Women in Academia - Interpersonal Relationships/Family Issues

This is a continuation of key points gathered from: Denice Park and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema article from: Zanna, M., Darley, J., & Roediger, H.L. (Eds.). The Complete Academic: A Practical Guide for the Beginning Social Scientist. Washington D.C. The American Psychological Association.

NOTE: I want to thank all my readers who leave comments sharing their experiences. I'd like to think that knowing YOU ARE NOT ALONE makes people feel a bit better...and that's the point of this whole blogging experience.

c) Interpersonal relationships including sexual relationships and sexual harassment

• When you first arrive in a department, it is wise to be somewhat restrained in developing intense personal friendships. You are vulnerable at this time and people may not be what they initially appear.
  
• Women often build intimacy through self-disclosure. Such disclosure early on to a colleague that you don’t know very well and with whom you might work for the next 30 years can be a very dangerous behavior
• Don’t have sex with anyone in the department, ever. (Psychstudent adds: ALSO, don't flirt too much, if you tend to flirt when you drink - don't drink around your coworkers).
• Never threaten anyone about what you intend to do about any grievance you might have. Litigation is a painful route to go—but tolerating bullying and harassment is unnecessary. Deal with problems earlier rather than later and save any e-mails or other materials that are suggestive of harassment.

Psychstudent says: Save all your emails and document everything! If people know you do this, they might think you are a bit paranoid, but they won't mess with you.

RIDICULOUS sexual harassment PSA ad from the 80's

(d) Family issues

• With respect to your life in the department, it is much more acceptable for men to say they have to leave a meeting to go pick up a child than for women to do it. The man gets gold stars for being a good daddy but the woman reminds the group of her overwhelming responsibilities with respect to child-rearing.
• In general, it is probably better to not bring up child-care responsibilities as a limiting factor for scheduling a meeting or teaching a class during weekday hours from 9-5.
• When you've had an extra semester or year before the tenure decision, tenure review boards, and especially external reviewers, may expect more of you than a faculty person who has come up for tenure on the traditional clock.
  
• This is never stated explicitly, but the implicit evaluation may be that "she had 7 years instead of the normal 6 before tenure, and she still only has X publications."

Issues of abandonment by your adviser

A good thing about my adviser is that he loves our (well, *his*) department and that he will work there until he dies. (I once had a conversation with one of the janitors who has been working for our department for over 20 years, and he says that one of the oddest things is having to clean up the offices of professors when they die. As a side note, a professor who has been dead for 8 years still has a mailbox and he gets more mail per week than I've gotten during my graduate school carrier. Creepy). A classmate of mine has been abandoned by her TWO advisers (you know, the primary adviser and then her backup adviser). I have another friend who was recruited to another university to work with a specific professor. The professor who recruited her (she had another very tempting offer) KNEW he would be leaving, but didn't tell her until she arrived to her program. When she arrived there, she couldn't find another professor who shared her research interests and consequently she's been struggling by conducting research she hates.
What's particularly "unpleasant" is that one of my friend's adviser's decided to take the students he liked with him and leave the other ones adviser-less....she was left behind.
Now, I'm all for people leaving their jobs for better one, but I always assumed their is an implicit/unspoken agreement between adviser-advisee. One implicit agreement is that you go to a university to work for/with them, and they don't leave.
I think that a lot of reason why graduate students are unhappy is that they don't know what to expect from their adviser (the correct answer: NOTHING). Unlike, regular bosses, advisers expect their graduate students to follow in their foot-steps. Unlike most bosses, advisers feel their duty is to tell their students that unless they go into academia they will be worthless. (It is my understanding that bosses in the "real world" don't give a damn about what you do when you leave your job). That is, I think the problem lies in the role of an adviser being something in-between a boss and a mentor - a role that is not clearly defined.
In summary, I've read lots of department memo's explaining what graduate students are expected to do; however, I don't know that advisers are expected to do anything for their students.
My relationship with my adviser improved greatly when the only thing I began to expect from him is that given I have my own funding, he shouldn't purposely hinder my process. That is, I expect him not to hurt my career unless he had a good reason (e.g. one day I became grossly unethical). Since, I truly settled for that expectation, I've been less miserable in graduate school and I think my adviser has began to respect me more.
(Note: I'm not necessarily recommending this, I'm just saying it has worked for me).

NYT Article - Urge to End it

Great New York Times article on suicide.

Interesting passage:

As it turns out, one of the most remarkable discoveries about suicide and how to reduce it occurred utterly by chance. It came about not through some breakthrough in pharmacology or the treatment of mental illness but rather through an energy-conversion scheme carried out in Britain in the 1960s and ’70s. Among those familiar with the account, it is often referred to simply as “the British coal-gas story.”

For generations, the people of Britain heated their homes and fueled their stoves with coal gas. While plentiful and cheap, coal-derived gas could also be deadly; in its unburned form, it released very high levels of carbon monoxide, and an open valve or a leak in a closed space could induce asphyxiation in a matter of minutes. This extreme toxicity also made it a preferred method of suicide. “Sticking one’s head in the oven” became so common in Britain that by the late 1950s it accounted for some 2,500 suicides a year, almost half the nation’s total.

Those numbers began dropping over the next decade as the British government embarked on a program to phase out coal gas in favor of the much cleaner natural gas. By the early 1970s, the amount of carbon monoxide running through domestic gas lines had been reduced to nearly zero. During those same years, Britain’s national suicide rate dropped by nearly a third, and it has remained close to that reduced level ever since.

Women in Academia - Presentation of the Self/Common traps

I came across the most wonderful article by Denice Park and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema from the Michigan Department of Psychology.
The article is from: Zanna, M., Darley, J., & Roediger, H.L. (Eds.). The Complete Academic: A Practical Guide for the Beginning Social Scientist. Washington D.C. The American Psychological Association.
I decided to outline the main points of the article and post them here, starting with "presentation of the self" and "common traps for women". Some my view this as "cynical," but I have seen this happen in a lot of departments (not in my department because there are no female professors - but the advise extends to graduate students).

(a) The presentation of self

• What adjectives would your colleagues use to describe you -- as smart, positive, productive, creative, a leader, firm, confident, and a great collaborator?
• Or would they describe you as cooperative, someone you can count on, kind, quietly competent, warm, and thoughtful? In an ideal world, you might hope that your colleagues would describe you as all of the above, but it is the first set of attributes that will get you tenure. (PsychStudent's comment: essentially, in academia, it is better to be respected than liked. Ideally you want to be BOTH, so...good luck with that)
• Never start conversations with self-deprecating remarks about your own competence.

• People who are frequently stressed out at work over personal matters, and who discuss their personal lives at length with others, are often not viewed very favorably in business or in academia. (Lucky for me, I have no personal life!). On the other hand, people who can cope with their personal and professional stresses and appear hardy and optimistic are seen as leaders and as attractive colleagues. (I will never ever appear optimistic, even if I force it...so I'm passing on this one).

• Men can get away with looking like impoverished graduate students, but women often can't.

• Dress somewhat better than is normative, even for women in your department. (This is absolutely true, and in part we have other women to blame. But since women, by default, are not taken seriously, it is important to dress for the part. Something else I've always wondered - are pretty women taken less seriously?)

• Do not express your feelings of unworthiness to colleagues; express them to a partner, close friend not affiliated with your job or even to a therapist (Rambling: I ran into my ex-therapist the other day, it was awkward because I dumped him for no reason)

(b) Common traps for women academic

• Cooperative and helpful on the job is that you can end up being exploited. Look around your department—you may notice that women are chairing a lot of committees and writing a lot of reports, and handling virtually all of the socializing. (My department avoids this by NOT hiring women)

• Women may also be asked to teach more of the undergraduate service courses, because they are perceived as more interested in, or in tune with, the undergraduates. (I do not make it a secret that I dislike undergraduates)

• It is desirable to be viewed as cooperative and helpful, but the very people that are thanking you for all the things you do (WAIT - people are supposed to THANK YOU?) are the same people who won’t think twice about voting against you for tenure if your teaching or scholarship is inadequate.

Academia and spawning.

My adviser has asked me to write up a plan for what I shall accomplish the next few years. What he wants to hear from me is that I plan to do insane amounts of research for the next two years, do an internship that's light on clinical work so I can do more research, and then get a super-academic job. I told him I want to get a post-doc so I can do more research and take time to "mature" and he told me that postdocs are useless (that is, they are for people whose graduate program did not prepare them to do what they are supposed to and thus it reflects poorly on the graduate program).
While I already got his feedback on personal things like relationships (my career should come first and women who pick men over research end up with husbands who cheat on them and leave them). There is another issue that will affect my career - having children. I feel that given the pressures of getting tenure during your reproductive years, unless you are superwoman, children do affect/hinder your career. Now, is this something you bring up with your MALE adviser? And should they really be providing advise on reproductive timing? (Long time readers of this blog have read my posts describing professors unwilling to fund a female student because she got pregnant, and FEMALE professors telling a grad. student that an abortion would be the best thing for her career).
Part of me wants to bring it up for the sake of making him feel uncomfortable (that's what he gets for giving people unsolicited advise on their personal lives!) and because I know he would say something ridiculous that would both amuse me and anger me.
The odd thing is that I think my adviser *means* well. When I was telling my narcissistic friend about the creepy conversation I had had with him she was upset that her advisers weren't using scare tactics to convince her to become a professor.
Pardon my french, but academia is so fucked up...and I've seen what graduate school does to relatively sane, strong, intelligent women. I wonder if it's any worse/better than other institutions!

(NOTE: the regalia picture symbolizes the ridiculousness of it all)

Give me research or give me death!

I had a meeting with my adviser to talk about what I want to do when I grow up.
I started the meeting by asking what the purpose of the meeting was, to which he replied that he wanted to know what my career goals are so he can allocate resources appropriately and so he knows what to tell other people about how to help me (or something like that).
To this I replied "Oh OK, so if I tell you I want to be a clinician you can tell people to start ignoring me and not waste any resources" (in retrospect that was pretty insolent of me, but...whatever, it's part of my charm). He looked at me in shock so I said "oh, I'm kidding...I don't want to be a therapist...really."
Then for about an hour I started listing jobs that involved some form of clinical work, or not being in a psychology department (I just wanted to see what sort of stuff he would say). He started telling me all these absurd (but sad, I guess) stories of people who turned down being a psychology professor and their lives fell apart (some ended in death...really).
He told me about a friend of his who used to be a full professor at a prestigious psychology department but he got tired of it and decided to open a private practice - apparently clinical work was so awful that he ended up committing suicide. (For some reason I almost could not control my laughter - not that suicide is funny, but the fact that my adviser was serious and he told me it was a "cautionary tale".) Of course I asked if there might have been other contributing factors to his suicide, but my adviser was convinced that it was because being a professor is so great and being a clinician is so unbearable. He had a couple of stories like that - one ended with a woman becoming a severely depressed single mother, and the other with a man decompensating into a psychotic episode after being denied full professorship.
It's creepy but humorous in it's absurdity. There is no doubt in my mind that he was serious about it. In a way I'm flattered that he finds me "worthy" of such "noble" profession - it's worse when your adviser tells you "there are a lot of things out there for you, like in the fast food business" (no offense to anyone in fast food - but why are you reading this blog?

My adviser is trying to give this "advising thing" a try.

After 3 years of little contact with my adviser, I get the following email from him (my comments in bold):

In the spirit of trying to do advising well, (at least he is honest, read "oh yes, so I do some of that advising thing I'm supposed to do but with minimal work") I'd like you (not "us") to develop a plan for what you hope to accomplish (what research topics you wish to tackle and questions you want to answer (the publishable ones) and a practical level like meeting program objectives (I must ESCAPE), along with a time line, for the next three years (I thought I had 2 left!!!) (third year is presumably internship, but it's still possible to do research) (oh yes, internship is that year where you have to do things that get in the way of research). Part of the plan should be a clear statement of what job opportunity you want to be prepared to apply for (oh no, we are going to sit down and have "the talk" where I tell him I don't want to be a professor and he tells me I am dead to him) during your internship year. Your time line should be divided into quarters and pretty specific for the the next few quarters (hmmm...the university switched out of the quarter system about 10 years ago. Nice)