pattern of identifying a few favored scientists, who ascend by impressing the leaders with some admixture of chutzpah and puffery far more than merit, is typical of private research institutes as well as medical schools. Then, these jerks are given big salaries, titles, and the opportunity to hoard resources like space and donor funding. Self-dealing is the result and even encouraged. All of this encourages bad boy behavior, favors men (typically the worst kind) and works against women. Until we address the poisonous nature of the star system (elevating scientists who are famous mostly for being famous, like many of those Salk faculty mentioned here), this pattern will simply repeat. To understand how much this can get out of hand and the potential for collateral damage, see the recent NYT series on the hijinks at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
220
@Steve This should be a NYT pick. You've articulated a systemic problem that affects many different types of workplaces.
28
@Steve Scientist here, too. I second that this should be a NYT pick. What the article only hints at is that fundraising and networking are now at a peak level in their use for defining 'great success' in science, not the quality of a person's creative contributions, or mentoring, etc. This environment naturally leads to the dominance of the silverbacks who can schmooze the best with (old, rich) potential donors to get the megabucks that are needed to support a major scientist's team and lab. I'm sure Salk feels it is a 'meritocracy'. Whoever could raise the most money -- by hook or by crook, often by crook including what some might consider unethical internal favoritism -- is naturally defined at the biggest 'star'. The problem for progress in a scientific field is that the dominating silverbacks are often pretty out-of-date (e.g. more up-to-date with potential funders than the cutting-edge science in their field) and often have trouble in recognizing innovative new pathways in their field, so will frequently shower money on sterile research projects that don't lead to major progress...
23
"(Verma says he does not recall this conversation.)" - how very convenient.
like many other women in research, I came out of grad school thinking that I was on a trajectory for the Nobel prize one day. I gave up soon after I hit my first sexist roadblock. along with life events, it was not worth the fight for me.
20
@JA
why do you think that men do not find roadblocks, even sexist roadblocks? I found many sexist comments against men here.
A perfect example of why the world is a mess, the most highly qualified women in a field being blackballed by a fraternity of men worried that a woman might outrank them.
68
If she were that qualified she would have enough grant money to pay her salary 3 times over. Perhaps she wasn’t producing what she should have been?
3
Of course Verma's students wrote on his behalf. If they had not, he would have made sure that there were consequences. Tolerating sexual harassment is at the core of the problem, but there is a lot else that is really horrible for women going on here at no cost, of course, to any of the men who sit happily on the sidelines, watching it happening and doing nothing.
51
This story is little different than ones published about gender discrimination when I was a child in the 1950's. We made progress, but then in 2016 feminism died. The problem is not men. It's women, who are the majority but too often refuse to exercise the power of their numbers. We almost made a giant step forward for women in 2016, but then most white women voted for a misogynist, because to them preserving racial privilege mattered more. Now, sexists sneer at people like us who want a better world, such as in comments to this piece, because they know they can get away with it. Women went to the voting booth and actually encouraged them. That's the real, relevant story. Repeating endless examples of gender discrimination serves no real purpose because people who actually care are too few. The real question is how the world will be different now that sexism is so open and brazen and most people don't want to do anything about it except complain about "political correctness." The real question is how to think now about an America that does not want to be better, or good.
27
@Joe
Thank you Joe for your comment. I know some of those women(like my own mother) who had spent their lives being loyal to their man and afraid of a world where their primary source of respect (as wife and mother) was challenged.
10
@Joe Thank you, Joe. This is an element that often is overlooked and unaccounted for in conversations about gender. And, I'm glad you've mentioned the 2016 elections as an example of this. The dynamic I observe is that fairness, access to opportunity and professional advancement for women of all colors isn't prized or prioritized--it seems that there is a push for only white women to achieve parity, first. POC are left to fend for themselves or otherwise, when (white) women's advantages seem to be threatened, they will support the patriarchy and often against their own interests. Another problem I see is that women push each other down and compete against each other, more often than men do.
1
@Joe It's a shared problem but I do agree with you that on a large scale, women are their own worst enemy. (yes, I'm a woman)
3
I can’t speak for female scientists, but I can say that academia is a club and the “merit” of work is subjective and is often determined by who you know, and whether you follow the party line, as much as the value of what you’ve actually done to advance knowledge. Is there still gender discrimination? Absolutely. I’ve had professors try to set me up to either kick me out of the PhD programme, or make it so hard that I would have no choice but to give up, because they decided I couldn’t handle it because I am also a mother. That is, despite my producing copious work for them and knowing the literature in the field better than them. I even got told off for working too hard. (Fortunately, their plan didn’t work) and I’ve since gone on to win prizes and publish papers in well regarded journals. But, it’s an uphill battle. Academia is very competitive and people will do anything to get ahead and push you down, especially if they see you as a threat. If they can use your gender to do that they will. And men simply don’t like smart women. Period.
306
@Kay
"And men simply don’t like smart women. Period." I was with you right up until the end.
8
@Dream Weaver
but like it or not, it is so often true: many men (and often women as well) do not like smart women at all. In a competitive workplace based on intelligence and competition: academia and scientific research institutes, smart women are especially resented.
You’re very lucky to never have experienced it and to be unfamiliar with the phenomenon.
33
@Kay
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant "some men don't like smart women" or "many men..." Making general pronouncements about the entire gender won't get us anywhere.
10
The daily slights do take a toll on your sense of value. As a female physician I am assumed to be a nurse routinely, I get asked to get bedpans and coffee for family members even after introducing myself as the physician. I had a family make a formal complaint that the nurse was great but the doctor never came and spoke with them. I was also once directly told I was paid less than a more junior male colleague because he had a family to support.
Imagine being a female physician of color who are routinely assumed to be hospital housekeeping.
Academic science is so very competitive due to the limited grant money available that these daily slights will inevitably make a lot of women say what’s the point. Especially after having children. Why pay my salary for childcare and be denigrated daily? And get shamed for abandoning your children? The choice becomes easy and women drop out.
124
@AR: My wife is also a physician. She has had similar experiences.
As a white male medical student I remember entering the room of a women, accompanied by a petite female resident and a black male attending. The patient had cancer and was naturally very upset. She had a lot of questions, all of which she directed at me because, well, I was the white man in the room.
60
@AR "I was also once directly told I was paid less than a more junior male colleague because he had a family to support." Get that on the record in the future and collect a nice chunk of change while setting the medical center on the right track. Seriously, people are awful. Academics in particular seem to be especially oblivious to their biases and the law.
13
My hope is that you directed the patient’s attention to the resident — repeatedly, if need be. When we passively allow this type of behavior, nothing changes and we are part of the problem.
My husband accompanied me recently when I was making a large purchase. The salesman assumed he should be talking to my husband and kept addressing him even though I was the one asking questions and my husband was the one hanging back. Finally my husband laughed, pointed to me, and said to the salesman, “You should be selling to her. She’s the buyer. She’s the one with the money.” It was only then that I had the salesman’s full attention. Oy.
20
I work for a software company as the unrecognized senior support agent. I have worked there for 16 years. My male supervisor is always marginalizing me in overt and subtle ways. I'm referred to as my department rather than my name, he purposefully excludes me on client issues, meetings and updated information I should be involved with. I have been attacked by him in a staff meeting without foundation, when I reported this to the owner of the company, he was instructed to apologize to me and he refused to. The list goes on and this will not end.
45
@Light Blues
No, the abuse, humiliation, marginalized status, will never end. I have finally retired after a lifetime of hiding the rage engendered by these systems only to find being “ an old lady” is even more enraging. I will go to my death having never been seen as equal and of equal value. I will go to my grave still filled with rage.
16
@mltrueblood
More like you can go to the grave with a smile as you know just how much all these people remain sloshing around in their pathetic ignorance. The abuse, humiliation, and marginalized status plus your own smarts brought you this knowledge.
2
Real opportunity is not just an open door.
Real opportunity is an open and supportive community, where all people can enjoy friendship, camaraderie, and the peace and joy of being valued.
I'm so very tired of 'opportunity hires' and "comparing student and faculty populations" . . . what is the point of hiring someone the institutional machinery is just not going to value or support the day they arrive on campus? We can do so much better if we acted as humans to everyone. Focusing on empty metrics, because we can measure them more easily than we can measure mentorship and community hurts my soul.
24
When will women get the same job opportunities or equal pay as men? Not in the near future. I have been a healthcare professional for 40 years in a female dominated job. Women in this profession have yet to realize equal job opportunities but have received equal pay. That being said, I am beginning to see a very slight increase in advancement for women in this profession albeit too little to late.
25
@Brenda
Women need to band together, same as the "boys club". Because women hurt women......they compete.
(Susan comment below......very true!!)
Many women pander/acquiesce to men in higher positions as a means to push their own agenda, ie, inflating their egos, kissing shoes, allowing for prominent speaking positions.
This hurts all women. Have seen this so many times.
It is the woman who does not need affirmation who is most feared. Band together with these women and start making small changes that are inclusive of women and then you will see real change.
11
Bravo for this article, I am happy to see this problem get written up in the NYT. It is a HUGE problem in the biological sciences. I left Harvard for the same reason. Like the Salk, "[Harvard] has not provided a work environment that allows women faculty to flourish" and lots of them have left. At least half of the women who were in my department and neighboring departments in the sciences have left over the past decade. The only exception to this rule: HHMI investigators. Women who get HHMI support are well respected and favored because HHMI is the royalty of the sciences; many others are dissed by the people in power (which includes the HHMI women). They get fewer and worse students, less money, worse space, heavier teaching, more and worse committee work (i.e not the powerful committees) and outright harassment. Not sexual harassment but scientific harassment. Go do some sleuthing about Pardis Sabeti and Jenny Hoffman prior to tenure if you want to read the awful things Harvard has done.
136
@Susan, what you said! I was a postdoc at Harvard Med in the late 80s/early 90s. At that time there were seven women who had tenure at HMS. Seven of how many hundred? One was the Chair of Anatomy, the brilliant Betty Hay. One was married to David Baltimore (Alice Huang - brilliant scientist but how could HMS say no to her?), one was married to the Dean, another was a terrific carotenoid researcher. We women got the message. When I landed my faculty position, I counted the female faculty numbers in the department before accepting. My college had 10% female faculty; when I recently left after 25yrs, it was still 10%. I am tenured and very successful, and that is in spite of the one-ton weight of feathers that kept me from being more than I could be. My only surprise is how long it took NYT to twig to this story at Salk, and the larger problem. Thank you for bringing it to a larger audience's attention.
59
@Susan What is HHMI?
3
@sbgal HHMI=Howard Hughes Medical Institute -- An independent, non-governmental research institute with HUGE amounts of money. HHMI entry into scientific research support in the 1980s produced a major shift in dynamics of funding. Their criteria for funding science and scientists, though private, is very high and seems not quite as "old boy network" infused as most other academic and research institutes. In addition to generously funding numerous individual researchers at institutions across the country (including at the Salk) they have a major research campus on the east coast.
9
It’s critical that accomplished women with successful research groups be promoted and given positions of visibility. The payoff for the next generation will be huge in terms of role models for young men and women scientists alike. I’m curious if in the absence of typical governing bodies there is an impartial ombuds office at the Salk. The marginalization of women at events like the research retreat is terrible.
18
What is it with men? I can directly relate to Dr. Emerson's experience. I know what it is to have credentials, knowledge, and experience and have men brought in to do what I defined.
Was Freud right with the Oedipal Complex? Is there a lingering resentment toward mothers, transferred to other women, for telling them what to do as children? The animal instinct to be the alpha in the pack?
There will be the usual comments about it being the women's fault for not being good enough, strong enough, forceful enough will ignoring how things are rigged and how if women try to do or be any of those things she will be faulted for acting strong or forceful - acting like a man.
77
@Marie: Actually it's much simpler. Many men resent the penalty they have to pay for being male in the dating game, where it is assumed that women have something valuable and men have to convince her to share it with them and not someone else. That resentment comes out in many forms, including harassment and discrimination.
16
@Marie
Well, unfortunately, it is even just the men who are to blame. I know this story all too well. As a female scientist you are often overlooked by female students and postdocs as well. It is a cultural thing--we are taught from early age that famous scientists look a certain way (white, male) and people make decisions based on these unconscious biases. You make the mistake when you are young of thinking that it is a meritocracy and the fact that women don't achieve the same level of success because they have done something to deserve it (taking time off for kids, not being aggressive enough, not attending enough conferences, not networking enough) but eventually you realize that there are systematic problems--a ton of feathers, still weighs a ton after 20 years.
24
@Anne This rings true in my experience. Every year when interviewing prospective PhD students and then discussing these conversations with faculty afterward, I find I get asked--but male faculty don't--much more about work-life balance and less about my science. Applicants often describe other prospective advisors (young, male) as being especially quantitative, even though my quantitative contributions totally exceed theirs, but are maybe... diluted?... by less-quantitative publications. Several students have told me that they wanted to rotate with me because they thought my lab would be a "friendlier" environment than male PIs' labs. Of course, I want it to be a friendly environment, but the students didn't know me, and they were often saying this while discussing former PIs' expectations about their productivity. I expect people to work very hard and probably let more people go than most PIs in my field.
4
This is why I left science in 1975. Hired as a field biologist by UC Santa Cruz, after graduating from UC Berkeley. The second day on the job, I was told, "We're giving you a $10,000 raise and an assistant. Oh, and a desk. No women are allowed in the field on this project. It will be too disruptive to the men. You are smart so you will be writing the reports."
I quit after a year of hostile discrimination, two 500 page reports I wrote and received last position on, and constant battles over some obviously bad data that was submitted to me by male colleagues from the field.
138
These woman scientists experience resource discrimination. Talking about it might be a state of fixing it. At the same time, where is the program for righting the balance?
Might formation of a federation or association, never say union, aimed at identifying the best places to work and why, advertising the same, seeking employment accordingly, and being ever so clear as to the worst of the bunch be a start? One can earn a science PhD but cannot find the wit to tackle being treated second class as one sees it? Maybe that is the entire story. There has always been an unlimited supply of downtrodden and those who accept it.
By law MI will draw honest voting districts in 2022. A common non-political women from GOP controlled Grand Rapids started the petition and saw the voters pass her clean up proposal. The Democrats whinned and slept until then. This one women got us a better result. The sisterhood of deprived female scientists might take a lesson from the non-PhD female from Grand Rapids.
My apologies to the woman who performed so well without my remembering her name.
2
My field is law, not scientific research. I, too, signed a non-disparagement agreement. Had I not done so, I could not have taken care of my family, particularly because I was at an age when, I knew, it would be almost impossible to find a job.
Discrimination against women in the professions is rampant. At my firm, only one partner in my field was a woman, and she was relegated to brief writing. Like the women scientists, when I fought back, I was smeared. I moved on. The success that I have had – the praise, the exceptionally positive feedback - has been reassuring.
It has also made me angry. The people who did this to me and the attorneys who assisted them are what Native Americans call wiindigoos - i.e., cannibals, who destroy people to feed their own ambitions. We have no concept in our own culture that adequately describes them.
Sexism does not begin to explain what happened to the women at Salk, or to other talented people whose energy is sapped and careers are stolen by the egocentric, selfish, prejudiced and deluded.
In Native American mythology, the wiindigoo is destroyed by the community, and must be if the community is to survive. This means that suing is not enough – the community as a whole must come to recognize the destructive forces within it and to reject those voices intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Only then can we grow into a place where what happened to these women, never happens again.
469
@RCT
We DO have a concept to describe "who destroy people to feed their own ambitions."
They are called Narcissists (and other Cluster B personalities). It's not just their ambitions. They feed off every good thing and destroy others for their own consumption.
Narcissism is slightly higher among people in the top percentile of intelligence than it is in the general population. They tend to overestimate their own intelligence and underestimate everyone else's. Most narcissism is genetic, however, it is reinforced socially by a childhood and youth where they were the consistently the smartest person in the room--often smarter than their teachers and parents--and an adulthood where they are treated like tin-pot gods. Honestly, that isn't good for anyone.
13
@RCT "the wiindigoo is destroyed by the community, and must be if the community is to survive." I like that because I say this all the time only to be told I should "work on myself, and be more positive." (Which ties into the whole notion that if you are somewhat abrupt and aggressive (qualities that are praised as "take no prisoners" in a man), you will be punished for it if you are a woman, but you will also be punished if you are not outgoing and pushy because you are not deemed a go-getter).
And yes, it absolutely is because these women are older and deemed worthless. If it happens to brilliant people like this, what hope is there for anyone else?
33
@Dejah. Yes. I was thinking of exactly the same narcissist whose initials are DT.
11
I am a female scientist. I worked in both in academia and in pharmaceutical companies and retired in 2007. During my career I wrote 92 papers. I have more than 12,900 citations and my papers are still being cited and downloaded. My H index is 44 and my I-10 index is 78. The sexism in the pharmaceutical company was horrendous. My work went from merit increase to unsatisfactory when I was on a 6 month maternity leave. When I was a post-doc and applied for grants on my own I was alway told my grants were too ambitious, even though they were based on work I had already accomplished. I never had a tenure track position in academia and for much of my career I was paid a part time salary for a 70 hour a week job because there wasn't enough money in the grants that I co-wrote to fund a full time faculty member. Unfortunately, I don't think anything has changed, but the truth is I would do exactly the same things today, because there is no career more varied and interesting than being a biophysicist.
182
@NJG Not to disparage your personal experience, but I see many of the female graduates from my Biophysics PhD program are running departments at major pharma companies or have founded successful biotechs or are successful tenured professors. I work for a biotech startup founded by a successful female academic who had no trouble raising $100M based on her prior work. I consider these examples as a strong signal that women who are rational and strategic and hard working can obtain powerful positions in a historically sexist environment.
I also see men leaving academic science to have better paying jobs that let them spend more time with their families. And now that I have kids, I understand that a lot better.
5
@NJG What does this mean: "My H index is 44 and my I-10 index is 78."
3
@MM
Different generations bring different results.
This next generation of PhD's has more working in their favor (Me Too and Womens Movement).
But sad for all the women prior who did not get credit.
Read the article "9 Women Who Changed History and the Men who Took Credit" by David A. Tomar.
2
So, scientific and medical research has nothing to do with finding cures for diseases, or drugs to treat them. That's all secondary to the real goals of getting published, networking, getting promotions and funding. No wonder no one has found a cure for cancer yet. The scientists are all too busy advancing their careers.
22
@Ms. Pea
Those activities you so casually dismiss are the ONLY ways to get funding. No funding, no science. Now one can argue convincingly that there should be more efficient ways of ensuring scientific discovery, however, it is NOT the case that scientists are choosing to do these activities for egotistical self-advancement. If a scientist doesn’t participate in the publishing/networking/fundraising/career advancement hamster wheel then they will get NO money to do science. Universities do not provide researchers money fund their labs, the scientists have to get that money themselves and that means grants. One can only get grants if one has a noteworthy scientific track record, i.e. publications, seminars, etc.
29
@Ms. Pea
Yup. I have believed for many years that we would be at least 10-20 years ahead in cancer research if it were not all about people advancing their own careers . Ot even worse now, people making personal fortunes in biotech companies they found. There are so many wonderful dedicated people in the business but too many at the top are simply not.
9
@Ms. Pea
No money=no research=no cures. I am pretty sure I could cancer if I could be taken seriously by the scientific establishment...I have cured other diseases. However, if you try to talk to a venture capitalist or a donor, they just look past you because they assume you aren't important and your ideas aren't important because you are female. This hurts society.
12
The premise of the female scientists profiled in this article is that Inder Verma, an Indian-American man who immigrated to the US in 1974, i.e. in the first decade following the lifting of de facto exclusion of Asian immigration to the U.S., was subjected to less discrimination than native-born White women scientists. And that Verma and his male subordinates/colleagues systematically discriminated against women.
If that is the premise, it flies against the experience of most Asian immigrants of that time, including my own father, who described the sense of aloneness and isolation he felt as a PhD student in Baltimore in the 1960s. It seems highly unlikely that America had changed so much by 1974 that Asian males had been co-opted into the (White) patriarchy to the point that they were able to bestride the Salk Institute and systematically suppress women.
There’s no doubt that funding decisions are political and that donors would prefer to fund scientists who already have a track record. That’s the way the world works. It’s true of almost all industries. And that structure can mean that good ideas and competent people can languish while less accomplished folk get ahead. But it’s not systemic discrimination.
5
@Shiv I am not a scientist and know nothing about the women and men mentioned in the article, but it does not seem to me that the article focuses on comparing and contrasting the opportunities of Salk's men and women scientists. Rather, I read the article as demonstrating how systemically discriminated against the women at Salk have been. Perhaps another study could compare and contrast the opportunities, lab space allotments, salaries, etc., of European-American men with Asian-American men. But that is not the point of this article.
92
@Shiv
As an Indian woman who came to this country as a graduate student in a non-STEM field, what does the sense of isolation felt by an international student have anything to do with the patriarchal suppression of women in the professional world?
Don't Indian women who were tortured by their own in-laws in turn do the same to their daughters-in-law when they are older?
The Indian culture (with a few sub-cultural exceptions) is well known to be one of the most misogynist and sexist cultures. Over millennia Indian men and women have been systematically taught that men are better than women. Why should that attitude change within a few years of living in this country?
38
@Shiv "That's the way the world works?" What you've described is precisely the definition of systemic discrimination. And simply because Verma may have been discriminated against, does not mean he has the right to discriminate and harass others without being held accountable.
31
When I was a postdoc at Berkeley I worked for two professors- one male, one female. I recall the female professor remarking how the male professor had "hired a lawyer to negotiate his hiring package". The male professor ended up with a package that gave him 10X the resources (larger lab space, better networking infrastructure) that helped him get his research engine started. When I worked for the female professor I had to run cable in the ceiling and build closet clusters because she hadn't negotiated for these things.
My advice to women who are looking to maximize their impact in science: spend the money on a good lawyer to guide you through the negotiation process. As distasteful as that seemed at the time, the reality is that negotiation is a asymmetrical power play (the dean has all the information and money and wants to obtain your skills as cheaply as possible) where you need a skilled individual to maximize your leverage.
Modern science is intensely competitive. If you want to be a star player, you have to understand the rules of the game and work them as hard as possible. I personally found this very distasteful and ultimately moved to tech which has been far easier and more lucrative, but less satisfying.
69
@MM
Wish this was so, but they don't value you in negotiations because the administration already knows you aren't going to bring in as much grant money or be as famous, so if you go hire a lawyer, they may tell you to go away or pack up.
15
@MM I hired a lawyer to look through my physician contract and it was $ well spent to help me understand the terms. In fact, my residency director asked all of us to consider hiring a lawyer and possibly accountant when signing a contract.
However, for negotiations and scientist/ research contracts, the situation is different. Also, keep in mind that when women do exactly what men do, they are often viewed negatively or less favorably. This has been shown in studies. A man is "ambitious", a woman is "scheming". A man is "diligent", a woman "neglects her family." A man is "objective when making decisions", a woman is "not sensitive to the feelings of others."
I have had the latter leveled at me by both men and women because I did not go through social niceties expected of women when having to make important decisions quickly. In one case, it was by a woman who assumed a family I was working with would be offended when the family were people I had worked with for years who knew me well and trusted my judgement.
12
As a senior woman scientist at a most
eminent institution of biologic research, this story does not surprise me. At all.
For some background, let me try to explain the "h"-index, "prestige publishing" and explain the concept of "impact" as it applies to a scientific career.
In the new all-metric world, one gets numerical credit when other people cite your work. This is a simple explanation of the "h-index". You don't need to have done all of the work, or really, any of the work. Many authors on a paper contribute very little to the work, maybe even just a reagent, but their "imprimatur" will get the paper noticed by the all important "prestige" journals.
Publication in an all important "prestige" or "high impact" journal will increase one's citation rate ("h-factor") because the paper is noticed. Some promotions are based on the sum of the "impact scores" of the journals in which one publishes. You can easily see how this cycle works as one builds a career based on these metrics alone, as opposed to scientific direction, curiosity, etc.
Individuals who are good at extreme networking tend to move up quickly. They get themselves noticed, they get their papers published more easily in the prestige journals, and so on. It has nothing to do with scientific skill or value of their work.
Women are learning how to do this (for better or worse) in the setting of an overwhelmingly man's world but it's an uphill climb.
207
@June3 You're correct that the best science doesn't always rise to the top, especially ground-breaking science which challenges currently existing ideas. In fact, the history of science shows they are often ignored at best and disparaged at worst by the powers that be.
However, women and any scientist can learn to use publicity and social media to their advantage. I have a colleague who is not only a great scientist but actively engages with the public, media, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. to get his work out there and he is very successful. The more people know about your work, the more likely they are to cite it and to increase your other indices. Also, the more likely funders get to know your work. While engaging with the public may be squeamish to many in science, it is needed.
Women can also support other women by publicizing their work. A senior colleague recently talked about my work during a major meeting where she was giving a presentation. That was totally unexpected. Her mention focused immediate attention on my last paper, which is currently among the top 1% via Altimetric.
5
And this, children, is why I walked away from astrophysics after I got my Ph.D. I was told directly by a senior faculty member that "...you won't go anywhere. You aren't pretty, you aren't young, and you don't kick up your heels.".
Industry isn't much better. I still have bad memories of a supervisor wanting to show me his "road maps".
170
The Salk’s discrimination against women scientists is shameful, and leads me to wonder if the Salk has been discriminating against minority scientists, too.
26
Sadly, it will probably take another 100 years for articles like this to disappear.
30
@Techgirl I applaud your optimism and pray that it may come true despite my doubts. But discrimination never truly goes away, it merely seeks new victims.
11
"The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.” - James Watson, The Double Helix
26
@Jackalope The man who took credit for a woman’s work. No surprise there.
10
@Jackalope So sayeth James Watson, an infamous misogynist... sadly...
6
With this misogynist president, things will get a lot worse.
25
The article failed to mentioned that Rosalind Franklin captured the image of the DNA double helix, which led directly to the work that Watson & Crick used to further that research and get the Nobel Prize. Ms. Franklin received no such credit.
It seems that diversity of ideas and the work that follows is not considered in the politics of science, when actually all research work should be recognized as contributory when men and women are working in the same institute or are sharing written findings. To rank work by an arbitrary "h" index omits the truth that what is perceived as less "valuable" work often causes others to reframe or develop their ideas. This is the collaborative process, however subtle, that operates every day in business. You find it in IT departments, biotech and physics research. Diversity is good, women bring much to the table and are often passed over as insignificant. All science advances when there are diverse minds at work. In Ms. Emerson's case she was retaliated against for speaking up. That is unacceptable in modern society.
178
@Jane Rosalind Franklin received credit- her name is explicitly listed in the acknowledgements of the W&C paper. She wasn't qualified to win the nobel prize for multiple reasons. I suggest reading "The Eighth Day of Creation", which is sourced from her diaries and internal notebooks, as a counterpart to Dark Lady, which I personally think overstates the case for Dr. Franklin.
Whether the credit she received was sufficient is arguable (her work was primarily technical, not particularly creative) and compared to what was recognized by W&C, but she definitely didn't have the qualifications required for the Nobel Prize.
A better example would be Barbara Mcclintock, whose brilliant work went unrecognized for decades before she won the Nobel Prize. She was seen as primarily technical (her texts on cellular microscopy were reference for the field) but was actually a brilliant biologist who absolutely refused to play the games scientists play. Like several of the scientists in this article, she was only able to carve out a space in the field with the help of more successful/established male scientists (see https://www.amazon.com/George-Beadle-Uncommon-Farmer-Emergence/dp/0879697636 for extensive details on how Beadle provided her with space to do research).
17
@MM
This your interpretation of a book written by someone else. You say she wasn't qualified to win the Nobel Prize for multiple reasons - actually the only reason many feel she didn't get the Nobel with W & C is that she died before they won. The Nobel is never awarded posthumously.
28
@MM
Sure. Given that the main qualification is being alive and Franklin was dead when the awards were given. The fact is this "Without Franklin's permission or knowledge, her fellow researcher Maurice Wilkins showed the photograph to James Watson" . In my book, that is called stealing.
38
How sad that scientific research is dominated by the desire for individual scientists to "get ahead" rather than the desire for the advancement of science. Too much ego, too little love of science.
16
@McCamy Taylor
Some of it's ego, but a lot of it comes from the way research is structured. To do science, you need money and good people. To get those things, you need money (ironic but true) and people to produce top publications and to find the answer first. Grants organizations, potential postdocs and especially journals care about where you publish (cell, nature, science). This forces scientists to care about getting ahead if they want to continue in science.
29
@Susan ...and thus research is structured in a way that allows men to continue to be gatekeepers at every phase of the process. This is a fixable, restructurable issue, not some immutable system, but guess who has vested interest in keeping things the way they are?
42
@McCamy Taylor
Most scientists that I know work because they love doing research and making a contribution to curing diseases or bettering lives. Unfortunately one needs money to do this.
7
It still shocks me that scientific institutions are still being run as boys' clubs. The contributions of women scientists are undervalued and under promoted.
The first paragraph of this article showcases the myth of two males "discovering" DNA's double helix. Dr. Rosalind Franklin's name has not gone done in history like Francis Crick's or James Watson's.
Rosalind Franklin's DNA research was crucial to their proposal that DNA was a double helix structure. While Franklin built a camera that photographed the most distinct images of DNA ever produced, Francis Crick studied hemogloblin at Cambridge College. While Franklin toiled away at hand-written mathematical calculations before the invention of computers, James Watson avoided the work he was hired to do at Cambridge-the structure of protein.
So how are Watson and Crick's names connected to DNA history- while, Franklin's-the woman's -is not? They gained access to HER photographs and HER DNA research surreptitiously and secretly
built a model.
They correctly hypothesized that DNA is a double helix structure.
But disregarding Franklin's crucial contribution to scientific history continues the lie that women scientist's work is second-class to men's.
I applaud Emerson's and Jones' and Lundblad's gender -discrimination suit against the Salk Institute.
At some point, women in the sciences will not have to work twice as hard to receive the resources and financial support they need to perform their vital work.
377
@claire sabbagh
I agree. She should have been an author on their paper. She should have had the time to figure out the structure herself. Instead, in awful irony, she died of cancer likely induced by her scientific studies. She never knew her data had been stolen and given to Watson and Crick. So the boys get Nobel prizes and glory, and the girl gets ovarian cancer.
136
@claire sabbagh .I suggest reading "The Eighth Day of Creation", there is an entire chapter on Franklin based on extensive documentation (the author was a journalist who obtained her papers from Aaron Klug) showing that her work, while technically excellent, received roughly the level of credit that was appropriate for the work that was done. As a counterpart, I found Dark Lady to overstate the case.
The reality is that if Franklin hadn't done what she did in terms of data collection, somebody else could and would have done it. But it;'s not clear that the fundamental recognition in the W&C paper- that the double helix provides a template mechanism for copying- could have come as early as it did without Dr. Crick.
11
@MM
That's exactly one of the problems we're talking about - the utter devaluation of women's contributions.
You speak of Franklin's work dismissively as if it were easily replaceable and non-essential. Anyone could have done it, amirite? Couldn't possibly be worth celebrating. Even if that were true, which I question, the fact is that no one else actually did it, so your dismissal via the hypothetical makes no sense.
In sum: Franklin's extensive work = trivial and not worth mentioning. W&C = everything that matters.
Thank you for illustrating one of the issues facing women in science so perfectly.
192
Thank you for this in depth article on the subtle and sometimes blatantly systemic roadblocks women face in the workplace.
We don’t want special treatment, we just want to be able to do our work.
My grandmother was an associate professor in the Midwest and her boss told her straightaway that he was sexist and she would just have to deal with it. While I was in college in the late 1980’s a prominent male professor in the school of architecture admonished one of his graduate students who was pregnant and questioned her motives and judgement for pursuing her career when she should have been home caring for her family.
I have been on job sites more than once when a junior male peer who had accompanied me was assumed to be in charge.
It’s sad to say that my optimism upon graduation that there would be no barriers to my success as a strong, intelligent woman in a male-dominated field has not always been proven true.
Yet, we soldier on and work so that the next generation of women will be judged on their merits and allowed to do their jobs unmolested.
387
@Tracy
I was in grad school in Microbiology in the early 80's. The faculty committees for women routinely questioned any married females abut how their husbands and children felt about them having to work so hard in the lab and not being at home. None of the male grad students faced this questioning. Several women exited their interviews in tears. It got so bad that other departments in the university refused to sit on grad student committees. I hope it has changed for the better, but I left and never looked back.
48
@Lori Wilson So much of this still lingers! As a PhD student and then postdoc (~10 y ago), I was asked at least twice what it was like to date a male medical student and then resident who must not have enough time on his hands for our relationship. My boyfriend at the time and I both laughed at the assumption that he was the one with the intense work demands, and that I was the one feeling neglected.
25
@Lori Wilson I’m sorry to hear this and hope that you have found happiness and success in the path that you chose.
13