It’s About Making Babies!

There is an article one Wired.com about how there are so many more men than women in science and research. Anna Kushnir, PhD, sent a letter, which Aaron Rowe published on his blog as “Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men?”

And the article is the title question, with details. Dr. Kushnir got her degree with 6 other women and one man; 4 of the 7 women and the man went on to post-doctoral work. And she notes there are 48 male professors in her virology department to 7 women - about opposite the 7 women to 1 man in her undergrad class.

Well, my BS degree is in Information and Computer Sciences, Computer Science Option, East Tennessee State University, 1982. Remember the country song about a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, that starts at a quick stop in Johnson City, TN? That is where ETSU nestles, hidden away in the northeast corner of Tennessee. The region was once organized as the state of Franklin, before it went broke (named for Ben Franklin, later absorbed as other states formed). Johnson City was once famed as one of Al Capone’s ‘hideout’s. City politics only *seem* to still run like Al did it.

So my credentials in science and advanced degrees are rusty and based more on the movie ‘Junior’ with Danny Devito and Arnold ‘The Gov’ Scwarzenegger, than on actual experience.

But I have observed women entering the market place, and into software development, and other technical and advanced fields including resistance in the US Navy to the first women assigned to sea-going ships. I am sure Dr. Kushnir considered this a reasonable question. But her research into the question seems pretty incomplete and dubious to support the criticisms she makes.

It is not acceptable if women are forced to choose between a family and a career in science.

It is not acceptable if women are feeling unwelcome in the male-dominated, and occasionally inhospitable, scientific community.

It is not acceptable if their being female is detrimental to their careers.

So what is the solution? Let women make their own decisions whether to stay or to go. Remove as many obstacles and pressures as possible and let the choice be theirs. Isn’t that the whole point of the much-maligned term, feminism? Institute reasonable day care at universities. Allow for extended maternity leave and the option of paternity leave. Don’t cut women any breaks. They are no less inherently able to achieve than men, regardless of what certain Nobel Prize winners and heads of major Universities may say. They don’t need pity or hand me downs. They just need the freedom to choose.

Oh, please. How can you in the same breath claim that there should be no obstacles to hiring women, and also explain how day care has to be provided. That women should be comparable to men, and rate extended maternity leave.

Consider this. A project director has a timeline, and a budget. If he hires a fertile woman apply with kids at home, he knows, for dead certain sure, that her attention is split between child care and work, her time will be diverted occasionally to take care of domestic issues. And his schedule and budget be hanged if she gets pregnant.

The topic here, plain and simple, is affirmative action. Dr. Kushnir is demanding affirmative action from organizations with limited budgets, limited schedules, and administrators that can lose their position for missing targets. Affirmative action has startup costs, and uneven payoff results. In general terms, affirmative action is better for the community, and usually better for the endeavor affected. But Dr. Kushnir hasn’t provided the funding that would make these additional practices available for women in science.

Why are women different from men? Historically, until women entered the workplace during and following WWII, the man would marry, and his wife was considered a helper in his career - raise his kids, keep his house, cook, laundry, etc. Today stay-at-home moms tend to still provide that support role. Let me repeat - most jobs filled by men required a support person at home, and especially for advanced careers.

Women want to enter the workplace without such a domestic support structure. Instead they listen to, and repeat, liberal propaganda that government, rich employers, or someone else should be compelled to provide (and pay for) that support structure. Whether the support comes from a house-keeper, a home-husband, or other name or relationship to fill the role of domestic support, women haven’t provided for the domestic support for their career.

Maternity leave and child care are not about career choices. They are fundamentally family issues, or domestic concerns. In the past men have used their careers to pay for their family. And employers are used to domestic issues being taken care of on personal time, outside the employer’s expense and outside the employer’s responsibility.

Let’s look at employers a moment. Most leaders in technical fields, science, and research, rise from among peers. The show tenacity (refuse to leave), or initiative (earn promotion), or get stuck (every one else successfully evades supervisor duties). Their training is in the discipline of the interest. Not family planning, not affirmative action, not managing budget and schedule with day care implications and the odd unexpected extended maternity leave. So most organizations are continually evolving a cohort of lower level supervision that will mature toward upper management - that focuses first on the project.

The very most successful strategy I can think of for women to ‘compete’ in male-dominated careers, is to form new companies with the policies they want to support the kind of careers they envision. That is how and why new companies form every day. Rising to seniority, establishing professional credentials, will make each individual involved that much more attractive to later changes to comparable organizations, however organized.

And I wish the very best of luck and good wishes to organizers of such an endeavor. I recall a lady I met one time apartment hunting. She commented, “Women aren’t kind to one another.” Perhaps the difference in culture, between how women interact and how men interact, also explains part of the difference. Anyone trying to form a team will try to match personalities and must do their best to avoid personality conflicts. Some women flirt, others never do. Some men are pigs, others are professional and respectable. These traits will come into play when evaluating people for a team. The simplest approach is to avoid women (or gays) likely to be flirting on the team, or likely to be taking time for domestic duties. Whether you call it ‘lack of focus on the career’ or ‘distracted’, bringing domestic duties to work makes more expense and schedule risk to work with you. It takes a *lot* of demonstrated talent to offset schedule risk and project expense.

I believe women are as capable in any task, given equivalent interest, education, and experience.

Dr. Kushnir, I think the TV shows ‘Charles in Charge’ and “Who’s The Boss” give you the answer to how to overcome the barriers keeping women from advanced positions. Take responsibility for your own domestic issues. I am not sure what to call a ‘male wife’, but you may have to add a housekeeper or nanny to your household, start your own endeavor to provide the domestic support you need, or keep waiting for the unfairness to go away.

Seth Godin observes that to communicate, we have to recognize the difference that anger makes.

I encountered this phenomenon in the classroom. Fred Jones wrote about anger in “Tools for Teaching.” Anger involves adrenaline. Mr. Jones writes about keeping classroom discipline, and getting angry isn’t a good thing for the teacher. It takes 28 minutes for adrenaline to affect the body, and then to dissipate. During that 28 minutes your judgement will be affected. The article in Tools for Teaching recommends taking a calming breath as soon as you feel the anger stir. It can take a couple of minutes for the level of adrenaline to peak - you cannot avoid the half hour that your judgement will be affected, but with luck you can defuse the total amount of adrenaline that is released. A ’smaller anger’ is much less disruptive than a full-blown rage.

What Seth Godin notices is that you have to address the anger of angry people. I think the point he misses is the level of anger. Keep the annoyances in play, and you make the anger more intense, and the possibility of communicating or persuading just keeps getting worse. Seth gives a couple of examples of corporate and individual responses to customer anger that don’t help. Trying to promote the company ‘line’ or story with an angry customer is unproductive; you have to ‘fix’ the anger, first. It isn’t likely that many customers will agree to wait 28 minutes and try again (hint: more likely to make the anger worse). So the next best counter-anger strategy has to be to remove the stimulus that angered the customer, or at least let the customer believe you will work to solve the problem.

Another lesson to be learned from teachers learning and maintaining classroom discipline is to reduce the likelihood of anger, or other signs you lost control of communication. Communicate clearly, keep the story simple, be truthful, respect your partner in communication and understand (as well as possible) her/his engagement in the conversation.

In a recent job interview I was asked, “How did you handle the latest angry customer you encountered?” I think of this as having a couple of conversation ’switches’. One switch is to change from serving customers to solving an immediate problem (whatever is bothering the customer). Another switch is to handling my assigned task, to calling for experienced assistance (this lets the customer understand I cannot solve the problem, that I recognize that the problem is important, and that I want to solve the problem rather than make the customer go away). By making a switch early, I believe I can help the customer manage to keep the tension level lower - making a better solution easier to achieve.

Seth mentions that you can sometimes avoid angry people - choose to not to work with someone that is angry. This makes sense at work. But people that spend time being angry show poor self-control - and sometimes their friends and loved ones suffer. Employers should take responsibility for angry workers. Tempting as it might be to fire someone with an anger problem, the right response for the community is to direct the employee into assistance. The company needs to know if policies are causing problems and fix them, and also to understand how morale affects business efforts. An employer that cannot handle an angry employee, without trying, won’t be any good at taking care of other employees. Seth’s strategy of leaving rather than work with an angry co-worker might work as a warning signal to management - and to other workers.

Anger, a tough subject. For me the important thing is that adrenaline, the ‘engine’ behind anger, is a hormone, affects the body, and has to be dealt with.