Weekend Reading: The Strange but Beautiful Things Edition

I don't have time for a long list of links this week, but I have two things to share.

First, the words and their histories in this article from Mental Floss delight me.

Second, I came across a picture I took of one of my gardening failures. I think I meant to post it but never did. This is what happens if you forget to use your green onions.

It also delights me.

Happy weekend!

On My Feet

The news today is wild, and not really in a good way. I haven't really processed all the happenings at the Supreme Court and in Texas, and even if I had, I don't have the time or energy to write a thoughtful post on them.

So I'm going to talk about shoes instead.

I recently had to buy some new sandals. I know- this sounds like a non-event. And it was a non-event until I stopped and thought about the sandals I was replacing. They were a pair of Chacos that I'd bought for our big trip. I took four pairs of shoes on that trip: the Chacos, a pair of black Birkenstock Mary Janes, my hiking boots, and a pair of Reef flip flops. Until the Chacos gave out, I still owned (and wore!) all of these, which is a testament to the quality of expensive shoes when they are expensive for reasons other than fashion, I suppose.

The Mary Janes have had to have their strap elastic repaired, but otherwise are in good condition. I don't wear them for "everyday" uses, but I keep them because I have yet to find their match for looking reasonable and being comfortable to wear while walking all day. Yes I know. I said Birkenstocks looked reasonable. But these ones do!

The Mary Janes, in San Antonio on last year's Texas trip

They come out anytime I need to wear a skirt and closed toe shoes and be on my feet all day. They almost always go on vacation with me.

I did not buy the hiking boots new for the trip, but before the trip I only wore them when I was actually hiking. During the trip, I wore them hiking, and anytime I needed to wear socks.

The hiking boots on the canopy walk in Taman Negara, Malaysia

After the trip, they were demoted to hiking-only use again, but they are still in my possession. They are definitely starting to show their age.

The flip flops have survived due to benign neglect. I am not one of those San Diegans that wears flip flops everywhere, so they only come out for trips to the beach and occasional use around the house.

But the Chacos. Well, those saw heavy wear during the trip.

At a "wildlife" center in Australia, feeding a wallaby

On the beach many places... here, in Hawaii, at the end of our trip

They are surprisingly comfortable, and are my shoe of choice for all day walking- as long as I'm walking somewhere where the sight of my toes won't give anyone the vapors. They not only keep my feet from hurting, they help keep my legs from hurting when I've been walking all days. I was so impressed by their performance on the trip that they continued to get heavy wear when we got home. They survived frequent wearings for almost 8 years. They still look reasonable and feel just as comfortable as they did from the start. But the bottom of the sole started flake off after our recent trip to Disneyland (where they kept my feet and legs happy through two days of tromping around the parks).

About to start their two day tour of Disneyland and California Adventure

So it was time to replace them. No prizes for guessing what I chose to replace them with.

Shiny new Chacos

This post was not sponsored by anything or anyone other than my happy feet!

Weekend Reading: The Hodge-Podge Edition

I've got a hodge-podge of links for you this weekend, and a lingering cold that has me coughing and complaining a lot. So I'll spare you the chit chat and get straight to the links!

First, Boing Boing led me to this really nice essay by Hillary Rosner about the overwhelming effects of all the advice people give pregnant women. Rosner is a science journalist, and was surprised by how overwhelmed she felt... but it also gave her some new insights:

"Pregnancy has allowed me for the first time to understand how hard it is to tell good information from bad. As a science journalist, I make my living by being able to decipher the two, but all these warnings bewilder me. As a result, I feel like I can see a bit more clearly how misinformation can become epidemic, leading to collective panic and seriously bad policy making."

Next, staying on the parenting theme, I found a good article via @ScienceofMom, with ideas for how to ask whether their are guns in the home when your kid is heading off for a play date. Pumpkin is just now reaching the age of "drop off" play dates, so we'll need to start asking about this. I also liked @DrRachelF''s suggestion for how to ask the question:

@wandsci @scienceofmom How about, "Do you have a pool in the yard? What about guns in the house?"
— Rachael French (@DrRachaelF) June 21, 2013

 I have no idea how I came across this book review that hints at why education research doesn't have more influence on education policy, but it is interesting.

The Harvard Business Review had a good but rather depressing article about how companies really aren't equal opportunity employers.

Reading that reminded me of this excellent Ta-Nehisi Coates post about why we can't ignore race and just look at socioeconomic class.

"When you hear people claiming that "class" can somehow account for the damage of white supremacy, or making spurious comparisons between Appalachia and Harlem,  you should be skeptical. I have made those comparisons. But learning is the entire point of researching, writing, and reporting. I am learning that you can not simply wish the past away."

He cites a lot of research explaining why you should be skeptical. It is a good read.

I always like to end on a happy note, so- say hello to Single Mom Postdoc, a new scientist and mother who blogs! If you go and say hello you will be one up on me- the cold and pile up of deadlines at work have seriously cut into my blog commenting- but you should do it, anyway. Her first post is about being a single mom in academia, and is very good.

Happy weekend, everyone!

Following the Money, Sort Of

Ginger at Ramble Ramble is starting a new writing prompt group. I don't know how often I'll play along- the limit on my blogging is more often time than ideas- but I thought I'd at least do a post for the inaugural topic. She put up two questions as prompts this week: Why did you start blogging? and What's the best decision you ever made?

I've written about why I blog before, so I figured I'd tackle the second question. It is a surprisingly hard question to answer. I've made some good decisions in my life (and yeah, some bad ones, too, but that isn't what the question was about). But which would be the best? They all sort of build off of each other, in the way that life does.

The first decision that I remember thinking of as really important was my decision to go to The University of Chicago for college. I can't really say why I chose to apply there, but I know why I went: they offered me a full tuition scholarship. I had a couple of other scholarship offers, so it wasn't as simple as choosing the only place I could go for free. But once the acceptance letter and scholarship offer from Chicago arrived, my choice was made. It was a perfect fit for me, although perhaps not for the reasons I thought when I accepted the offer. I accepted the offer with happy thoughts of the life of the mind and other phrases from the U of C's brochures. But it was actually a perfect fit because the academic rigor started to build my confidence in my abilities. I'd had a lot of good educational experiences before college, but was rarely really challenged. I also grew up in a place that was fairly conservative and went to a high school in which many of the students in one of the dominant social groups belonged to a religion that advocated for women to take a secondary role to their husbands. My family did not believe that, and my parents always supported me in my undertakings, and made me feel like I could do anything I wanted. But I think the combination of the fact that I was rarely challenged academically and the fact that a lot of my peers believed that a woman's place was in the home led me to sell myself a bit short.

That all ended in college. It wasn't an instantaneous thing- not by a long shot. Like many people I've met since, a lot of my college peers looked at my long blond hair and generally sunny disposition and judged me to be a lightweight. My performance in my classes seemed to reinforce their opinion, and I started to see myself as a lightweight, too. Part way through my first quarter there, I was sure I'd made a mistake, and I started thinking I should transfer some place else. Having never faced much of an academic challenge before, I didn't know how to study, and although I was not failing any of my classes, I felt like I was in over my head. Then the guy I was dating at the time, whose family lived in Chicago, didn't invite me to visit him for Thanksgiving. I spent the long weekend in the dorm, a bit bored and angry. And I studied. I studied so well that I aced my chemistry exam the following week. That surprised a lot of people, including me. From that point forward, my performance in my classes improved, and I started to believe more in my own capabilities. By the time I graduated from college, with an A- grade average, I felt like I could probably handle any challenge.

As I was finishing up at college, I decided to go to graduate school. Again, I can't really say why. It just seemed like the thing to do. Of course, the graduate students I knew tried to talk me out of it- that is sort of the duty of all graduate students, to warn people considering graduate school that it isn't all that much fun. Despite their best efforts, I was not deterred. And again, the specific choice of school was influenced by money. I won a National Science Foundation fellowship, which meant that I'd be bringing my own money into whatever graduate program I attended. A lot of graduate schools essentially said "That's great!" and offered no improvement over the standard graduate student compensation package. One or two said "That's great! You don't have to be a teaching assistant if you don't want to be one." The one I went to said "That's great! You can have an extra $3000 per year."

If you had asked me at the time, I would have said that the program seemed like a really good fit for me. It did- but so did several other programs. The honest reason why I went to the school I went to for my PhD is that extra $3000 per year.

It worked out well- the program was good. It was also very customizable, and because of that I graduated with training in both science and databases, which helped me land an offer for a job at a biotech company. I also had an offer for a postdoctoral fellowship, and I really agonized over which offer to take. For once, the deciding factor wasn't the money- or not entirely the money, anyway. The biotech job paid literally twice as much as the postdoctoral fellowship, but it also offered me more independence. Looking back, I can't actually believe I agonized so much over that decision, given the huge difference in salaries, but at the time, leaving academia felt like a giant step into uncertainty.

That particular job didn't work out all that well- but it set me on a career path that has served me well. And it was at that job that I met my husband. He would not appreciate me telling the entire world the story of how we ended up together, so suffice to say that money had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

I think I can get away with saying that when I met Mr. Snarky, I was at the tail end of another relationship, although I didn't really realize that at the time. In due course, the other relationship ended, and Mr. Snarky was there, offering me another option. I tried to warn him off- he was sure to be my rebound guy, right? But he said he didn't care, and I decided to give him a chance. And here we are, 12 years and two kids later, still happy.

I don't know which of these decisions was my best one, but I'm glad I made them all the way I did. However, I also tend to think that life has a way of working itself out, most times, so I suspect that if I'd made different decisions, I would probably have gotten to an equally happy place. I don't usually agonize over decisions. I've never really tried to state my decision-making philosophy, but perhaps it is this: do what seems best at the time, and trust yourself to make the best of where those choices lead you. And if everything else seems equal, picking the option that works out best financially is a pretty good way to go.

How do you make decisions? Can you look back and pick a decision you consider your best one?

Weekend Reading: The Hold the Right People Accountable Edition

I was planning a links post around the theme of various ways to make the tech world better- but then I went on a little Twitter rant about holding the men in power accountable for increasing the representation of women in high status fields, or in fact for increasing the representation of any under-represented group. And I realized that the only non-women in tech related link was an article from Bruce Schneier comparing the current state of the internet to a feudal society. That is a good article. You should go read it.

But most of the links in this post are about why women are under-represented in tech. My Twitter rant was sparked by an article by Linda Holmes about movies, and how the vast majority of the movies are about men. There was a section at the end of this post that set me off:

"Somebody asked me this morning what "the women" are going to do about this. I don't know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?

They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by "we," I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says "win some, lose some" and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every "surprise success" about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock."

And that reminded me of how people expect women to fix our own under-representation in the the upper levels of the business world. As Avivah Wittenberg-Cox has been pointing out for awhile now, this is not really a problem we can ask women to fix, because the women aren't the ones who have the power to change the culture and how promotions are made. The people with the most power in that regard are the people in charge- who are mostly men.

It also made me think about a post by Elizabeth Yin about what female founders really face in Silicon Valley. As she points out in her post, part of the problem is that venture capitalists (much like movie executives, probably) base a lot of their decisions on pattern recognition, looking for opportunities that are similar to successful ventures they've backed in the past. And since there haven't been a lot of female founders, there haven't been a lot of successful female founders, and so on and so on.... a self-reinforcing cycle.

If you wonder how skewed the ratios are in Silicon Valley, take a look at this series of graphics from Mother Jones showing the severe under-representation of women and non-whites in tech.

And if you want evidence that the white men in charge don't generally see this as their problem, read the first comment on that last post. (Although, in general, reading the comments on any article about women in tech is a depressing undertaking, and I don't recommend it.)

Someone named Sebastian Meisinger asks:

"How is it a problem? If it is a problem, how did it happen? What do you propose we do to fix it?"

Why is this a problem? I think it should be obvious, but since it apparently isn't, here is my answer, in the form of a tweet I made earlier this week:

Techies like to fix things. We fix the prob we see. We don't always see probs that don't affect us. Lack of diversity in tech hurts us all.
— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) June 12, 2013

Sure, techies can and do fix problems that aren't directly relevant to them. It happens all the time. But the first step is for someone who sees and understands the problem to also understand what technology can do to fix it. The relative homogeneity of the people who understand what technology can do to fix problems leads to a relative homogeneity of the problems that get tackled. This is part of the reason why we have so many apps to fix the problems (or problem-like issues) of young, well-off men. (Another part is the pattern recognition tendencies of venture capital that I mentioned above.)

I was prompted to write that tweet by coming across the Black Girls Code initiative. I have since contributed to their fundraising campaign. We all suffer from the lack of diversity in tech. We should all try to fix it.

As regular readers know, I read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, and I found some useful things in it. Sandberg herself acknowledges that the changes women can make themselves are only a part of the solution. I think it is high time that we start expecting the white men in charge to start owning this problem. They are the ones with the power to change things. Their companies and organizations will benefit greatly from the new ideas and different perspectives that diversity brings. Honestly, I don't know why boards aren't demanding management teams fix this problem. Think of the market opportunities that the tech giants are not addressing!

OK, actually I do know why most boards aren't demanding their management teams fix the problem. They are just as blinded by the lack of diversity as the management teams themselves are.

We often focus on the sexists. But I think we should also applaud the men who get it right- and there are plenty of them, in tech and elsewhere. So I'll end on an upbeat note, with two examples of the men in charge stepping up and tackling the problem.

First, from the tech world, there is the example of Etsy, which has a largely female customer base but was largely staffed by men. The CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea, recognized the problem and decided to stop trying to solve it by poaching women from other companies. Instead, he invested in developing female junior engineers. And it is working.

And finally, Lt. Gen David Morrison, the Australian Chief of the Army, delivers an amazing take down of sexists in the ranks. Watching this clip makes me want to stand up and cheer:



(I found this clip via Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon)

There are men in power who get it. So let's start expecting all men in positions of authority to get it. Let's start judging them when they fail to tackle the problem. When they shrug their shoulders and say that the problem is that there aren't enough good women or people of color to hire, let's reply, Yes, but what have you done to try to fix that? Any one of those tech giants could step in and bring Black Girls Code to full-funding in an instant. Why don't they? Let's stop obsessing about what Sheryl Sandberg gets wrong on this issue and start pointing out what Mark Zuckerberg gets wrong.