Working around the Barriers

I had lunch with an old grad school friend today. It was great to see her, and as always, lunch with a friend did me good.

But there was an undertone of... I don't know what. Sadness? Anger? Frustration?... too. Every time I meet up with a woman friend who is in my generation, I hear about how sexism and gender bias are blocking her progress. This is not because my friends are whiners, or prone to looking for something external to blame for their problems. In fact, the stories usually come out as an aside, to explain a change in course. She was working her way around a barrier, and that barrier was usually a man. If it wasn't a man, it was multiple men.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I've heard a variation of this story at least 10 times in the last year. It is demoralizing to think about this in the aggregate. So much talent being thwarted.

But I'll say this for us: we're all finding a way around. A lot of us won't get what we originally set our sights on, but we're all getting pretty good lives. So that's something.

The other heartening thing is that we're helping each other find our new paths. On my more optimistic days, I think that in another 10 years, I'll look at what my group of friends has accomplished and be amazed. We will have built an alternate universe of success.

On my less optimistic days, I think we are doomed to achieve less than our potential. We will salvage good lives from the wreckage of our ambitions, but we will always know we could have done more.

Probably, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I see signs of hope. Not in millennial men. Sorry, some of them are awesome. So are some GenX men. So are some Boomer men. But my own experience has shown me that younger men can be just as sexist as their elders. In fact, sometimes they are more sexist because they haven't met the woman who will teach them to be better yet. Seriously, just look at Silicon Valley.

No, I see signs of hope in women. Just as we are individually finding our ways around the barriers in our careers, we are collectively looking for ways around the barriers. I hope that we remember to go back and dismantle those barriers where we can. Because my daughters and their friends are coming behind us. When I sit and watch my daughters' gymnastics class, I am in awe of the joy and strength of the girls out on that floor. I want a world where that joy and strength—and joy in strength—can continue into adulthood. When I went to watch my daughter's spelling bee, I was thrilled to see the kids supporting each other, cheering for each other. Boys and girls cheered for and high-fived their classmates, even when they were clearly disappointed not to be the one still in the running. I see my friends working to raise their sons to be just as feminist as their daughters, and I think, maybe we can fix this. Not for our generation, but for the next one.

I think my generation will be a generation of women who mostly had to find their way around the barriers. What keeps me going is the thought that maybe I can help bring some of those barriers down for my daughters.

So, here's to lunch with friends. And here's to finding our way around the barriers. But also: here's to finding a way to break those damn barriers down.

Beware the Narrative, Part II

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that the latest sexual misconduct in science news comes from the university where I did my undergraduate studies.

I was taken by surprise by how much more strongly this news affected me compared to earlier revelations. My undergraduate years were also when I experienced what is objectively the most severe gender-based harassment of my career. As I tweeted last night, I let it be handled quietly by the PI of the lab I was working in, because I needed the PI's letter of recommendation to go to graduate school. A friendly professor in a different department had already alerted me that the PI in question had damned me with faint praise in a letter submitted for a scholarship competition. I'd addressed that and was fairly certain future letters would be better... and I couldn't afford to upset that balance if I wanted to go to graduate school.

I should be clear. The PI and I never discussed "the deal" by which I didn't raise the harrassment to the higher authorities and the PI wrote good recommendations. Perhaps, if given the chance, the PI would have written glowing recommendations even if I had involved others in my complaint. I'll never know.

I do know that as things happened, I got accepted into several really good graduate programs. I picked the one that seemed like the best fit for me, went to graduate school, landed in a lab with a truly great PI, and had an overall good experience. I also, for the record, had an overall good experience during my undergraduate studies, and still think that choosing that particular school was one of the better decisions I've made in my life. As I wrote about in an earlier navel-gazing expedition, University of Chicago was good for me.

Anyway, I got my PhD and spent 15 years in the career that the PhD launched.

And then, a little over two years ago, I left that career path. In one way of looking at it, I left abruptly. In another way of looking at it, I just moved up the start of a plan that had been forming for some time.

Which is the right way to look at it? I honestly still don't know.

I wrote last night that one of the hardest things in making the decision to change career paths was feeling like I'd let my younger self down. She'd put up with a lot to get to where I was, and I in a sense threw that sacrifice away.

What I eventually came to think, though, was that her sacrifices had allowed me to get to a place where I had some genuine options, and it was OK to choose to stop putting up with the things that continuing on that career path required me to put up with.

It is hard for me to compare how hard it was to deal with that undergraduate harassment experience with how hard it was to deal with the "energy tax" I wrote about earlier this week. If I wanted to really understand how those things did or did not lead to my decision to change career paths, I'd have to do a lot more work than I am willing to do right now. I will say, though, that I personally found the constant second guessing of my own experiences really hard to handle. Was I being "over-sensitive"? Was I wrong to not want to always be the one smoothing things over? Was my perception that I was always the one smoothing things over wrong? Was I misinterpretting things? Maybe I just wasn't as good, or maybe my ideas weren't as good, or.... Gah. It went on and on. I still feel like an unreliable narrator of my own career, particularly the last five years or so of it.

Beyond that, you could also tell the story of my decision to change career paths multiple ways. I've written about that before, too, and still believe that trying to make sense of people's messy lives with neat, clean narratives is a mistake.

I was flippant about it last night on Twitter, but I really have made peace with the fact that younger me made sacrifices to stay in a career that current me decided she didn't want. I view all of my career experiences as building on the previous ones, and not just because the money I earned in my first career is what gave me the space to try this new one. It also gave me knowledge and skills that are relevant, even as some other knowledge and skills are getting left behind, at least for now.

Also, I'm truly excited about what I'm trying to do now. There are definitely problems in science and technology that are related to gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, and other factors about which people are often biased. I applaud and support the people tackling those problems.

There are also problems related to the fact that the cultures of science and technology undervalue the skills required to manage groups of people working together. This undervaluing leads to people managing groups of people working together with no actual clue how to do it well. Sometimes they have good instincts and do OK. Sometimes they don't, and really bad things happen. I don't think these career paths burnout so many people  because they are working on such hard problems- a lot of the people who choose these fields choose them because they enjoy working on hard problems. I believe the lack of management skills contributes directly to the burnout rate. That is just a belief right now, because I've never seen any data on it, but this is where I think I can make a more direct contribution. And that is one of the things I'm trying to do in my current work.

I'm trying to do other things that really matter to me, too. But this post is getting long and rambly, so I'll save that for another time.

My point here is that: yes, bad things have happened over the course of my career. Some of those things probably had a role in my decision to change my career. But other things also had a role, and some of those were positive- I saw different problems I wanted to work on. In the end, it doesn't matter why I, personally, left my old career path. What matters is that on average, more women leave than men. Personal stories help people make sense of that overall trend, but don't expect any of them to be neat and tidy stories.

And I'll leave it there. I needed to get this much out, to finish processing what I was feeling when I read that story last night, but I don't want to delve deeper. I have enough work booked and enough money in the bank to be certain that I'll get to stay on this career path for the rest of this year. If it becomes clear that I'll need to go back to something closer to my old career path in order to pay the bills, then I'll need to examine what caused me to leave a bit more closely, so that I can find a way to go back and stay healthy and happy.

Until then, though, I think I'll bury this again. I have work to do.

The Hidden Costs

I've been thinking a lot about the hidden cost of the way things are, and how hard it is to see the costs when you aren't the one paying them.

The line of thought was kicked off by a stray tweet that came across my timeline and made me think about how much I still haven't fully processed the events that led up to me quitting my last full time job. I oscillate between thinking I should drag all of it out, perhaps with the help of a therapist, and really deal with it and thinking that I'm doing pretty well now, so why dig all that up again?

And really, the particulars of what caused me to spin out aren't novel and aren't all that interesting. Even I'm a bit bored by them at this point. What is interesting, at least to me, is the way that I could like and respect everyone individually, but that the culture that they made working together was pretty much toxic to me. And how they didn't really notice, even as I was slowly imploding from the stress of it, and how some of them never understood why I left and to this day think I just wanted more time with my kids. (Note: I do not spend more time with my kids now than I did then. I do spend happier time with my kids, but that's just because I'm happier pretty much all of the time now.)

I don't think these guys are particularly clueless. I think that the costs I was paying were so foreign to them that they didn't even see them. I tried once to explain that the way I had to be to interact successfully at work was bleeding over into the rest of my life and making it hard for me to interact successfully with my friends and my kids' friends' moms. But that didn't go well, because I was pretty sure the person I was trying to explain this to just thought this meant I was friends with silly people, and that is not the case at all.

I did get at least one person to understand that a confrontational approach would backfire if I used it at work. But they didn't see the way that meant I was constantly getting stepped on by the people who could get away with a confrontational approach, and the way it meant that I had to just absorb a lot of other people's aggravation. They could direct their emotions out, but I couldn't respond in kind, and just had to carry mine with me.

I never even tried to explain the cost of having to prove I knew what I was talking about over and over and over, because I knew without asking that in their view, that was what everyone has to do. They didn't think they were interrogating me. They thought they were interrogating my ideas, and may the best idea win. And maybe they were. I was certainly not an impartial observer. But since my perspective- both because of who I am and because of the different expertise I had- was often so different from theirs, my ideas were more likely to be interrogated, because they were different.

Ugh. This is getting boring again. Back to the general point about costs.

I've been around long enough to have practice navigating all of those issues. The problem, which I probably should have seen coming but didn't, is that all that navigation had a cost. It was like a tax on my energy and enthusiasm that I had to pay and most of my colleagues did not have to pay.  Probably the easiest way to explain what happened is that I didn't notice the extent to which that tax was draining my reserves, and I went broke.

In fact, I went in debt, and it took me a good six months or so to pay that back and build up reserves again.

Think about all the myriad people this sort of thing happens to, and all the different energy taxes there are. I paid some of them, but I am exempt from a lot more. There are no doubt a bunch that are as invisble to me as the ones I paid were to my colleagues. I have almost certainly contributed to someone else's energy bankruptcy, without even realizing I was doing it.

This has got me thinking: would it be possible to build a workplace that was energy tax-free? I doubt it. But we could perhaps build a workplace that recognizes the taxes exist, and tries to compensate for some of them. I have almost no idea what it would take to do that, but I think it is worth thinking about, particularly if we want to build truly inclusive workplaces, because the taxes are not uniformly distributed and probably never will be.

I don't have a conclusion for this piece, but it has been bouncing around in my head for awhile now and I wanted to let it out. If you're so inclined, help me think this through in the comments. What energy taxes do you pay? Do your colleagues see them? How could your employer help minimize them or at least compensate for them?

Mood Swings

I've had "write a Wandering Scientist post" on my to do list for three days. It necessarily had to cede precedence to paid work (I had a Chronicle Vitae submission to finish up over the weekend) and finishing the shopping for our Christmas Adopt-a-Family (gifts had to be dropped off today). Family time gets high priority on the weekends, too, and this weekend we decorated our tree and I took Petunia to a birthday party.

So it is not surprising that it has taken me a few days to get to my post. What is surprising to me is how much the tenor of what I want to write has changed over these three days. If I'd sat down on Saturday to write, it would have been a fairly grumpy post. I was feeling put out by some people who'd implied I only "got" to quit my job when I did  because I'm married and my husband has a steady income. While I won't deny that his reasonably secure income makes the process of starting my own business less daunting, it is inaccurate to imply that his income is what makes it possible. The fact is, once we decided to buy the house we bought 8 years ago, we decided that we were going to be a two-income family. His income cannot cover our bills. My income is absolutely essential unless we want to move.

What actually allowed me to quit my job when and how I did was our financial buffer- i.e., the pot of money we'd been saving up over the past decade or so. Again, I won't deny that being a two income family made that saving easier, but judging from the behavior of some of our peers, it is not a given.

And what actually allows me to make a go at starting the company I want to build is that I managed to secure a contract with a client that brings in enough money to allow me to meet the financial needs of my family. If I lose this contract before I can make the other aspects of my business sufficiently lucrative to meet those needs, I will have to find another or find a full time job.

That is the essence of what I would have written on Saturday, but I would probably have written it in a much rantier tone.

If I'd sat down to write this post on Sunday, I probably would have written an upbeat post about taking Petunia shopping for the Adopt-a-Family gifts- she tried to help me decide what t-shirts 5 and 7 year old boys would like best, and she mostly adhered to my admonition to not beg for things for herself, since we were shopping for others. When she first said she wanted to come with me, I was worried about how it would go, but she did great.

Or I might have written about how much fun we had at the birthday party. It was at the Mission Trails park, and involved a bunch of kids scrambling over boulders, some cake, and then all of us following a trail down to the San Diego river (it is more of a stream at this point). Petunia had such a great time and told me she wanted to come back with Daddy and Pumpkin and "hike ALL of the trails."

Today, though, my good mood is a bit tempered. My Twitter feed was full of the "hack a hair dryer" stuff. I didn't go look to see what I thought of the original campaign. Mostly, I'm just tired of the idea that the reason that women and people of color of all genders are underrepresented in STEM fields is a lack of interest. I'm tired of the well-meaning campaigns that imply there is something wrong with girls, that we need to change who they are to make them more like boys.

There is nothing wrong with our little girls. All of the little girls I have ever met (and I have two daughters, so I've met a bunch) have been curious about the natural world and how things work. They are already interested in science. A lot of them take genuine delight in numbers and math. A lot enjoy building things. I see no evidence that we need to change anything about how we present science or anything about little girls in order to "get more girls interested in STEM." What we need to do is to change our world to stop pushing them away from these interests- a not so gentle push that starts before school and that I still feel today, as a 43 year old adult with a PhD.

Here is the short version of all of that:

I don't think we need more initiatives to get girls interested in STEM. I think we need initiatives to stop pushing girls away from STEM.

— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) December 7, 2015

But my mood improved again when I took off from my client site a bit early so that I could take our Adopt-a-Family gifts to the office of the non-profit that organized the drive. It always makes me happy to see their offices filled with bags of gifts. This is one of the most important parts of Christmas to me, so much so that even when I was laid off back in 2011, we still donated some money for their drive. (The other important part of Christmas to me: baking. I'm looking forward to starting that next weekend.)

I came home and opened my computer to get some more work done before dinner and saw the horrifying suggestion from Donald Trump that we shouldn't let any Muslim in the US. Not even US citizens returning from abroad. So now my mood has swung back to the negative side. This is going to be a very important election for us. It feels like the most important election I've ever witnessed. I hope Trump is stopped in the primaries. If he is not, I know that I will need to find a way do more to fight this threat than just vote in my safely Democratic state. I am shocked and depressed that we have gotten to this point, but then I think about Fox News and the "infotainment" trends of the past 20 years or so, and I guess we're reaping what we sowed. Yikes.

So my mood is swinging pretty wildly these days. It is almost time for me to go make dinner, so I'll end this post with another thing that makes me happy: in my last post, I asked if some of you would be willing to like the Facebook page for Annorlunda Books so that I could get a decent URL. You did, and I now have https://www.facebook.com/annorlundabooks/. Thank you! I still don't understand why I needed a set number of likes to get this URL and not to get the other two associated with my business (Annorlunda Designs and Tungsten Hippo), but now thanks to you, I don't have to figure it out. I really appreciate all of the help and support my blog readers have given me over the years. Choosing to reactivate this blog was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Beware the Narrative

I'm still catching up after my vacation/staycation. I never finished the posts about the trip to France,

A picture from the LA trip, representing both balancing acts
and the enduring power of a good story!

and now I have a short trip to LA I'd like to write about, too. I may not get to it. I had the best intentions to write about my last trip to Arizona- I even took pictures to use in a post!- and then I never wrote a post. It is a shame. I don't think my trip story posts are the most popular with readers, but I like to have them to refer back to.

Anyway, I read an article I'd saved by Lisa Miller about why we need older women in the workforce, and I realized that by Miller's definition, I've left. She is looking for women to show the way forward in what I'll call a "regular job"- i.e., one where you go into an office and do your part in a larger organization. I can understand why she wants this. It is hard to navigate your way through office politics and career decisions without role models, and although men can be helpful to a certain extent, they are playing by different rules. I couldn't emulate a former boss' direct and confrontational style, for instance. That would have been career suicide for me, although it worked well for him.

There's been a lot written about why women leave the workforce. People argue about whether it is motherhood, or overwork, or sexism, or something else. I've been thinking a lot about this given my own recent exit from the corporate world. I still consider myself very much in the workforce (and so far at least, still have a paycheck to prove it), but I'll grant that I've left the corporate world. I left at the stereotypical time: mid-career, partway up the ladder but still definitely on a middle rung. I have more than one kid, too, which studies have indicated correlates with a greater likelihood of leaving.

So what made me leave? Here are the possible reasons:

• The company moved and the new commute was making it hard to get a full work week in.
• The culture in which I was working evolved into something I didn't enjoy that much.
• I'd reached my limit on the low key sexist BS that was constant background noise in my career. I have a few jaw-dropping "you have GOT to be kidding me" sexism in the workforce stories, but I honestly think it was the constant low level stuff that did more harm. As I explained to a friend recently, it was like that stuff was just silently accruing, and all of the sudden I'd hit some sort of pre-set BS limit that even I didn't know existed. The men I was working with at the time weren't particularly sexist. They were just the guys in the vicinity when I hit the limit.
• I had other interests I wanted to explore.
• The job I was in had policies that made it very hard to have any sort of side gig- including writing. That was annoying and made me feel overly constrained.
• I wanted to try being completely in charge.

There are probably more reasons that aren't obvious to me right now, but those are the big ones. So which was "the reason" I quit? None of them. All of them. It was a combination of things. Depending on what larger point someone wanted to make, my story could be spun to emphasize some of the factors more than others, but I honestly can't say that any one factor was more important than any other in my thought process the day I quit.

People want there to be a clean answer for why so many women decide to opt out of corporate life, but in my case, there isn't a clean answer. I suspect this is true of most people who decide to leave. Would decreasing the background sexism convince more to stay? I have no doubt that it would. But it would be easy to take a story like mine and argue that women like me leave the corporate world for more positive reasons. It would also probably be easy to go through my work history and find things I'd done wrong, or suboptimal decisions I'd made that led to some of my other frustrations.

In the end, I left because I wanted to explore different things, and my exhaustion with the environment in which I was working made it appealing to go do that.

Or did I leave because I was exhausted by a hostile culture and realized I had other options?

Even I don't really know.

We love narratives and personal stories. On the surface, they make it easier to understand complex issues. By personalizing them, we make the issues more accessible and harder to ignore. But there is a downside, too, because narratives are rarely clean. People's lives are messy. Decisions are made for a confusing mix of reasons. People do less than ideal things, making it easy for people who are looking for reasons not to see a particular problem to dismiss their stories.

We see this playing out in a far more horrifying context in the reaction of some people to the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black men and women who have lost their lives were "no angels." They'd "made mistakes." No one will ever be perfect enough. The protesters will never use the exact "right" tactics. For people who don't want to see the issue, there will always be a reason to dismiss the most recent story.

As much as I love stories, individual stories alone will never allow us to understand what is really happening in our society. Luckily, we have social scientists who have studied how to aggregate our stories and better understand the whole picture. We have historians who can help us see the broader meaning of our individual stories, by placing them in a historical context. Unfortunately, these viewpoints aren't always well represented in our discussions. It is hard to find people who can take an individual story and weave it into the wider context and help us understand what that story really means, but those are the voices I'm seeking out these days. After all, if I can't even understand the narrative my own story in isolation, how can I hope to understand anyone else's?

On Saying Stupid Things and Internet Outrage

My original plan was to largely ignore Tim Hunt and the comments he made at the conference in South Korea. (If you need a rundown of what he said and what has happened since, here is a good place to start.)

But then came the somewhat predictable outcry that he had been the victim of a "witch hunt."

Leaving aside the fact that victims of actual witch hunts usually ended up dead, not embarrassed and out of a couple of honorary, unpaid positions, I think there is something I want to work through there, which means there is something I want to blog about. Bear with me: this post is essentially me thinking out loud.

Do I think people should lose jobs- even honorary ones- for saying stupid things? Not really. But is that really what usually happens? It seems to me that what actually happens is something more like this:

1. Person with some amount of privilege says thing that is offensive and/or insulting to a group with less privilege.

2. Outcry ensues.

3. Person with privilege issues a "sorry I was misunderstood" sort of apology and/or doubles down on offensive thing they said.

4. More outcry ensues.

5. Person is fired or resigns. (Or person retains position and nothing really bad happens to them at all- but for this post, let's assume they're fired.)

6. Other people with privilege are understandably a bit alarmed by this outcome, particularly if they don't fully understand why the initial thing that was said was so harmful. They start arguing that the response was unfair, often with inflammatory and/or wildly inappropriate terms like "witch hunt" or "lynch mob." (Note to fellow white people: do not call anything a lynch mob except an actual lynch mob. Just don't.)

So why was the person fired? Was it for the first offensive thing said? Or was it for the refusal to listen and show signs of learning and addressing the underlying beliefs and/or implicit biases that made them think that offensive thing was an A-OK thing to say? I don't know. I actually suspect that even the people doing the firing don't know in some cases.

Is the firing a problem? I am not 100% sure what I think, but I lean towards thinking that if you have any role in reviewing other people and/or their work, then it is actually quite appropriate to lose your job if you demonstrate that you are unwilling to address your biases.

Racial biases, gender biases. homophobia... these all hurt people. They always have. We've just become used to the way they hurt people. We've become used to women having to walk a ridiculous tightrope in order to garner respect and advance into leadership roles. We've become used to Black people having to keep their reactions under tight control so as not to be labeled "angry" and therefore unpromotable (or unhireable). We've become used to having the upper echelons of our professions be completely unrepresentative of even the composition of the entry level, let alone society at large. These things seem normal to us, just the way the world is. And yet these things have real, harmful consequences on actual people. The impact of implicit biases is well documented. They change the lives those people lead. They hold people back and keep them from reaching their full potential. They cause people to abandon well-paying careers, sometimes without really knowing why they've burned out and need to quit. They create stress and worry that spills over into the rest of people's lives. These are not "victimless crimes."

So now, social media has come along and changed the power balance a bit. Sometimes- not always, but sometimes- the person with the biases actually experiences some harm from them. This is shocking to many people, because it is so unexpected and new. It feels like the rules have changed, and indeed, they have. The potential harm to yourself of harboring unexamined biases is much larger now.

Again, note that these unexamined biases always had the potential to cause harm- that harm was just usually to other people, not the person who harbored them. Also, I'm not unsympathetic to the people who say the stupid, insulting things. I have a fair amount of privilege myself. It is probably only a matter of time until I say something stupid. I hope that if I do, and I get called on it, I can muster a proper apology.

Are the new rules perfect? No, but then, neither were the old rules. Could we come up with something better? Absolutely. But going back to the old rules is not better, and I am not on board with any suggestion that we do that. I am, however, on board with suggestions to find our way to a better set of new rules. To do that, though, all parties have to be willing to try, and frankly, whenever I see one of these events play out on social media, I don't see a lot of willingness to try from the people in the old privileged positions. If you want society to find a better way to respond when someone says something incredibly offensive or insulting, you have to be willing to acknowledge that the initial problem was the offensive or insulting speech, not the outcry against it.

For the record, here's how I'd like to see this sort of thing play out:

1. Person with some amount of privilege says thing that is offensive and/or insulting to a group with less privilege.

2. Outcry ensues.

3. Person with privilege issues an actual apology, indicating that they have understood the problem with what they said. Ideally, they also spell out steps they will take to address the harm caused and/or take meaningful steps to be more aware of the bias that prompted the insulting speech and combat its effects.

4. Everyone goes on with their lives, and the world gets a little better.

If we get to that point, will the "angry Twitter mobs" be willing to accept the apology? I don't know.* But wouldn't it be nice to find out?

-------------------------
*Actually, I can think of one example in which the events went pretty much as outlined above: Daniel Handler's racist joke about Jacqueline Woodson at the National Book Awards. Granted, not everyone who says something stupid and insulting has access to the money required to make the particular restorative gesture he chose, but I suspect most people could come up with something meaningful that was also within their financial means... if they really thought about the mistake they made and how to make amends.

Playing a Game Rigged Against You

Those of you who are on science/academia Twitter are probably already aware of the uproar this morning over a Science Careers advice post from Alice Huang that was at best tone deaf. It has been taken down (here's the apology) but is archived.

In short: a postdoc wrote in saying that she thinks her new adviser is trying to look down her shirt. Dr. Huang's advice was basically to suck it up.

The furor was all over Twitter, and the post was down before I had a chance to read it. (I've since read the archive). 

I agree that Dr. Huang's advice wasn't great. But a lot of the reactions didn't offer good advice, either, if you ask me. 

Here's the thing: once you've been harassed, you're out of the realm of needing advice, and into the realm of needing a strategy. This is doubly true if you work in a "small world" field like science, and quadruply true if you are early in your career and need your adviser's letter of recommendation to have a shot at moving to the next step.

This is not fair. This sucks. But it is true.

Here's what I had to say on Twitter.

Science is such a closed network, particularly in some fields. If you speak up, you may have to change fields. I know ppl who have had to.

— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) June 1, 2015

So here's what I have told real women who've asked about dealing w/real sexual harassment: find someone you trust to help you strategize.

— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) June 1, 2015

Once you are unlucky enough to have harassment happen to you, you are in place where every potential response has drawbacks.

— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) June 1, 2015

You need to work through options w/someone who help you realistically assess what each one means to your career and your own mental health.

— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) June 1, 2015

You want to strategize w/someone who will listen to you & has broad view of field to help you find best way forward. There is no magic fix.

— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) June 1, 2015

Pick your strategy partner w/care. Needs to be sympathetic to the issue, but not inclined to steer you to a battle unless you want it.

— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) June 1, 2015

Let me expand on that a bit. I should also say: I am a woman who has spent more than 20 years in very male-dominated corners of science and tech. I have experienced harassment and other problems I'll call "gender-related" on more than one occasion. I have never brought a formal complaint, although I have on occasion raised the issue with supervisors, with mixed results. I have managed to have a successful career in my chosen field, but this has not come without costs. I am still working to understand the full extent of the costs. I am happy to discuss specifics one on one, but won't be posting more here right now. There would be costs to doing that, too, and as you'll probably gather from what follows, I think my first responsibility is to myself. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I can honestly say I am speaking from the position of having had to make some of these hard decisions.

OK, so back to expanding on my tweets.

Handling harassment is not at all a straightforward thing. There is no "right" response. Basically, you just rolled a really crappy roll in a game that is rigged against you. You're going to take some damage. You unfortunately cannot avoid that. Your best bet is to figure out how to minimize the damage, and direct it to your strongest areas. 

I'm sorry. It isn't fair that this is true, but in my experience and in what I have observed happen to other women, it is true. 

So, having rolled this crappy roll, what do you do? I think your best bet is to find someone with whom you can strategize. I think this because you need to come up with a response that is tailored to your specific situation. Factors to consider include:

• What are your long term career goals?
• How small is your specific field?
• Does the person who is harassing you have past form, and if so, is that past form well known in the field?
• What sort of psychic damage is the harassment doing?
• What sort of support can you access to help you deal with the psychic damage?
• Can you make a lateral move that will help resolve the situation?
• Do you have any high power allies?

There are probably additional factors, too.

Your ideal strategizing partner is senior enough to have a wide view of your field and related fields, and savvy enough to understand the likely career ramifications of an action like filing a formal complaint.

At a minimum, you need someone who understands the outsize influence advisers have on the career of early career scientists. A lot of the people I've seen on Twitter advocating for a robust "haul him in front of the institution's disciplinary board" sort of response are not scientists. They do not know what this would do the the woman's career. Getting your next position without a glowing recommendation from your adviser can be done, but it is difficult. If you don't get the letter from him and explain why not, people will tend to assume that there are "two sides to every story" and whatnot, and you'll have to overcome that. If you do get a letter from him, chances are high that it will be full of coded garbage like "difficult to work with" and "not a team player." This will also hurt your career prospects.

I'm sorry. This sucks. It is not fair. But it is true. You need to develop your strategy based on how the world truly is, not how it should be. 

Therefore, treat anyone who seems eager for an extremely robust response with suspicion. This sort of response WILL come back and cause you some damage. I am sorry. It is not fair. It is wrong. But it is, from what I have observed, almost universally true. That doesn't mean you shouldn't sue the jerk. It just means that you should only choose to do so after thinking about it carefully and deciding that is what best serves YOUR interests. 

Whatever you do, you and only you will be in charge of picking up the pieces of your career and your mental health and moving on. 

And yes, I know, how will this ever change if we don't fight it? I don't really know. I know that some people will fight it and some people will try to sidestep it, and some people will do exactly what Dr. Huang suggested and suck it up and wear big, baggy clothes. I support all of those people. I like to think that if enough of us make it through to the point where we have the power, money, and influence to set our own rules, we'll eventually rewrite the rules of the game. Maybe that is wrong, and maybe I should have "gone nuclear" at one or more points earlier in my career. The thing is, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the same career I have now if I had done so. The people advocating for us to blow up the game don't always understand the costs to the people at the center of the conflagration.

I will always support someone who decides to take on those costs, but I'll never judge someone who looks at them and decides she is not up to that particular battle.

So, to the anonymous postdoc who wrote to Science, I say: find someone at your institution or nearby who you can trust and who has enough experience to understand how various options are likely to play out. Do some soul-searching about what matters to you and which of the various forms of damage you now face you can best survive. And good luck.

Updated to add: it has been pointed out that finding your strategy partner is itself fraught. I agree! I have no great insight on how to do this, other than this: if you are at a company, know that any supervisor at that company is probably legally required to report any harassment that he or she becomes aware of. They cannot guarantee you confidentiality. If you are not yet sure you want to report this, find a strategy partner at a different company. I don't know what the reporting rules are in academia. I suspect it depends on your contract type. So tread carefully. I would look for a senior woman who seems to have a clue about these sorts of issues. Perhaps ask around with a few junior women you trust to keep their mouths shut first.

Dressing for Success

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I had a meeting with a potential new client today. So yesterday, I was somewhat frantically sorting through my wardrobe, trying to find something appropriate to wear.

This is a surprisingly fraught decision.

Unlike my male peers in my particular line of work, I can not just wear khakis and a dress shirt. First of all, khakis are seen as more casual on women than on men. I have several pairs of khakis (my personal favorites are the Broken In Straight Khakis from The Gap), and I frequently wear them when working onsite with a client. They are fine for daily wear in my line of work, but not for a new client meeting. I could possibly get away with black khakis, but only if they were new enough to be unfaded and crisp.

However, my male peers can wear khakis for new client meetings. I know this, because they do it, and they get business. (And hooray for them!)

Then there is the problem of the dress shirt. Given my bra size, I simply cannot buy an off the rack dress shirt and have it fit. It will either be too big around the waist, and therefore look sloppy, or be too tight across the chest, and therefore look awkward, at best.

There is also the question of the degree of formality. One simple solution to the need to look professional is to wear a suit. I like this option, because a suit jacket hides a lot of flaws, including shirts that don't fit completely right. However, in my industry, that is really not done, except for during a full job interview (and even then, it is not necessarily required).

If I had worn a suit today, I would have betrayed a lack of knowledge about the industry. The people I met, it turned out, were wearing jeans or khakis and casual shirts.

So, I needed something professional but not too formal, and I needed a top that would work on my body type (I am a classic hourglass).

Plus I needed to be comfortable, so that I could concentrate on the meeting, and not on my clothing.

And then I needed shoes. They needed to match my outfit and again be professional without being overly formal.

Here's what I came up with:

I am quite happy with the outfit. The skirt came from a Stitch Fix box. I would probably not have picked it for myself, but it is a nice skirt and is very comfortable. The top came from a shop in Wellington, New Zealand. I always do some clothes shopping when I'm in New Zealand, because I find the clothes there are more likely to be cut in a style that flatters a woman of my body type. I don't know why that is. This particular top is from an Australian brand called Veronika Maine. The shoes are a testament to my policy of buying quality: they are Munro pumps that I bought roughly 12 years ago.

The necklace is a strand of silver "pearls" that my husband gave me for our anniversary this year, despite having assured me that the trip to France was our anniversary gift to each other (so I didn't buy him anything).

There is a funny story behind that necklace. It is from Tiffany's, and is the only thing I own from that store. He specifically wanted to get me something from Tiffany's this year because we had recently been reminiscing about the following story:

Back in the early 2000s, when I was working at my second biotech company, a male colleague went to Tiffany's to buy a gift for his girlfriend. The salesperson asked if he wanted it wrapped, and he said yes. Then the salesperson asked what color ribbon he wanted, and he said: "I don't know. What color is the box?"

Several of the women at the office were teasing him about how shocking it was that he didn't know what color the Tiffany's box is, since it is such an iconic thing in the US. So everyone was asked if they knew what color the Tiffany's box is. All of the women did. Not all of the men did.

That night, I went home and asked my then boyfriend if he knew what color the Tiffany's box is. He said: "What's Tiffany's?"

Clearly, I didn't care about this gap in his knowledge, although it did get a good laugh when I mentioned it at work the next day.

And now, almost 15 years later, it is the reason I had the perfect necklace to wear with my outfit today.

The meeting with the potential client went well, by the way. I don't know if it will lead to new work in the short term, but it was a chance to meet some new people, and given the small world nature of my industry, that is always a good thing.

Learning What Works

I remember thinking that What Works for Women at Work, a book of information about common types of bias women face at work by Joan Williams and Rachel Dempsey, looked like a useful book when it came out early last year. I also remember thinking that I couldn't trust myself to read it right then, because I suspected it would hit very close to home, and I was in a fragile place.

I can now say that I was right on both counts.

I have somehow found myself on the hook to give a short talk about how women can self-promote (don't ask... I initially said no on grounds that this isn't something I'm all that good at myself!) and since I of course want to do a good job, I knew that the time had come to read this book. I want to tell people the right advice- which is most definitely not that you just need to self-promote like a man. There is plenty of evidence that doing that often backfires. See, for instance, the HBR article I discussed a couple of years ago.

Anyway, I bought a copy of What Works for Women at Work, and set aside some time yesterday to read through the sections most relevant to my topic at hand. It is a good book: written with an easy to read style, well-referenced so that I can look up the data to support their statements about bias, and with some helpful ideas for how to navigate through the biases to achieve your career goals.

And yeah, it hit close to home. The two authors are from two different generations (they are in fact a mother-daughter team). Joan Williams is in her 50s, and her introduction to the book was so painfully true for me that I almost started to cry. As I read on, I definitely recognized a lot of things that have happened to me over the years, and I began to realize why I deviated from my original plan and suddenly quit my job last year. I have a better understanding of how I could like and respect my former colleagues and at the same exact time be unable to stay in that position. I have said before that I just burned out, but the first two sections of this book provide an explanation for why I burned out.

If you're curious, or want to read along at home in the book, I think I burned out from exhaustion from having to "prove it again" so damn many times and from exerting so much effort to stay balanced on the f%&#ing tightrope they describe.

Even now, a full year after the events that led to my sudden resignation, I find reading this book fairly devastating. I have no idea what would have happened if I'd tried to read it last year.  I wish I had read it 10 years ago, but even if it had existed, I might not have recognized how much I needed to read it at that earlier stage in my career. (Side note to any early career people out there: read this book now, before you begin to get the promotions and such that will put you on a collision course with these implicit biases. Forewarned is forearmed and all that.)

Reading it now is making me feel a little better about my uncharacteristic decision, though. I am starting to think that I acted so suddenly because I was in a type of immediate danger: if I'd stayed longer, I might have become so burnt out that I would have been unable to salvage my new career path from the remains of my old one. At some point, the instinctive self-preserving part of my brain overruled the rational, planning part and made me act.

So here I am, having mostly picked up the pieces, but still trying to make them fit back together in a stable way. I find that I am unbelievably motivated to get to stay my own boss. If I'm completely honest, I'm also feeling fairly motivated to "prove it again" just one last time, which means, of course, that I can't hang up my tightrope walking shoes quite yet.

Photo from Flikr user Wiros: https://www.flickr.com/photos/91515119@N00/1795141144

I Am Not So Special

I recently came across an article about the impact of commute times on the number of women in the workforce. (@Geknitics tweeted it out.) The article discusses how long commutes are often more stressful for women, who are more likely to have the job of keeping the family's schedule on track.

That is certainly true in our household- I have always been the person who makes our weeknight dinners, so if my commute is delayed there can be ripple effects that disrupt our entire evening. This is less traumatic now that my kids are older, but when Pumpkin was little a screwed up evening routine often translated into even more disrupted sleep than usual. She really liked routine as a baby and toddler. As I sat in a traffic jam, I could predict the ripple effects through the rest of our evening, leading to me getting only a few hours of sleep that night. It made me want to cry. Of course, I was so sleep deprived in those days that a somewhat stirring television commercial could make me want to cry, but you get the idea.

So, I shifted my schedule to make sure that traffic jams were a very rare occurrence, and that our nighttime routines stayed intact. If Mr. Snarky was late, we just ate without him, and kept the routine on schedule. Things rolled merrily along... until they didn't.

It is no secret that one of the things that contributed to the timing of my decision to quit my job and start my own company was the fact that my company relocated and made my commute more difficult. The small amount of slack I'd managed to squeeze into our schedule was gone, consumed by the longer commute. Dinners were late a lot and although that no longer translated directly into crappy sleep it still had an impact on our evenings, and we all felt it. I had planned to work at my last job for at least two more years before quitting and starting my own business, but a variety of things combined to make the pressure grow and grow... until last April, I couldn't take it anymore and just quit. The commute was definitely one of the forces applying pressure.

There were other forces, too, of course. I am still not ready to write about them in detail. This is partly because I still don't think I really understand what, exactly, happened and partly because there are bridges I'd rather not burn.

But you can probably guess some of the reasons, and I'm able to write about things that impacted me over the course of my career. I often felt like I had to work harder than my male colleagues to be taken seriously. I found myself assigned less technical roles, and then I found people (even people I considered supporters) surprised to learn that I could do hands-on technical work. I couldn't see a path for advancement. I felt blocked.

All of this is pretty standard stuff, as cited in the report about midcareer women leaving IT jobs that I've shared before.

So, while there were positive things pulling me to quit, there were a bunch of negative things pushing me to quit, too, and those negative things are depressingly common.

Sometimes, I feel empowered to learn that the challenges I face are general, not personal. Not this time. I could certainly put a positive spin on things, but I have a rule that if I'm going to write about something here, I will be honest in what I write. I definitely don't write about everything, but if I write about it, I have to be honest. Otherwise, what's the point?

And to be honest, realizing just how in line with common trends my experiences have been makes me feel defeated, not empowered.  It is like I came up against a well-mapped mountain range and got lost in it, anyway.

Rationally, I know that I am being unfairly harsh to myself. But the negative voice of self-doubt in my head is not particularly rational, and in these early days of this my new endeavor, solid signs that it is going to be a success are rare, which only emboldens that snotty little voice.

Even with a map, that's not an easy climb.

I am fighting this the only way I know how: by focusing on the positive things that pulled me in my new direction, and reminding myself that it is too early to know how this story ends. My new company is going to grow slowly by design, because that is how I want to build it. My efforts can look a bit scattered right now, but they are in fact proceeding pretty much according to the plan I laid out when I decided to do this. There is enough money coming in to pay the bills. I need to find more contracts, but that is normal and I have only just started looking seriously, since I gave myself a lot of time last year to decompress. I love that I can write about whatever I want now, without having to ask anyone for permission. I love that I can define for myself what things are worth my time. I love being in charge, even if it is only of myself.

In short, there is a lot of good on this new path, and it is quite likely I would have chosen to follow it even if the old path had been nothing but flowers and butterflies.

Could I have stayed on my original career path if I'd just tried harder, and maybe found a better map? Maybe. But this new path suits me well, too.

Will I be a success story, or a cautionary tale? Only time will tell.

Surviving as a Woman in a Very Male World

I don't think I'm giving anything away if I say that I've been struggling a bit at work lately. Some of that has nothing to do with my gender, and some of it has everything to do with my gender. And some of it, its hard to say. I should also say: some of it is probably my own damn fault. I'm not perfect, by any stretch.

A lot of the part that has to do with my gender is due to cracks in the plasterwork I've put up to cover the disconnect between me and the male work culture I inhabit. The cracks have been growing lately, and I'm at a bit of a loss as to why. The particular guys I'm working with now aren't unusually sexist or obnoxious. In fact, I rather like them all. I've got some women on my team (I hired most of them) and there are other women at the company. It is, in other words, about as good as things are likely to get, at least on paper. Still, something is... not right for me. I suspect it is something about the company culture, but haven't pinned it down, and even if I had, I would not blog about it at this point.

It may also just be timing. Maybe I'm running out of my patience for trying to gracefully handle sexism in the workplace, and am coming up to the time when I'm going to going to go out in a blaze of glory...



But I'd rather not.

Still, the cracks are showing, and even growing, and I have been thinking a lot about what I can do about that. I need to up my sanity maintenance game, which has got me thinking about how I've survived (and even occasionally thrived) in my very male dominated work world. Here are my top three sanity saving techniques:

1. Maintain perspective

Even when my work is at its crappiest, I live a pretty great life. This is not to say that I'm going to stop trying to fix the crap, just that I won't let the crap obscure the awesome things in my life. I am (mostly) healthy. I have a great family, I live in a great place, I have enough money to go on great vacations... Etc., etc.

Lately, I've been consciously reminding myself of this as I turn the corner towards Pumpkin's school in the afternoon, and see this:

Seriously. I can't complain.

 Which brings me to my second technique...

2. Use mindfulness

I've written before about how I use mindfulness to maintain my equilibrium at work. In that earlier post, I mostly wrote about using a mindfulness practice to build my reserves of patience. I also use mindfulness techniques to fight the tendency to be derailed by BS at work. When someone does something that is BS, I try to recognize it for what it is, name it as BS, and then consciously put it aside.

This works for egregiously sexist things, but it also works for what I call the "accidental gaslighting" that pervades work places that are lacking in diversity. Since everyone (or at least everyone with the power, authority, and automatic respect) is of the same basic type, a lazy assumption that their way of thinking and responding is the one and only "right" way can take hold. If you respond differently to something, it is a problem with you, not with the thing to which you responded. This happens even when everyone thinks they respect you and value your input. They will in fact tell you that they respect you and value your input, but that you just have to learn to handle X or not be so sensitive about Y or what not.

And that is BS. Because often the X and Y are things like a confrontational discussion style ("it is the only way to make sure we don't succumb to group think!"), a tendency to talk over you ("you just need to talk louder!"), a tendency to make everyone earn respect ("but we do that to everyone!" ), and so on. Somehow they miss that their confrontational discussion style silences some group members, leaving only the ones who tend to think alike feeling comfortable speaking up. They miss that they don't talk over everyone equally as often, or in the same way. They do not realize that in fact, they do NOT make everyone earn their respect in the same way. Some people start with more baseline respect than others.

And they have never considered that their "male" way isn't the default "right" way. Of course, everyone should adopt their way!

Basically, they're Henry Higgins:



In fact, our entire culture is Henry Higgins. We have to have entire books written about What Works for Women at Work and how we can successfully be just the perfect amount more like men. Where are the books telling the men not to be such insensitive asses?

(No, I haven't read that book yet. I'm sure it is very good and helpful, but I'm not in a mood that would be receptive to its advice right now.)

All of this cruft tends to accumulate in my brain until I start believing that there is something wrong with me, too.

And that is the biggest BS of them all.

I fight it with the mindfulness trick of observing the BS thought, labeling it, and putting it aside. I imagine a big, sturdy box in my mind. I shove the BS thought in that box and lock it up. This works until something breaks the box open.

I also use side projects to help me remember that I've got some strong skills, and when I do come up against something I don't know or can't do right, I consciously put myself in a growth mindset by reminding myself that I can get better at anything if I work at it. (If you aren't familiar with the idea of growth vs. fixed mindset, check out Carol Dweck's book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.)

3. I only fight the battles I choose

I realized early on that if I fought every single sexist thing, I would wear myself out from fighting and not have any energy left to do the actual things I want to do. And by early on, I mean roughly half-way through college. Here is a tweet that sums this up well:

I have X cycles to spend. I don't want to spend a bunch of them on fixing sexist problems. I want to spend that time doing good work.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) April 6, 2014

Not only does each battle exhaust some of my energy, but each battle damages me. Being a geek, I imagine this like the health points in a videogame. Each time I fight sexism in the workplace, I pick up negative health points, in the form of people perceiving me as a "complainer" or "not a team player" or what not. If I deplete my health points too much, I'll be out of the game.

The insistence that I'll only fight the battles I choose annoys some other women, who want me to fight the battles that matter to them, particularly when they perceive me as being in a more powerful place than they are. I understand this, and I am sorry. But I can't fight them all. I will not let anyone- not even myself!- guilt me into fighting every battle. I fight some of them, but I have to pick the ones that matter the most. I try to be cognizant of the need to help the women coming up behind me, and I will almost always make the time to give advice to a younger woman who asks for my help. I try to help as much as I can, but I cannot promise to fight all of their battles. I have to choose strategically. I get to decide when I fight, and when I walk away so that I can be there to fight another day.*

Those are my tricks. Does anyone have any others they want to share?

*Interestingly, calling out racism, homophobia, or ableism does not seem to deplete my health points as much as calling out sexism. Also, since I am in the privileged group in all of those cases, I feel it is my responsibility to speak up when I see these issues in the workplace, so I almost never walk away from those battles.

Lazy Isn't Accidental

I wasn’t planning to blog about the recent events involving Julie Ann Horvath and GitHub, partially because my little corner of the tech world is pretty far removed from that corner, so I didn’t feel like I had anything to add, and what I would say, I’ve said before. I am also working very hard to deal with the fallout from my very bad day a week and a half ago and put all of this messy “woman in STEM” stuff back in the mental box in which I usually contain it. From a purely selfish standpoint, I just want to lock that box back up and move on with my own life plan.

But then someone I know made an offhand comment about how maybe the reason tech has these periodic high profile “diversity fails” is because there are so many guys- and I am quoting here- “on the spectrum” in tech.

And that got my ranty juices going, because I think it does a huge disservice to people with autism spectrum disorders as well as to women and other marginalized groups in tech. I have managed someone with an autism spectrum disorder and while that presented some different challenges, a prevalence of misogynistic asshole-ish behavior was not among them, because guess what? He wasn’t a misogynistic asshole. In fact, he was one of the least likely people I have ever worked with to say something that was even borderline sexist. So can we please, please, please stop with the lazy stereotypes about people with ASD and just acknowledge that being sexist and having ASD are two distinct things, which may overlap in individuals much like having brown hair and being sexist may?

Also, there is a HUGE difference between having an autism spectrum disorder and just being socially awkward, and people should not self-diagnose ASD to avoid owning up to their social challenges. And they certainly shouldn't use an ASD diagnosis, whether from a doctor or from their own analysis, to justify being an asshole, because that just makes them an even bigger asshole. (For the record, I have never seen anyone with an actual ASD diagnosis do this, but since they are a large and diverse group, I'm sure there are some assholes among them, just like there are in any large group.)

Furthermore, I cannot think of a single person in a marginalized group with whom I have EVER worked who was not capable of distinguishing between social awkwardness and sexism, racism, and other discriminatory speech and behavior. It is, in my experience, extremely rare to come across someone from a marginalized group who will NOT give people a giant benefit of the doubt with respect to this. I am sure a few people with a hairline trigger on reporting harassment are out there, but your chances of running into them are quite small. (Particularly when compared to my chances of running into someone who makes sexist statements, but let’s not go there…)

I think there is a misconception that there are no negative impacts to reporting abusive or discriminatory behavior. This is laughable. There are huge impacts. I've witnessed people put up with unbelievable behavior because to report it is to risk destroying their career. I have personally put up with wildly inappropriate behavior because reporting it would (1) make it worse and (2) have negative impacts on my career. It is almost never a good thing for your career to raise these issues. It just isn't.

I think a lot of the angst around this topic amongst more privileged groups is related to the fear of “accidentally” saying or doing something wrong. I get that. It certainly gets a lot of hype. But I think it is entirely unfounded. First, as I discussed above, most people in marginalized groups are likely to give you a lot of chances and the benefit of the doubt. Second, I’ve come to think that most “accidentally” racist and sexist speech isn’t really accidental. It comes from a place of ignorance, and what is your excuse for being ignorant? It is easier now than ever to learn about these issues. Diversify your Twitter stream and read some of the links that your new tweeps post and you’re already off to a great start. If you won’t do that, it isn’t an accident. It is lazy.

The trick to not being viewed as a racist or a sexist is pretty simple, really. Just don’t be a racist or a sexist. I mean REALLY don’t be one of those things. Don’t just say “hey, I think everyone is equal so it is all fine.” Learn about your privilege and implicit bias. Learn to give other people the benefit of the doubt that you hope they will give you. I.e., don’t make people earn your respect . Assume people- even women and Black people!- who are in technical roles know a decent amount of tech, and if they ask a question, answer it with respect not condescension. In short, treat people- even people who are not straight white men just like you!- in the manner in which you would like to be treated.

(And hey, fellow cis straight white women- we don’t get to skip this step! We need to examine our implicit biases and learn how to really not perpetuate a discriminatory system, too. Extrapolating from our anger at how we are treated is only the start, and sadly a lot of us seem to fail to do even that.)

You’ll still make some mistakes, but they will be less common and most people will overlook them, or perhaps, if you’ve really earned some trust, gently correct them. Apologize sincerely (this is so rare, that it is likely to render the person to whom you are apologizing speechless), learn from the mistake, and move on, with your career trajectory completely unharmed. In fact, if you really, honestly do this- apologize for your mistakes, learn from them, and improve- your stature is likely to increase.

Or, you could be lazy and continue to do nothing and to tell yourself that you believe in equality so everything is fine. You’ll continue to make “accidental” mistakes. But that’s OK. 99% of the time, the person on the receiving end will decide that she isn’t in the mood to blow up her career today and will let it pass. She’ll pack your mistake into her mental box of stupid, discriminatory things she’s dealt with and you’ll both move on. Maybe you’ll notice that something wasn’t quite right, but hey, you believe in equality, so it can’t have been anything you did. If your career is long enough, you might eventually hit that 1% case where someone is just so sick of this shit that your “accidental” mistake blows up in your face and does you some damage. In that case, I think you got exactly what was coming to you.

Cost

I've had a bit of a tough end to my week. I don't think I can muster a links post.

You can still go to Wednesday's post, written before my week took a precipitous nosedive, and give me advice. No one is telling me which Twitter handle I should use if I do decide to start a blog about management (I think I'd write about both project and people management if I do this). Also, where are the witty blog name ideas??? Come on, people. I can't be expected to sort these things out on my own. It is the age of crowd-sourcing!

I'm still not sure what I will do. I may do nothing with the project management ideas except for bore my friends. I may start a blog. I may even end up doing some consulting on the topic. I just don't know.

I've been going through some career angst for awhile now. There are many aspects of my current career path that I genuinely love. But there have been some pretty large costs, too. I have worked in very male-dominated fields since college, fields where I am quite often the only woman in the room. This is not all bad- I have many wonderful male friends, and I have learned a lot from many male mentors. However, as I've acclimated to my extremely male work environment, I've developed different ways of talking and interacting with people. I project more self-confidence, even when I'm not feeling it. I am more direct, even when delivering difficult news. These traits make me less likeable to some women, so I try to leave them at work. Of course, I am not completely successful at that, and I recently had a reminder of that, which I am not going to write about in detail. This is not to say that I have no female friends- I have many wonderful female friends, too. Regardless, I am more likely to feel awkward in groups of women now, because the expected behaviors no longer come completely naturally.

At the same time, I have not completely transformed my behavior to fit in with the guys at work, and I occasionally get reminded of that, too. In fact, that is part of what made the end of this week so tough. I know that some of my colleagues think the solution to the problem is for me to just "adjust to their argumentative style of discussion" or whatever behavior is causing me issues at the time. And that might indeed make my work life better. But at what cost?

Already I feel like there is no place in my life I can be my full, authentic self. In fact, I'm not even sure who my full, authentic self is anymore, and that is making me feel very unsettled and strange. I'm not sure what to do about that, either.

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OK, that is a bit of a downer post for a Friday night. So here is a link to a video of bunnies jumping over things, because bunnies are cute. I am noticing a lot more bunnies on the internet these days, and I wholeheartedly approve of the diversification of the cute from just cat photos.

Earn It

I have a friend who is facing a frustrating situation at work. She is smart, competent, and extremely good at her job, but a couple of her colleagues are not treating her with respect, and their mutual boss is insisting that she just needs to "earn their respect."

This is, of course, impossible, since her colleagues have decided not to respect her, and choose not to see the awesome work she is doing. I do not know why they do not respect her, but it is probably a combination of gender bias and discipline-related arrogance (they are in a discipline that considers itself "harder" than hers). I ran into a similar situation once, early in my career, and I am still convinced there is no real solution, and that if you find yourself in a situation like this you should just start a job search. (If anyone out there has figured out how to turn a situation like this around, please share in the comments.)

This sort of situation, though, is my answer to the people who ask me why I default to respecting everyone. In general, I respect people and assume they are smart and competent until they thoroughly demonstrate otherwise. I know many, many people in science and tech who do the exact opposite: they assume people are stupid/incompetent until they prove otherwise. They do not understand my approach and think I am a hopeless Pollyanna, fated to waste untold hours on unworthy people.

This has not been my experience, but even if it were, I would stick to my method of requiring people to lose my respect rather than earn it.

The reason is simple. Who suffers in the case of a mistake? I would rather pay for my mistaken impressions myself, not project the cost of my mistakes onto someone else.

Also, although all of the people I know who insist that others earn their respect are sure that they are unbiased in the application of their rule, it doesn't look that way to me. They are blind to their own implicit biases, which include scientific/technical discipline as well as the usual gender, race, and sexuality biases. I see that people who are not straight white men usually have to work harder to earn respect, and that people working in disciplines perceived as "softer" or "easier" may never be able to earn the respect of their peers in the "harder" disciplines.

And that doesn't even consider the ways in which women and people of color are penalized in this respect-earning competition for behaviors that are completely fine- or even respected!- in white men.

It also doesn't consider the way in which having to continually earn respect can have a disproportionately discouraging effect on members of marginalized groups, who have probably been told all of their life that they aren't meant to be doing whatever it is they are doing. Trust me, the effect of having to constantly prove yourself is like stereotype threat on steroids. I recently joked to my husband that for a woman in tech, the message is: "you aren't as good as the boys, girls don't do this, you aren't as good as the men, you're good at this... for a girl, if you were really good we'd know, this is a meritocracy so if you aren't at the top you don't belong there, if you haven't been coding since you're 13 you can't be any good" until one day the message is "your problem is that you don't have enough self-confidence!" It is crazy making, and I want no part in subjecting anyone else to that nonsense.

I know myself well enough to know that I still have plenty of implicit biases lurking in my subconscious. It is far safer and fairer and just nicer to assume everyone is worthy of my respect until they do something to lose it. Also, I feel better about myself this way.

But of course, saying this is one of the things that makes some of the guys I work with respect me less. Because, of course, REAL scientists/tech people make other people earn their respect.

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In other news, this week's Tungsten Hippo post is about steampunk, inspired in part by a recent incident in which a local steampunk group was asked to leave a mall. At first I thought this had nothing to do with today's post, but I actually think it is part of the same theme- it is better to give people the benefit of the doubt. And I'm going to do that and assume that the mall guards wish they had given the steampunk group the benefit of the doubt, and feel a bit foolish now that they know what steampunk is.

Weekend Reading: The I Am Not Broken Edition

I almost wrote a post on Thursday about how great I felt. I had spent two or three weeks feeling really run down and then 10 days with a slightly unsettled stomach thanks to antibiotics. No one really took the run down feeling all that seriously, including me for the first couple of weeks. We all assume that a working mother of two young kids should of course feel exhausted. But that is not normal for me. I am normally a fairly high energy and happy person. After a week and a half, I finally was worried enough to contact my doctor, who ordered a bunch of tests. Those came back normal, so once again everyone- including me- was willing to just drop it and assume I was just tired. But then I got a weak symptom that made me wonder if I had a urinary tract infection. I made a doctor's appointment for the next day and found out I was right. After two days on the antibiotic I felt energetic again.

Moral of the story: I need to take myself more seriously. I knew deep down that there was no reason I should feel so completely exhausted, but I was still happy to go along with the standard narrative that I was just tired because I work and have kids and have such a busy life.

(The other moral of the story is that I need to do a better job of remembering that I am prone to "silent" UTIs since having kids...)

So anyway, I am not broken. This week's links are further affirmation of that, in various ways:

Anita Bell argues that we should stop trying to teach women to be more assertive in meetings and the like and start trying to teach men to shut up and listen more often.

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox argues that we should stop trying to fix women in the workplace and start trying to fix managers.

Vivek Wadwha points out that the cutesy brainteasers some tech companies like to use while hiring and the over-reliance on employee referrals contribute to under-representation of women in their workforce.

Company culture matters, and it is hard to fix once it is broken. I argue this a lot when talking to other people about why management matters. Seemingly small management decisions can shape the culture.

This was apparently the week that the Harvard Business Review vindicated me, because it also published a story about how planning ahead for a vacation makes the vacation more relaxing.

My last two links don't follow my theme, but I want to share them anyway:

Ariel Waldman's Pastry Box post about getting adults involved in science is very thought provoking. I recommend it for all the scientists in my audience. I don't think I agree with her completely, but she makes some really good points and there's a lot to think about in that essay.

And I love this tumblr of Chicago Dibs.