Nerd bravado, cont'd.

[mmcirvin]

Via Daring Fireball: Philip Greenspun's brutal article advances a theory as to why there are fewer women than men in science: "They found better jobs." Greenspun thinks that the nerd-macho emphasis on ultimate intellectual achievement prevents young male students from recognizing that by any rational standard science really, really sucks as a career. Willful blindness or no, I suspect that anyone who is or has been in the business will snicker at his essay with dark recognition.

I'm not sure it explains everything, such as the differences between male and female fractions in different disciplines, and different countries. ...Or maybe it does. I remember that Physics Today did a big transnational study years ago and found that the countries where physics was most overwhelmingly male were countries were it was commonly held to be something you could only do if you had innate talent. Maybe it isn't that that attitude drives out women; maybe the women are just being economically rational and the thought of being ratified as an innate genius disproportionately attracts men, especially young men, who wouldn't have any reason to stick with it otherwise.

I know that stubborn pride was a part of what kept me going as long as I did; in some corner of my mind I still think of my decision to quit upon getting the Ph.D. as washing out rather than selling out. But that wasn't the whole appeal. Fundamentally, in hindsight, I think I didn't so much want to be a physicist as I wanted to be a guy who knows about physics, specifically general relativity and quantum field theory. Aside from some imagined prestige emanating therefrom, these were things I didn't understand and was curious about, and I got as far as I needed to in order to get the information.

Comments

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

"countries where physics was most overwhelmingly male were countries were it was commonly held to be something you could only do if you had innate talent"
Which countries are you referring to, Matt?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The US, for one.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I should expand on that. They collected statistics about a lot of different things, if I recall correctly; social status of physicists, funding for physics, etc.

It turned out that the countries that had a much larger fraction of female participation in physics than the US weren't particularly places known for non-sexist attitudes (I remember Italy and the Philippines, and some former Communist countries). Nor were they necessarily second-rate physics communities, to forestall the explanation that women are just worse at it and these places had lower standards; Italy is a physics powerhouse (granted, I don't think it had the very highest fraction of women, just much higher than the US). But they were places where people said that success in math and the hard sciences depended primarily on hard work.

In the US, the attitude was at the opposite extreme; people tended to say there was some necessary talent you either had or didn't have, and if you didn't have it no amount of plugging away would help you (kind of disturbing given our supposedly egalitarian ideals). And the answer to that question was the thing that had a huge correlation with the fraction of men in physics.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Women who are willing to overlook how much their job objectively sucks to do something that bolsters their self-image tend to end up in the NGO sector.

Or possibly teaching school.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced. The proportion of women in biology is much higher than in physics; is biology really a better career than physics? (I don't know, I'm asking.)

I do agree that science isn't an attractive career from a lot of viewpoints (long hours, lots of pressure, moderate pay). On the other hand, looking around the field, I think science is actually a good field for what I'd call lower-middle-class people. I don't see very people who are from wealthy families, I don't see many from very poor families (though there are a handful), but there are quite a few who are from traditionally blue-collar type families (builders, farmers) and lots more from traditionally middle-class but poorly paid families (teachers, most obviously). Obviously there's a barrier for the very poor, who can't afford the long years of school, but if you don't mind a few years of struggling at post-doc stipends, and can scrape up the odd scholarship, then you can move into a fairly comfortable niche, salary-wise. Certainly there are better-paying options, but they all have downsides too.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That objection gave me pause, too. Biology doesn't seem to be the same as the physical sciences in this regard.

I suppose economic background cuts both ways. If you're intent on making a better life for yourself than your parents had and climbing up the ladder of money, power and prestige (which many American minority students particularly feel pressure to do), you're better off going into law, business or medicine. On the other hand, if you're not accustomed to a life of extreme luxury it probably helps with life on a grad student's or postdoc's pay.

I remember noticing my first year at Harvard that the physics grad students there were much more solidly middle-class than the grad students in some of the humanities, who tended to be prep-school kids who had favorite hangouts in all the capitals of Europe. I don't know what that means, if anything.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...come to think of it, it most likely just followed from the physics grad students usually having full financial support from assistantships of some sort.

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of that is US-specific, too. For instance, the article seems to take for granted that a scientist will be denied tenure and looking for work at the age of 44. I don't think that's so common here in Canada as it may be in the USA; if you can get hired to a tenure-track position in the first place, I think you have to be doing notably badly, not just fail to do notably well, in order to not eventually get tenure. There may be less "speculative" hiring of profs the universities don't intend to keep for the long term. I'm sure the different funding situation (Canadian universities get more government funding) makes a big difference. And I have the impression that the systems in some other countries are a whole lot different from Canada and the USA.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

I've heard (without stats) that it's easier to get tenure in Canada than in the US. I'm having a hard time finding stats at all, though, for either country. The best I've done so far is a claim that somewhere between 6 and 35% of PhDs get tenure within 5-6 years of their degreee -- but that's essentially meaningless, not only because of the wide range, but because almost no one I know even comes up for tenure within 5 years of their degree. These days, a 5-6 year post-doc is standard, and then if and when you move into academia you have another maybe 5 years before you come up for tenure.

The stat I want to see is what proportion of assistant professors (tenure track) ultimately get tenure, and I can't dig that up via Google or other sources. My hunch is that it's around 40-60%, but I don't know if that's even close.

"I wanted to be a guy who knows about physics...."

[(Anonymous)]

Fundamentally, in hindsight, I think I didn't so much want to be a physicist as I wanted to be a guy who knows about physics, specifically general relativity and quantum field theory. Aside from some imagined prestige emanating therefrom, these were things I didn't understand and was curious about, and I got as far as I needed to in order to get the information.

I want to say something elegant, but the most direct response I can muster is "Holy shit, that's me." In '90 I graduated high school; in '98 I started college with math/physics dual majors; and this fall, I'll be starting again, after a few starts and stops over the last few years, a B.S. in at least math in my sights.

I've been asked so many times it's about nauseating, "What are you gonna do with that?" For a moment, I can't answer, because I'm almost offended at the insinuation that one must have career goals in mind to seek post-secondary education. Eventually, I recover, and say something like, "I don't know. I'm not in it for a job. I just want to learn about this stuff." In short, I want to be "a guy who knows about math (and some physics)".

Much if not all the start and stop was due to familial priorities (wife and four kids), so that question is at least as relevant as it would be if I were a bachelor. Things have only become more complicated, but I'll be trudging ahead anyway on the hopes that being "a guy who knows about math (and some physics)" might engender a good-paying job, too.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

in some corner of my mind I still think of my decision to quit upon getting the Ph.D. as washing out rather than selling out.

Hard words. I regard my departure from philosophy in a similar light. Even though I realize that picking a city, meeting a woman, making an above-subsistence salary - in short, having a life - was worth more to me than pursuing an academic career, I still sometimes feel in the small hours of the night that I failed.

But you'd have to be an idiot to want to be a philosophy professor. An extremely intelligent, driven, committed idiot.

And then I fell into my current career, which is kind of like having my cake and eating it too - an opportunity I would never have stumbled upon if I was a junior associate lecturer with a 2% chance of tenure in North Dakota or wherever.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

When I got out, I'd basically reconciled myself to a number of facts:

1. I had, all along, been harboring fairly specific ideas of a backup career.
2. My advisor (and everyone else I knew) liked to tell people that if you were harboring ideas of a backup career, it was an excellent time to go do that and get the hell out of physics.
3. There was a tech boom going on, associated with the Internet bubble, and it seemed terribly odd to be mucking around in this straitened environment while it was supposedly raining gravy.
4. The successful young physicists were terrifyingly driven, much more than I was. They loved doing physics so much that they simply could not imagine anything other than doing physics, and would give up every comfort and fight to their last breath to do physics. That wasn't me.
5. Toward the end of graduate school, I'd unexpectedly met the right woman and fallen in love. She lived in the Boston area, had a job there, and said she was willing to follow me if I went somewhere else, but was I going to tell her to make that sacrifice? (Especially considering that at the time, she had much more income than I did, or was likely to have if I got a postdoc.)
6. Fundamentally, I liked it here and would hate moving to some random place just to follow the work.

With all those things in mind, it was still kind of hard to swallow my pride and get out.

Physics is like a cult

[(Anonymous)]

I had all of the same feelings! And I beat myself up for leaving physics because I'd felt like I'd let the cause of women down by leaving. Kind of just confirming the attitudes of the macho nerds. But who needs that noise anyway?

Glad to know that I wasn't alone in needing to be deprogrammed after graduate school in physics! Enjoy your blog!

Kristin at www.radioactive-banana.com/blog