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.

Houston, we have an image problem

I was at a novelty store a few months ago, and came across a board game called "The Mad Professor Science Kit". I noted that the mad science professor looks nothing like me at all.

I've written a lot about how journalists and artists and other media people need to get the memo about what professors and scientists look like, in order to help change images in the minds of the younger generation. 

Alas, we still have a ways to go. Here is my unscientific analysis.

Method: Clip Art Google Image search, Screenshot of page 1 of results.

Term 1: professor

Results: 8% owl, 92% male, 0% female. Only one person who may be of asian or latino descent. (Note: Page 2 has a whopping two female professors - wowie! And one person of color.) 

Term 2: scientist

Results: 80% male, 20% female. No owls. One person of color. Page two has owls, and a few more women.

Term 3: engineer

Results: Of 19 humans and gendered characters (Mickey Mouse), 90% male, 10% female. No people of color.

Term 4: "computer scientist"

Results: Of the three humans, 33% are women! And it's Grace Hopper, baby! No people of color, though we do have a link to "African Americans in Science and Technology", which is nice. An a Pi symbol, cat, Connect 4, and some cool geek pride T-shirts. 

"Software engineer" and "programmer" do not yield very positive results, but I am pleased to say "computer programmer" yields several women, including a woman of color and this awesome coloring book page: 

I know it seems like a silly thing, clipart, but a heck of a lot of people use it when preparing presentations.

Any artists out there want to start a revolution? Or maybe work on an NSF proposal? I think this would be a great STEM education thing. And easy as anything to do. 

NSF Fastlane: Party like it's 1999

I know the government is a monolith.

I know the government does not have any in-house software developers anymore to write and maintain software.

I know these are Troubled Economic Times.

But, still, what's up with Fastlane? This system is a dinosaur snail. I've had simple figureless PDFs take a century to distill.

NSF, if you fund me, in addition to doing amazing research I'll stick a few of my a-ma-zing undergrads on revamping Fastlane. Actually, I'll make it a class project and stick a gazillion undergrads on it. Give us a semester, that puppy will zip.

Science literacy fail

Image description: Google News headline "Study warns of  chemicals in canned foods"

Oh noes! There are chemicals in our food!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Good luck avoiding chemicals tomorrow as you feast, breathe, and digest. :-)

Signal Boost: Stand With Science

Junior PI Scientist-Mom-Wife wrote to ask me to signal boost Stand With Science, and I am more than happy to oblige. I'm actually going to repost her words here, to tell you about this effort.

Next week the Congress Joint Select 'super' Committee on Deficit Reduction will decide where to make the next big cuts. If they do not agree or find a plan to reduce spending, sweeping cuts will be put into effect that will likely affect everyone in science and academia.

A group of MIT students have started a letter urging Congress not to cut science funding and they are amassing signatures. They include an amazing video that describes the importance of science, engineering and technology to our daily lives and to American jobs. It's a positive message, and really accessible to the public.

There are now about 7000 signatories on this letter, including Nobel Prize winners and numerous well known scientists (you can view signatories Bob Horvitz #6854, Philip Sharp #6866, Bob Weinberg #6846, Susan Lindquist #6727, Doug Melton #6994, Ray MacDonald#3652, Gary Ruvkun #3712, Didier Stainier #4064, Richard Hynes, Luisa Iruela-Arispe #5087, Andrew Ewald #6899, etc...) and the number keeps growing.

The video and petition have clearly gone viral, which is great. The main message is that the future of science is at stake.

This video and letter have been covered by the NY Times, Science (AAAS) and many other news organizations and blogs. We need faculty and respected scientists to help further this worthy request to Congress.

If you have time, please view the MIT student video and consider signing the letter.

Here's the video:

Readers, please sign this letter. Bloggers, please blog about this. Make some noise. The last thing we want to do in this economy is cut STEM research funding - let's send a strong message to Congress.

Vanished!

MIT has produced a science video game for kids that looks to be both a lot of fun and educational. It's for kids aged 10-14.

Image Descrption: A screen shot from the Vanished game.
Credit: MIT

Here's an excerpt from an article about the game:

The game’s conceptual origins lie in discussions researchers in the Comparative Media Studies group have had with Smithsonian officials, dating back about four years. The creation of “Vanished” took place after the MIT researchers won a grant to develop the game from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2009.

The NSF has an interest in projects such as “Vanished” due in part to the agency’s findings, over many years of research surveys, that much of the public’s science knowledge comes from outside the classroom. The grant for developing the game came from the NSF’s program in “Informal Science Education,” which seeks new ways to interest students in science.

The MIT researchers hope that participating in “Vanished” will help break down myths among students, and help them realize that in asking questions and hunting for information, they are performing tasks central to science.  

“Scientists aren’t a priesthood of people with secret knowledge,” Osterweil says. “They don’t walk around with it all in their heads. They do research to find it out.”

Here's a link to the game. Enjoy! It's only available for two months (and started about 2 weeks ago), so be sure to play between now and the end of May. 

Strengths and Weaknesses

When you review a paper for a conference or journal, many of the reviewing forms request that the reviewer outline the paper's strengths and weaknesses.

Recently, I read a review that went something like this:

"Weaknesses:  Several of the main findings presented in this paper are merely confirmation of previous work."

I wish this was one of those publication venues where you can review the reviewers, because I would have written back:

"Weaknesses: Reviewer 2 has gotten so thristy for novelty they have forgotten one of the hallmarks of science: replicability."

It's not just Computer Science that is plagued by this problem, certainly it's cropped up elsewhere. But our discipline does have a tradition of getting a little too obsessed with the novelty of an idea that they forget the value of reproducing previous findings.

Sorry, but don't apologize

One of the bits of advice floating around for scientists is, "Don't apologize for your work". Usually this advice is dispensed within the context of giving a presentation - don't start a presentation with, "Sorry", don't apologize for unreadable graphs, etc.

But I think this advice should be extended to all professional scientific communication. If you hurt someone's feelings or spill their coffee, absolutely you should apologize. Of course you should speak considerately and professionally to all people. But when it comes to communicating science don't apologize for yourself. Don't degrade your expertise, don't qualify your statements.¹

You can qualify presentations of information, for example, "This work is preliminary" or "This was just a first step to exploring this problem area." But that is very different from saying, "I realize I am only a masters student" or "Sorry, I am a n00b here" or "I know my undergraduate degree is in French literature, but..."

Be bold! Yes, you will probably need to wave the white flag sometimes. But don't start out with your flag waving. Start out strong.

---

¹ Unless you work in a country where apologizing is the norm for professional communication, in which case, I'm sorry for this post. ;-)

Punch Beating

Recently, two different people have told me they were all excited about a revolutionary new idea, went to the literature to read about it, and found someone had already invented it.

I said: "Great!"

They said: "Great?"

I say "great!" for several reasons:

1) You clearly had a great idea if somebody else already came up with it.
2) You are capable of lots and lots of great ideas and will have more
2.1) People who only have one great idea usually have very dull careers following their accolade.
3) At least you didn't spend five years building something you were hoping to patent only to find out it exists and is currently being sold in three countries.

In my area of research, I am always delighted to learn somebody has studied one of my ideas, particularly if they've done a satisfactory job of exploring it, because it means I can spend time more working on other ideas.

Anyway, I'm sure there is some good research-zen koan for this one. Maybe... hold each idea in your hand like a grain of sand, cling too tightly and someone else will patent it.

Room for Failure

Back long ago when I was a wee undergraduate lass, there was a mathematics professor at my university, let's call him Smith. I have no idea what caliber of researcher Professor Smith was back then, looking now at his citation count in Google Scholar I'm not feeling impressed, but maybe those sorts of numbers are more common for Math.

We undergraduates knew Professor Smith not for his mathematical brilliance, but for his tendency to insult people when they came to his office hours and asked questions. I.e., "How could you not know that? You're stupid." To my knowledge he was completely gender-egalitarian in doling out insults, in fact I first heard about his behavior from a male student.

Yesterday when I read Amy Chau's WSJ article, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior", I thought back to Professor Smith. In those days we all though Professor Smith was a jerk with no social skills, a demotivator, and a poor excuse for an educator. But it occurs to me - maybe he was tough on us because he expected us to be top notch students, and thought we should be pushing ourselves harder. Maybe he came from a cultural background where calling people stupid is acceptable practice and he missed the memo that it is Not Okay in the US.

Growing up, I was lucky to have parents who did not flip out when I got a low grade, and teachers who were always respectful and kind towards me. I did hear tales of some people whose parents would flip out when they failed a test, and I do wonder what effect that has on the developing mind. Does it lead students to cheat? Commit acts of self-harm when they fail? Drop out of school entirely? (I have no doubt it is a major contributor to grade-grubbing).

We seem to stress measured, quantifiable success both in education and in science - receiving high scores, publishing positive results. But I really wish there was more room for (and encouragement of) failure. I wish more stories were told about how a lot of good science comes out of making mistakes, or how a lot of brilliant thinkers flunked out of school.

Once I gave a talk and a young student came up to me and said, "Thank you so much for telling us about the mistakes you made in your research. I've never seen anyone do that before." I was astonished. It just always seemed like the honest thing to do.

Honeybee Mystery Solved!

This article made me really happy. In case you weren't aware, since 2006 honeybees have been dying in droves, and no one knew why. All I could figure was that some seriously weird X-Files stuff was going on. But it turned out it was a virus-fungal double whammy. So, no aliens or mutant corn, just something pretty humdrum as far as nature is concerned.

Image by BrainPop

The nice part about the article was how the different scientists collaborated - all due to some clever networking:

"Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines. A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal.
...
But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees.

Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom.

I love that. (And not just because I'm a sucker for bad puns.). Person C connects Persons A and B, and fabulous science happens.

Just a guy from New Hampshire

I was flipping through the June issue of the IEEE Women in Engineering magazine, and came across an interview with Dean Kamen. Kamen is a really fantastic (albeit eccentric) inventor, responsible for: the first stair climbing wheelchair, the segway, the first insulin pump, and other neat things. The article was focused on his recent novel inventions for extremely efficient power generators and water purifiers to be given to people in developing countries. I absolutely loved this quote:

Image by James Young Art

He has been called an idealist, an optimist, and occasionally even naïve for his big ideas about fixing the world’s problems. Kamen says he sometimes even wonders himself. 'I think, well, if with all their resources the United Nations and everyone can’t do it, I must really be nuts trying to do it myself—I’m just some guy from New Hampshire.'"

The article goes on to discuss his efforts in STEM outreach and education. I liked this quote too:

"'You get what you celebrate' is a common catchphrase of Kamen’s. He has noticed a crisis in United States culture: young kids are growing up excited about being football stars and actors, not engineers or scientists. Despite the one-in-a-million chance of succeeding in show business or professional sports, our society encourages kids to prioritize these dreams over other options. Celebrating Britney Spears and Shaquille O’Neal over our inventors, scientists, and engineers skews too many kids away from careers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, resulting in a nationwide shortage of engineers and scientists and a drop in our global standing in technology development. The solution, obviously, is to change our culture."

Indeed! (Though I'm not sure I buy the shortage part. IEEE has a bit of a bias here.)