Rejection

Do you know that general feeling of tension and malaise you get when you are in the middle of a job hunt? The reluctance to check your e-mail because there may not be any news of the job hunt, or worse, that there is a letter. The pit in the bottom of your stomach when an e-mails pops into your mailbox with a job title in the subject line. The unease with which you open it, bracing yourself for rejection. After all, you applied to dozens of positions, and realistically only expect to get a few offers. The inevitable feeling of worthlessness that washes over you, however briefly, when you see yet another rejection. The process of trying to talk yourself out of the conviction that the rejection is a judgement of you as a person, even though rationally you know it is nothing of the sort.

Yeah, that feeling. The one that comes from repeated rejection.

I've been looking for housing in Small City. I have been sending out dozens of e-mails to ads for rooms. Since I am still spending most of my time in His Town, I do not contact at housing agent in Small City. I am mostly working off with people who have listed places independently. And I get .... nothing. Or at least very little.

Most people do not respond to my e-mails at all. Those that do, respond with a polite but curt statement of non-interest. I have almost always gotten housing from newspaper ads (before Craig's List), word or mouth or Craig's List in my many houses in my undergrad, grad and post doc years. I have never been in a situation where my e-mails have gone almost completely unanswered. I have always managed to find several people interested in showing me their properties.

Perhaps I am transplanting my American reliance on Craig's List for all my housing and second hand needs into a culture that is not used to working outside housing agents. Perhaps I am giving off some sort of odd but subtle negative signal in the way I am approaching prospective landlords. Perhaps my situation is a bit out of the ordinary, and that makes people hesitant to answer. Whatever the reason, I start feeling the way about housing that I feel about rejection letters for jobs. I start wondering if there is something wrong with my mail server.

Then my partner points out my name. I have visions of potential housemates not wishing to live with a fresh off the boat academic from a third world country who speaks English with a heavy accent and has who knows what strange habits. They are not very nice visions. They focus an ugly side of my countrymen that a part of me likes to believe does not exist. They remind me of how poorly some of my fellow fresh off the boat graduate students were treated in my country. They remind me of how rudely a black friend of mine was treated at a diner I normally loved, the time I sent her in to pick up the order while I sat in the car.

We dipped into the bags for hot salty fries on the drive home, talking about how the worst part about experiences like these are the seeds of doubt they plant in one's head. Was the waitress just having a bad day? And the cook? On the same day? It could happen. It is not impossible.

Am I just doing something subtly culturally wrong? I am a gregarious American living in a staid European society. It is not impossible to believe.

The problem with cases of discrimination like this is that it is impossible to tell. But the seeds have been planted. The damage has been done.

In which I need to get a grip

A couple weeks ago, Mathbabe posted some thoughts on survivorship bias that got me thinking about the anecdata in my life.

In case you do not want to look up the Wikipedia article, survivorship bias is a bias introduced into data when a studied population is compared to historical averages, ignoring the fact that the studied population has certain non-average characteristics that cause it to be observed/ in the sample.

It is a sort of selection bias introduced by assuming that the portion of the sample that does not complete the study is randomly distributed, when that is not the case.

I'm not going anywhere with this. I just need to air my thoughts.

1. I know two African Americans in my field. Someone who knows my circle of colleagues should feel free to correct me. I went to graduate school with one of these scientists. Through a series of confounding and rather stupid events, I had a conversation with him about "growing up black in the US." It turned out that he did not consider himself black, but mixed race. Given the "one drop" policy that is still an unspoken truth in much of the US, I asked him what the difference was. His answer: he did not grow up immersed in black culture. I forget the details, but it involved a small college town, and hanging out with other children of academics. I am not arguing anyone's right to identify racially however he/she chooses. I am simply struck, that of all the African Americans either my partner or I know, the only one who identifies as mixed race is a successful academic.
2. At one of the women in my field meetings I went to several years back, I found myself sitting next to a post-doc, very insistent on the fact that there was not difference in the treatment of women and men in her field. She was often the only female in her sub-field at conferences, but that was because her field was new, and women had not yet flocked to it. Considering the field as a whole, she thought that women just needed to learn to deal with the crap a bit more. Once we did that, we were just judged on our publication record. Naive as I was at the time, I tried to argue with her on just the arguments that she presented: that she claimed that men needed to be good scientists to succeed, while women needed to be good scientists and pachiderms to succeed. Ignoring all else, wasn't the extra pachidermal requirement itself a sign of inequality? I should have kept my mouth shut. I only succeeded in spoiling my lunch. I do not know if I offered any solace to any of the other attenders. I certainly did nothing to convince my intended audience. It still rankles me on bad days.
3. For the second time in my career, I recently attended a two part conference where I was the most senior woman for the first part. Moments like this disgust me. This conference also had the added feature that there were no female speakers in either part. That is a first for me. I am immensely grateful to the older gentleman who also pointed out the lack of female speakers. I am saddened by the number of women a pointed out the gender distribution to who did not seem to notice or mind. (To be fair, it is not as if the men I pointed the gender distribution out to really seemed to care either.) I envy the women who can go through something like this and not notice. Life must be easier for them somehow, I imagine. If you do not feel the insults that are thrust at you, consciously or not, you cannot be hurt by them.
4. Various people close to me are in very shitty situations right now. Compared to them, I live a pampered life. Class differences in my friend set should not surprise me, but it disturbs me greatly when the situation is put before me quite so clearly. They do not have PhDs, they do not have dual income households. Sometimes, it is simply a matter of financial or emotional survival for them. They live in situations that, I am fairly certain, given my emotional and physical shortcomings would leave me crippled or dead. But they survive. Given all the advantages I have in life, I wonder what exactly it is I am doing, pretending that I can speak for women. The circles I surround myself with on a day to day basis are those of such a tiny elite.

For those of you who know my moods: yes, I just submitted a job application.

Words

Early in the morning, a male in my bed announced that I was sexypoo. I did not kick him out. I asked him if he meant if nicely, which he did, so I gave him a hug.

Then he called me a sexy peebin. He had not meant that kindly, so we talked about it.

Sex, for Epsilon, right now, is a game played by people with armpit hair. It is a game people can play nicely, or it is a game people can play meanly. When it is played meanly, it is a REALLY bad thing. (Yes, I will get in serious trouble next time he sees one of his friends' mothers who shaves in a sleeveless shirt.) But Epsilon understands playing games nicely and meanly much better than he can understand rape or sexualizing women's bodies or sexual abuse in relationships. He understands armpit hair better than he understands puberty, and it is less vague than "big people" (he's big, why can't he play sex?)

Explaining sex is easy. Explaining sexy is hard. It is different from other bad words he picks up. Four letter words are scattered about our house with undone dishes and unpicked up toys. Fuck and shit are words that you say when you are really unhappy about something, never say them to a person, only to a situation, and not outside the house, as that will upset people-- a long set of rules, but clear. 

Stupid is not a word one says under any circumstance, even about oneself. Rascal is not nice, but a word we don't make a big deal about. After all, Puff the Magic Dragon is a rascal. One only uses that word nicely, not meanly.

We watched Peter Pan a while ago. His daycare had a pirates and mermaids themed week, the movie seemed appropriate. Ujan has started calling people savages as a result. Peter Pan said it all the time, it must be a good word. We had a long sad conversation about once upon a time people in the country we live in called people who look like us savages, and the depravation of liberties that entailed, and the people who died trying to fight that. So far, there has been a 48 hour reprieve in the use of the word in the household. It will come back. We will have another conversation, but he is starting to understand.

Sexy? What do I do with that word? It is not a bad word in its own right. It is even possible that when one of this classmates picked up the origial phrase "you're a sexy girlfriend" somewhere, the child heard it in a non-offensive context. The child probably repeated it, was told that it is not a nice thing to say, misunderstood the adults admonition, and brought it to daycare as a singsung tease. "You're a sexy girlfriend. You're a sexy peebin. You're a sexy dirty sock."

Like a bout of flu, or orange paint in his hair, Epsilon infected my house with it in all innocence. I never thought I would ever allow anyone to call me sexy, but motherhood has changed a lot of things I thought were immutable axioms in my life. Sexy is not the same as sex, even though it sounds like they should be related. How does one explain desire to someone who still thinks it is funny to fondle my breasts? Sexy is not the same thing as pretty, unless one is trying to give a zeroth level approximation of the word to a preschooler. I viscerally recoil from the idea of him calling one of his female class mates sexy, in order to tell them that they are pretty, while I do not have the same reaction at the thought of him saying that to a male. HE is not objectifying the girl, any more than he is racially motivated when he describes a new playmate at school as black, before he manages to mention that the playmate is male, and weeks before he can tell me his name. At the age of three, he is still truly describing the world as he sees it, in the order of what is apparent to him.

Still, sex and race are suh topics of power and abuse in this world, navigating this ground, teaching him to use the word sexy, fills me with unease.

What's the opposite of Eggmus?

Epsilon said something heart breaking the other day. He pointed to a black man and said that "he isn't pretty." My partner and I were floored. When we pushed him, he said that he wasn't pretty because he was black. To his credit, upon further pushing, he admitted that if he took off his jeans and put on a pink dress, he would be pretty.

We've had a lot of issues with Epsilon (who is big into princesses and dresses right now) and whether or not boys can be pretty. We've tried talking to the school about it, to no avail. I figure that our views on gender roles are far enough out of the societal norms that we shouldn't risk traumatizing the teachers at the school by insisting they make a point of it. But this new racial aspect is very different, and we both feel like we need to come down firmly to the school.

Beyond a general feeling of "AACK!", we'll talk to the teachers. I want them to incorporate messages about pretty girls (I'm going to give up on the gender issue here) of all colors, and read stories to the kids that unselfconciously incorporate characters of all races in them. Unfortunately, judging by the public library here, books like that are much harder to come by in His Town than they were in the last place we lived.

This shouldn't surprise me. But it does.

Things that make me sad

I know several professional women or female Phd candidates who keep making decisions to put their career behind that of their husband's, behind the perceived needs of the family. I don't think I can name a single case (in my small and biased sample) where the woman isn't convinced, or has eventually convinced herself that she is happy with her decision.

I can't sit easy with their comfort, because more women make the choice to prioritise their own career behind their partners and families than men do. Furthermore, fewer women make these choices in this country, where the last few decades has seen a lot of discussion about the importance of women not only in the workplace, but in highly demanding fields, than they did 50 years ago before this public discussion, or in other parts of the world where this discussion has yet to happen or take effect. I doubt there is anything fundamental about the womanness of my foremothers, nor of the womanness of my cohort abroad causing this difference.

It makes me think of the times when friends or family have been singled out by the police, or gotten rude service from a take out counter that is normally very good. It raises the question of whether the other person was having a bad day, or did they see something in the skin color? It is impossible to tell whether each interaction is a draw from the bad day distribution, or from the racist distribution. The only things that people who study these these things have been able to measure is that certain people get bad draws more often, and those people tend to belong to various minorities.

The public discussion about women's roles in the workplace has changed the underlying population distribution to less women being willing to sacrifice their careers for the needs of the family and to more men being willing to do the same. But the choice profiles for the two genders aren't even close. Each woman I know who leaves her professional job, or chooses not to finish her PhD, or makes decisions (with her family) that she should bear more of the burden for the family, is a draw from a distribution that isn't where I think it should be. I have no idea whether I can be truly happy for my friends' decisions, even if they seem happy with them, because I don't know where they stand in the distribution. This makes me sad.

This is what America looks like

I've been listening to selected speeches from the DNC off of Politico's website all day. It struck me that there seem to be an overwhelming number of women and minorities speaking. So I decided to count.

I took my list of speakers from here. Not counting the Presentation of Colors, Pledge of Allegiance, or the videos, and counting the Hispanic Caucus and the Women of the House of Representatives as one speaker each, I counted 54 separate speakers. Of which, 20 were female, 11 were African American, 13 were Asian, Hispanic or other, and 17 were white male.

So, actually, there were 37% female speakers (as opposed to 51% in the population), 20% African American (as opposed to 13 % nation wide), 24% Hispanic/Asian/Other (as opposed to 24.4% nationwide) and 31% white non-hispanic male (as opposed to 31.9% nation wide.) I'm not doing a count of gay speakers because that takes more effort than simple google searches of the names.

Wow. Okay, so women are a bit under represented and African Americans a bit over represented. But in general, this is what America looks like. A whole lot of women and minorities. Not so many white dudes. If every TV show and movie and book I read had a cast of characters that looked like this, I wouldn't feel like I somehow didn't belong in America. My darkness doesn't stand out in the crowd of speakers up there. Neither do my breasts.

This is not the Vagina Monologues. This is America. A representative sample. This is how (threateningly? joyously?) diverse we look like if we all stand up and get counted visibly. I feel like for the first time in my life I am actually seeing it in front of me. It makes me so happy, and almost proud.

I was going to write about the genderness of some of the speaches, and complain about why female speakers feel like they must identify with their roles as mothers/grandmothers/care-takers. On the flip side, I was going to laud Polis for opening with his role as a father. But you know... this realization has taken the wind out of whatever complaints I may have. I am going to bed a happy woman today.

Eloquence on race

I'm listening to an interview given by Van Jones, ex white house green jobs special advisor. Since he is a black activist, the conversation turns to race, specifically the recent Treyvon Martin shooting.

Mr. Jones takes some time to put President Obama's reaction to the event in the greater context of his having to deal with race in the American Presidency. Along the way, he revisits the beer summit and Skip Gate's arrest. His description is very eloquent, and can be found here.

Well, first of all, that comment [about Treyvan] from the President really should be seen as the third act in a three-act play on race for this president. ...
Act II, now he’s president of the United States. Skip Gates is arrested. ...
So now you have probably the most famous professor at Harvard, Skip Gates, African American, arrested in his home. Here’s Barack Obama, President Obama. Now, the most powerful man in the world, president of the United States, steps forward and says, "I think the police behaved foolishly." The right wing and the law enforcement establishment brought the wrath of God down on the White House. I was there. And suddenly, he’s forced to do a beer summit, to sit eye to eye with a racist police officer. As a black man, even the most powerful man in the world cannot speak about race. And if he does, he’s then forced to sit humbly across the table from a racist police officer. ... As was Skip Gates. That was one of the most terrifying, shocking revelations about where we are in a racial discussion in this country that I had ever seen. And so—

Emmigration fears: I

A few years ago, I found myself sitting across the table from a Brazilian at a conference dinner, when the conversation turned to a recent act of racial violence in his country.

"Race relations are a lot better in the US," he told me. When I argued against him, citing our history of slavery and Jim Crow and more recent immigration woes, he replied, "You talk about it in the US, and thus you are more aware of it. It doesn't mean the situation is actually worse there."

Those words ring in my ears every time we visit the library for Epsilon. We live in a fairly urban part of the country, and virtually every book Epsilon takes an interest in, that is not populated by animals, has African, Hispanic and/or East Asian looking characters, male and female. In fact, he's found a vehicle series with minor characters of my ethnicity. (That never happens!)

Before Epsilon was born, when we were considering adopting, probably an African American child, we were told to make sure that we had lots of books where the child's ethnicity was prominently featured. Then the adoption agency showed us several books that were about being black. The example books were about race; they were painfully self consciously aware of race. I remember thinking, if I my mother brought home books like this for me from my white suburban public library about my ethnicity, it would not have helped me be more at ease in my skin*. Since Epsilon's birth, I have been so very grateful to my public library for the ease with which it celebrates the racial diversity of my town and my country.

Thinking of my Brazilian's colleagues comments, I asked my partner to look at the picture book sections of the public libraries near University E. He also looked in a neighborhood where a colleague with a toddler lives. The results are not promising. Books that deal with diversity as a normal part of life can be found near University E, but we would have to be aware of the situation, and try to steer Epsilon in that direction, rather than trust that the frequency is great enough that Epsilon will naturally pick up a few.

There are some things I will miss about this country.


*I have nothing against books about race. I've written about one I really like. But there is a fundamental difference between a book written to point out racial differences, in however positive a light, and one that treats it as a natural part of life.

black is brown is tan

We went to the library over the weekend, and my partner checked out a book from his childhood that had me in tears on the drive home. This is saying a lot, given that we only get books for Epsilon at the library. It is a truly well written kid's book, and I highly recommend it for anyone with an interracial family. But that is not the point of today's post.

I think most of the tears came from the realization that black is brown is tan, one of the original children's books about interracial families, was written in 1973, when a family with an African American mother and a white father was still not recognized as a family in 29 states.

black is brown is tan
is girl is boy
is nose is
                   face
is all
       the
       colors
of the race

And then of course there are the words that ring comfortingly true to a brown girl growing up in a white suburb, who could not stand to see any part of her skin in her field of vision when she was hanging out with her white friends in high school.

i am black I am brown the milk is the chocolate brown
i am the color of the milk   chocolate cheeks

Or the "Well, duh!" moment in the verses for the father:

i am white the milk is white
i am not the color of the milk

I've read several children's books about race and family, about bi-racial or multi cultural homes. They all sound the same after a while, and they are all published in the 90s or the naughts. I know how my family and the families of some of my friends are currently struggling with the interracial choices my generation has made. But these lines were written a few years before my birth.

there is granny white and grandma black
kissing both your cheeks
                                                        and hugging back
sitting by the window telling stories of ago.

My partner finished the book, I wiped my eyes and finished driving home. As we talked about the book throughout the day I realized that the color difference between my parents is at least as, if not more extreme than the color difference between my partner and I. No one blinked an eyelash about that aspect of my family, since we were not inter-racial in American eyes. We now live in a cosmopolitan enough setting that few people bother us. But if I can get a job near my partner, that all is going to change.

Faces from the job hunt

I've been going through university webpages this last week as I've been applying for post-docs and tenure track positions. Just in the US, I've looked at over 80 department websites, looking at professional webpages of faculty in 2 to 3 subgroups per department. Here are a few observations:

1) I have yet to see a single woman put up pictures of herself with her kids. On the other hand, when I do see a school with lots of men pictured playing with their small children, I subconsciously think "maybe I won't be so miserable here." I don't know if it is on purpose, but it's good marketing.

2) Of all the pictures on web pages I've seen, I have seen 5 faces that look like they were of African/African-American origin. Two male, two female, and one that I'm guessing. To be fair, I have not found any traditionally black colleges that with research strengths that match my interests.

3) One department home page had a line about my field separating the power of thought from authority. Who writes this crap? What does that even mean? Do the faculty not read the department web page?

Doing the number

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an event that (re)raised my awareness about non-Asian presence in the sciences and engineering on campus. Thank you for all your personal data. I decided to poke around to see if I could find actual data.

The Society for Women engineers has a set of links to the some nice tables compiled by the NSF about various racial distinctions, (African American, Non-white Hispanic, American Indian) and genders in various fields.

The numbers are starker than I'd imagined. The data I finally decided to look at is 5 years old, and if you poke around on the NSF pages, they talk about increases in minorities of various varieties increasing, but it is in single digit/annum rates.

Here are a few numbers. In 2006 number of PhD's in awarded. For the record, accoring to the 2010 census, there are between .9% and 1.1% American Indian/Alaskans in the US (depending on how you count Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders), 15.08% Hispanic/Latino, 12.3% African American.

Total Phd's granted by general field in 2006, and percent female

	All	Science*	Engineering	Health
Total:	45,596	29,854	7,191	1,906
Female:	45.05%	44.20%**	20.19%	67.37%

Underrepresented minorities (as percentage of total):

	All	Science*	Engineering	Health
AI/Alask:	0.26%	0.19%	0.06%	0.31%
AA:	3.92%	2.82%	1.43%	6.56%
NW-Hisp:	3.31%	3.35%	1.56%	2.47%

Female Minorities (as percentage of minority group):

	All	Science*	Engineering	Health
AI/Alask:	53.37%	52.27%	0.0%	50.00%
AA:	63.22%	61.76%	40.78%	79.20%
NW-Hisp:	54.5%	53.82%	29.46%	74.47%

It would seem that once a minority group makes it into academia, the male/female divide seems to disappear. This is a trend I've noticed in other contexts. Maybe I'll ramble about that later.

The big losers? MechE (13.85%), EE(14.86%), Physics(16.56%) for gender inequality.

For Underrepresented minorities, the wall of shame is Astronomy (1.52%), EE(1.88%), Physics (1.9%).

This doesn't cover the whole picture. I'll be keeping an eye out for other pieces of "interesting" data, like who gets hired, over the next few weeks.

*Agricultural, Biological, Aero/Astro/Oceanic, Computer, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Psychology, and Social sciences.
** Dropping Psychology, and Social science, where women are overrepresented, this becomes 35.84% Not great, but respectable.

on meeting housemates on campus

I've been telling this story to illustrate a point a lot recently.

I had a housemate who I haven't had much chance to see since she moved out several months ago. Earlier this term, I invited her to swing by my office to have lunch, and catch up a bit.

She parks her bike, and not being part of the campus community, asks around to figure out where I'm located. She realizes that people are staring at her. She tells me this when we meet.

My stomach sinks as I realize that she is probably the only undergrad aged African American female on campus.

I've had several conversations about diversity on this campus recently. When we (the general public) tend to think of diversity on college campuses, especially expensive colleges that undergrads and their parents work very hard to get into, we still tend to think about diversity in the same terms that we think about it in our neighborhoods and public schools. "What percentage are non-white?" And schools come up with numbers of "minority" students, the overwhelming majority of whom are some stripe of Asian, Depending on the school, they may throw foreign students into that batch, the majority of whom are European of some stripe.

This type of rigging the books hides the key point behind the point of diversity pushes on campus. It should be about the underrepresented populations.

This diversity problem seems to be worse in the sciences and engineering than in the arts and humanities, which is one reason for the very undiverse undergrad student body at my campus.
In the interest of keeping this post from going the way of a rant, I'll end with a question.

Dear readers,
How many african american or latino academics do you know? How many do you know of? How many are female? (If you are not based in the US, feel free to insert your favorite socially and economically disadvantaged minority into this question.)

My answers are, if I restrict to STEM fields, (2,1), 0, 1.

American renga and race

I was listening to a story on NPR this morning about a new poetry book Crossing State Lines: An American Renga. A renga is a collaborative style of oral poetry from the ancient far east. Think poetry duals during Renaissance Europe. Or, and this is my point, rap duals in modern day America.

My problem is partially with the book title "American Renga," but I see a point in that... A lot of the poets in this book are poet laureats from different states from across the country। My larger problem is with the spin given on this story, the lack of discussion of other collaborative poetry that occurs on a regular basis in this country. Linked poetry that circulates in the daily lives of people who may not be the target audience of NPR's listenership.

If this story was done because April is poetry month, as it claims, then does there not need to be a discussion of the context of the poetic form, or for the modern evolution of the form that has brought this project about? (The story was more than 7 minutes long, after all.)

Maybe I should stop listening to NPR.

Raci, Sexi Wisconsin Recall

Since I'm spending so much time in Chicago now, I decided to go up to Wisconsin to help collect some votes for the recall effort against Mary Lazich.

I don't think I've been part of something so sincerely grass-roots in a very long time. The women who were there, were by and large housewives who were honestly fed up. They had never been involved in politics before, but they couldn't stand by and and see their state go the direction it was going. Also, this is one of the more strongly republican districts, and therefore the powers that be that are helping out in organizing and signature collecting, in other recall efforts are not spending as many resources on this one.

There were women there who have been out every single day, collecting signatures at village halls and street corners, and any way they can, often alone. This is courage I have not found in myself, no matter how mad I've been about something. I am truly impressed.

The part I found the most, shall we say, entertaining, about this all, is the response I elicited from the people we were trying to get signatures from. Comments included "white power", which I attribute to layer of fuzz on my head in place of hair, and a ramble about whether Lazich was some sort of Pakistani name (well, at least this person knows that I am South Asian?!?), various attempts at being lewd, and being followed in a car while canvasing.

Its been a long time since I've spent time in a public setting in a very conservative part of this country. And this is why. The women I was with were surprised by my reaction (rather lack thereof) to these comments. I'm not sure where that comes from. Partially, I suppose, from the fact that it is much easier to take things on the chin when something like this happens in a place one does not have an emotional investment in. Partially, ironically, I suppose this comes from 7 years of training in academia (I won't name names).

I've talked about how I feel much more comfortable (at least when I had hair) to go to a conservative village in India than to a conservative part of this country. There is a huge level of perceived safety in being able to blend into a crowd, even though the former situation is probably, in actuality more dangerous.