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

[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