higher chances for women?

Uh, I have been really quiet for a while. Mostly because I was on conference/job hunt travel and before that it was the usual craziness to get your students on track and everything else more or less done before leaving.

Now I'm back, jetlag is pretty much conquered and I've already spend a decent amount of time in front of my office computer. The weeks away were full of different impressions, not only because I went to a really big conference so pretty much everybody was there and the whole socializing and catching up gives a colourful picture already. But the impression that stands out the most and makes me thinking a lot comes from the job-hunt part of the travel.

As the end of my fellowship slowly dawns I thought about my options afterwards, esp. the ones including getting closer to home again. One possibility to transfer back to my home country and continuing on the academic track would be if I'd applied for an early career research fellowship. The specific one is a pretty big thing and includes enough money to pay yourself, a Post-Doc and 1-2 PhD students for 4-5 years, plus money for equipment, travel and what else is needed for successful research. It's a personal award, but one needs a host professor, who'd be willing to have this person + project planted in his department. The likelihood that such a project gets funded increases if the reviewers have the impression that the hosts labs and experience fit very well to the proposed project. That's why I visited a few groups, who work in related fields, to talk to the professors, see their labs, get an impression what it would be like to work there, see if the personal chemistry fits and if they would be willing to host me. Overall, these trips were very positive and interesting for me and I see several options where to settle down with my next project (in case it gets funded). 

But there is one thing I heard at each of these visits, that makes me thinking and that is the sentence: "You have a bonus when it comes to applying for this fellowship, because you are a woman." I'm sure everybody meant this in a very encouraging way: "You should apply, because you even have a bonus which increases your personal success probability." And in the beginning I thought that this is really great for me. But by now I'm wondering if it is actually true! And if it is not true, what does this sentence really mean? Everywhere you go you hear that women in STEM fields nowadays have higher chances, because universities get asked at every project renewal why there are not more women in leading positions. And men in my age feel threatened by that. So people seem to believe, that women have higher chances to succeed. Even though in the Schools in my home country I have worked in so far there is no sign of increasing numbers of women in the permanent staff ranks - just the temporary positions are given to women quite often.

In Australia there is a huge awareness for this topic as well, but looking at the success rates for grant applications, the women chart usually shows lower numbers. And while still a third of our students up to postgrad level are female (which is a lot for a science/engineering field) the number drops to 12% for the academic staff in our School (including both fixed term and permanents). The leaky pipeline...? No sign of "higher chances" just yet.

At the moment I think the sentence "women have higher chances" is just interpreted wrong by the people who don't make the decisions. It does not mean "women have higher chances compared to men", because it does not make sense to hire a woman just because of her gender, if there is a more qualified man available.   It just means "women have higher chances compared to women 20 years ago", which maybe means that my application will not directly go in the bin but gets a decent amount of attention. And if I stick out enough it maybe even goes one the pile for the next round. But I don't think that any woman would be hired or get funded instead of a man if she is not obviously better than him - even though as a woman you get told otherwise and even though men freak out because they don't know how to compensate for the lack of "female bonus". This is all very disturbing and misleading - I hope we can settle for something a bit more honest and relaxed in the next 10 years. And if I'm wrong, I'd like to see the statistics!

a winter of deadlines

Ahhh, where did the year go. It was just February a little while ago and now the summer is already long gone, the rainy and miserable season has started and all the deadlines have piled up to a huge mountain.

My life is dictated by deadlines right now and I just try to keep up with them: application deadlines for jobs (yes, starting to look around what other unis have to offer), deadline for an invited paper, a field trip coming up and some conference travel combined with semi-formal job interviews. Oh, and deadline for my promotion application as well. At the moment I'm still on top of things but the point where I have to start working crazy hours gets closer and closer. Weekends are already occupied with "administrative" stuff such as proposal and paper reviewing. Luckily the weather is just horrible, so it feels almost like a treat to snuggle up in bed with a cup of hot tea and a bunch of stuff to read. At least I'm not missing anything outside.

I wonder if there will be a time, when I'm able to plan a year ahead and avoid getting into this maelstrom of deadlines that I saw coming already 6 months ago.

politics

fascinating Australian politics! Kevin Rudd, who was kicked out of his position as Prime Minister by Julia Gillard three years ago has now kicked Julia Gillard out of her position as the Prime Minister to maybe become Prime Minister again after the next election. It must be fun to have to vote here!

go for a swim

it's good for your brain! 

And reading The Conversation of course helps as well.

how much trust, how much control?

This is a question I ponder about a lot. How much freedom should you give your students in their work and how much should you trust them that they stick to the rules of scientific working even when there are so many tempting options that could make their life easier.

GMP wrote this great article about taking over paper drafts that don't come along good enough or fast enough if written by students. This is one great example about the boundary between giving freedom and trusting that the students will do a great job - even though it might take a while - and taking over control at some point to get that paper out to the public.

Another related point is plagiarism. We all would love to have students who don't copy and paste sentences or whole paragraphs from other peoples work and it would save so much time to not have to check at all. I often feel bad, that I do check my students works for plagiarism, because -hey- they are not little kids anymore, they are grown-ups in their mid 20s, they know the rules, they understand why these rules are in place. But often enough I get reports written in more or less heavy accent of whatever nation the author comes from and in between there are these flawless, well constructed sentences. Pasting them in Google gives a straight hit in 99% of the cases - very sad, but at least you know that they had a look at some of the famous papers in their field. So I continue to check on them, which is annoying, takes a lot of time and does not build my trust in their general scientific work.

Because if they copy and paste from other people for their reports, what is their standard for their own work? How well do they conduct their experiments? Do they just show me the one flawless data set and don't mention the other 10, which look "unexpected"? I had a case like this once and it made me dig through the persons raw data, which was a real pain. Of course there are people with very high standards, who prefer to measure 5 additional data sets just to be sure and who are not afraid of data that does not look like textbook but instead ask the big "why is this" question. If I'd dig through their raw data I'd understand that they would feel treated like little kids.

Another sensitive topic is the communication with collaboration partners. I'd love to have my students discussing their projects with more senior scientists and this means that there has to be an initial contact at first. If they don't meet in person on a conference or during a visit, this contact will be most likely via email - and there are so many pitfalls to be aware of. Some students just write perfectly polite emails just by themselves, but others come across quite rude - even if from their cultural background they should be very good in expressing respect towards a more experienced person. Does that mean I have to check emails before they are sent? That again feels like massive paternalism.

How do you determine the level of control a certain student needs? Do you fully trust them in the beginning and adjust the control level on the go? Or do you control a lot and let them run free if they seem to get the concepts of scientific standards? What if they don't care and try to take the "easy path" again and again?