Category Archives: Careers and employment

Dress for physics success!

Posted on by
18

Twelve years ago I edited a feature article for Physics Today entitled “So you want to be a professor!” Having recently landed a tenure-track job at San Diego State University, the article’s author, Matt Anderson, wanted to share his job-hunting experiences.

Among the advice that Anderson offered was this paragraph on what to wear to a campus interview:

When trying to decide what to wear for the interview, it is probably better to err on the side of being a little overdressed. For men, I recommend a comfortable suit and tie. The female candidates I conferred with generally wore suits—either a skirt-suit or pantsuit—stockings, and low heels. Although physicists generally dress casually, I urge you to look sharp. It is better to stand out a little because, after all, you are the candidate and people should know it! If you’re still uncertain, a good idea is to observe what the well-respected scientists wear to conferences. They generally dress in a style known as “business professional.” For my interviews I brought two outfits: a suit for the day of the colloquium, and a shirt and tie combo for the other day. Also, wear comfortable shoes! You will be on your feet for two days straight.

Fashion and levels of sartorial formality haven’t changed significantly since Anderson wrote his article. Indeed, modish men’s suits continue to follow the slim silhouette that Hedi Slimane introduced in 2001, soon after he joined Christian Dior to become the fashion house’s creative director for menswear. Women’s clothes also fit more closely than they did in the 1990s, when Giorgio Armani’s soft, loose style predominated.

The always well-dressed James Bond takes a moment to check the latest postings on cond-mat.

The always well-dressed James Bond takes a moment to check the latest postings on cond-mat. I found the picture on Matt Spaiser’s engrossing blog, The Suits of James Bond.

Whether we like it or not, the fashions of London, Milan, Paris, and New York do influence our expectations of what it means to be well dressed. In a recent post to the blog Marketing for Scientists, Marc Kuchner asked image consultant Kasey Smith the question, How is a scientist supposed to dress? Her principal advice: Your clothes should not be baggy.

You could take your clothes to a tailor shop, or when you buy new clothes have them tailored to fit you. Men know this already. Men’s clothes come with the hems not even in there. They know that they have to mark the hems. Women just think that clothes should fit them off the rack, but that’s not true either. Just like men have to do these alterations, so do women.

Of course, interviewing for a job and giving a talk—two occasions when one might dress up—are not what most scientists do most of the time. Nevertheless, says Smith, even casual clothes should look neat and presentable.

I rather like the typical indifference of physicists to their clothing. We wear what we like when we like. What matters is our work, not our appearance. On the other hand, given that physics is one of the highest expressions of human civilization, and given that our collective image helps to attract (or repel) young people, we should perhaps pay attention to Smith’s advice.

Humanities envy

Posted on by
5

While browsing the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, I noticed a commentary that bears the intriguing title “The science in social science.” Although the author, anthropologist Russell Bernard of the University of Florida, does indeed discuss the science behind economics, psychology, and other disciplines, the commentary’s main target was the public’s low appreciation of the benefits of social sciences. As Bernard puts it in his abstract:

A recent poll showed that most people think of science as technology and engineering—life-saving drugs, computers, space exploration, and so on. This was, in fact, the promise of the founders of modern science in the 17th century. It is less commonly understood that social and behavioral sciences have also produced technologies and engineering that dominate our everyday lives. These include polling, marketing, management, insurance, and public health programs.

At first, Bernard’s defensive tone led me to believe he had succumbed to a condition known as physics envy, the feeling of inferiority among some social scientists that their disciplines lack the mathematical and empirical rigor of physics. Lest you think that physics envy is an imagined malady, consider the opinion piece by two political scientists, Kevin Clarke and David Primo of the University of Rochester, that appeared last March in the New York Times. It’s entitled “Overcoming ‘physics envy.’”

But rather than argue, as Clarke and Primo do, that social scientists shouldn’t strive to frame their ideas as testable theories, Bernard convincingly recounts how the fruits of the social sciences pervade and enrich our daily lives.

Sicinius Velutus and Henry V

Although I doubt physicists will contract anything that might be called social sciences envy, there is evidence here and there that physicists and their professional relatives increasingly recognize the benefits of greater exposure to the arts and humanities.

Writing for the Sacramento Bee, Marisa Agha reported recently that a small and growing number of Caltech undergraduates are choosing majors like English and history and coupling them with a science or math major. At the university where I did my bachelor’s degree, Imperial College London, the undergraduate curriculum features an expanded range of optional classes in the humanities, including the delightfully titled Global History of Twentieth Century Things.

The benefits of studying humanities extend beyond the traditional goal of creating well-rounded graduates through a balanced curriculum. If you’ve cavorted about a stage in Elizabethan dress reciting Shakespeare, then giving a talk at a meeting of the American Physical Society will be as easy as setting dogs on sheep (Sicinius Velutus in Coriolanus). If you’ve argued in ten pages for—or against—the case that the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s inherent instability was the principal cause of World War I, then writing a three-page paper in Applied Physics Letters will be as easy as conquering France or speaking French (if you’re Henry V in Henry V, that is).

The civl flag of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The empire's instability was a principal cause of World War I.

The civil flag of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The empire’s instability was a principal cause of World War I—or not.

When scientists study humanities, society wins. Dealing with climate change, taming terrorism, and ending hunger are big, important problems whose ultimate solutions are unlikely to be wholly technical. Knowledge of human behavior and history, and the ability to understand and communicate with people, will be needed too.

Although Steve Jobs was talking about a tablet computer, the iPad2, when he made the following remarks, their sentiment is profound and apt for 21st-century scientists and engineers:

Technology alone is not enough . . . It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.

When the pie shrinks

Posted on by
Reply

When I read the title of James Langer’s editorial in the 12 October issue of Science—”Enabling scientific innovation”—I expected a generic exhortation for the US to invest more money in basic research. What Langer wrote, however, was a despairing indictment of how the US evaluates and funds scientific proposals in these times of tight budgets.

According to Langer, just when advances in experimental and computational techniques have opened up new areas of research, opportunities to fund such research are contracting. Worse, the shrunken funding pie has made peer reviewers and proposal writers averse to risk. As Langer puts it:

In my area of condensed-matter and materials physics, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) can fund only about 10% of the individual-investigator proposals it receives. [The Department of Energy (DOE) has similar difficulties.] Each proposal is sent to a group of peer reviewers, who rank it on a scale ranging from “excellent” to “poor.” NSF then funds only those proposals that receive the uniformly highest reviews. One less-than-“excellent” review, no matter how misguided, is usually enough to doom a proposal. Any proposal that is truly innovative, interdisciplinary, or otherwise unusual is almost certain to be sent to at least one reviewer who will be less than enthusiastic about it. Sensible investigators know not to submit such proposals; as a result, some of the most urgent research areas are disappearing.

Evidence to justify Langer’s fears appeared this week in the form of a commentary in Nature entitled “Research grants: Conform and be funded.” The authors, Joshua Nicholson of Virginia Tech and John Ioannidis of Stanford University, looked at the relationship between a biomedical researcher’s citations (a rough measure of scientific significance) and the level of his or her funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

In particular, Nicholson and Ioannidis examined authors of papers that have garnered more than 1000 citations since 2001. The pair found that

three out of five authors of these influential papers do not currently have NIH funding as principal investigators. Conversely, we found that a large majority of the current members of NIH study sections—the people who recommend which grants to fund—do have NIH funding for their work irrespective of their citation impact, which is typically modest.

Such correlations don’t prove that review panels aren’t funding high-risk, high-reward proposals. But at least to Nicholson and Ioannidis, the correlations suggest that NIH is failing to fulfill its mandate of funding “the best science, by the best scientists.”

In his Science editorial, Langer struggled to come up with a more effective way of funding the best science. He even entertained—but dismissed—the idea of disbursing money through a lottery, which could well do less damage, he wrote, than the current system does.

But there is no more effective way than peer review. When funds are limited, it’s hardly surprising that reviewers become more cautious. Investors do so too. The solution to the review problem is both simple and hard: Increase the size of the funding pie so that reviewers are emboldened to take risks.

The death of distance has been exaggerated

Posted on by
Reply

Last April, I went to a meeting at Case Western Reserve University. To get there from Cleveland’s airport, I took a commuter train.

At first, the view from the train was bleakly urban. But as we neared the city center, I expected the industrial outskirts to give way to office and apartment buildings, restaurants, and shops, as in other cities. But no! Through the train windows, right in the center of town, I saw factories, cranes, marshalling yards, piles of gravel, and barges.

I shouldn’t have been surprised—Cleveland is a port. To reduce transport costs, refineries, smelters, and factories are sited as close to rivers and harbors as possible. And in Cleveland, this means the center of town. What’s surprising is that so many other cities have shed their heavy industries and reclaimed their river- and lakefronts.

The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. (Photo by Sarah Vaughan.)

Light industries, including the lightest of all—knowledge-based industries—don’t need to be near harbors. The much-touted death of distance, brought on by the cheapness of telecommunications, means a worker with a modem can be anywhere. Greenwich’s burgeoning hedge-fund industry is based 40 miles from Wall Street, for example, sparing hedge funders a time-consuming commute without disadvantaging their communications.

But is distance really dead? Google, that most 21st-century company, began work earlier this year on a vast data center in Oregon—not in trendy, microbrew-quaffing Portland, but in the modest town of Dalles. At the heart of the center, two buildings the size of football stadiums will house server farms. To cool the servers, the center will draw power from a hydroelectric plant on the nearby Columbia River. Cheap energy brought Google to Dalles.

There’s another sense in which distance remains alive. If you’re a knowledge worker—a computer programmer or an editor, like me—the ability to work anywhere doesn’t mean you’ll set up your broadband wireless computer and work just anywhere. As much as you can, you’ll choose your location. In the 21st century, the best locations might be by rivers and lakes, as they were in the 19th, but this time for recreation rather than transport. You might not set up your laptop in Dalles, Oregon; instead, you might opt for Bend, Oregon, whose pleasant climate and environs have attracted thousands of newcomers in the past decade.

Even theoretical physicists, whose mental abstractions tend to make them indifferent to environment, are succumbing to the pull of place. Twenty-seven years ago, the US National Science Foundation funded a fledgling center for theoretical physics at the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus. At the time, UCSB was hardly at the top of the UC, let alone the US, pecking order. But the campus is on the Pacific Ocean, and the institute is as close to the beach as environmental regulations allow.

The institute is thriving. Its director, David Gross, was lured there from Princeton, and in the institute’s 25th anniversary year, he shared the 2004 Nobel physics prize for his work on quark confinement.

Today, the distance that matters isn’t to a harbor, but to a power plant—or the beach.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 104 of the January/February 2007 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

Subtleties of gender bias

Posted on by
4

In 1940 at the age of 19, Rosalyn Sussman graduated from New York’s Hunter College as the school’s first-ever physics major. Eager to pursue physics further but lacking funding, she applied for an assistantship at Purdue University. Someone at the university wrote back to her Hunter College adviser: “She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman. If you can guarantee her a job afterward, we’ll give her an assistantship.”

Hunter couldn’t make the guarantee, so Sussman spent a year as a secretary at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons—until World War II intervened. Short of manpower, the University of Illinois offered her an assistantship. A decade later, she and her collaborator Solomon Berson developed the radioimmunoassay. The technique, which revolutionized endocrinology, is used to identify hormone disorders. The pair’s discovery earned Rosalyn Sussman Yalow a share of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. (Berson died in 1972.)

This photograph of Rosalyn Yalow was taken around 1977, the year she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates

The blatant, casual discrimination that Yalow faced is rarer now, in part because it’s illegal in the US and other countries. Even so, the percentage of women faculty in physics and other math-intensive fields remains well below 20%. Last year Cornell University’s Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams caused a stir when their research led them to attribute the underrepresentation of women not to discrimination but to women’s own choices.

Theodore Hill of Georgia Tech and Erika Rogers formerly of California Polytechnic State University offered a different reason: Girls are less encouraged than boys are to be curious, playful, and bold—traits, Hill and Rogers argued, that are needed for success in math-intensive fields.

Although Ceci and Williams and Hill and Rogers attributed women’s underrepresentation to different causes, the baleful influence of stereotypes could underlie their respective findings. Girls might eschew physics because their image of a physicist is a man, not a woman. Parents might dissuade girls from climbing trees because girls shouldn’t take the same risks as boys.

John and Jennifer

Stereotypes reside in our minds and are manifested by our actions. To determine whether a bias against women, unconscious or otherwise, plays a role in women’s scientific careers, Yale University’s Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues devised a clever experiment. They asked a randomly chosen sample of male and female professors in three fields—biology, chemistry, and physics—to evaluate a male candidate, “John,” for a lab manager position. A different randomly chosen sample drawn from the same pool was asked to evaluate a female candidate, “Jennifer.”

Unknown to the professors, John and Jennifer were fictitious; except for their gender, their resumés were identical. Despite being equally qualified, John and Jennifer fared differently. On average, professors offered John a starting salary that was 14% higher than the one they offered Jennifer. John was considered the stronger candidate, was rated more competent, and—somewhat paradoxically—was offered more mentoring. The bias in favor of John was present across all three fields and was displayed by male and female professors alike.

What could cause such a troubling bias? In the introduction to their paper, Moss-Racusin and her colleagues are inclined to lay the blame on unconscious factors:

If faculty express gender biases, we are not suggesting that these biases are intentional or stem from a conscious desire to
impede the progress of women in science. Past studies indicate that people’s behavior is shaped by implicit or unintended biases,
stemming from repeated exposure to pervasive cultural stereotypes that portray women as less competent but simultaneously emphasize their warmth and likeability compared with men. Despite significant decreases in overt sexism over the last few decades (particularly among highly educated people), these subtle gender biases are often still held by even the most egalitarian individuals, and are exhibited by both men and women.

Do the Yale team’s findings mean that science faculty members, male and female, are biased against female scientists? Possibly. The source of my uncertainty lies in the position that John and Jennifer ostensibly applied for, lab manager. Moss-Racusin and her coauthors do not provide a job description, so I looked for one online.

Physics Today's jobs site had no lab manager positions. I did, however, find one at Baylor College of Medicine on Nature's job site. The description and requirements are clear and detailed, but if you want to conduct original research, that job is not for you.

So it’s conceivable that the professors in the Yale study evaluated John and Jennifer not as scientific researchers but as technical administrators. Even if that were the case, the bias in favor of John exhibited by scientists for a scientific job would still be present and still be troubling.

Dispelling stereotypes that may have been acquired unwittingly and over time is doubtless a difficult goal. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues don’t offer specific solutions but they do advocate establishing objective, transparent evaluation criteria to forestall the inadvertent use of different standards for male and female candidates. “Without such actions,” the paper asserts, “faculty bias against female undergraduates may continue to undermine meritocratic advancement, to the detriment of research and education.”

To “research and education” one could also add human health. If discrimination had prevented Yalow from becoming a medical physicist, I expect someone else would have developed radioimmunoassay, but perhaps not soon enough to benefit some patients.

Engineering in computing and science

Posted on by
Reply

In March 2003, the members of the American Physical Society met in Austin, Texas, to talk about their research. As Physics Today‘s news editor, I went there too.

Covering a big physics meeting is grueling. Unlike real scientists, science reporters have to pay attention to every field and subfield without bias or favor. Not surprisingly, halfway through the meeting, after two days of superconductivity, biological physics, statistical mechanics, and so on, I needed a break.

I walked from the Austin convention center to the historic Driskill Hotel at the corner of Brazos and 6th Streets. There, in the hotel’s café (“Austin’s original socializing parlor”), I ordered a reviving espresso and opened a diverting magazine.

Once caffeine molecules had blocked my adenosine receptors—or whatever it is caffeine does to make one feel pleasantly edgy—my attention left the polar bears in the article to settle on a large group of students at a nearby table. They dressed and sounded like physicists. Here, I thought, was a chance to interrogate Physics Today’s next generation of readers. I approached their table and introduced myself.

But they weren’t physicists. The group had two components: undergraduate seniors from the University of Texas’s chemical engineering department and high school seniors from around the US. Chris, one of the undergraduates, explained the plan: “We want to recruit the best high school students to the best chemical engineering department in the country.”

Then, perhaps emboldened by his own confident words, he took a risk: He asked me, in front of the high schoolers, whether I thought chemical engineering was an interesting and rewarding choice of career.

Of course, the first chemical engineering thing I thought of was an enormous smelly-smoke-belching chemical plant. Next, my mind recalled that Paul Dirac abandoned his early career as an electrical engineer to become a theoretical physicist. Fortunately, in the milliseconds before I replied, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán came to my rescue. To the delight of Chris and his fellow recruiters, I quoted von Kármán: “The scientist describes what is: the engineer creates what never was.”

The aphorism popped back into my brain last month, when I received a press release from Stanford University about a prototype handheld camera that can take pictures of large depth of field even with a wide aperture, a task that’s impossible with conventional cameras.

To work, the Stanford camera incorporates an additional element: a square array of 90 000 or so tiny lenses, each of which, in the words of the excellent press release, “separates back out converged light rays received from the main lens before they hit the photosensor and changes the way the light information is digitally recorded.”

We’re used to compact engineering marvels—iPods and so on. But when I investigated further, I was struck by something else: The camera relies just as much on a sophisticated computer algorithm as it does on clever engineering or physics. Indeed, the computer algorithm inspired the engineering.

Computational scientists—and their friends, like me—tend to regard the products of engineering, principally the computer, as tools to use and command. Here, however, was the case of engineers creating what never was—except, that is, in the equations encoded in a computer algorithm.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 88 of the March/April 2006 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.

Manufacturing is cool

Posted on by
1

Lehman Brothers filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 15 September 2008. Although the collapse of the giant financial services firm was a result, not a cause, of the Great Recession, the date remains a convenient and grim milestone.

In the winter that followed the collapse, something odd, even paradoxical, began happening in the US economy: Job openings in manufacturing began to rise. They’re still rising now. As of December 2011, US manufacturers had 264 000 open jobs, up from a historical low of just under 100 000 in early 2009.

The news is both good and bad: good, because companies are looking for workers; bad, because they can’t find them. A report in the 19 February Washington Post by Peter Whoriskey examined the shortage of workers and its causes.

One cause noted by Whoriskey is the changing nature of manufacturing. The jobs that remain in US factories tend to require more computational skills than those that disappeared overseas. Reeducating the US workforce for new-style manufacturing jobs is a slow process. Technical schools are adding classes to meet the demand, but high schools continue to focus on getting their graduates into four-year colleges, not into factories and workshops.

Another cause of the shortage—and a surprising one—concerns the image of manufacturing work. Quoting Whoriskey’s story,

“It’s a glamour issue,” said Dave Van Dam, 37. “The kids come in here and see a dirty, loud place. We get oil on ourselves. Then they go upstairs and they see the designers in their cubicles with two screens and headphones on listening to music.

“Plus, there’s the uniform we wear on the floor,” said Van Dam, dressed in work pants and a shirt with his name embroidered in blue stitching on the chest. “You go into a restaurant dressed like this, and you get treated different than if you have a suit on.”

The funny thing is, Van Dam said, that a skilled machine operator makes more than a designer. Pay for skilled operator-programmers runs from $18 to $28 per hour; the designers upstairs make $14 to $24.

Van Dam’s comments remind us that money isn’t everything when it comes to choosing one’s vocation. The undergraduates who join the UTeach program at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, know that high salaries won’t await them when they land their first high school teaching jobs.

And my hometown of Washington, DC, is full of idealistic young people who forgo money for the chance to make the US and the rest of the world a better place. People who are lucky enough to have a choice of vocation want jobs that are interesting as well as purposeful. Can manufacturing provide such jobs?

Yes, I think so. Last week my friend Kevin announced that he was looking forward to receiving a pair of gray “dress pant sweatpants” from Betabrand, a company based in San Francisco. Curious, I visited Betabrand’s website and discovered that it also sells a “DARPA hoodie.”

Wondering what the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has to do with leisurewear, I investigated further. It turns out that Betabrand collaborated on the hoodie with another San Francisco company, Otherlab.

Situated in an old pipe organ factory in the city’s Mission District, Otherlab has 14 employees who work on a mix of projects in robotics, energy, education, and industrial design. Here’s how the company describes itself:

Otherlab is a private Research and Development company with a number of core competencies. We welcome industrial partnerships and commercialization partners. We have worked with dozens of companies globally from small start-ups to multi-nationals and Fortune 500 businesses. We develop enabling new technologies through an emphasis on prototyping coupled to rigorous physics simulation and mathematical models. We develop our own design tools because it’s lonely at the frontier and to create new things and ideas, you often have to create the tools to design them.

I’m not sure how many companies like Otherlab exist in the US. Nor can I determine how many people they employ. But it’s clear that the work Otherlab does is interesting and purposeful. Even if Otherlab remains an R&D boutique, it serves the US economy by demonstrating to students that manufacturing can be cool.

A surprising reason to leave academia for industry

Posted on by
2

Ten years ago I edited a feature article entitled “Physics for profit and fun” (Physics Today, February 2001, page 38). John Waymouth, a retired director of R&D at GTE, wrote the article, which has stuck in my mind thanks to its attention-grabbing first paragraph:

I spent my entire working life using physics to grub for paydirt in an industrial setting. By this I do not mean the central research laboratory of a multibillion-dollar technological conglomerate able to support “pure” curiosity-driven study. I mean the product development laboratory of a nose-to-the-grindstone division engaged in a battle for market share in a rather prosaic industry that nevertheless depended on mastery of some complex and challenging technology. In such a setting, any project that yielded only meeting presentations or publications in refereed journals had to be considered essentially a failure.

Waymouth goes on to recount his career in industry, comparing it—favorably—with the one he might have had in academia. He was glad that he never had to apply for hard-to-get government grants and proud that his research begat two new and profitable product lines: very high output fluorescent lamps and metal-halide high-intensity high-pressure discharge lamps.

I detected an echo of Waymouth’s article yesterday in an oral history interview with Jonathan Sachs, the inventor of Lotus 1-2-3, a popular spreadsheet program that made its debut in 1983.

lotus-1-2-3.jpg

Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the first spreadsheet program. That distinction belongs to VisiCalc. But whereas VisiCalc was developed for the Apple II computer, Lotus 1-2-3 was developed for the IBM PC, which, along with its clones, proved to be the more popular computing platform. Indeed, Lotus 1-2-3 was the PC’s “killer app”: People would buy a PC just to get the spreadsheet program.

I learned something of the history of Lotus 1-2-3 when I was a postdoc at Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in the late 1980s. One of the four MIT grad students I met there told me that the program’s inventor used to work at MIT’s Center for Space Research.

My brain must work in mysterious ways, because I never thought to look further into the connection between space research and spreadsheets until yesterday. Having quickly found Sachs’s oral history interview, I was intrigued by this exchange between Sachs and his interviewer, Martin Campbell-Kelly:

CAMPBELL-KELLY: About 1978 you left MIT to go to Data General?

SACHS: Yes, the summer of 1977, I left MIT. I’d been working there for a long time and I’d written a lot of stuff that was kind of interesting, but the problem with working at MIT is—they get money for a grant; they do something and then they do something else. There’s never a wider audience for this stuff. So I began envying people working in industry who wrote the tools that I used—and where they would write something a lot of other people would use. And what I also got out of my system later on was the notion that I wanted to get more into management and run larger projects. That was also something I never really had the opportunity to do at MIT.

Sachs’s answer was a double surprise for me—first, because I didn’t expect such a rich and thoughtful rationale; and second, because I was surprised at all. I know that high-tech industry offers challenging and rewarding careers, but evidently I still need reminding. Maybe you do, too.

Charles Day

The freedom to choose physics

Posted on by
4

Thor, the six-year-old son of my friends Anne and Vince, likes to wear orange. Emma, the (nearly) six-year-old daughter of my friends Laura and Neil, likes to wear pink.

Thor and Emma popped into my mind yesterday when I came across a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper’s authors, Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University, scrutinized studies from the past 20 years to answer the question: Why are women underrepresented in physics and other math-intensive fields of science?

Perhaps to some readers’ surprise, Ceci and Williams concluded that

despite frequent assertions that women’s current underrepresentation in math-intensive fields is caused by sex discrimination by grant agencies, journal reviewers, and search committees, the evidence shows women fare as well as men in hiring, funding, and publishing (given comparable resources). That women tend to occupy positions offering fewer resources is not due to women being bypassed in interviewing and hiring or being denied grants and journal publications because of their sex. It is due primarily to factors surrounding family formation and childrearing, gendered expectations, lifestyle choices, and career preferences—some originating before or during adolescence—and secondarily to sex differences at the extreme right tail of mathematics performance on tests used as gateways to graduate school admission underrepresentation.

As Ceci and Williams point out, the impact of raising a family affects the prospects of all women scientists, not just those in math-intensive fields. Improving the support available to scientists with young families, adjusting tenure process would help to remedy that source of underrepresentation.

But what to do about “gendered expectations, lifestyle choices, and career preferences”? The question is tricky because, as Ceci and Williams state,

to the extent that women’s choices are freely made and women are satisfied with the outcomes, then we have no problem.

Indeed, studies cited by the two authors show that adolescent girls prefer careers that focus on people rather than things. That preference, according to the studies, accounts for women’s large presence in biology and medicine and their small presence in math-intensive fields.

But to what extent is that preference the outcome of free choice? I don’t doubt that young Thor made his unusual and distinctive wardrobe choice by himself and not under the influence of either society or his parents. Only Dutch sports fans favor orange garments.

Young Emma’s preference for pink, on display in this photo, seems more rooted in contemporary American society than in her free choice. All five of my young nieces favor or used to favor pink or its close relative purple.

CharlesEmma.jpg

Paradoxically, pink preference could be grounds for optimism. If physics were marketed to girls as skillfully and vigorously as pink clothing is, maybe the underrepresentation in our ranks would begin to diminish.

Don’t get me wrong. By talking about orange, pink, and purple clothing, I don’t mean to be flippant. I agree with Ceci and Williams:

To the extent that [career] choices are constrained by biology and/or society, and women are dissatisfied with the outcomes, or women’s talent is not actualized, then we most emphatically have a problem.

Charles Day

PS Knowing how punctilious young children are about their ages, I should point out that Emma was four years old when the photo was taken.

US innovation, US unemployment

Posted on by
Reply

I spent last week at SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco. During my stay there I read the local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, which, in its 27 January edition, included an opinion piece by the Chronicle‘s regular conservative columnist, Debra Saunders.

Entitled “Obama’s Take on US Innovation,” the piece criticized President Obama’s claim that America’s slumping economy can be revived with more government-funded innovation. She quoted from the president’s State of the Union speech of that week:

We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology and especially clean-energy technology—an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet and create countless new jobs for our people.

I agree with Obama that investing in innovation, especially in basic research, is a good thing. What is not clear, as Saunders pointed out, is whether that investment will help solve the recession’s main problem: near-10% unemployment.

Indeed, there are reasons to share Saunders’s skepticism about the potential for “innovation” jobs to boost employment in the near future. So-called green jobs, according to Saunders, account for only 1% of California’s workforce, despite “years of subsidies and special treatment.”

Moreover, Saunders contended, boosting funding for R&D “means funneling government money into high-profile projects staffed by like-minded college graduates, a group with an unemployment rate of about 5%.”

Whether or not you agree with Saunders’s characterization, the 5% figure is probably accurate and may even be an under-estimate. On the same day as her column appeared, NSF issued a press release with the admirably descriptive title “Unemployment Among Doctoral Scientists and Engineers Was Lower Than Among the General Population in 2008.” The subject of the press release, an NSF survey, put the unemployment rate of science and technology PhDs in 2008 at just 1.7%, 4.9 percentage points lower than that of the general US population.

As the publication of President Obama’s 2012 budget nears, advocates for increased funding for science are pleading their case. Those advocates should keep in mind that when so many Americans are out of work now, arguments based on the creation of future jobs will seem less compelling.

Charles Day