Jose Antonio Sânchez Reyes | Dreamstime.com

This is a piece on gender inequity and sexual discrimination (not sexual harassment, which is a different and emotionally more devastating thing). I´m writing this at this time not because of any one thing that´s happened, but because of a culmination of things. Sometimes it just seems like a topic is in the air, building momentum, and this topic has finally found a voice in me.

This post had three different triggers. The first was a bad moment I had last semester, when I found out a student in my Physics for Engineers class was making sexually harassing comments on a regular basis. The second trigger came from confronting numbers and statistics on women in physics and astronomy for a pair of talks at Dragon*Con. And the third trigger was this little gem posted by Rebecca Watson on Twitter under the heading “Sexual Assault Prevention Tips (A must-read! Pls RT and save someone from being raped)”

Sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and rape all share one rather awful thing in common: They occur when one person or group is able to act in a hurtful way to another person or group without anyone stopping what´s going on. This does not have to be men against women: I´ve seen barns filled with middle-aged women swarm on the lone equestrian male, doing everything from landing the friendly slap on the ass, to cat calling him in his riding attire. It also doesn’t have to be purposely hurtful: I´ve watched as male grad students, at the beginning of the semester and before social groups have formed, thoughtlessly walk around asking all the other men if they want to head out [for lunch / to go to the gym /to get a drink] while they left the women behind. Sometimes people in power don´t even realize what´s going on as they do it, the sexual discrimination that happened to women at MIT is an example of this. Over years women weren’t given the same job advantages as men, and it was entirely without thought. When the problem was pointed out, measures were taken to fix the problem. (This study is mentioned in the forthcoming National Academies report, “Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty.” )

And here is where I´m going to ask all of you to listen to me really closely: Anytime anyone with the power to help is aware of any form of discrimination and they do nothing to fix it, they are just as much to blame as the perpetrators.

Throughout my adult life I have over and over had some well-meaning man watch me get frustrated in some work situation or academic situation, and they´ve said with the intention of comforting me: “It’s not you, he´s an [expletive] to all women.” Okay, nice try. I appreciate the attempt, but – Could you maybe offer a girl a little help?

I want to be clear: If you are in a position of power, and you see a problem, telling the victim they are being victimized is not a solution. Finding a way to stop the perpetrator is the only a solution.

This is not a matter of men against women. This can be in either direction with gender. It can be racial. It can be religious in nature. And in academia it can even take the form of Large Prestigious University Researchers discriminating against small college researchers.

Let me return to those 3 triggers above as talking points.

Trigger 1: Male student making sexually harassing comments I have never been so angry in my life, and as the professor of the class I grabbed my syllabus, found the line that says, “Loud and disruptive students are not welcome. If you disturb your classmates, you will be kicked out!” and made it clear that I would wield that line of my syllabus if even one word of sexually loaded speech was uttered, and that the student – any student with harassing language – would not only be kicked out of my class for the rest of the semester and fail, but I´d report them to the dean of students.  Then I moved back onto discussing physics. The students behaved (all the way through the end of the semester in fact!), but at the end of class a tough as nails, takes no shit from anyone, women came up and commended me for what I had done, but then she said it´s all kind of useless as long as there are professors making sexually explicit jokes in single gender dominated classes. All I could do was say, I´m sorry, I can´t help you, that prof has tenure and I´m just someone living grant to grant. All I can say is you need to report it on your evaluations or go to a chair or dean. Every university has its 1 or more faculty member who say the wrong things, crossing the wrong lines, sometimes just to get a laugh. But as long as that 1 (or more) person exists, the problem exists.

And here, I have to be very careful what I say because I know this is a dangerous post to write. The people I work with now I may have to work with for the rest of my life – academia is a very small culture, and with our very limited resources, emotions run high and grudges are held for decades. But I want to say this nonetheless: We as a field need a better way for addressing these problems so junior faculty like me don’t have to tell students – “I’m sorry, I can’t help you” because I’m too afraid for my own job. I have known about problems at every institution I´ve been at and I haven´t felt comfortable reporting them because I know that if I reported every problem a student reports to me it would put my situation in jeopardy. We need a better way to report problems.

Right now, a student must report the problem to a person in power (all men in my areas of expertise – I don’t count as someone with power. If they report it to me, I can report it to the chair or dean, but then have to produce the student), and if it is another student victimizing them, they may have to confront that student face-to-face in the university judicial system. If it is a faculty member, it is likely half the university will know who reported what very rapidly (never trust an academic with a secret). We’re all told everything is in confidence, but we’ve also all had that one gossipy tenured senior person (often from another department) let us in on the past 10 years of sexual misdeeds. This means the accuser – the victim – will face extensive scrutiny and the potential of becoming the bunt of lunch time laughter (a form of additional harassment) while they wait and hope for the academic judicial system to help them out.

We need a better way to handle problems and keep people safe. I don’t know what the solution is. I wish I did. I just know we need something better.

Trigger 2: The depressing numbers Let´s face it, the situation is bleak. Go read the two reports I summarize here. These numbers tell me one simple thing: A lot of women are leaving science for a lot of undocumented reasons. People only go into things like physics and astronomy for 1 reason: Love. They love the field or they love the challenge. They weren´t seeking fame or fortune. Like the impoverished poet, they self-selected to bleed themselves into their work. Both men and women with into physics/astronomy out of love, but women have preferentially left behind the field or challenge for undocumented reasons. I know I personally left the field once out of frustration, and one element of that frustration was knowing I’d never be part of the old boys club (which I then learned also existed in other fields).

Trigger 3: The one certain way to prevent rape is to get rid of the rapers – The topic of this post isn´t rape, but the idea still applies. In the case of gender discrimination by men on women, I as a woman can do all I want to try and avoid harassment, but at the end of the day, I can be as cautious and uncontroversial as I want (or don’t want), but the choice to be discriminated against based on my gender isn´t a choice I get to make – it is a decision made by others. The only thing that can stop men from harassing women is for men to step forward and say enough is enough. (The same is true if you reverse the genders, or change this to a case of religious, race, or other discrimination.) Always, it must be other members of the group in power who step forward and stand up for the people being victimized. This was true during the civil rights movement, for instance.

And here is the challenge I want to put out there: If you are a man and ever feel the need to pull a woman aside and say “It´s not you, it´s because you´re a woman,” I want you to act on that need, and then I want you to report to the proper authorities what is going on. Be an advocate. Stand up for someone who may not be able to stand up for themselves. You have the power to change things.

And if anyone ever tells you, “It’s not you, they are like that to all [women / minorities / Christians / Jews / gays / etc],” look at that person and tell them, “If I fight this, I could lose my job and be labeled a trouble maker. If you report this, they’ll listen. Will you help? Will you report what you’ve witnessed to the appropriate authorities and prevent this from happening again? Will you help me?”

Be safe. Be good. And if you have power, help someone without it.

As a child enrolled in pull-out honors classrooms and sequestered in special science tracks, I grew to dread group projects. These were the times when my intellect made me a freak to be fought for because every team needed someone to do the worst of the work. There were the dioramas of English class, designed to depict “Lord of the Rings” in a shoe box. Always there was the person who did all the writing, the person who did all the building (sometimes the same person), and the person who did all of the whining (or people, as the case might have been). In this uneven pattern of inflicted group work, the smart were punished and the lazy were praised as we all shared the same grade. In lab this carried into our activities, our notebooks, our group reports. In history it was the class presentations. Over and over again it repeated until the teachers relented and the smart kids were allowed to work alone just to stop our whining.

Whoever got the neat idea it would be a good idea to partner the A kids with the F kids never stopped to think that also this would do is teach both sets of kids they were freaks not worth the teachers time.

As a college professor, I find myself looking out at a sea of young scientists and engineers who hate group assignments, and I need to find a way to teach them, as I learned the hard way, that group activities can be okay. (And I’m hoping I can teach this before their first group assignment, which is a week from Wednesday).

When works, collaboration can allow an intellectual conquering of the world as partners and teams run wildly through data and ideas, matching one persons strengths against another’s weaknesses so the can build a more capable whole.

The standard way to teach “Collaboration is Good” is to point at all the prominent discoveries that required large teams; the top quark had always been my perennial favorite. Today, Galaxy Zoo offers a new example of a powerful collaboration that anyone can participate in. Still, while neither of these projects could have been accomplished without large collaborations is always convincing.

Sometimes it helps to remind them of why I need collaborators, and why academics like to work in communities and travel to conferences.

As one person, I am capable of a lot of hard work, deep thought, and random acts of creativity, but it is hard to motivate myself forward in isolation. It is through talking, brainstorming, arguing and even sometimes shouting (I tend to avoid that) with collaborators and colleagues that ideas can go from shadows of possibility to reality. In the past couple years this has happened over and over again, as discussions with Fraser took us from thinking, “Reporting from conferences is neat” to creating our Astronomy Cast Live program, and as discussions on a small galaxy evolution literature search led to an SDSS data mining project, and much much more.

now as an adult who can choose my peers, I find that as I work on projects – education, media, and science alike – I have come to like working in partnership with others. My collaborators are people I can ask, “Is the idea crazy?” and to whom I can say, “I’m having a bad math day, can you help?” At home, discussions of astronomy research are met with blank stares, but with my colleagues I can laugh with giddy joy at our progress, and cry over coffee as we work late into the night to prevent mistakes from leading to failures.

A good collaborator is a friend who knows when to tell you your ideas are full of s***. And a good collaborator is someone who makes you keep trying until you come up with a good idea. It is all about the letter “C”: Coffee, communication, creativity, comradery, chardonnay or cider, curiosity, conclusions, collegiality, conferences, colloquiums, and yes, collaborating.

I have a personal policy of only working with people I like and/or respect. This is a luxury I hope never to be forced to give up. It was not a pleasure I had in school, and I don’t think I have any way to guarantee my students will not wish nasty things on the people they partner with in class. But. But maybe I can convince them collaboration is at least worth a try, and that it really can be easier to work with a partner than to work alone.

And really, it isn’t all just about dividing the work – it’s also about having a wingman as you work your way through a playing field of ideas. Tell me, interesting bit of science, have you met my collaborator? Perhaps the two of you should talk…

Take for instance our solar system. Up until 1995 it was the only one with a normal sun we knew of (there were some pulsar planets found earlier). Based on it, and it alone, we built an entire detailed nebular theory of solar system formation that we think is mostly true.

This isn’t the only place in research where instances of “observation” lead to “understanding.” With observational astronomy we at least have the option to go out and search for new data. And sometimes we even find it. Sometimes. And until that sometimes is realized, most astronomers are more than willing to say “This is based on 1 example – we’re looking for more.”

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an example of large science done well. As it chews through large areas of the sky we’re greatly multiplying the sizes of our samples and the numbers of our examples. Tidal tails were barely understood a dozen years ago, and now we know of many of them wraping like starry spaghetti around our galaxy. The number of overlapping galaxies has jumped from under a thousand to many thousand thanks to SDSS and its child project Galaxy Zoo (which sprang out on its own, via spontaneous, pub fertilized, gestation). The science coming out of SDSS is amazing (and it’s currently being live blogged over here).

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is just the starting point. In the coming years two new large survey telescopes will be coming online. The first is Pan-STARRS, which has a primary mission of trying to find pretty much every medium to large sized rock or chunk of ice out in the solar system threatening to cross the orbit of the Earth. It is set to come online late this year. Following on its heels is the LSST, which presently anticipates seeing first light in 2015 and has science goals of finding the remaining unidentified random small objects in the solar system as well as finding transitory objects like supernovae.

On their way to accomplishing their core missions, these telescope projects will obtain hundreds of images of different areas of pretty much every corner of the sky they are each able to access. By adding these images together we can probe deeper and deeper into the sky as more and more months and years pass by. In this deep means faint, and as we survey the faintest fuzzies of the sky, astronomers will find a new definition of what it means to have a statistically significant data set.

Hopefully, in a couple years, the physicists will joke that astronomers consider a mere 40 or 400 data points as being statistically significant.

Statistically significant is a fancy way to say a result is believable. If you see me toss a basketball into a hoop from 5 meters once, it might be a fluke (or a miracle, more likely). If you see me do it 28 out of 30 times, you can say with statistical certainty that I am capable of accurately throwing basket balls (this would never ever happen). Statistically significant crops up in many places, and we use it for silly reasons. The house I live in is Pink (it’s an old Victorian that once was a farm house). When we bought it my colour blind husband told people it was salmon or mauve or puce. I said it was pink. This lead to us surveying every poor soul who came over about what color they perceived our house to be. Based on a statistically significant sample of about 20 people who answered at the 80% level “Pink” or “Pink or Salmon,” my husband now tells the pizza guy we’re the first pink house after the intersection

This idea of statistical significance applies across all non-theoretical astronomy research. Along with the hard science areas of observational astronomy, high-energy accelerator-based cosmology, and rover / probe based planetary science, astronomy/physics departments sometimes also hide a few soft scientists working on astronomy educational research who can do statistically significant research as well.

In the hard versus soft science discussion, I’m a bit half-baked. Different bits of my research likes to sit on both sides of that fence.

In Astronomy Education Research we have very few large scale surveys. There are the occasional longitudinal studies. Using them I can tell you how performance varies by ethnicity and gender on the GRE. I could tell you how graduating classes matriculate men and women across the decades. There is even some large scale surveying of what type of jobs we get, what classes we take, and who does better on exactly which standardized tests.

But these surveys don’t always help instructors like me get inside my students heads and understand how the specifics of what I do does or does not improve learning. There is no 10,000 person survey to explain if one demonstration of diffraction is better at explaining spectroscopy than another demonstration. In designing my courses, I rely on my personal experience, and I rely on limited case studies. I do have data sets demonstrating demos do deserve to be done. I have facts and figures fully justifying labs. Somethings I know about my formal class thanks to the work of others. But mostly, I have to follow my gut and simply employ what are called best practices (broad concepts like using labs, encouraging student interaction, and keeping my class actively engaged in the content rather then lecturing)

As a new media content provider, I find that the best practices for blogging, podcasting and even YouTube have yet to be defined. (And I’m doing my part, where I can.) As a trained researcher, I get frustrated with comments that all my experience says are true, but I personally don’t have the data (or know of anyone else who has published the data) to back up. For instance, a quick run through YouTube will find videos that qualify as trash, campy, quality, and OMG why. My experience looking at hit numbers tells me that it is the camp and the why that seem to get hit the most. To prove my stomachs interpretation of a not statistically significant data set I’d need to define a way to quantify a video as into a category like “campy,” and then use that metric to classify a few 1000 videos, and then document how many hits those videos received in a known period. To help remove bias, I’d want to do things like only use first time posters, and similar restricting factors to keep my data as easy to understand as possible. Its a question that intrigues me. And if I had a fleet of marketing students, I’d probably put them to work answering these questions.

But I don’t have that fleet, so I answer the questions I can, as I can, and I chew out papers when I can.

And until that data can be gathered, I and others talk in anecdotes. In the press room at AAS, we all talk about the seemly magical combinations of actions that we have to do to get our posts dugg on digg. Sometimes it feels like our not-well-documented anecdotes amount to, “When the moon is full, and I include the word serendipity and bite my tongue while hitting the publish button I hit the front page.” The same is true of some teaching.

The trick is to remember, all we have are our personal anecdotes, and what works for Phil Plait won’t work for me. And what works for Fraser probably won’t work either. And nothing will ever replicate the magic of Astronomy Picture of the Day.

New media is young. Large surveys will come. Just not today. Until then, let the gossip and story telling begin (just don’t claim statistical significance.)

In truth, universities are just places that strive to be more, but often struggle to make their dreams reality. As places run by humans and often open to the public, they aren’t as secure as we may desire. While the majority of crimes are related to random strangers entering campus to thieve, and peep, and sometime grope and rape, the most tragic crimes we see are the ones perpetrated by the students and staff who become broken as they try to run the academic gauntlet.

At the University of Texas as a graduate student, I learned in the shadow of the UT tower. In August of 1966, Charles Whitman (a former UT student) went on a shooting spree from the top of that 307-foot tower and over the course of 96 minutes shot and killed 14 people while injuring dozens more. Earlier in the day, he had killed both his mother and his estranged wife. The day ended with a a police officer killing Whitman. By all accounts, he snapped after experiencing one too many personal failures, including academic failures.

At the University of Texas as a observational astronomer, I took data through the McDonald Observatory 107-inch telescope. In February 1970, a night assistant had a mental breakdown, fired a shot at his supervisor and then shot up the mirror of the telescope. The day ended with a local law enforcement officer talking him down and taking him away in hand cuffs. The stories I’ve heard from people who were there attribute his breakdown to frustrations in part or in whole related to research problems.

These events aren’t unique. In grad school, we all hear the stories of abused graduate students breaking and killing themselves or their advisors. I suspect we all hope never to experience this happening at our home institutions, but at the same time we all have or know someone who has thought “what if I…”

In 1998, the year I defended my master’s thesis, Harvard graduate student Jason D. Altom, one of the best of his field, killed himself. In a note published in the Harvard Crimson after release by Altom’s parents, Altom wrote, “This event could have been avoided. Professors here have too much power over the lives of their grad students,” the letter continued. Having a committee of professors involved earlier in the evaluation of a student’s work would “provide protection for graduate students from abusive research advisers,” Mr. Altom wrote. “If I had such a committee now I know things would be different.” (Taken from linked Chronicle article.)

If our best can’t thrive in our Darwinian “survival of the fittest” academic community, … .

Yesterday, a new and tragic crime joined the list of events we can not afford to forget.

In April of 2007, the spring of my first year possessing a title containing the coveted word “professor”, Virginia Tech senior Cho Sheung-Hui killed 7 faculty and 23 students before turning a gun on himself. In a note, he railed against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus. (Taken from linked News Day article.)

I’m not a psychologist, a sociologist, or someone who can pretend the slightest training in the mental workings of the human mind. But, I am a human who has survived the US educational system. When I hear of these shootings, I don’t ask why, I thank God it doesn’t happen more often. The upper tiers of academia, to which Harvard and Texas and Virginia Tech all belong, appeal to a certain type of person. They welcome the student who chooses to study astrophysics because they are told it’s the hardest major. They nurture the student who believes anything less then perfection is failure. They push and push and push, trying to get each student to jump over a bar so high most of us can never reach it. They push, because occasionally someone can jump over the bar, and that person, when pushed to become the best they can be, just might save the world. And hey, there is a curve (often unspoken) to make sure everyone else still gets a mostly passing grade.

But just passing can be an emotional failure. The pressures put on students pulverize self-worth and crush the understanding that mistakes are okay.

I was one of those freaked out students who feared every B would keep me from college. I was so freaked that I vapor locked on exams. The only semester I actually got straight As was my last semester of my senior year (when it really no longer mattered). As early as 8th grade, I was being pressured that my occasional Bs would keep me out of the MIT I dreamed of attending (in reality, I suspect the D I got in German and my less then perfect math SATs had more to do with it). Today, I hear parents freaking out that if their child doesn’t attend the correct private pre-school, they won’t get into the elementary school that will get them into the right high school that will get them into the right college.

Parents are hiring college admissions advisors to shape their children into what colleges want. In one of the sadder examples, would-be Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan was assisted by her admissions councilor in getting a book deal that would have her writing her first novel while she tried to finish high school and complete her first year of college. She was accepted at Harvard, but her first book was retracted after it was discovered that she had somehow plagiarized large amounts of text from her favorite authors. I don’t know how anyone thought this brilliant young woman could balance so many things. Phil Plait, a brilliant astronomer needed to quit his job to write his second book, and he is an experienced writer. Viswanathan was an 18 year old who should have been busy having fun learning to be an independent co-ed.

We are all guilty of occasionally perpetuating higher than necessary standards. In mentoring students, I hear myself advising them to seek research opportunities as high school students and to try and publish research as undergrads. That is what I did, and it worked for me. But… aren’t normal high school students supposed to be flipping burgers and don’t normal undergrads just focus on finding a good summer co-op, but otherwise worry more about what they are doing Friday night?

Oh yeah – being normal is the same as failing. At least that is the impression any student trying to replicate my career path might be tempted to believe. It is even what I believed. At Harvard, I decided I must be too dumb to be a professor. After all, many of the profs I dealt with got their PhD in their early 20s and had tenure by 30. Here I am at 33 and still not on the tenure-track. To some, that is failure. In truth, we all chase our dreams at our own rates and if I think about it, I haven’t failed.

And I need to remember, as I place myself in the awful position of potentially getting mistaken as a role model, that I shouldn’t put pressure on the same students who are already putting pressure on themselves. We in academe need to tell our students stories of the successful people in our lives who never saw college as a need. We can’t forget to praise our students for trying. We need to tell them to enjoy life. We can’t simply push them as we were pushed. Academe can be a cycle not too different from any other cycle of abuse – but each of us has the ability to break the cycle. We’ll make mistakes – on our thoughtless days, we’ll write “See me” on failed exams without writing praise on perfect papers (isn’t perfection simply meeting expectations? No – it’s not.) We’ll forget to say, hey, you may not make it the first try, and that’s okay – it was hard for us too, and we struggled too. But hopefully we’ll learn to nurture as we teach.

And we’ll remember our youth and what it was like to have a dream and fear every day that one bad homework, one mistake on an exam, could crush that dream forever. Dreams should be treaded on lightly, and we need to care for those who are hurting as they struggle toward a dream.

I will never forget the stories of the students academe has broken and the world has lost. I will always be here for the student in need. To you, my door is always open.