Notes of a young science student

I am sometimes asked if I always liked science as I was growing up. The short answer is no. It wasn’t until I took physics in high school that I fell in love with science and considered a science-related career path. My mother recently unearthed a notebook from when I was 10 years old; written on the first page of the notebook is the title, “My journal of science ideas.” I think this must have been part of a school project, although I have no recollection of it. The journal contains more than 120 brief entries that I wrote over the course of 4 months. About 20 of the entries posed questions that I researched and wrote about in subsequent journal entries. Here’s an example:

Aside from the question/answer entries, most other entries are interesting facts that I learned, although a few entries record observations I made.  Breaking down the entries by topic, animals were the subject of 35 entries, insects and mold each had 11 entries, five entries are astronomical in nature, and five could be classified as physics.

The notebook provides a revealing peek into my view of science at the age of 10. Over half of the entries in this “journal of science ideas” simply recount trivia, and although I asked questions in some of the journal entries, they were often questions with answers that I could find in a book. Experimentation and hands-on engagement are notably absent, except for one entry where I describe a demonstration that I did for my class.

Earlier this month, a friend posted a link to an article at the Hechinger Report on the state of US science education. The article notes that the US approach to science education is “a mile wide and an inch deep” and that the content sequence does not build as logically as it does in other countries. My science journal certainly displays breadth without depth, and science comes across as information to be learned rather than puzzles to be solved. No wonder I wasn’t always fond of science as a kid!

Deaning 201

I’m sure this is burned into your memory because you read this blog so carefully, but I’d said back there somewhere at the start of my Dean-blogging that apart from the day-to-day work in deaning, there were some larger projects I was involved with for the sake of the college’s bottom-line.

One of these projects was to help with most efficiently saturating the physical capacity of the college. We have fluctuations in on-campus enrollment due to all sorts of factors and it would be nice to try to make most efficient use of them by spreading this enrollment evenly over the three terms. Many of these factors are small and uncontrollable but somewhat statistically predictable (illnesses, withdrawals, transfers out, accelerated graduation, students choosing to go to non-Carleton off-campus programs …), and some are more controllable (Carleton off-campus programs). I oversee the Off-Campus Studies program, whence my involvement.

So, my physicists model of this was that we have some ‘signal’ (a somewhat controllable knob on our off-campus programs) and lots of ‘noise’ (all the random things we can guesstimate but hardly predict deterministically) while helping steer towards a smooth enrollment. My role mostly consisted of laying out the case — and making encouraging noises about their work — to the Off-Campus Studies Office at Carleton, and particularly its director, Helena Kaufman, as well as to the Off-Campus Studies Committee as they went about their business of approving programs and constructing the calendar.

The current projected numbers for the next academic year are based on processes that got rolling a couple of years ago, and involve the cooperation of a lot of the noise. With those caveats (and the consequent disclaimer of credit), the really good news is that the projections for the next academic year are that it’s going to be remarkably smooth. (And yes, I am being weasel-y on the numbers, in case these are trade secrets somehow). It’s a long haul yet to keep it this smooth, but it’s a good start, and a satisfying feeling — because this is good news for Carleton.

This particular feeling also helps me re-articulate for myself why I said ‘yes’ in the first place to doing this job: Carleton (like the rest of academia, really) is going through ‘interesting times’ mostly related to the finances and I was asked if I wanted to step up to the plate to help steer through the choppy waters. And it’s been high stress on the project management and people management side, sure (no kidding!) and you’ve got to forgive me (a) a little ego in the possibly misplaced (albeit cautious) confidence that I can indeed contribute, and (b) some personal stuff in the desire to explore  the self-stretching of being the immigrant/outsider who gets to inhabit/color the insider perspective. I’ve been at Carleton almost a decade and I’ve learned more about the enterprise of liberal arts colleges in the last year than I had conceived existed, and it still makes my head spin until I retreat to the safety of thinking about open nonlinear quantum systems to breathe a big breath of physics relief. But I do get it at the fundamental level — I get why this job is so crucial, how and why I can contribute, and so far like being part of the team here. And it’s nice to have some good news to report.

Onward through the fog!

TED science talks link

Courtesy Erin Lenderts, a link to some interesting TED talks on science. Not a lot of physics, though there is a talk about CERN, if nothing else.

 

 

Women in science — this week’s headlines

This week brought quite a variety of headlines about women in science to the websites that I frequent:

“Women in Science: No Discrimination, Says Cornell Study” — Science 2.0 February 7

“Sexual discrimination against women in science may be institutional” – The Guardian February 8

“The Real Barriers for Women in Science” — Inside Higher Ed Quick Takes February 9

It’s notable that all these headlines are referring to a single paper by Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams that appeared in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. This paper has also generated some buzz in the blogosphere, including posts by Charles Day, Female Science Professor, and Amy Slaton. Additionally, it was mentioned in a New York Times article by John Tierney:

[T]he taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams.

You may recall that I’ve commented before on John Tierney’s unhelpful approach to addressing the question of women in science, and I also mentioned in that post, and a related post, that I thought the book, The Mathematics of Sex, by Ceci and Williams did a good job of addressing the complexity of the issues surrounding the under-representation of women in mathematically-intensive science fields. What do I make of this latest paper by Ceci and Williams? The answer is complicated, but my take on the paper is more in line with the headline from the Guardian than the headline from Science 2.0.

This winter I’ve been digging into The Mathematics of Sex because, with my colleague Joel Weisberg, I’m co-facilitating a book group on it through Carleton’s Learning and Teaching Center.  The book group participants include faculty and staff from departments and offices ranging from biology, math, and physics to educational studies, English, and alumnae relations, and we’ve had some great discussions. At our last meeting, some members of the group noted that Ceci and Williams have a narrow definition of discrimination. In Chapter 5, they present studies that could be interpreted as providing evidence of discrimination in hiring. In particular, they discuss a 1999 study by Steinpreis et al. where identical CVs, some with male names and some with female names, were sent to hiring committees for assistant professor positions. The male CVs were consistently rated more favorably by search committees than the female CVs. The summary discussion of this study (pg. 132) is revealing:

[I]t might be argued that basing hiring decisions on the sex of applicant [sic] is not rooted in a desire to avoid women per se, but rather that sex is a proxy for other things that both male and female employers believe to be important. We can ask “what might applicant sex be a proxy for?”. Does it signal to employers statistical associations between sex and work, such as a concern that a young female applicant might have children which, according to surveys described earlier, will reduce the number of hours she devotes to the job, lower her satisfaction with work, etc.? None of this normative statistical information is, of course, fair to those female applicants who are as careerist and work-centered as their male counterparts. Statistically, however, more women than men reduce their hours at work when they have children. In principle, no one endorses treating applicants as members of groups as opposed to as individuals. However, even though every person deserves to be treated as an individual, independent of their sex, it is understandable how statistical information about work patterns of mothers and fathers can influence employers implicitly, and still not reflect prejudice against women per se, but rather against mothers. Some may argue that there is no difference in this distinction because both possibilities reflect bias against women. However, we believe there is merit in distinguishing between employers who discriminate on the basis of  the sex of an applicant outright, and those who use sex as a proxy for the likelihood that the applicant will be unable to work as many hours or as unidimensionally and dedicatedly as someone with no children.

As members of our book group noted, this sort of rhetorical hair-splitting may allow one to claim the absence of discrimination, but it certainly doesn’t suggest the presence of equity. Lack of equity is a problem, and one that requires remediation. Much of what Ceci and Williams find, even if they are not willing to call it discrimination, is institutional and societal structures that disadvantage women and constrain women’s choices, without having a similar impact on men.

In their book, Ceci and Williams clearly state, “Although we come down on the side that thinks claims of overt discrimination are overblown, we nevertheless recognize that even a tiny degree of discrimination or unconscious barriers can be deleterious for women’s progress in the academy. ” The current PNAS paper seems to be an attempt to tamp down what Ceci and Williams believe are overblown claims of discrimination, but the paper also acknowledges that much remains to be done to improve the range of choices available to women interested in pursuing a career in the sciences. The one aspect of the recent paper, and the surrounding internet discussion, that I find potentially troublesome is the question of career preference, and the extent to which girls freely choose the paths they take. Figuring out to what extent choices are influenced by societal pressures and expectations is challenging, but important for those of us who are interested in supporting the development of the next generation of scientists.

If anything, the publicity surrounding the publication of the Ceci and Williams paper has me even more excited than usual to return to the book group to see what my colleagues have to say.