{"id":546,"date":"2006-08-29T11:27:04","date_gmt":"2006-08-29T11:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/29\/mars-and-venus-in-grad-school\/"},"modified":"2006-08-29T11:27:04","modified_gmt":"2006-08-29T11:27:04","slug":"mars-and-venus-in-grad-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/29\/mars-and-venus-in-grad-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars and Venus in Grad School"},"content":{"rendered":"

It appears to be a good week for non-controversial posting<\/a>, so while I’m making enemies, I might as well go all out…<\/p>\n

The recent call for book ideas from the Feminist Press has sparked an interesting discussion at Cocktail Party Physics<\/a>, but I want to highlight one comment in particular<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

There is a lot more of a macho-subculture in the sciences than appears at first glance. For example, the quotes “Nobody gets an A in my class!” Or “You guys aren’t cut out for the sciences.”<\/p>\n

I don’t know if you found those discouraging, but for young boys, those kinds of statements are challenges. They don’t discourage extra effort, young boys get told they can’t do stuff all the time, and it doesn’t seem to stop them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is really the only reason I’m ambivalent about some of the proposals for attracting more women to physics. (More below the cut.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Usually, when this subject comes up, a lot of time is spent denouncing the “macho” culture of physics– the whole “only the strong shall survive” thing that makes everything run on confrontation. There are calls for more sensitivity and openness, and a less aggressive approach to research, and I definitely agree that there are a lot of idiots out there who deserve to be leashed.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, though, one of my fondest professional memories is built around confrontation. When I was a post-doc, I went back to my old research group at NIST to give a colloquium about recent results, and like all colloquia there, it was a battle. I brought slides for a twenty-minute talk, and we called a halt after an hour and a half, with four slides to go. I think the title slide was the only one that didn’t draw some sort of challenge. It wasn’t done in a hostile way, mind, but they pushed at everything I said, and nothing got by them.<\/p>\n

That was the most fun I’ve ever had giving a talk. I knew the material backwards and forwards, and knew we were right about our conclusions, and I absolutely loved the challenge. I knew that there wasn’t a question they could ask that I couldn’t answer, and knowing for certain that I would win every argument was a huge kick. It was absolutely the high point of my speaking career.<\/p>\n

So I have a certain amount of sympathy for the current model. When I hear people call for a less confrontational approach to science, I worry that that means losing not just the hostile and belittling remarks– which absolutely and without question need to go– but also some of the stuff that works for me. I wouldn’t want colloquia in that group to be done any other way. ( I also think the “paper torture” process by which articles got written was tremendously effective, but that may be a subject for another post…) It was terrifying at times– in grad school, I had a mortal terror of the phrase “Before you leave that slide…”– but I’m not sure that a less confrontational approach would’ve worked as well for me.<\/p>\n

The real challenge for science in general is to find a way to simultaneously make science more accomodating for those who don’t like confrontation, without also sapping the motivation of those who respond well to the confrontational approach. After all, whatever we may think of the more testosterone-addled members of the profession, the current approach has been pretty effective at generating good science.<\/p>\n

In the end, there’s almost certainly no one-size-fits-all solution. Different people will respond to the same stimuli in different ways, and what drives one person away will only encourage another. It’s not even necessarily a function of gender– in some areas, I’m much more likely to turn away from confrontation than my sister is (she’s in law school at the moment– another field that doesn’t lack for confrontation…). The trick is knowing who to challenge, and who to encourage more gently, and finding a way to balance those two approaches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears to be a good week for non-controversial posting, so while I’m making enemies, I might as well go all out… The recent call for book ideas from the Feminist Press has sparked an interesting discussion at Cocktail Party Physics, but I want to highlight one comment in particular: There is a lot more… Continue reading Mars and Venus in Grad School<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}