msevior (msevior) wrote,
2006-08-01 13:14:00

A very disturbing blog.

My friend Pat Lam, pointed me to this very disturbing blog of a woman Particle Physicist working at Fermilab.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0151290/

The Journal appears totally authentic. The writer is clearly a top experimental Particle Physics researcher. Her story is appalling.

I had no idea that such things were common at Fermilab, which been the career forming lab for a number of outstanding women Physicists.

I hope that none of my friends, colleagues or ex-students ever suffer that.
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  • 13 comments

Anonymous

August 1 2006, 06:35:50 UTC 6 years ago

Disturbing?

What's disturbing? Don't you think that personality and the ability to work well with others should be taken into account when evaluating a job candidate?

I've heard the exact quote "He's an arrogant asshole, I'm definitely not going to give him a job." Does that disturb you too?

msevior

August 1 2006, 07:02:43 UTC 6 years ago

Re: Disturbing?

That post was the good news story on the rest of blog. Read on.

Anonymous

August 1 2006, 07:25:33 UTC 6 years ago

Re: Disturbing?

Oh, I didn't see that part. Still, I'd prefer not to make a judgement about a legal case of which the only knowledge I have is an anonymous blog post by one of the sides involved in the litigation.

msevior

August 1 2006, 14:31:42 UTC 6 years ago

Re: Disturbing?

True. We do not know the other side of the story but the stastics back her up.

Anonymous

August 15 2006, 08:19:31 UTC 6 years ago

Re: Disturbing?

As a physicist, I'm sure you know that statistics doesn't show anything about a single non-random sample. Regardless of the merits of her case, I'm having trouble feeling sympathy for someone who calls those who disagree with her things such as "ignorant", "male jerks" and "fat slimy arrogant obnoxious bastard".

I'm getting "tilting at windmills" vibes.

Anonymous

August 1 2006, 09:20:39 UTC 6 years ago

I read quite a few of the stories, none seemed overly sexist. If it's just a bunch of people letting off steam, then fine, but if they act like that all the time I'd be prejudiced against them too, simply because they are so prone to pointing fingers and getting angry.

The sexism I saw was the same level of prejudice any mninority group experiences. It would be the same in a female dominated environment, an asian dominated environment, a youth-dominated environment, etc.

Max Howell

msevior

August 1 2006, 14:35:35 UTC 6 years ago

we're trying to break down barriers for women.

Physics is a traditionally male dominated profession. We're (well we are at Melbourne Uni) trying very hard to turn this around. I'd hoped we had achieved a higher standard than "a typical male-dominated environment"
.

Anonymous

August 1 2006, 13:47:54 UTC 6 years ago

two wrongs don't make a right

I'm not sure what you find disturbing. Aggressively arrogent women are often labeled bitches and aggressively arrogent men are often labeled assholes. It's not necessarily sexist. Some language is inherently sex oriented. For instance, pretty and handsome mean the same thing, but you generally don't describe a woman as handsome or a man as pretty.

Notwithstanding, neither asshole nor bitch are appropriate comments when asking for an objective assessment and N was wrong in using them. They're too emotive and carry too much baggage and because they don't describe specifically what's wrong (was this person too aggressive, too arrogant, too much of a backstabber, etc), it does little to help make an accurate evaluation.

IMO, an explosive rant in response, by either gender does little to help. IMO, a better course of action is to keep your cool and clarify the emotive language with objective language. The entire rant can be summed up thusly: Absinthe agrees that M is aggressive, but no more aggressive than other tenured peers, and that Absinthe feels that that level of aggressiveness is important to push forward ideas in the scientific field. Fortunately, N was wise enough to filter through the emotion and extract this crucial message. But for many less objective people, Absinthe's emotional rant would have elicited an emotional response that would have hurt both Absinthe's and M's standings in N's eyes.

catherinemawih

July 16 2008, 19:04:49 UTC 4 years ago

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with the racism issue. I’m saying that there are difference between men and women, and you say that that’s the same as saying there are difference between, say, a Chinese man and an American man.

msevior

August 1 2006, 14:29:18 UTC 6 years ago

Sorry, not the first post, the whole story

It's the whole blog, not just the most recent post which is disturbing. She cites an endemic sexist attitude which includes inappropriate attributation of credit and systematic victimization.

Anonymous

August 1 2006, 18:32:11 UTC 6 years ago

too much emotion, too few facts

I read about half of her blog. The only really interesting fact she provides is that female physicists are less likely to given an article to peer-review. That is extremely disturbing (if the institution of peer-review is biased, it's a very serious problem in modern science), but not relevant to her complaints.

And her complaint is, essentially, "my supervisor was an asshole who sabotaged my carreer when I tried to take childhood leave." From this she concludes that her supervisor (and by extension the whole lab leadership) was sexist and/or racist. IMHO, her conclusion is unsupported. Unfortunately, there are a few truly sadistic people in science who seem to enjoy emotionally torturing postdocs, torpedoing carreers of people who slighted them, backstabbing, running bureaucratic interference, and climbing the carreer ladder by throwing other people off it. Due to their skills with bureaucracy, these people are hard to get rid of, even if literally everyone in the department hates them. My guess is that her supervisor didn't hurt her because she was a woman. He hurt her because he enjoys hurting people.

Finally, I find quite a bit of her language (like "lily-white") offensive. As is her insinuation that any committee of white males will automatically discriminate against non-white-male scientists.

Anonymous

August 1 2006, 19:22:08 UTC 6 years ago

I read the article and found nothing of the office fondling, being passed over because her breasts were to small, or anything else equally as "disturbing" as I would have thought. In my life experience, I have encountered more than one occasion where a male referred to a female as a bitch, and a female referred to a male as an asshole. Perhaps I should write my own blog about these disturbing, no….shocking occurrences.

The problem with the referenced article is that it is clearly one-sided, as perhaps the entire blog is. None of us were there and don't know exactly the context in which the offending reference was said. We can't see the body lanuguage or the facial expression or the tone in which is was said. Personally, by the way it was quoted, I would interpret it as an academic with a queer sense of humour. However, if this were the case, that in fact would make Absinthe the bitch, would it not? After all, M did receive tenure.

I didn’t read anything else in the blog for fear it would be as much of a waste of time as the article I did read, but from now on lets please try to have the subject line teasers match the crime…

Anonymous

September 27 2006, 08:55:17 UTC 6 years ago

hi

woman are very proactive these days.