Eight little words inculcate imposter syndrome

The great Maria Klawe, ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, president of Harvey Mudd, wrote a surprisingly humbling and honest article in Slate on imposter syndrome.

In some ways, this type of article is good for young women in the field, because they figure if superstars like her can feel it, they can feel it too. i.e., "It's normal to feel this way."

Except, it's not normal to feel this way.

The reason we feel like we don't belong / aren't good enough, is because we've been encultured to believe this since Day 1. The message from the media is passive pink, and rarely are young women cast in roles of lead scientist in film and television. The whiz computer genius in a show usually looks like this:

"That doesn't look like me. Also, he seems really unhappy. I don't belong in computer science."

Readers protest, "But it's just TV! It doesn't matter!"

But it does. This is how kids choose careers. As much as we'd like to think that our annual science outreach visit to our children's classrooms hugely influences students' future career learnings, we're talking marbles vs. Large Hadron Collider. Hollywood is it.

So for the lucky few who manage to beat the cultural odds and enter our field anyway, they have one more major hurdle.

It's not the intellectual requirements of the job.
It's not work-life balance.
And it's certainly not babies!

Nope. It is eight little words that skewer you with a knife. Eight little words that knock you down in one fell swoop.

Eight little words that men never hear.

"You only got here because you're a woman".

Have you ever said this to someone? Have you ever thought this and not said it?

This is an awful, awful thing to say. Why? Because underlying it is the assumption that only men can do computer science. Why on earth would you think that?

I first heard these words as an undergraduate, from someone I thought was a close friend. I felt sick to my stomach. I never felt imposter syndrome before that point. I loved technology, I was good at understanding how it worked, and how to make it do the things I wanted it to do. Up until that point, I assumed my strong technical abilities and grades was why I had been admitted into the program. Surely not my gender!

After I felt sick, I felt mad. Really mad! Who was this joker to tell me I didn't belong here? I'll show him.

Now, I'm fortunate, because I face adversity with stubbornness. It's just my nature. But most people are not like this. They get beaten down with a stick enough times, and they head for the hills. I can completely understand that, I've had my moments.

Here's the thing. Every time you say or even think these eight words, you're beating someone with a stick. You might think it's an innocuous statement, but really what you're saying is, "Go home dumb little girl."

Don't be a boorish bear.

Achoo! Work life balance is a myth.

I am allergic to conversations on work life balance. Basically, they make me feel uncomfortable and guilty, which make my eyes red and itchy. (And allegra doesn't seem to make the deadlines go away...)

So I was happy to see this article in Fast Company by Craig Chappelow, "Work/Life balance is a myth; here's what you can do about it." There was no real news in the article, but I liked this a lot:

Here’s what I tell [executives]: work-life balance is a myth. That myth compels many of us to view an ideal life as a set of perfectly level scales. On the tray on one side is your personal life. On the other side is your work life. With heroic efforts, you can keep both trays exactly level. If one starts to tip too far, you make some kind of nifty move that balances them again.

In reality, that perfect balance almost never occurs, except for those rare, fleeting moments when the trays pass each other on the way up or down--and we’re too frazzled to appreciate that brief moment of self-actualization anyway.

In professional life (both academically and previously in industry), I tend to find it's feast or famine. There are times when everything is going nuts, and there are times when things are calm, peaceful, and somewhat boring.

In personal life, things are usually calm, peaceful, and somewhat boring with occasional intense, dramatic moments. Some of these dramatic moments are quick and minor (flat tire, broken furnace, lost filling, puking child), some of these moments are lengthy and painful (health decline / death of family members, financial worries, etc).

It is not possible to predict when dramatic moments will occur in real life, and it's only a little bit possible to predict when fires will happen in professional life. So I tend to agree that having work life balance is a bit of a myth.

Seeing Color, Seeing Smart

A reader recently sent this article to me, describing the recent firestorm surrounding CNN's new documentary "The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley" in its "Black in America" series. Although the documentary has not yet been released, a variety of soundbites from it have made their way into the limelight, which is causing the controversy.

Generally I really dislike when people take soundbites out of context. I'm sure Mike Arrington's remark that started all this ("I don’t know a single black entrepreneur.") had more context surrounding it. However, something struck me in his blog rebuttal to the world. (From NYT article):

On Oct. 28, Mr. Arrington took to his blog to accuse CNN of ambushing him. He asserted that he said he knew no black entrepreneurs because he doesn’t “categorize people as black or white or gay or straight in my head.” 

He wrote, “They’re just smart or not smart.”

The problem is, how he thin slices "smart" is almost certainly based on someone's appearance, accent, vocabulary, phrasings, and body language. And in technology, those in Silicon Valley who are not in the "White, American Male" category almost certainly have to work harder to earn a "smart" label.

I could cite compelling scientific evidence to support my claim (pick up just about any issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the Harvard race project, or even just Google Scholar for "seeing race"), but for the purpose of brevity I will (just once) argue by anecdote: I am often told, "but you don't look like a Computer Scientist!". Why? Because the image burned in our brains of a smart computer scientist is: young, white, American male. Used to be a man with dark greasy hair and glasses, now it is a blunt, sneaky, snappy Jesse Eisenburg type man. But, still man, still white, still American.

"Seeing Smart" still means seeing color, seeing gender, seeing ethnicity. It just means you might cut someone a break if they can manage to work past those initial, societal-given barriers of What a Smart Person Looks Like.

This will eventually change, but Hollywood needs to step up and quit playing to tropes. Quit casting people of color and women as tokens/BBFs while the young white men do all the science and inventing. *This* is where kids get their role models from. This is where society gets its ideas of what Smart looks like.

Huh. I think I have the start of a STEM education grant here...

Hey, where did all the women go?

Today on Scientopia I discuss a recent article about women leaving science, which delighted me not only because it included fellow FCS and blogger Amy Dalal, but also in its clear statement that the major reason women leave the profession is because of workplace culture, not babies.

Digging to America

Under an avalanche of deadlines, travel, and other sundries I have been finding refuge in lightweight fiction. Last weekend at the library I borrowed Digging to America by Anne Tyler, which has at times had me rolling on the floor laughing. Other times it is less lightweight than I would have liked, but halfway through the book I'll still recommend it*.

Several passages in this novel have reminded me of anecdotes told by online friends Pika and GMP. There is one character, Maryam, has lived in the US for a very long time but due to her Iranian accent people still always ask her where she's from. For example, Maryam is at a party:

First he talked to Sami, on his other side... then it was Maryam's turn: How long had she been in this country? and did she like it?

Maryam hated being asked such questions, partly because she had answered them so many times before but also because she preferred to imagine (unreasonable though it was) that maybe she didn't always, instantly, come across as a foreigner. "Where are you from?" someone might just ask when she was priding herself on having navigated some particularly intricate and illogical piece of English. She longed to say, "From Baltimore. Why?" but lacked the nerve. Now she spoke so courteously that Lou could have no inkling how she felt. "I've been here thirty-nine years," she said, and "Yes, of course I love it." 

My favorite thing about this book is that the writer is extremely subtle and clever in how she brings up American cultural unawareness. There is one character, Bitsy, who tries so hard to get others to be "culturally sensitive" to her adopted daughter Jin-Ho that she is inadvertently over-the-top culturally insensitive to her Iranian friends. I find this character almost too embarrassing to read at times, but then I realize that's the entire point.

I find the "mommy wars" in this book exceptionally comical and well-penned, because all I can think is how I know people exactly like those characterized. Bitsy is often judgmental (and/or jealous) of her friend Ziba's parenting; her daughter Susan is a peer to Jin-Ho and was adopted on the same day.

A while ago, Sami and Ziba had gone away for the weekend and left Susan with Maryam. Bitsy was amazed when she heard about it. During her own brief absences - never longer than a couple hours, and only for unavoidable reasons such as doctor appointments - she used a person from Sitters Central, a woman certified in infant CPR. Anyhow, her mother was too frail to babysit and her in-laws had made it plain taht they had their own busy lives. But under no circumstances would she have considered leaving Jin-Ho overnight. She would have been frantic with worry! Children were so fragile. She realized that now. When you thought of all that could happen, the electrical sockets and the Venetian-blind cords and the salmonella chicken and the toxic furniture polish and the windpipe-sized morsels of food and the uncapped medicine bottles and the lethal two inches of bathtub water, it seemed miraculous that any child at all made it through to adulthood.

Finally, for you academic types, I'll leave you a quote in the style of FSP:

Her family visited constantly. They showed up every weekend with platters of eggplant and jars of homemade yogurt. They hugged Sami to their chest and inquired after his studies. In Mr. Hakimi's opinion, European history was not the best choice of fields. "You propose to do what with this? To teach," he said. "You will become a professor, teaching students who'll become professors in turn and teach other students who will become professors also. It reminds me of those insects who only live a few days, only for the purpose of reproducing their species. 

:-)

(*) Though if this book turns into an awful ball of mush, I will rescind this remark. 

Things I don't have to think about today

John Scalzi posted an absolutely breathtaking poem in his blog yesterday - check it out.

(Normally I'd post excerpts to tease you, but I'm loathe to perturb poetry. Just trust me, it's worth the click!)

Firing Squad Science

When I was at my last place of employment someone recommended a book to me, "Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman." I can't remember a single bit of advice from it, other than to be bold and always sit at the main meeting table, because you are taken more seriously that way.

But one thing I seem to remember from it is, perhaps incorrectly, is that when a man walks into a room he quickly assesses who is in charge. He is trained to do this, either by his social upbringing or it's wired into his genes hailing back to alpha-male primate days. In contrast, women do not usually assess workplace/social situations with the same sort of hiearchical eye by default. Thus, I try to look at these situations from multiple perspectives when I am in them, just to try to get a handle on what might be going on.

Recently I attended a talk where I watched what looked like a monumental power struggle play out, and was really not sure what to make of it. A male grad student was giving a talk. Another male person (grad student? postdoc?) kept interrupting Every. Single. Slide. to nitpick one thing or another. About halfway through the talk, Senior Professor (advisor to the student, I think) started interrupting with clarification questions, which started out nice and then got progressively more aggressive as the talk went on. He and others also snickered from time to time at several of the slides, which as far as I could tell just had equations on them.

Toward the end of the talk, Outsider Postdoc starts asking questions and eggs on the first interrupter guy, while still trying to occasionally include the speaker in the discourse. A few other men start chiming in with their two cents, some reasonable, some insulting, and eventually the entire thing dissolves into a rapid-fire bloodbath with the speaker left lying on the ground twitching, croaking, "This work is preliminary...just a first step..."

After a very long and uncomfortable time, my colleague and I managed to escape the seminar room and as we were walking back to our department felt extremely unsure about what had just happened in there. My colleague remarked that they actually weren't sure who the speaker was, because the audience members talked so much.

The funny thing is, of all the things those audience members said, I think only about 10% of the points were really about the research. The other 90% were "Look how smart I am" and "My slide rule is bigger than yours."

In science, I think there is a difference between precision and nit-picking. You can help someone in their research to find the clarity necessary to be strong as scientists without publicly humiliating them. You can ask useful questions politely while still demonstrating your intelligence to whomever it is you're trying to impress.

Having been executed this way before, sometimes I just want to stand up and call out for a cease fire.

Scary smart women

I have a few things in the queue that I meant to write about ages ago, but I kept getting distracted by other topics. So, here we go! (We're FIFO)

pop(Tyler)

Just a thought, but you may be interpreting intimidation as sexism. A lot of times people are discomforted by having a conversation with a smart person. This discomfort probably conflicts with the initial impression given by an inviting appearance.

I thought I replied to this comment, but it's not showing up, so perhaps I forgot. I'm not in any way meaning to pick on Tyler, because I am taking his comment completely out of context, but I have heard variants of this argument used before and would like to discuss it. The argument usually goes something like this: "It's not that he means to be a jerk, it's just that she intimidates him."

I can't think of anyone who intimidates me who is both friendly and smart. Once I had a friend who was a musical and programmer savant, and I suppose I found myself a bit intimidated by him just because he was so smart and so talented. And I guess a few months ago when I read about Terry Tao I felt like a slacker, because I always had to work my tail off in mathematics. You could take an infinite number of copies of me and an infinite number of pencils and I'm not going to win the Fields medal, I can guarantee you that.

But even when I encounter someone who is {smarter, more successful, more X} than me, I don't really view them as a threat whose Life I Must Destroy. I don't view them as someone who is going to take resources away from me. Like most warm-blooded humans, I'll probably feel a twinge of jealousy, but they'd never know it. I'm not going to start acting like a jerk to them.

In dating situations, I suppose I can forgive men being intimidated by women and acting goofy because of it. But in professional interactions, men being intimidated by smart women and acting poorly because of it is a form of sexism. It implies the inherent possibility of a non-professional relationship at some future time. And furthermore, it implies inequality between the sexes because a man with those same attributes is probably less likely to elicit the same sorts of goofy behavior.

I of course can't speak for all women,  but for myself and other women I know, we just want to be treated politely and respectfully, aka, professionally. Not strange specimens to act weird around, or to point out our Otherness at every possible moment, or to always be viewing us as competitors Who Must Be Destroyed. There's enough cool problems in science that we really can all peacefully occupy the same space. 

What research pond do you swim in?

The funding / job fairies have come down from the sky and offered you a choice. You can be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond. Which would you choose? (It's not rhetorical - feel free to answer in the comments if you feel like)

Wasted Talent #473: Limitations of Modern
 Medicine, Angela Melick

I have been contemplating this question for awhile. An unusual opportunity presented itself where I'd basically be a bright orange fish in a big pond of purple octopuses. On the one hand, there's a few octopuses who have a *tiny* bit of overlap to my research area, but, really, we're talking seriously different species. I'd definitely be the only vertebrate in the whole pond. (Yes, those other researchers are spineless! har).

On the one hand, you never really have to prove that you're an independent researcher when there is just no other option. But on the other hand, you seriously have to work extra hard to find the other fishies. Which helps you build networking skills, but can be seriously exhausting.

And I suppose it could be fun to get to know the octopuses. Perhaps we will be united by a shared love of Science which transcends the need to be working on similar genres of problems.

But I am unsure. I feel uneasy because in some ways my chosen research area already makes me an outsider within my current pond, but we at least have our fishiness to unite us.

Women in CS: It's not nature, it's culture

Here's my goal for the year:

To convince people to stop throwing up their hands and saying women are just not interested in Computer Science, and instead do something about it. 

Whenever someone says this, the implication is, "It's not our fault. We're not doing anything wrong." Instead of saying, "How can we retain/attract women?" they simply assume that we are:

• Not interested
• Biologically deficient at math/logical thinking
• Don't have what it takes to be a "code cowboy"¹

These assumptions are not correct. In some parts of the world we see equal numbers of women and men studying computer science and engineering and being employed in the tech sector. For example, in Malaysia women comprise 50-60% of jobs in the tech sector. This is entirely due to culture - turns out, men who work indoors are seen as less masculine than those that work outdoors, and women who work outdoors are seen as lower class [1]. It's funny, we actually have sexism working in reverse - leading to an increase in women working in technology. 

The data ain't pretty, though 1982 sure looked nice.

Source: NYTimes

We see similar trends in other parts of Asia. I don't have recent data, but around 2003 women were earning 59% of science and engineering degrees in China, 46% in South Korea, and 66% in Japan. (Compared with 33% in the US). [2]

As for the biology argument, if you're still not convinced, read Terri Oda's excellent piece, "How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science? Hint: it doesn't."

So for the non-Asian world that is still struggling with underrepresentation [2], I think we need to change our culture. We need to eliminate the geek mythology (that to be successful you must eat/sleep/breathe code and nothing else) [3], we need to ensure we illustrate the purpose and value of computing [4], we need to be proactive in recruiting women [5], we need to provide plenty of other women as peers and role models [6], and we probably should de-masculinize the workplace [7]. These approaches are all shown to make a big difference in attracting and retaining women in CS.

If you do these things at your institution, I guarantee you that in addition to helping attract women, you will also attract men. And probably also people of different races, cultures, ethnicities, and socio-economic statuses. Which given the recent yo-yo enrollment trends over the last decade is not a bad thing at all. We really don't want computer science departments going the way of the way of the dinosaur².

So, please - stop mansplaining and start doing.

Notes
¹ It's worth mentioning since it's a common misunderstanding: coding != computer science, coding ∈ computer science. It's like how doing an assay is not molecular biology research. Assays are an aspect of the field of molecular biology, coding is an aspect of the field of computer science.
² No disrespect to anyone who works in Paleontology (I am truly saddened to hear of your suffering), but I just couldn't resist the pun.

References

[1] Mellstrom, U. Masculinity, Power and Technology: A Malaysian Ethnography. Ashgate, 2003.
[2] Simard, C. "The State of Women and Technology Fields Around The World". Anita Borg Institute. 2007.
[3] Margolis, J. and Fisher, A. "Geek Mythology and Attracting Undergraduate Women to Computer Science" Impacting Change Through Collaboration, proceedings of the Joint National Conference of the Women in Engineering Program Advocates Network and the National Association of Minority Engineering Program Administrators, March, 1997.

[4] Margolis, J., Fisher, A., and Miller, F. "Caring About Connections: Gender and Computing". IEEE Technology and Society, December, 1999.
[5] Cohoon, J. M. 2002. Recruiting and retaining women in undergraduate computing majors. SIGCSE Bull. 34, 2 (Jun. 2002), 48-52.
[6] Lagesen, V. The Strength of Numbers: Strategies to Include Women into Computer Science. Social Studies of Science February 2007 vol. 37 no. 1 67-92.
[7] Cheryan, S., Plaut, V.C., Davies, P.G., Steele, C.M. "Ambient belonging: How stereotypical cues impact gender participation in computer science." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 97, No. 6. (December 2009), pp. 1045-1060.

Disconnected connectedness

NPR had a nice interview yesterday with the author of Hamlet's BlackBerry, William Powers. In the interview, Powers talks about how several information upgrades in recent history (Roman cities and papyrus, the printing press, and now the internet), and how, always, society struggles to cope.

Photo by YlvaS

Academics are of course no exception to feeling overloaded. I am presently at a conference, and yesterday chatted with a friend. She said she struggles with staying present in life. Even while we were outside walking in a beautifully wooded area, she said she is always thinking of the next project, the next paper, etc.

This seems like a terribly stressful way to live.

Powers discusses ways in which his family has "offline time" on weekends, where they spend the entire time with each other instead of computing. Most people I know also seem to have developed certain rules for managing their technology. Like, "I don't use instant messenger at work", "I only check email after 6pm.", etc. This is certainly how I manage things, but perhaps due to occupational hazard I am more used to technology than most, and thus it's easier for me to ignore it.

The trick, I think, is to manage things in such a way that you can attend to the important things (i.e., your co-author needs your feedback by tomorrow), and disregard the unimportant things (i.e., the latest old spice guy video). Sadly all this technology is designed to trick our sensation-seeking brains into thinking every piece of information we receive is equally important, and sets it off into fire-fighting mode every time it dings/flashes/buzzes.

Speaking of which, back to meatspace...