Raging at the descriptive as if it is prescriptive

A quick google search turns up this definition of prescriptive: “relating to the imposition or enforcement of a rule or method.” Another one brings up this definition, and refinement, for descriptive: “describing or classifying in an objective and nonjudgmental way….. describing accents, forms, structures, and usage without making value judgments.“

We have tread this duality a time or two on this blog. Back in the salad days of science blogging, it led to many a blog war.

In our typical fights, I or PP would offer comments describing the state of the grant-funded, academic biomedical science career as we see it. This would usually be in the course of offering what we saw as some of the best strategies and approaches for the individual who is operating within this professional sphere. Right now, as is, as it is found. Etc. For them to succeed.

Inevitably, despite all evidence, someone would come along and get all red about such comments as if we were prescribing, instead of describing, whatever specific or general reality we were describing.

Pick your issue. I don’t like writing a million grants to get the barest hope of winning one. I think this is a stupid way for the NIH to behave and a huge waste of time and taxpayer resources. So when I tell jr and not so jr faculty to submit a ton of grants this is not an endorsement of the NIH system as I see it. It is advice to help the individual to succeed despite the problems with the system. I tee off on Glam all the time….but would never tell a new PI not to seek JIF points wherever possible. There are many things I say about how NIH grant review should go, that might seem to contrast with my actual reviewer behavior for anyone who has been on study section with YHN. (For those who are wondering, this has mostly to do with my overarching belief that NIH grant review should be fair. Even if one objects to some of the structural aspects of review, one should not blow it all up at the expense of the applications that are in front of a given reviewer.) The fact that I bang on about first and senior authorship strategy for respective career stages doesn’t mean that I believe that chronic middle-author contributions shouldn’t be better recognized.

I can walk and chew gum.

Twitter has erupted in the past few days. There are many who are very angered by a piece published in Nature Communications by AlShebli et al which can be summarized by this sentence in the Abstract “We also find that increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors.” This was recently followed, in grand old rump sniffing (demi)Glam Mag tradition by an article by Sterling et al. in PNAS. The key Abstract sentence for this one was “we find women earn less than men, net of human capital factors like engineering degree and grade point average, and that the influence of gender on starting salaries is associated with self-efficacy“. In context, “self-efficacy” means “self-confidence“.

For the most part, these articles are descriptive. The authors of the first analyze citation metrics, i.e. “We analyze 215 million scientists and 222 million papers taken from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) dataset⁴², which contains detailed records of scientific publications and their citation network”. The authors of the second conducted a survey investigation: “To assess individual beliefs about one’s technical ability we measure ESE, a five-item validated measure on a five-point scale (0 = “not confident” to 4 = “extremely confident,” alpha = 0.87; SI Appendix, section S1). Participants were asked, “How confident are you in your ability to do each of the following at this time?”:”

Quite naturally, the problem comes in where the descriptive is blurred with the prescriptive. First, because it can appear as if any suggestion of optimized behavior within the constraints of the reality that is being described, is in fact a defense of that reality. Intentional or unintentional. Second, because prescribing a course of action that accords with the reality that is being described, almost inevitably contributes to perpetuation of the system that is being described. Each of thse articles is a mixed bag, of course. A key sentence or two can be all the evidence that is needed to launch a thousand outraged tweets. I once famously described the NSF (in contrast to the NIH) as being a grant funding system designed for amateur scientists. You can imagine how many people failed to note the “designed for” and accused me of calling what I saw as the victims of this old fashioned, un-updated approach “amateurs”. It did not go well then.

The first set of authors’ suggestions are being interpreted as saying that nobody should train with female PIs because it will be terrible for their careers, broadly writ. The war against the second set of authors is just getting fully engaged, but I suspect it will fall mostly along the lines of the descriptive being conflated with the prescriptive, i.e., that it is okay to screw over the less-overconfident person.

You will see these issues being argued and conflated and parsed in the Twitter storm. As you are well aware, Dear Reader, I believe such imprecise and loaded and miscommunicated and angry discussion is the key to working through all of the issues. People do some of their best work when they are mad as all get out.

but…….

We’ve been through these arguments before. Frequently, in my recollection. And I would say that the most angry disputes come around because of people who are not so good at distinguishing the prescriptive from the descriptive. And who are very, very keen to first kill the messenger.

Fear of being pilloried for your past sexual misbehavior

This one is for the guys who are looking at the accusations against Trump’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh. You dudes who are standard issue American heterosexual male-identifying people of at least minimal success with satisfying your sexual proclivities. You. You who are now worried that some incident in your past might have been perceived then, or eventually, as somewhat other than you perceived it by the target of your dubious affections.

Yes, you.

Please consider this is post in need of a Trigger Warning, it’s going to be about sexual assault.

In which I again punch down at some totally sympathetic character

The Washington Post tells this tragic tale of woe:

In her nearly 2,500-word letter, Ben-Ora explained the complaints she had with Yelp, including how she was required to work for a year in customer service before she could move into another position.

“A whole year answering calls and talking to customers just for the hope that someday I’d be able to make memes and twitter jokes about food,” she wrote.

She’s 25.

In case you were wondering, yes, she did major in English, why do you ask?

She’s poor*, and struggling and doesn’t like it. Because the world should pay her six figures to write internet memes and shit. I guess. And this is all the fault of her employer somehow.

Because 80 percent of my income goes to paying my rent.

Nobody with a college degree can reasonably expect to move to the Bay area and have anyone feel sorry for them about not knowing what rent costs. The internet exists. You can check on that. Beforehand.

Let’s talk about those benefits, though. They’re great. I’ve got vision, dental, the normal health insurance stuff — and as far as I can tell, I don’t have to pay for any of it! Except the copays. $20 to see a doctor or get an eye exam or see a therapist or get medication.

Benefits? A mere $20 copay? ….and this is an outrageously bad sweatshop that she works for? ok.

Naturally, after posting her screed on Medium, the inevitable.

UPDATE: As of 5:43pm PST, I have been officially let go from the company.

Wasn’t that what you wanted?

__
via @forensictoxguy

*from her remarks, it looks like she is making $20K takehome, fwiw.

Scenes

In the past few weeks I have been present for the following conversation topics.

1) A tech professional working for the military complaining about some failure on the part of TSA to appropriately respect his SuperNotATerrorist pass that was supposed to let him board aircraft unmolested…unlike the the rest of us riff raff. I believe having his luggage searched in secondary was mentioned, and some other delays of minor note. This guy is maybe early thirties, very white, very distinct regional American accent, good looking, clean cut… your basic All-American dude.

2) A young guy, fresh out of the military looking to get on with one of the uniformed regional service squad types of jobs. This conversation involved his assertions that you had to be either a woman or an ethnic minority to have a shot at the limited number of jobs available in any given cycle. Much of the usual complaining about how this was unfair and it should be about “merit” and the like. Naturally this guy is white, clean cut, relatively well spoken…. perhaps not all that bright, I guess.

3) A pair of essentially the most privileged people I know- mid-adult, very smart, blonde, well educated, upper middle class, attractive, assertive, parents, rock of community type of women. Literally *everything* goes in these women’s direction and has for most of their lives. They had the nerve to engage in a long running conversation about their respective minor traffic stops and tickets and how unfair it was. How the cops should have been stopping the “real” dangers to society at some other location instead of nailing them for running a stop sign a little too much or right on red-ing or whatever their minor ticket was for.

One of the great things about modern social media is that, done right, it is a relatively non-confrontational way to start to see how other people view things. For me the days of reading science blogs and the women-in-academics blogs were a more personal version of some of the coursework I enjoyed in my liberal arts undergraduate education. It put me in touch with much of the thinking and experiences of women in my approximate career. It occasionally allowed me to view life events with a different lens than I had previously.

It is my belief that social media has also been important for driving the falling dominoes of public opinion on gay marriage over the past decade or so. Facebook connections to friends, family and friends of the same provides a weekly? daily? reminder that each of us know a lot of gay folks that are important to us or at the very least are important to people that are important to us.

The relentless circulation of memes and Bingo cards, of snark and hilarity alike, remind each of us that there is a viewpoint other than our own.

And the decent people listen. Occasionally they start to see things the way other people do. At least now and again.

The so-called Black Twitter is similar in the way it penetrated the Facebook and especially Twitter timelines and daily RTs of so many non-AfricanAmerican folks . I have watched this develop during Ferguson and through BlackLivesMatter and after shooting after shooting after shooting of young black people that has occurred in the past two years.

During the three incidents that I mention, all I could think was “Wow, do you have any idea that this is the daily reality for many of your fellow citizens? And that it would hardly ever occur to non-white people to be so blindly outraged that the world should dare to treat them this way?” And “Wait, so are you saying it sucks to have a less-assured chance of gaining the career benefits you want due to the color of your skin or the nature of your dangly bits….it’ll come to you in a minute”.

This brings me to today’s topic in academic science.

Nature News has an editorial on racial disparity in NIH grant awards. As a reminder the Ginther report was published in 2011. There are slightly new data out, generated from a FOIA request:

Pulmonologist Esteban Burchard and epidemiologist Sam Oh of the University of California, San Francisco, shared the data with Nature after obtaining them from the NIH through a request under the Freedom of Information Act. The figures show that under-represented minorities have been awarded NIH grants at 78–90% the rate of white and mixed-race applicants every year from 1985 to 2013

I will note that Burchard and Oh seem to be very interested in how the failure to include a diverse population in scientific studies may limit health care equality. So this isn’t just about career disparity for these scientists, it is about their discipline and the health outcomes that result. Nevertheless, the point of these data are that under-represented minority PIs have less funding success than do white PIs. The gap has been a consistent feature of the NIH landscape through thick and thin budgets. Most importantly, it has not budged one bit in the wake of the Ginther report in 2011. With that said, I’m not entirely sure what we have learned here. The power of Ginther was that it went into tremendous analytic detail trying to rebut or explain the gross disparity with all of the usual suspect rationales. Trying….and failing. The end result of Ginther was that it was very difficult to make the basic disparate finding go away by considering other mediating variables.

After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding.

The Ginther report used NIH grant data between FY 2000 and FY 2006. This new data set appears to run from 1985 to 2013, but of course only gives the aggregate funding success rate (i.e. the per-investigator rate), without looking at sub-groups within the under-represented minority pool. This leaves a big old door open for comments like this one:

Is it that the NIH requires people to state their race on their applications or could it be that the black applications were just not as good? Maybe if they just keep the applicant race off the paperwork they would be able to figure this out.

and this one:

I have served on many NIH study sections (peer review panels) and, with the exception of applicants with asian names, have never been aware of the race of the applicants whose grants I’ve reviewed. So, it is possible that I could have been biased for or against asian applicants, but not black applicants. Do other people have a different experience?

This one received an immediate smackdown with which I concur entirely:

That is strange. Usually a reviewer is at least somewhat familiar with applicants whose proposals he is reviewing, working in the same field and having attended the same conferences. Are you saying that you did not personally know any of the applicants? Black PIs are such a rarity that I find it hard to believe that a black scientist could remain anonymous among his or her peers for too long.

Back to social media. One of the tweeps who is, I think, pretty out as an underrepresented minority of science had this to say:

I keep reading about all these schools spending $$$$ to diversify the faculty and yet… pic.twitter.com/PUgWbGlYqe

— Bashir3000🤔 (@Bashir9ist) November 23, 2015

Not entirely sure it was in response to this Nature editorial but the sentiment fits. If AfricanAmerican PIs who are submitting grants to the NIH after the Ginther report was published in the late summer of 2011 (approximately 13 funding rounds ago, by my calendar) were expecting the kind of relief provided immediately to ESI PIs…..well, they are still looking in the mailbox.

The editorial

The big task now is to determine why racial funding disparities arise, and how to erase them. …The NIH is working on some aspects of the issue — for instance, its National Research Mentoring Network aims to foster diversity through mentoring.

and the News piece:

in response to Kington’s 2011 paper, the NIH has allocated more than $500 million to programmes to evaluate how to attract, mentor and retain minority researchers. The agency is also studying biases that might affect peer review, and is interested in gathering data on whether a diverse workforce improves science.

remind us of the entirely toothless NIH response to Ginther.

It is part and parcel of the vignettes I related at the top. People of privilege simply cannot see the privileges they enjoy for what they are. Unless they are listening. Listening to the people who do not share the set of privileges under discussion.

I think social media helps with that. It helps me to see things through the eyes of people who are not like me and do not have my particular constellations of privileges. I hope even certain Twitter-refuseniks will come to see this one day.

ladeeeez men

After discussing this post at shakesville:

It’s difficult to describe what I mean when I say my husband likes women, because it’s so rare that we don’t even have words for it. And because any words I might use are corrupted by the urgent defense of patriarchal standards, which reject any dynamic that isn’t framed to center women as the objects of men.

with certain parties, I conclude that it is worth discussing on the blog.

My thought is this: Isn’t this familiar to everyone? I mean when you go to social events there are some men that gravitate towards talking with men and other men that gravitate towards talking with women. There are totally woman-guy and guy-guy phenotypes and they have been obvious since like middle school (and as this post mentions, not just because they are trying to hook up).

Right?

Arrgh Matey

Key and Peele
Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

Dear Authors, Don’t do this. Ever.

this has been bopping around on the Twitts lately..

Shit — – F. Cesari / Nature pic.twitter.com/8vlpksZZHc

— Sarah Merkling (@Drosophilista) March 10, 2015

Patricia Arquette, Privilege and the Oppression Olympics

I was watching the Oscars last night when Patricia Arquette busted out some equal-pay feminism in her acceptance speech.

“To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” Arquette said, her voice intensifying. “It is our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America!”

HECK YEAH!!!!!

I was hooting and hollering too much, I assume, because I got shushed. Apparently some other people in the room wanted to hear what else was being said or whatever.

So it was with some confusion that I saw backlash later on the Twitts about her. It seemed to be of the intersectionality sort of criticism. Also known as the Oppression Olympics. Not to make light of it but look, we all come with various attributes that confer privileges upon us in this society we inhabit. Most of us have one or two attributes that confer the opposite. Some unlucky folks have a pretty tough menu of biases slanting against them. So yeah, there seemed to be a drumbeat of Twitterage against Patricia Arquette’s immense privilege of wealth, whiteness and heteronomativity. I thought at first that this was undeserved, based on what she said from the stage…it’s the Oscars for goodness sake, of course they are all white and perfect and immensely rich.

Then today I finally happened upon her expanded backstage comments. From this account:

“The truth is: even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are applied that really do affect women,” she mused. “And it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”

Breathtakingly tone-deaf.

Look, I’ve spent a lot of time in my life feeling sorry for myself. I get it. It is really, really easy to focus narrowly on that one aspect, attribute, experience, factor or misfortune that leaves the self at apparent disadvantage. And it is correspondingly easy to forget all about all the other factors and attributes that have conveyed immense privileges upon our lives.

This is not solved by the data, of course. Firstly, because we can all pick and choose which truthy stat we want to brandish. Is it equal pay? Very easy to brandish the generally accepted, broad brush stats for men versus women. And very easy to ignore that women of color are even more screwed than woman not of color. Easy to have no idea whatsoever how well minority men are paid relative to women not of color. Or what being gay confers in terms of salary.

And it is incredibly seductive to argue the anecdote. Well, Oprah! And J.Lo. And Eddie Murphy! And FFS Neil Patrick Harris is the Master of Ceremonies for goodness sake! They are sitting right there, so therefore why would anyone think of how their respective skin tones and desired life-partner would have anything to do with equal pay for women, eh?

Academic science is no different my friends. If this highly public case makes the intersectionality issue clearer to you than it has ever been, do try to turn that inwards.

We run across these examples on the blog all the time, of course. Whether we’re discussing the struggles of women in science, the Ginther report, outing yourself to search committees or thesis advisors, the Baby Boomer hegemony of NIH Grant funding, postdoctoral pay rates or the evils of PIs with too many grants, the issues are the same.

“Sure, sure, there are these other biases in careers. But what is REALLY important is that I, the speaker, haven’t experienced* any of those advantages that adhere to my classes and characteristics. And let me tell you about my specific set of life events that prove that really, I personally have been at huge disadvantage. So it is totally misplaced to talk about the general advantages of my characteristic X because the anecdote of me proves that X is much less important than this totally other thing that I happen to suffer from.”

At this point one or the other of you, DearReader, may suspect I am talking about you in particular. Naturally, I am not. This is a common theme. Very common.

It is something that I have suffered from in my life and continue to do so. I have felt immensely sorry for myself a lot over the years.

Like many of you, I can claim one or two disadvantages within a context of immense privileges when it comes to pursuing the career of academic science. Like many of you, I CANNOT HELP BUT IGNORE MY PRIVILEGES AND PITY MYSELF ABOUT MY HARDSHIPS. Like many of you, I feel compelled to speak out about perceived injustices in the world. Like many of you, some of those injustices I speak about happen to be ones that I think affect me. Like many of you, some of those injustices I speak about do not happen to affect me in any direct way.

And, like many of you and Patricia Arquette, I often speak about injustices in a way that appears to ignore the fact that other people have it a lot worse.

Social media has a way of helping us to remember that other people have it even worse. And that trying to recruit others to help you in your fights, without ever appearing** to be that concerned about their fights comes across as selfish and tone deaf.

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*of course you have, you just think that this is totally normal and average and deserved, and thus not worthy of inclusion in any discussion.

**For all I know Patricia Arquette is a huge fighter for underrepresented groups, including ethnic minorities and LGBT folks. But her comments certainly didn’t convey that.

The tldr; version of this post:

I love y'all white leftie women academics. I do. But you are still really myopic self-focused motherfuckers. Like #PatriciaArquette

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2015

On my TL, I hear about black issues from black folks, gay issues from gay folk and feminist issues from all of the above. It's a thing.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2015

Bro Country

heard this a few days ago on the country station.

Thanks for sending me to look for it on YouTube MyTChondria, the video adds punch.

People of science are just like other people. Horrible.

Go read comments from Professor Isis-the-scientist today:

Science Has A Thomas Jefferson Problem…

Still, this doesn’t change the fact that the notion that “Science Has a Sexual Assault Problem” makes me salty. Life has a sexual assault problem. 26% of women scientists are assaulted in the field, but about that many women in general report sexual assault. A large portion of the attacks against scientists are perpetrated by someone the victim knew, but many women in general know their attackers. So, at the crux of the stunning and shocking and eye opening is something that I find more insidious – it is the belief that science is somehow different than society at large.

After all, surely rape and assault and violence are acts committed by poor people, and brown folks, NFL players and the occasional misguided frat boy. Certainly our logical, skeptical, professional and enlightened scientific brethren aren’t capable of the type of violence that Hope describes. Surely, tenured white women aren’t at risk for that type of violence.

Pretending that any type of person is “different”, in the good way, is a suboptimal way to go through life.

People are horrible.

Given half a chance:

-Doods will try to rape women
-White cops will shoot innocent teen browns
-Dewds will try to cop a feel.
-Grant and manuscript and career/job reviewers will support candidates that seem most like themselves
-Guys will leer and objectify.
-Postdocs will slack and blame their PI
-Old wrinkly profs will delusionally think one of the young sweet grad student things will come back to their shitty hotel room at scientific meetings if their clumsy overtures are made to enough of them.
-PIs will exploit the hell out of their “trainees”
-Men will rape women.
-Institutions, meaning deanlets, will screw over their Golden Goose Faculty

People are horrible.

Act accordingly.

On Feminist 0.6 thinking

Look, it’s a long slog to make yourself a decent person. I once wrote a fairly popular blog post entitled “I am“. It contained passages such as

I am a friend. A friend to women who I met when I was 5 years old, ones I met in high school, college, grad school. Women I met as a postdoc, as a faculty member, as an inhabitant of my community.

I am a boss and a mentor. Women work for me and with me on my various professional activities.

I am a husband. My spouse is a professional person working, as it happens, in the sciences.

I am a father. Of a nonzero number of miniwomen.

These sorts of sentiments still feel truthful to me.

But so do the sentiments in this piece which takes a shot at such self-referential thinking:

As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters

I’m not proud to admit this, but before I had daughters, I sometimes used to harvest women for their organs to build Liver Pyramids in my backyard. I just didn’t see a problem with it. I sure do now, though. What if someone killed my daughters just to make a pyramid, or even a ziggurat, out of women’s internal organs in their backyard? I sure wouldn’t like that at all. They’re my daughters!

Go read the whole thing. Careful with drinking any coffee until you are done.

Anti-Slut-Shaming Feminism

I know I have a few card carrying feminist types in my audience so I have a question for them.

The anti-slut-shaming issue is, to my understanding, a defense of women wearing whatever the hell they want without fear of randoms treating them in any particular way for those choices.

To the extent we are talking about public behavior and events…..I get that.

Ix-nay on the blaming of rape victims on the basis of their clothing choices. Yep.

No discrimination in the workplace for such matters that are irrelevant to job performance. Sure.

“Dude, you need to control yourself“. Totally down with that.

…..

“If you react to the sartorial style of a woman with sexual interest, my friend, that is ALL about you and your perving. The person in question is not dressing that way to have any effect on random dudes. They are not doing this in the slightest, tiniest way to have an effect on anyone other then their own personal pleasure and entertainment.”

Here is what is unclear to me, my feminist readers.

Do you REALLY believe this?

Or is this the kind of situation where you take an absurdly absolutist position so as to avoid the slightest toe-step down the slippery slope of victim blaming in the aforementioned public, vocational and/or criminal situations?

Guys who do more housework get less sex

No, really. It is science.

Sabino Kornrich, Julie Brines, Katrina Leupp. Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage American Sociological Review February 2013 vol. 78 no. 1 26-50 doi: 10.1177/0003122412472340

Data are from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households published in 1996, interviews from 1992-1994.

The division of labor:

Core tasks include preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning house, shopping, and washing and ironing; non-core tasks include outdoor work, paying bills, auto maintenance, and driving.

As you can see in the graph, the more of the “core” tasks a man completes, the less sex he gets.

The covariates for overall marital happiness and specific happiness with spouses’ contribution to housework did not change this relationship. The covariate for gender-traditional ideology on household labor likewise did not change this relationship. Thus, none of these factors explains the relationship between sex frequency and the participation of the man in “core” chores.

One interesting tidbit of note in surveys like this:

women reported having sex with their spouses slightly more than five and a half times in the past month, and men reported lower frequencies, about .4 times fewer over the past month. Although it may appear surprising that husbands’ reports are lower than their wives’, existing research comparing husbands’ and wives’ reports has found similar results

I’m sure that won’t cause any hilarious disagreement over which is the true value.

I’m sure the overall finding is entirely intuitive and agreeable to your sensibilities.

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h/t: @seelix and @docfreeride

also, The Times is ON it.

I'm sorry….but you brought this on yourself, honey.

The intro may be trigger-y for some.

No, this doesn't mean you need to avoid your female colleagues like the plague

Bora Zivkovic has been a skeevy, predatory harasser of women. He was accused in online public and confessed. Subsequent revelations from other women who were similarly preyed upon follow a similar narrative. So even if Bora’s original confession admitted only to one incident, well, nobody believes that and nor should anyone.