Stop Telling Women Scientists To Try Hard

What do Ivanka Trump and Microsoft have in common?

They're two groups that claim to want more women in STEM but are not being very damn helpful about it.

Let's start with Ivanka. She's made her dad sign the Inspire Act and the Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act, laws that dictate NSF and NASA need to work to get women and girls interested in science (assuming that they somehow aren't already).  Simultaneously, she stood by as her father cut the budget for education in general, scrapped funding for the biggest science-funding organizations in the nation (aka our federal government), and froze national hiring of federal science positions, ensuring that this year's crop of graduates are even more screwed in their career search than normal. Personally, we don't see the damned point in getting women into STEM, if you then ensure they can't get jobs afterwards.

All internships and no job makes Amy a dull girl

Men in Paleontology

Look. We love doing science. We love being ladies. But we're beginning to be a little sick of being called women in science. Why? Sometimes it feels like "women in science" sounds a lot like oil in water: two things that do not mix.

Yeah, that seems a bit unnatural, doesn't it? Gender has little natural sway over anyone's love of science, or their ability to perform it. Yet somehow you never hear people call male scientists "men in paleontology" or "boys in STEM" - you only get the extra adjectives if you're a woman, or a person of any color other than "blanched turnip". Sometimes that title feels less like an acknowledgement of our uniqueness, and more like a sentencing of otherness.

Don't get us wrong - we are still women, we are still paleontologists, and we still think paleontology has a lot to catch up on when it  comes to diversity. We're just annoyed that the emphasis is so frequently on our personal diversity, not our science. To make our point, enjoy a series of memes that are by no means politically correct or non-offensive but sure as shit point out how dumb it is to preface everything with "women in" paleontology.

Should we let people be assholes on university campuses?

Oh wow, what, two blog posts in one week? That's right - in addition to visiting new national monuments, we also recently got super rage-y over a new article published in the Atlantic called "Coddling of the American Mind" and instead of writing an epic comment on the paper's page, we're writing it here.

The article was written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt: the first is a lawyer who represents a classic case of "outsider knows better," and the second is a professor who's worried he's going to get fired because he doesn't understand what offends students. Both of them are white doods with hurt fee-fees, and both seem to completely miss the difference between "making people feel like shit" and "babying people."

Alt. titles: "Unwanted Advice from Privileged White Dudes"

Blackout Science Rage: Proposal Edition

No introduction today, we're just going to dive right in: Meaghan recently received the following critique for a proposal requesting funding for her oreodont research.

"The premise that by examining extinct organisms we know what modern organisms are threatened is fundamentally flawed, unless you can demonstrate that the causal mechanisms are identical. Is it really the teeth that define the successful (or not) morphologies?”

Please allow Amy to nerd-translate:

"Studying dead critters to understand modern living critters is horse shit unless you can show that they were influenced by the exact same forces. Do funny shaped teeth really determine the success of certain oreodonts?"

Originally when Meaghan read this she didn't get past the first sentence because she flew into a paleo-rage; upon second glance she is still a grumpy Gus but less likely to make noises that make her roommates think she is possessed by demons or possibly hoarding a room full of cats in heat.

Canada's Putting a Price Tag on Science

Dear Readers, we have two great shameful secrets to reveal to you today. Secret number one is that Meaghan has a hidden past, buried deep in her DNA: she is half Canadian, born in the frozen wastes of the North and holding citizenship both there and here.

Sorry aboot that?

Whew. That feels good to get off of our chests.

Secret number two is a little less shameful for us, but a whole lot more shameful for Canada: apparently they, too, have morons in charge. Essentially, the guy in charge of the National Research Council (Canada's equivalent of the National Science Foundation) has declared that "scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value," and that the NRC will be shifting its focus accordingly. A short glance at the webpage for the NRC reads very much like a business - their new tagline (and isn't it great when a government agency decides it needs a tagline??) is the catch-all bland statement of "working with clients and partners, we provide innovation support, strategic research, scientific and technical services." If you took out 'scientific' you'd have the generic business model for any IT or marketing company. Given that the focus has gone commercial, it sounds like removing science from their science foundation is exactly what they plan on doing.

"Our organization is now easier for business to understand and access," says John McDouchnozzle, the guy in charge of the new changes in town. And that's great, it really is - because big business is exactly what has driven great research in the past. In fact, commercial viability of research has led to such great discoveries as the fact that whale ears AREN'T hurt by sonar, scientists don't think the climate is changing, and the fact that tobacco isn't bad for us! Oh wait... all three of those particular findings were funded by extremely biased, often commercially-driven sources and have since been contradicted? Hmm.

Dr Joe Camel, PhD in the Science of Marketing

The truth is that sometimes scientific discovery is not only commercially nonviable, it is directly contradictory to the interests of the industry involved. Putting a price tag on science will not just eliminate basic research that contributes to the whole (which has no immediate monetary effect but may add to future research that does). It could also directly inhibit research that doesn't say what commercialism and industry want it to say.

Meanwhile, Canada's health organization says it's totes cool to use homeopathic alternatives to vaccines. Why get a shot when you can drink tiger's blood? It's ALL THE SAME, SAYS CANADA. In fact with this new regime, it's probably good for the tiger, too! Removes weaklings from the gene pool, and everyone knows a smaller gene pool is a better gene pool, amiright??

Seriously. Did you guys have a real harsh winter up there or something? Sounds like the Canadian government got a nasty case of frostbite on the brain.

WTF, Canada. WTF.

The Sequester and Science, Part 1

Whether we're creating a mass extinction event of gummy invertebrates in the kitchen, or whining through the most depressing grant-writing parties at the dining room, life at Vengeance Team Headquarters is always a little stressful... and recent federal budget cuts haven't helped. See, in academia science is funded primarily by grants and fellowships, those sweet monetary unicorns that sequestration is making even more rare and competitive, and 20% of those are federal funding sources. As students, Amy and Meaghan apply for a lot of these, which feels like spending hours crafting arrows that you then shoot into the dark. Even the most highly recommended grant applications aren’t always going to get funded at the best of times, and the best of times for funding are going to soon seem like a distant memory. The National Science Foundation expects its overall budget will be cut by five percent and it is likely that new grants will take a major hit—a thousand fewer will be funded this year.

We've already seen the competitive aspect coming out to play, with scientists and the public tearing each other apart over the merits of their research. But worse than the infighting, and worse than poor funding rates for grants, are the insidious impacts of these cuts which hit deep at the core of everything that we (mostly Amy) love. That’s right - the sequester is hurting lemurs.

Within the article, Lemur Center Director Anne Yoder laments about the impacts of budget cuts, “In our case, it would mean the loss of jobs, and consequently, our ability to care for our lemur colony would be compromised.”

Compromised. Lemur safety will be compromised by the sequester. We (mostly Amy) cannot emphasize this enough: the sequester is dangerous for lemurs.

Of course upon hearing this we (mostly Amy) flew into an angry angry rage.       

"This is ridiculous. This country values military funding, patriarchal, capitalistic mind numbing bullshit. Lemurs are gonna die, while our government representatives make more money that some african countries. It may not be evident quite yet how bad this is, but the long term effects of these science budget cuts will be severe. Does this mean no more bananas or tamarinds for lemurs (THEIR FAVORITE TREATS), they’ll have to suffer through generic fruit like the rest of us? Or god forbid, RED DELICIOUS APPLES?"

But don’t worry everyone (Amy). The Vengeance Team is on it. We’ve created a petition (wow, they really don’t check those do they) and have contacted Sarah Mclaughlin to use her heart-wrenching song in a promotional lemur video. We’re sure she’ll get back to us soon, but in the meantime here are some of our favorite lemur videos, which you can feel free to link to when you sign our petition.

In Prosimian Solidarity

Meaghan and Amy (Seriously, mostly Amy)

Famous Amos and Marvelous Melvin

Currently the Geology department at our school is hiring for a new full time faculty position. This is an exciting opportunity for the department to expand the university's breadth of research. It is also an important chance to discuss the presence of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Currently, the department has 24 faculty listed, not all of whom are full-time or tenure-track, and 5 of them are female. The graduate student proportions are much different, about 50:50.

An article published in 2007 noted that while about half of PhD earners in STEM fields were women, they only held up to (aka, many schools had less than) 30% of faculty positions. This percentage dropped even further in universities with increased prestige, higher student entrance criteria, larger student body, absence of a women's studies programs, increased research productivity and increased federal funding. Essentially, the more prestigious the school, the fewer lady faculty members they'll have.

The problem is no longer an absence of well-qualified women from accredited universities - 45.9% of STEM PhD holders in ages 25-39 are women, though that percentage does vary by field. However, women are less likely to advance than men and also more likely to leave a position than their male cohorts. At current rates of hiring and exiting, the faculty diversity caps out at about 40%, even as the PhD rates continue to equalize. This is called demographic inertia: though the amount of qualified women is increasing, the amount of women actually hired and retained isn't.

There are countless explanations for this phenomenon, some of them asinine, some of them bitter, and some of them unexpectedly and really disturbingly true. Recently our adviser showed us a paper on how selection bias affects hiring practices. A nationwide sample of biology, chemistry, and physics professors evaluated the application materials of an undergraduate science student who had applied for a science laboratory manager position. All participants received the same materials. The only thing that changed was the gender, with some applications displaying traditionally female names and others male. Participants rated the student’s competence and hireability, as well as the salary and amount of mentoring they would offer the student.

Ladies: too great for mentoring.

 When faced with a female student, faculty rated the application as less competent, less hireable, and less desirable than the same application with a male name. This preference was independent of the faculty member's own sex, too - female professors gave the male students just as much increased preference as the male professors did. The mean starting salary offered to the female student was 26,507.94$. The mean starting salary offered to a male applicant with the exact same qualifications was 30,238.10$. That's a difference of 3730.16$ for being named Bob instead of Betty, because somehow possessing a penis makes you more equipped to clean beakers.

So what does this mean?  If the only difference on the resumes were female vs. male names, can this whole dilemma be solved with androgynous name choices for future generations? Sorry future little Scarlett Rebecca Atwater, looks like it's gonna be Casey, Pat, Jordan, or  Morgan for you! But before we all go changing our names to J.K., there are other choices - and a good thing too, because being named Melvin would cause Meaghan to projectile vomit, and Amy is actually having a near meltdown at the thought of having to respond to her childhood nightmare nickname Amos. For one, shouting this bias from the rooftops might help: there is evidence that diversity education can reduce both explicit and implicit or subconscious bias.

There are a few ways of altering hiring practices that will help skew the ratio, but even then this is a process that takes time. For most schools, if they begin specifically hiring equal numbers of women it will still take almost 60 years for their faculty to reach equalized levels. Women leave faculty positions more readily and for a wide variety of reasons including unequal burdens of family responsibilities and discrimination in promotion considerations. Stop this hemorrhage, and faculty positions should reach equal levels in about 40 years. Combine both of those tactics, and it only takes 30 years!

That's still a long time, and unless you're a faculty member you might not hold any sway over the processes that will result in change. There are other things you can do. If you're a woman in science, consider mentoring. If you're a man in science, you should consider being more like this guy, and participate in groups like The Good Men Project. If you've got a daughter, send them to women-friendly science camps. Giving women extra support can go a long way to making them more resilient to the factors that bar success.

Science! Ladies can do it too. And definitely better than Barbie who thinks carrying plastic dinos around is science.

And remember that talking about it is one of the ways to fix it. Many of our readers are fellow science students that Meaghan and Amy have hassled into reading their blog. Bring this up in lab meetings, bring it up when you're discussing summer jobs. And if you ever get a chance to participate in a hiring process (geology graduate students, we're looking at you!), keep in mind the subconscious bias that might prevent you from suggesting a woman candidate that's equally as qualified as her male counterparts.

WORKS CITED

Cameron, E. , Gray, M. , & White, A. (2013). Is publication rate an equal opportunity metric?. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28(1), 7-8.

Marschke, R. , Laursen, S. , Nielsen, J. , & Rankin, P. (2007). Demographic inertia revisited: An immodest proposal to achieve equitable gender representation among faculty in higher education. Journal of Higher Education, 78(1), 1-26.

Moss-Racusin, C. , Dovidio, J. , Brescoll, V. , Graham, M. , & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(41), 16474-16479.

Rudman, L.A., Ashmore, R., Gary, M. (2001). "Unlearning" automatic biases: The malleability of implicit prejudice and stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 81(5).

Thanks to Dr. Hopkins and Dr. Davis for suggesting some of these articles, and for bringing up the topic in our lab meetings and making us think about it as well.


 

Science in Popular Media: The Internet, It Lies

Amy and Meaghan have recently come to the conclusion that all journalists are failed detectives. It's the same general job concept: both professions enjoy exposing crimes and scandals, wearing trench coats, and smoking pipes. However, when detectives get something wrong they lose their job, while when a journalist gets something wrong, they sometimes print a retraction. When a detective blows something out of proportion in order to generate some controversy, people think said detective is an idiot. When a journalist does the same thing, they get hired by Fox News as a sensationalist.

Exhibit A.

Recently Meaghan and Amy have been encountering the sour bouquet of incompetence that is science in the media on a more-regular-than-is-pleasant basis. From students asking when dinosaurs are going to be cloned, to their parents warning that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is about to erupt, the Vengeance Team are tired of explaining away the stupidity of their friends' and families' news sources. In order to avoid giving themselves ulcers or concussions from rage blackouts, Amy and Meaghan have compiled a short list of things to keep in mind when reading any non-peer-reviewed article on science.


1) What you're reading is coming through a filter.
Do not ever assume that the reporter knows what they're talking about. Reporters like all of us, are human... which means that a substantial proportion of them are intensely stupid. We're talking like full on, manatee squash levels of stupid: unable to interpret what is exactly in front of their faces because it may not meet their preconceived notions or doesn't match whatever will the article a green light of approval (see #2). Sometimes, this stupidity is apparent if you're more cynical than the reporter; sometimes it's only clearly wrong if you're not.

Take the example of the second linked article, a scathing report on the discovery of a "Unicorn Lair" in North Korea. While hilarious, the article is written from the perspective of someone biased to consider North Koreans as hopelessly gullible peons searching to support their beliefs that Kim Jong-un is amazing and super awesome and rides mythical beasts. That level of filter and bias caused the author to stop at Exit Ridiculous and not explore much further; the next day the website posted a follow up after looking at some more of the details. The discovery of this cave, of which "Unicorn Lair" is a very loose translation, is actually more the equivalent of  finding out that a legend used a name of a real place, person, or occurrence. That doesn't lend the legend more credibility - it's just finding a bit more of the root story at the bottom of a game of historical Telephone.

Sadly, this was photoshopped. See #5 for details

2) The reporter is inevitably writing for people even stupider than they are.

Yes, just like all the employees at the DMV, reporters expect you to register somewhere between pretty damn to holy shit amounts of stupid.


So the knowledge that they put into their articles is not only filtered by their own stupidity, but is then boiled down so it would make sense to a mildly literate slime mold. Metaphors are a well-loved tool for explaining difficult concepts, but sometimes they get used because the reporter didn't really understand what the scientist was talking about. This happens in education as well; sometimes using a metaphor imparts a totally different message than you anticipated.


3) Being interesting sells better than being accurate. 
News articles must be sensational, unique and capable of attracting the population that also thinks Jersey Shore is classic prime time entertainment. That means that journalists tend to use words, ideas and general untruths to pull viewers into their venus fly trap of pretty pictures. This is most obvious when looking at headlines, which are simultaneously incredibly oversimplified and exceptionally over dramatic. Now, the Vengeance Team is no stranger to Drama and Dramatic Oversimplification (see any of our posts ever)... we just get all rageface when we see it's not obviously separated from science.

After all, which of the following titles would you be most inclined to click on?

'Dracula' Dinosaur: Pegomastax africanus had fangs, beak, bristles

"This New Vampire Dinosaur Will Haunt Your Dreams Tonight" 

Found: A Parrot-Headed, Big-Fanged, Porcupine Dinosaur. Really.

'Fanged vampire parrot' identified as new species of dinosaur 

Dwarf species of fanged dinosaur emerges from southern Africa

4) "Expert" is a word without credentials. 
 One of the things that sells is controversy, even if that controversy is pretty much not accepted by the scientific community at large. The fact that popular media often capitalizes on controversy ends up with flawed or outright false information being listed with equal weight to genuinely researched information. They often do this by employing both Experts and "Experts" and pitting them against one another in a fight to the verbal death.

Expert is a very slippery term, one which is often self-ascribed. In the news, you don't have to have a degree or a work background to be an expert... you just have to have an ego and a mouth that spills out big words, particularly if those words are contradictory to common perception or common sense. Since journalists refuse to perform background checks on morons, you're going to have to do it yourself.

Recently, CNN invited a "pair of experts" to duke it out on TV over climate change. Their experts were Bill Nye the Science Guy, who holds 3 honorary PhDs and a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering, and Marc Morano, who has a B.A. in political science, has never published a scientific article, and is funded by organizations who receive huge amounts of money from gas and oil companies.

Just kidding! NEITHER OF THESE THINGS BELONG, because NEITHER OF THEM are Climate Experts. There are reasons why both of them were picked: Marc Morano is one of the few Climate Denialists, and he's wealthy and persuasive enough to avoid showing up covered in rotten tomato stains. Bill Nye is famous, super awesome, and coined the term "Science!" This makes them appealing for a 10 minute rambling debate, but it doesn't actually make them experts: they were chosen because they could draw people in, not because they were the best at what they were talking about.



5)  Those pictures aren't always related.
We know we're about to mess with your view of all that is good and true in the world, but it's time to pull the bandaid off and just tell you: sometimes Google isn't right. We know, we know - we gave you the red pill when you wanted to keep taking the blue, but it's time. To prove this to yourself, go ahead and pick an animal that you know a lot about. For example, sloths. Put that into google images search, and scroll down a few pages... are all of those sloths?

Now imagine you're a journalist suffering from the affliction mentioned in point #1, doing research on some sort of fossil animal you've never even heard of. You put your fossil name into google images and come up with some skeletons! That's how you get an article that's about dinosaurs that has a picture of a horse skeleton with glued on fangs. It's also how the two bits below were woven together, when having a elementary school student on staff would probably pick up the mistake:

"Fossil find: The discovery of the thigh bone of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in Montana, USA, revealed patterns only previously found in the bones of pregnant birds."

6) Consider your source.
A peer-reviewed article means that people who are theoretically just as intelligent and qualified as you are read your article, made you rewrite it a time or two, and then said it was good enough to publish. An article from a website or a newspaper typically goes through at least one editor's hands, who is unlikely to be any more familiar with the content than the journalist was, and who looks to make sure there aren't any half sentences. Blogs often aren't looked at by anybody: case in point, if they were, do you think there would be so many damn curse words in ours? (SORRY MAMA)

The process of editing and reviewing papers or articles is important. Scientific journals rely on their integrity to be published, so when they mess up and somehow, somehow-dear-lord-HOW, manage to publish press releases named "could “advanced” dinosaurs rule other planets," they are quickly humiliated into retracting them. This particular example also relates back to #3: the original article was mostly about how molecules on Prebiotic Earth shared similar structure, but the press release focused on and amplified the crazier bits. 


In Summary
Hulking out about science in the media is not good for the Vengeance Team. While Amy does seem to live on a refined fuel of Top Ramen and Pure Rage, Meaghan is trying desperately to coax her to swap in some vegetables. Meaghan herself is already at her limit of apoplectic fits because all the Olds in Eugene are much faster bicyclers than her, so she can't handle the additional strain on her tiny, china-doll heart. Please, for the sake of Meaghan and Amy's health, consider your sources, consider your authors, examine their motivations, and don't ever assume Google Images is telling you the truth.

If you are a journalist or journalism student reading this, and you are offended and have works of your own that defy these trends, please email us! We want to reward good journalists who do their jobs, understand the scientific process, and don't contribute to our burgeoning ulcer problems. We know you're out there... we're just not sure where.