Why pseudonymity matters

A while back, someone on Twitter shared a link to an article in an Anthopology blog that mused about the reasons why people are more comfortable sharing personal information on line than they are in person. But as I read the article, I saw something else: one of the reasons why many women choose to use pseudonyms online.

The blogger witnessed a conversation on a subway that went like this (full version here):

Him: I haven’t seen you in awhile!
Her: Yeah …
Him: So are you going to Penn?
Her: No.
Him: You don’t live out east?
Her: No. I live here, in Manhattan.
Him: Oh, I live on Long Island. If I didn’t have kids …
Her: Yeah, it’s expensive.
Him: Well, yeah. But also the schools. I would have to pay for the type of education my kids get on Long Island.
Her: [Nods politely. Casts sidelong glance at me.]
Him: Are you married.
Her: No.

Just reading the conversation made my skin crawl and set off every one of my warning alarms about creepy guys. Ick. ICK.

The anthropology blog muses that people are willing to share much more personal information online because they feel as if they have a degree of distance that they don't have on a subway. There's this implication that sharing information online is just as dangerous as talking to a creepy guy on a subway, but that people don't realize just how dangerous it is.

But... sharing can be valuable as well as dangerous.

Living in a world where one can't share personal stories - a kid's lost tooth, a failed experiment, a glorious day in the field - is isolating. It's even more isolating when those personal stories involve undercurrents of discrimination - like being mistaken for an administrative assistant. Blogs (and other communication across distance) can reduce the sense of isolation for women geoscientists - that's one of the findings from the survey that Anne Jefferson, Pat Campbell, Suzanne Francks, and I did last summer (now online here). Blogs do seem to help.

But sharing that personal information can come at a cost if you attach your real-life name to it. Creepy stalkers may be rare, but if your real name is attached to your stories, you can be found. And, although it may help job-seekers to be Googleable, it's also important that job-seekers come across as someone who would fit into a job. Expressing fear that you aren't good enough at research is not a good way to sell yourself to an R1 university, and sharing frustration with teaching sexist students does not make you look like an excellent teacher. The very things that make women-in-science blogs valuable could threaten the careers of the bloggers, if the bloggers didn't use pseudonyms.

We didn't talk about pseudonyms in our GSA Today article. But I've got a feeling that pseudonymity is what makes the benefits discussed in our article possible.

Networking opportunity for women in atmospheric science and meteorology

Via the Association for Women Geoscientists e-mail newsletter:

Are you a woman interested in atmospheric science or meteorology? The Desert Research Institute and the National Science Foundation are sponsoring a program called ASCENT (Atmospheric Science Collaborations and Enriching NeTworks), designed to connect women faculty and post-docs with one another. It's an opportunity for networking and making professional connections, during a three-day workshop in Steamboat Springs, Colorado this June.

From their website:

Atmospheric Science Collaborations and Enriching NeTworks (ASCENT) is a program focusing on women in atmospheric science/meteorology and is designed to initiate positive professional relationships among female faculty of different ranks and postdoctoral researchers. The program consists of a three-day summer workshop with follow-up reunion events at major national meetings. While networking with like-minded women scientists, participants will have the opportunity to be involved in frank discussions to explore specific promising practices toward eliminating the "leaky pipeline", defined by the attrition of women at different stages in their academic careers. By fostering relationships among women faculty and researchers, ASCENT will develop research opportunities and improve the quality of collaborative atmospheric research conducted at multiple universities and colleges.

The workshop will also accept two female high school teachers and two female high school students. The application deadline is March 15.

Panel discussion on women in science - ideas?

I've got a great new dean who's an active supporter of women in science (and a woman scientist, as well). When the call went out for ideas for Women's History Month, she suggested that the scientists do something. So... we're bringing in Dr. Marjorie Chan of the University of Utah, who has a women-in-geology talk she's given as an Association for Women Geoscientists lecturer, and besides her talk, we're going to do a panel discussion on issues facing women scientists. I'm organizing it, and I think I may be moderating it.

I've never organized any sort of panel discussion before, and I've never been in the audience for anything like this. So I'm looking for ideas.

We're a small public liberal arts college, so the audience will be a mixture of faculty members and undergraduates - no grad students, no post-docs. The panel members so far include Margie and the senior woman in the biology department - we're working on finding someone else. The other someones won't be from physics/engineering or chemistry - each department has one woman professor, but they're both assistant profs, and we don't want to put them on the spot.

So what should we talk about?

Margie knows the current statistics for women in the geosciences, and the biologist knows the history of her department, so at the very least, we can talk about the history in those two fields. Some of my other ideas are:

- Debunking persistent myths about women's abilities as scientists. (Maybe more important for students in intro classes, though.)

- Discussing Virginia Valian's ideas about the ways that tiny differences in perception can lead to big differences in women's success.

- Discussing the problem of balance.

- Doing some kind of exercise like Sciencewoman recently did, thinking about our strengths and how to promote them.

- Discussing the success of our biology program in hiring and educating women.

- Brainstorming things that we can do to help women in science (both students and faculty).

Anyone led a panel like this, or been in the audience for one? Any advice for what works and what doesn't?

Titles and respect

A couple of days ago, I was introduced as "Dr. Hannula" to a class of kindergarteners. Doesn't that sound pompous?

Let me back up a bit. Because I'm part-time this semester, I had time to go to my son's 100 Days of Kindergarten celebration and help out in class. He's been asking why I can't come to school with him - his friends' moms, including one who is an M.D. doctor, have, so why not me? So on Tuesday, I went to kindergarten and helped kids count out 100 raisins and Cheerios for their snack.

Apparently, my son told his teacher that I should be called "Dr. Hannula." I vaguely remember a conversation at home about this, in which my husband told my son that I was a Ph.D. "doctor," and I guess it must have made an impression. At least it avoids the Miss/Ms./Mrs. weirdness - I'm married, but I kept my last name, and "Mrs." always makes me feel like I'm on the Brady Bunch or something. So when the teacher asked if I wanted to be called "Dr. Hannula," I shrugged and said "Sure!"

The experience caught me off guard, in part, because of all the discussion in the blogosphere about what to call Jill Biden, Ph.D., adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College, and wife of the vice-president of the United States. I'd been thinking more about honorifics, and especially about the sense that people who have earned respect (such as Richard Feynman) don't need titles.

My perspective is a bit warped by being a geologist. We're a notoriously casual discipline, as anyone who has noticed the dress code (or lack thereof) at our conferences could tell you. When I was an undergrad, my role models were Shelby, Mary, Dave, and Ed; in grad school, I added Elizabeth, Louie, and Gary to the list. So when I got my Ph.D. and waltzed into the classroom a week later, I introduced myself as "Kim," and that fit in perfectly with Ray, Pat, Tom, Lucy, and Grant.

But here's the thing. There's something cool and grown-up about being invited to call a respected authority figure by his first name. But what happens when the authority figure doesn't look right - when the authority figure looks more like your sister than your dad? I didn't realize this immediately, but I've seen plenty of hints that women professors have to prove themselves before they earn the respect that male professors get the moment they walk into the classroom and hand out the syllabi. I may have undermined my teaching at my first job by assuming that all I needed to do was explain complex stuff clearly and be tough but fair in my grading - by assuming that I didn't need to prove myself to my students. Just maybe, if I had gone by "Dr. H." when I was 27, I could have avoided getting creepy anonymous notecards on the first day of class.

Going by "Dr." isn't going to earn me respect, any more than wearing Aretha Franklin's inauguration hat will let me sing about it. But maybe by being "Dr." to a group of kindergarteners, I can help change their expectations. And in twelve years, they might walk into my classroom and feel all grown-up when I tell them that they can call me "Kim."

Job opportunities: AWG's Geologist in the Park program

The Association for Women Geoscientists has just announced their Geologist-in-the-Park positions for 2009. These are temporary positions, usually for the summer, for women geoscientists to work with the staff of specific national parks, sharing their expertise. In the past, the positions have been aimed at professionals or graduate students, but all the announcements this year invited advanced undergraduates to apply.

The specifc positions for 2009 are:

NPS Headquarters and Unspecified Parks of applicant’s choice
Storm Hazard Analyst

The GIP will assist with a project assessing the storm vulnerability of natural and cultural resources in coastal national park units and contribute to ongoing research or develop a unique project within the larger on-going NPS study. A thorough understanding of how past storm events have impacted coastal parks is critical to improved management of these resources, particularly within the context of rising sea level, a cycle of increasing storm frequency and continued coastal development. The participant is encouraged to submit brief outlines (less than one page) for potential projects in specific coastal parks. This project is an excellent opportunity to fund storm hazard research that would benefit both the participant and National Park Service. The work location is flexible. The participant may work either in the NPS Lakewood CO office, independently from her home, or in a park. More information about park units can be found at http://www.nps.gov/

Applicants should be advanced undergraduate or graduate students whose educational background and career objectives are in coastal environments. Applicants must have completed basic undergraduate course work toward a degree in geology, biology, environmental science, engineering or a related field. Students who are beginning graduate or undergraduate thesis projects, are especially encouraged to apply. Professional level applicants are also welcome to apply. Experience with ARCGIS 9.x is preferred.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
Geologist

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is a World Heritage Site and includes part of one of the best preserved Permian-aged reef complexes in the world. The rock has preserved an ancient sponge-algal reef and the environments associated with the reef. The park also contains Carlsbad Caverns, one of most spectacular caves in the world.

The GIP will conduct field mapping onto aerial photographs and topographic maps at a scale of 1:24,000. This includes measuring stratigraphic sections, bedding attitudes, fault orientations, and other measurements. The participant will use a GPS to identify the locations of measured sections, geologic contacts, fault locations, and other field measurements. The participant will also use GPS to georeference measured sections and field study sites from previous published studies. The work will involve hiking over rugged desert terrain in a variety of conditions that may include a wide temperature range (40-100 degrees, depending on time of year), high winds, and inclement weather. Elevations may range from 3,000 to 5,000 feet.

Applicants should be advanced undergraduate or graduate students whose educational background and career objectives are in geology. Applicants must have completed basic undergraduate course work toward a degree in geology, and must have some experience with basic geologic field mapping techniques. Applicants must be able to read topographic maps and be able to navigate unmarked terrain using a compass, maps, and aerial photographs. Students who plan to pursue geology as a career, or those with a strong interest in field geology or carbonate geology, are encouraged to apply. Professional level applicants are also welcome to apply. The applicant should be able to work well independently and be comfortable working solo in rugged, sometimes remote terrain (a field radio will be supplied and must be carried by all personnel working in the backcountry).

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado
Paleontologist
May 26 to August 14, 2009

The Florissant Formation preserves an abundant flora and fauna of fossil plants and insects that were deposited in late Eocene (34 million-year-old) lake shales. The participant will assist with ongoing projects relating to the paleontologic resources of the monument. Primary responsibilities will be on a new excavation project to collect fossil plants and insects from the late Eocene Florissant Formation, and on the monument's ongoing project to inventory and monitor fossil sites. Other duties may include some of the following: preparation and curation of fossil specimens, inventory of collections, updating database from field observations, compilation of a manual to document fossil sites, and assisting visiting researchers. The participant may have an option to use up to 50% of the time for research if they have a research plan defined and approved beforehand, and especially if they can develop it into a graduate thesis project. Work time will be split between office, lab, and field, according to project needs.

Applicants should be advanced undergraduate or graduate students whose educational background and career objectives are in paleontology. Applicants must have completed basic undergraduate course work toward a degree in geology or biology, with an emphasis in paleontology. Students who plan to pursue paleontology as a career, or those who are beginning graduate or undergraduate thesis projects, are especially encouraged to apply. Professional level applicants are also welcome to apply. Experience with Access database is preferred. The applicant should be able to work well independently.

The deadline is usually April 1, but this year the deadline will be flexible, and the first well-qualified applicant is likely to be hired for each position. If you're interested, contact the park in question as soon as possible for more information.

Yes, Virginia, there is life after tenure denial

Over at ScienceBlogs, DrugMonkey has a post about a former ScienceBlogger who left academia when it was clear that he wouldn't receive tenure. The blogger has moved to a non-academic job, and both misses and doesn't miss academia.

But that's not what I want to respond to. One of the commenters asked about other possible outcomes beyond leaving academia or being hired with tenure someplace else:

Can someone start over at the Assistant Professor level somewhere else?

Yes, it is possible. I did it.

When I was coming up for tenure, I figured that the world just ends if you're denied tenure. When it happened to me, I thought about switching to a more lucrative version of geology, or maybe getting pregnant and becoming a stay-at-home mom. But I also read job ads and saw three jobs that fit my interests (teaching-oriented institutions, looking for my specialty, in places where I wouldn't mind living). I applied for them and headed to the west coast for a week for a family vacation and exploration of other career ideas.

When I got back, two of the three places wanted to interview me. I flew out to Durango, interviewed, and was offered the job. I cancelled the other interview (because, really, what place can compete with Durango?) and, six months later, started a new job as an assistant professor. Again.

Why would anyone in her right mind start over as an assistant professor? Ummmm... well, there were a lot of reasons.

1) I loved teaching. The worst thing about leaving my first job was leaving my students. (I mean, they were writing letters to the school paper and crying in class and crying in my office... and those were the male students.) And I had a chance to do it again, in a school that had values similar to mine.

2) During the interview, the provost looked at my C.V. and said he couldn't believe that I hadn't gotten tenure. So I knew that I was capable of meeting the expectations here. To be pre-tenure without the fear deep in my gut... you know, working hard isn't bad. It's being afraid, worried that I would never be good enough... that's what was bad in the first job.

3) I got a job here. I still have people come up to me at conferences and tell me that they want my job. (I smile nicely and say: "NO.")

4) Did I mention that there are hot springs in this town? I had always wanted to live someplace with hot springs.

So... here I am. And I'm not the only person who has come out of tenure denial and walked into another academic job. (I can think of at least five other women geoscientists, some from research universities, some from liberal arts colleges... but all who were denied tenure and went on to have great careers at another institution.) It is definitely possible.

In my case, I was able to get interviews because 1) a lot of people thought that my first institution had made a major mistake, and 2) I applied to schools that valued my skills (and which were public, rather than private, so they didn't see hiring a reject as a mark against their reputations). And I made use of my outraged colleagues. I had something like nine people write recommendation letters for me. (My colleagues from the old institution, members of my dissertation committee, research collaborators, and... ummm... former undergraduate students. I don't generally think it's appropriate to ask students to write letters for me, but they were already in grad school and beyond my ability to help or hurt their careers.) If you've been denied tenure, it helps to have potential employers read glowing letters that talk about how stupid the administration of your previous institution was to let you go.

And I got the job offer because I was comfortable lecturing, and I was enthusiastic about the place. (And because they needed to hire a woman, but half the interviewees were women, so it wasn't as if I was the last female geologist in the universe and they were stuck with me.)

And now I'm tenured.

And did I mention that I live in Durango?

Question from a reader: preparing for jobs in hydrology

I've got a question from a reader, and I'm probably not the best person to answer it. She's a sophomore geology/environmental science major, and she's looking for advice about how to prepare for a career in hydrology/environmental geology.

What will exist in three years? Where are we going? How do I ensure I will be marketable as a woman in the geology field? What things should I be involved in now that will help me then?

I don't have a crystal ball (and my Gore Mountain garnet, although big enough, is blurry and hopelessly stuck in the Precambrian). And worse, I've never worked outside academia. I get some ideas about what it takes to get a job by talking to recent alums, and to people who might hire my students, and to people on the internet, and by reading the American Geological Institute's workforce data snapshots. But that's not the same as having been there myself.

So, with those caveats, let me gaze into the Magic Garnet Crystal and see what it says.

What will exist in three years?

I get the sense that hydrology jobs have remained fairly steady, compared to petroleum and* mining (which have boomed). Hydrology seems to be driven by government regulation - local, state, and federal agencies hire hydrologists for monitoring or research or to collect data that will make it possible to tell what's changed, and private environmental companies exist to help other companies comply with regulations. So I think the future of hydrology depends on who wins the next election (at all levels of government). But hydrology doesn't seem to boom or bust the way the resource industries do.

Also, hydrology/environmental geology has hired geologists in the last twenty years. Petroleum and mining companies are currently trying to hire young geologists to replace the ones who are about to retire. My generation (who got work as hydrologists) isn't retiring yet, so hydro probably won't experience the same squeeze.

So my guess is that there will be jobs, but it will take some work and searching to find them. (I don't have a good idea of exactly what those jobs are likely to involve. Anyone reading want to answer?)

What things should I be involved in now that will help me then?

Employers often contact people that they know (college professors, students who have worked for them in the past) when they've got a job opening. My department gets a lot of e-mails asking whether we've got any good students who could work during a summer, or who are ready to take a full-time job. We've started forwarding the messages to all of our students, but if a professor can think of someone immediately, that person has an advantage in applying for the job. So you want your professors to know what you're interested in, and to think of you when those questions come up. (That's potentially a women-in-science problem, if the professor remembers the male students first.) Doing a good undergraduate research project on something related to hydrology might help you stand out.

Internships can be good opportunities to explore career options. Working for a government agency (like the USGS) during college can make it easier to move into a permanent position after graduation. And internships in the private sector can help you build a resume and might lead to a full-time job, as well. (Finding interships can be difficult. Talk to your professors, and check out your college's career center. They might have good leads.)

Networking in general helps, too. The Association for Women Geoscientists can be a good group for networking - the chapters have activities in various parts of the country, and the newsletter discusses career issues a lot. (Also, environmental geologists seem to be very well-represented in AWG.) There are mentoring sessions for students at regional and national Geological Society of America meetings. Some regions of the country have regional hydrology societies, which could also be good resources.

It may also be good to prepare to become a certified professional geologist. You can also become a student member of AIPG (the American Institute of Professional Geologists). (And even if you don't, there is career information on the student section of their website.)

How do I ensure I will be marketable as a women in the geology field?

You know, I don't think women have a lot of individual control over the sexism we experience. So... be good at what you do, be assertive, network, write and revise your resume, etc., etc., etc. It's not very different from advice I give to male students. But beyond that, if you don't succeed right away, if you get asked annoying questions about your personal life, if you get harassed... don't blame yourself. And keep trying. The biggest piece of advice I could give to a woman in science is: cultivate resilience in yourself.

The second biggest piece of advice would be to find friends (or family, or a partner) who will support you in what you want to do.

That's the advice of the Magic Garnet Crystal. It's full of inclusions, though, so it's not the most trustworthy oracle around. Hopefully some other readers will comment.

* See the comment by BrianR below. Brian works in the petroleum industry, and has seen hiring slow down this year.

Survey for women geoscientists: why leave industry?

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists wants to know why so many women geoscientists leave the energy industry. They've got a web survey to find out. They are asking for any women geoscientists to participate, whether or not they've ever worked in an energy industry.

(If you're like me and haven't worked in industry, the survey is really really short.)

Links: Sichuan earthquake and age of geoscience profs

I don't have internet at the new house yet, I'm going into the field tomorrow, and I'm leaving Sunday for the Teaching Intro Geology workshop. So I won't be doing much blogging for a while (unless I end up trying to blog from the workshop).

In the meantime, some news that I wish I had time to say more about:

1) GSA Today has an article about the tectonics of the Sichuan earthquake, by Clark Burchfiel, Leigh Royden, and collaborators. It's open access, so you can see it for yourself. The article explains Burchfiel's comments that the earthquake was larger than he would have expected - both estimates of exhumation rates in the mountains and GPS measurements of active deformation suggest that earthquakes of that size occur only every 2000 to 10,000 years. In other words, although the earthquake makes sense in the broad context of plate tectonics, the techniques used to study active tectonics would not have predicted this to be an especially dangerous area.

2) AGI's Geoscience Currents series has just released the geoscience faculty age distribution for 2008. Fewer than 200 faculty members are younger than 36; the numbers of faculty become dominated by associate professors (rather than assistant professors) between age 41 and 45. The flyer states that "The low numbers of faculty under the age of 40 likely reflects the growing tendency for geoscientists to take post-doctoral fellowships prior to entering the faculty ranks." I suspect that cause and effect are switched here, and that many geoscience post-docs would happily trade their jobs for faculty positions if given the opportunity. (As an aside, when I got my Ph.D. at age 26, I told myself that I would give myself ten years to find a job, and if I wasn't employed by age 36, I would do something else with my life. I know I finished grad school at a frighteningly young age, but it's still disconcerting to see that my upper age limit is on the low end of the age range for new hires!)

The graph is also worrisome for young women who wish to be both geoscience professors and mothers - waiting until after tenure (as I tried to do my first time around) is not an option for most women, and that means dealing with a young child in the stressful, highly uncertain world of post-docs and visiting instructors and assistant professors. (Or not having kids at all. But nobody expects men to give up the possibility of kids in order to be scientists.)

Unfinished business

I've spent the last week rearranging numbers in Microsoft Excel.

This isn't the sort of thing that one tells people in order to sell the glamorous life of a geologist*. But it feels useful and productive. See, I should have done this seven years ago. Yes, that's right... I'm working on a draft of a paper that has languished for seven years.

Let me back up. My first teaching job involved many changes: I moved to a different coast, I went from a research fellowship to teaching five courses plus labs per year, and I started doing research in a new mountain belt (and a new metamorphic grade and tectonic setting). I figured that broad experience was good for someone who wanted to teach (and whose job involved a grand total of nine different new course preps in the first four years). I knew it would be difficult to find new research projects in a new field area, but I didn't realize how difficult it would be to earn the respect of the people already working in the area. I worked anyway, cobbling together money from small grants to pay undergrads for their field time, and collecting data with instruments at my institution. After seven years, I had started publishing in the new area, and I was trying to figure out how to get NSF funding for research with undergrads. I had tried three different programs as a PI without success, so I tried something new: I networked. There's a program called Research Opportunity Awards that allows professors at teaching-intensive colleges to get money tied to an existing, funded NSF grant. I found people from whom I wanted to learn, I contacted them, and I wrote a proposal.

And then I didn't get tenure.

Even though I landed another academic job within three months, I was faced with moving away from my field area and from my instruments, to a new place, with new preps and different expectations. I probably should have apologized to NSF and the PIs (and I did talk to the PIs about backing out), but the PIs thought I could pull it off. So I spent the summer between jobs doing lab work and modeling work at two different institutions.

And then I dropped the ball. Six courses a year, plus field camp, left me exhausted and ready to stare at some walls. Plus I wasn't teaching courses that related to my old research, and students wouldn't work with me in a field area on the other side of the country. There wasn't even that much pressure to publish for tenure here - publishing on pedagogy or as a third author on my old PhD work, and writing equipment grants with other members of my department, was fine for this job. And then I had a baby, and I had even more responsibilities here, and nothing forcing me to finish the old work.

And, to be honest, I couldn't face the Vermont research. It depressed me to even open the draft of the paper, or to look at the thin sections or the spread sheets. Research isn't just a matter of working hard - it involves inspiration, and although anger may be a useful emotion for some purposes, it doesn't lead to great research.

But I've been here for eight years now. I've got tenure. I know my courses. I've got local research projects with senior thesis students, and I've been developing local research projects for intro students, as well. And my son is five, and doesn't need me as constantly as he did as an infant and a toddler. And I got a tiny internal grant to get a little more microprobe data. And now... it's time to put it together, to finish writing the paper that's been sitting on my hard drive for seven years or more.

I've searched georef to see what's been done. The only things published in the past eight years were work that was in progress in 2000. (In fact, one is co-authored by one of my old academic advisees. Yay for her!) Perhaps it's a sign that my work was never cutting edge - but then it never aspired to be. Not all research needs to be published in Science or Nature - sometimes it is worthwhile to tell the world what one knows about an obscure, overgrown corner of the world.

And sometimes it is simply worthwhile to take care of unfinished business.

*I realize that it is unlikely that anyone would mistake me for "one of the coolest, sexiest men alive." However, I might be fun to have breakfast with, if you've got good enough coffee.

AWG's pilot mentoring program accepting mentees

The Association for Women Geoscientists has been putting together a pilot mentoring project over the past few months. They've been accepting mentor applications for some time, and now they're making their last call for both mentors and mentees.

From the AWG e-news:

The AWG peer mentoring pilot project has been enrolling mentors since our kick off at the AWG Transitions Convention. We have an interesting mix of AWG mentors, professors, environmental professionals, research lab scientists, and oil and gas professionals. Some are experienced mentors; others are excited to learn how to pass along their experience. We now have more mentors than mentees now but are still accepting mentor applications.

Most people have had informal mentoring relationships over the course of their career. Some employers provide on the job training that is called mentoring. However, there are many reasons to work with an external mentor in a facilitated mentoring relationship. Are you wondering what your next career move should be? Do you need to find someone who can help you:

o Find new role models?
o Gain feedback in a confidential relationship?
o Enhance your networking skills?
o Tap the career wisdom of the senior members of the organization?
o Gain insights into the professional culture?
o Gain wider friendships?
o Gain increased skills to self-direct your career?

Maybe it is time for you to work with a mentor. Noted women’s career advocate, Sheila Wellington, reports, “Mentors are more important to career success than hard work, more important than talent, more important than intelligence. Why? Because you need to learn how to operate in the work world – whether in a corporation, a professional firm, a nonprofit, a university, or the public sector – and mentors can teach you how.”

Don’t let this opportunity pass! Visit the website soon to fill out a mentor or mentee profile: http://www.gulfcreek.com/AWG/. Mentees must be AWG members.

The website provides a matching process that allows mentors and mentees to each have a choice in the assignment increasing the likelihood of a successful mentoring relationship. The site offers a training tutorial for mentors and mentees, an open access library of mentoring articles, and additional training materials for participants. The site also automates a monthly support program with suggestions for ways to use a mentoring relationship for competency development.

To our knowledge, the AWG Peer Mentoring Center is the first web based mentoring program designed specifically to connect women in a scientific professional organization for coaching or mentoring relationships. Many professional scientific organizations are now embracing mentoring programs for their membership or their student members. Our program combines elements successful in workplace mentoring programs with those from telementoring programs that support students. Our program will teach you about mentoring and support your mentoring relationship.

This is a unique opportunity to enhance your career and help AWG to develop an important new program to benefit our membership. Feel free to contact me with any questions, Elizabeth.pottorff@state.co.us. Thanks!

More information and forms for signing up here. Mentees must be AWG mentors; mentors can be anyone.

(Also, I'm not sure why they don't list the mining industry as employing mentors. If you work with ore deposits and want to help mentor, your expertise might be needed!)

Why so personal?

I had a conversation today with David Brown, who's writing an article about geoblogging for the AAPG Explorer. He asked one question that I really didn't know how to answer: why is my blogging so personal?

I've been thinking about it for the rest of the day, and I think there are a couple answers. The first goes back to the reasons why I blog. Geologists, like other scientists, do their professional communicating using strict (but often unwritten) rules. Scientific writing is impersonal, for good reason: the point is to talk about the observations, the models, the reasons why one explanation is better than the other. The ideas should hold up under examination by many other people. And a scientist should be able to step back from her own pet hypothesis and conclude that she was wrong, if that's what the evidence says. Good science should be free of ego and bias.

But that's an almost inhuman ideal. And, well, it may be a useful process, but it's not what makes me keep working in this field. I do geology because it's beautiful. I love being outside, scrambling through brush, and then looking up and seeing the mountain across the valley, or the potholes in a streambed, and feeling as though the breath has just been knocked out of me. I'm fascinated by the stories hidden in the textures of metamorphic rocks. I like to spin the stage on a petrographic microscope and watch the pretty colors. (Come on. I can't be the only person who does this.) I like the twisted shapes of multiple crenulations seen in thin section, and the smoothness of slickenlines on a fault plane. And I like being confused: walking up to an outcrop and wondering what on earth could have made it like that, and does it really make sense given what everyone else has said about it.

Those aren't the kinds of things that go into a scientific paper. They keep me going through the research, but when the time comes to write a grant proposal or a journal article, I have to put them aside.

Five years ago, I had just been admitted to the hospital to have my son. I was luckier than most women in science: I had accumulated a great deal of experience before my mid-30's, enough so that I got tenure while on maternity leave. If I hadn't, having a baby would have knocked me out of science.* I'm not as strong and determined and efficient as most of the women-in-science bloggers. I slacked off, let the fieldwork slide, didn't publish. Now, I'm working my way back. But I can't do it by simply sitting down and writing an impersonal article. I need to be driven by the sense of wonder, as well.

I started blogging as an outlet for that part of me: the part that finds geology beautiful.

And there's another thing. Being a geologist means that I have an intense sense of place. I'm not from around here, but I live here, and do research here. So I blog about plants, rivers, ice crystals, and whatever else I see, because blogging helps me pay attention to where I am.

(Of course, I may write very personal-sounding posts simply because I'm not a good journalist, and I can't think up universal hooks. So I'm left telling personal stories. Perhaps.)

* You know, it struck me that this could be used as fodder for all those people who think that women shouldn't be hired as doctors or scientists or whatever, because they'll just go and have babies and stop being productive. So, a little more detail about my situation five years ago: I was denied tenure at my first job, in December of 1999. It was like getting dumped, after trying for seven years to become the person that my old school expected me to be. So I was a bit commitment-shy in the first years of my new job: I didn't want to become too attached to the place before I knew that it wouldn't dump me, as well. That meant that I decided I wouldn't start a new research project in a new field area until after I had tenure. And by that time, I had a baby. So, here I am.

scientiae-carnival

Internships, scholarships, and workshops, oh my!

Here are various opportunities culled from my e-mail from the past few days. These start with undergrad opportunities, and then go on to opportunities open to grad students, post-docs, and faculty.

Association for Women in Science Multicultural Internship Program: summer internships in Washington, DC for women undergraduate science majors from underrepresented groups (individuals of African American, Latino/Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander descent).

Summer of Applied Geophysical Experience, a Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Los Alamos National Lab, New Mexico. (A former student of mine was an intern at LANL for a year after graduation, and the experience helped him a great deal in grad school.)

Various Association for Women Geoscientists scholarships. Several chapters give their own scholarships, some for undergrads, some open to grad students. There is also the national Minority Scholarship, open to undergrads nationwide.

On the Cutting Edge workshop deadlines:

Preparing for an Academic Career in the Geosciences, for grad students and post-docs. Deadline is Friday, March 14.

Early Career Faculty, which means in the first four years of a full-time teaching position. Deadline is Friday, March 14.

Teaching Introductory Geology in the 21st Century still has ten slots open, although the deadline passed. The workshop program is starting to come together, and it's going to incorporate discussions of how to reach out to underrepresented groups and how to teach geology in an urban setting. (I'm going to this one.)

Mentoring program for women in geoscience

The Association for Women Geoscientists has a (fairly new, I think) peer mentoring program.
From the Laramide Chapter newsletter:

Expectations and benefits for participants:
As a Mentor…

• You will likely talk by phone or email 2 times per month during your agreed time period… normally 6 - 12 month but relationships can be shorter or longer.
• You will be networking with the next generation… trying out new ideas
• You will gain new perspectives and likely tap into new directions within the profession (regeneration)
• Most mentors report learning new skills in coaching/mentoring and satisfaction of helping someone succeed

As a Mentee…

• You will likely talk by phone or email 2 times per month during your agreed time period… normally 6 - 12 months but relationships can be shorter or longer.
• You can seek direct feedback in a confidential relationship
• A mentor will help enhance your networking skills
• You will be able to tap the career wisdom of the senior members of AWG
• Gain increased skills to self-direct your career
• Together you and your mentor will gain insights into the professional culture
• Most participants report gaining new role models and wider friendships

Benefits of the Peer Mentoring Center

• Fits with adult learning preferences by building on work experience and practical exercises, by providing collaborative support via mentoring relationships, and by offering opportunities for participants to observe their own competencies.
• Builds on best practices and research in adult professional development mentoring.
• Provides easy access to mentoring guides and articles, tools for mentoring, self-assessments, and other resource materials. Materials have been written or assembled by an expert in mentoring research and practices.

A few other pieces of information:

• Anyone* can be a mentor; only AWG members can be mentees (for now).
• They are seeking mentors for both early career and mid-career professionals. (You can't sign up to be both a mentor and a mentee, though. Maybe that will change someday.)
• The interests include lots and lots of things outside academia (writing, management, government, various industries). I suspect that this network may be particularly useful for women seeking jobs outside academia - it can be very difficult to figure out just what the possibilities are, especially when everyone you know is trying to get a job at a research university.
  

*There isn't anything on the registration form that says that one must be a woman to participate. (It also doesn't ask for gender anywhere on the form.) Men can certainly be AWG members, so... well, if you're male and interested, maybe you should contact them and ask about it.

Gender and the geoscience pipeline (or: life as one of the 14%)

I don't have access to Nature Geoscience, so I haven't read the article published there on gender equity in the geosciences (“Gender Imbalance in US Geoscience Academia” by Holmes, O’Connell, Frey, and Ongley, p. 79-82) that Eric and Julia have recently written about. I've read the older "Where Are the Women Geoscience Professors?" report by AWG (and some of the same authors), however, and I've shared a GSA hotel room with one of the paper's authors. (Does that alone say something significant about women in geology?)

Jim asked what the women geobloggers thought, so here it goes...

First, the short answer: I think the best explanation for what I've observed over my career comes from Virginia Valian's gender schemas work. The basic idea is that people's expectations influence their perceptions of others (and of themselves), and these little differences in perception add up. So the statements about "intrinsic female attributes" (such as the ones Eric quotes: 'females in general prefer to teach'; 'females lack self-confidence'; 'females in general have a low interest in the subject matter'; and 'females don’t like field work') are the problems in themselves. Even when they aren't true about a particular job applicant (or woman coming up for tenure, or grant applicant, or paper author), the expectation that they will be true influences the people making the judgments.

It feels to me like I'm constantly having to disprove the same flawed hypotheses, over and over again. (I'm the first woman professor in any of the small schools in western Colorado - there were others on the Front Range, but in the triangle bounded by Colorado Springs, Albuquerque, and the greater Salt Lake City area, I was the first.) No, I am not the department secretary. Yes, I can identify rocks. Believe me, it gets old after a while.

Second, the personal experience.

I graduated from college in 1989. Half of the students in my undergrad department were women. One of the four tenured professors was a woman. When I started grad school at Stanford, three of the five new PhD students were women. My graduate advisor was a woman. When I got my first teaching job in 1993 (with PhD in hand, and yes, that was very fast), I was the third woman in a six-person department. Things looked pretty good.

That department now has one woman out of six professors. (And I am not the one.) I've got a lot of stories that I could tell, but perhaps I will just tell two, one about research, and one about teaching.

Research: I heard through the grapevine that I supposedly was only given my PhD because I had gotten a job. (Umm. No. Actually, I hadn't intended to finish in four years, but when I met with my committee after 3.5 years, told them about the two papers I had nearly ready to submit, and asked them what to do next, they told me to finish. I panicked; I didn't feel prepared to take on the job market, especially in January. But I started applying for jobs, and got three interviews and two offers. And, yes, that was unusual. And remember I was the third woman in the department that hired me; I was not an affirmative action hire.)

Teaching: I taught this large lecture non-majors course, and to get discussion going on the first day of class, I asked each student to write a question on a notecard. One of the responses from students was "What's your sign? Who's your daddy?" Another was "Is it true that this is the easiest class on campus?" (I was filling in for another person who normally taught the course, by the way. I wasn't the person responsible for the reputation.) When the teaching evaluations came in, the students said the class was too easy.

I was denied tenure at that job. (By the administration; my department unanimously recommended me for tenure. The problem was with course evaluations in the large intro class and with letters from outside evaluators about my scholarship. I "wasn't excellent enough.")

I got another job, and I've got tenure now. But I'm not the only tenured woman professor in the geosciences with stories to tell. There are women who are incredibly brilliant and talented who have lost jobs, or have been passed over for promotions. Some had children; some, like me, did not. (I had my son after moving to Colorado.)

The academic job market in the geosciences has been extremely competitive in these past twenty years. It's hard for everyone to get the jobs that they want, and the hiring committees have a lot of good people to choose from. The two men who entered grad school with me both are tenured at major research universities, and I think their institutions are lucky to have hired them. They're great people, and extremely talented scientists.

The women I knew in grad school are also extremely talented people. But they aren't, in general, in as prestigious of positions.

The problem isn't the pipeline. There were plenty of women in the pipeline twenty years ago. They were in grad school with me, or they were new PhDs at GSA, smart and exciting. They should be tenured professors now, and leading cutting-edge sessions at GSA. But the demographics at conferences don't seem any different than they were when I started. Lots of women students. Not many women who are established scientists.

I don't think that the problem is entirely structural, either. (*Insert bad joke about faults here.*) Yes, it is incredibly difficult to juggle a small child and new teaching and research responsibilities. But it is even harder when you've also got to disprove flawed hypotheses. ("She's only interested in teaching." "She was only a courtesy co-author on that paper." "She doesn't want to do field work." "She lacks self-confidence." "She was only hired because she's a woman.") Changing the tenure clock to accommodate childbirth only helps if the committee doesn't think less of a woman for taking that option. (Or doesn't assume that the woman should write twice as many papers in that time.)

So what can we do about it? Well, question our biases. (Yes, all of us. Women too.) When we write letters of recommendation, make sure that we talk about women's talents as scientists, not just about how nice they are. When we read letters of recommendation, take "she's a great teacher" as a positive thing, not as a sign that the woman applicant is mediocre at research. And call other people on their biases, especially when we're on hiring or tenure or promotion committees.

It seemed like the work was over in 1989, or in 1993. But it isn't.

rediscovering the joy in field work

I became a geologist because I love to be outside. It's that simple, really. The chemistry lab smelled bad and I couldn't wear my contacts; geology labs involved things like hiking out to a flooding river and watching how it behaved.

But something funny happened on the way to a career. Field work became a drag.

It happened in fits and starts. First it was field camp. The TA hit on me, my field partners on one project spent an entire day saying unpleasant things about their girlfriends, and I simply didn't walk fast enough. And I didn't know the stratigraphy, and I didn't know the fossils, and I didn't carry enough water. I felt incompetent. But I must not have been, because the instructor recommended me for one of those USGS internships for the next summer. And after spending a summer working in geochemistry labs during the week and hiking on weekends, I realized that I really did need the outdoors, regardless of my field camp experience.

So I went to grad school and became a structural geologist. But the field work... was frustrating. I wasn't fast enough. We ran out of food (which is a particularly big deal when you've been dropped off by helicopter for three weeks). I was scared of heights, but I had to keep up with my field partners. Oh, and the rocks were not what they were supposed to be. "The map is not the territory..." especially when the original mapper didn't actually walk most of the ground.

I finished my PhD, despite actively loathing it by the end, and got a job (which was a pretty amazing feat, given that I thought my PhD was rather unimpressive, and given how much trouble my colleagues had finding work). And the next summer, I needed to find a field project for a student. And I found one, and the problem turned out to be more interesting than I had expected, but it took years to work it out. And every year, the same fear hung over my head: what if I'm wrong about this? What if I can't find the right rocks? What if I can't publish anything? What if I can't get funding? So I didn't much like the bugs, or the thrashing through the brush, or the long drive to the field area, or the negotiations between the bickering students. It was an important part of my life, but it wasn't something that I looked forward to.

And, although the research started going well by the end, the fears turned out to be justified. I didn't get tenure. So I got another job (which, again, was pretty darn lucky, under the circumstances). But this time, I decided not to commit myself to a new field area. I was tired. Tired of thrashing through the woods and finding nothing. Tired of working to learn a new area only to lose my job. Tired of expectations.

Fortunately, the expectations at my current job are pretty low. I'm a competent teacher, and I advised some research students, and I had enough ideas left over from my previous job that I published a little. Oh, and I co-wrote an instrument grant proposal, and it got funded. I guess that probably counted for a lot. Anyway, I got tenure despite not really having an active field area.

And I had a baby in there, as well. The first couple summers, the physical demands kept me home, and then the emotional demands kicked in. And, honestly, the kid made a good excuse. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I didn't have any collaborators (either students or faculty) to brainstorm with, and it was very easy to live down to low expectations.

But finally the ideas started finding me. A grad student working in the area shared his conclusions with me, and one of his samples made me curious. So I talked an undergrad into looking at the rocks with me last summer, and she's going to work on them for her senior thesis. And for the past two weeks, we've been going out into the field to look for more samples.

Except that we ran into a few problems. The interesting rocks are in a wilderness area, on the opposite side of a small river from the main trail. I thought we would be able to cross the river on a bridge on private property, but it turns out that we would also somehow have to scale a major cliff with our backpacks. The property owner offered to let us use her horses later in the summer, when she finishes bringing them up to the high country and when the river is lower. But for now... we couldn't wade it, and we broke a canoe paddle trying to get across in a boat. So we put off that part of the work, and just spent some time doing reconnaissance on some related rocks.

And it was so cool. We hiked long days, we carried heavy packs, we scrambled up cliffs, we got rained on, we forded snowmelt streams, we headed back early because the strong winds were blowing down trees... and we looked at rocks, and compared observations, and saw things that hadn't been discussed by previous mappers, and brainstormed ways to test competing models, and tried to figure out ways in which some previous conflicting observations could be reconciled. And it was beautiful. The smell of the pines after a rain, the sound of rushing water, and the look of river-sculpted metamorphic rocks.

I don't know why, suddenly, it was so much fun. Maybe because the pressure was off, finally. No PhD qualification looming, no threat of tenure review, not even the fear that my student wouldn't have a thesis -- she already has some rocks from last summer, and this is an undergrad project. Maybe it was because there weren't any men along, and there wasn't this constant sense of having to prove how tough or competent I am. Maybe it was because I had been away from it for a long time, and there's nothing like a few summers dealing with office politics to make dirty socks seem like the most wonderful thing in the world.

But it doesn't really matter. Because for right now, for this particular moment, I'm enjoying what I do. And a year ago - even six months ago - I couldn't say that.

the rheology of women in science

I'm multitasking, bouncing between reading a classic structural geology article, brainstorming possible speakers to invite to campus next year, and mulling over the implications of Virginia Valian's tutorials about gender schemas and science (mentioned in this month's Association for Women Geoscientists newsletter). And it struck me: the experience of women in science (and, according to Dr. Valian's work, a lot of other fields, as well) feels like strain hardening.

Rocks may seem solid when we stub our toes on them, but rocks actually can change shape in a lot of different ways. There's brittle behavior - breaking rocks. That's fairly familiar - my four-year-old has even been experimenting with brittle behavior by dropping rocks onto one another and watching them smash into little pieces. Brittle behavior is responsible for things like earthquakes. Rocks near the earth's surface are brittle.

And then there's a whole suite of ductile deformation mechanisms -- ways in which rocks change shape without breaking, the way Silly Putty does. There's pressure solution, in which minerals dissolve because they've been pushed against one another too hard. There's Coble creep, which sounds kind of like somebody you would avoid sitting next to at lunch, but which really is just a way in which atoms move through the space between mineral grains. It's like pressure solution without the water. And there's Superplastic Creep, which isn't really capitalized, but really, how could I avoid capitalizing something that sounds like the ultimate geeky superhero? In superplastic creep, small grains both change in shape (maybe by pressure solution or Coble creep) and slide past each other.

All three of those mechanisms ought to let rocks deform more easily when the rock is made of smaller pieces of stuff - they should experience "strain softening," in which deformation gets easier as time goes by.

But there's one deformation mechanism that behaves in the opposite manner, and it's an important one: dislocation glide. Dislocation glide sounds like something that ought to be easy and graceful. And maybe it is, for a little while. Dislocations are lines where crystal lattices are contorted, and they're supposed to actually be easier places to break and reform bonds than is possible in a perfect crystal. And if a crystal had only one dislocation, the dislocation could glide right through from one side to the other, changing the crystal's shape ever so slightly. But crystals have lots of dislocations, and when they try to glide past one another, they get tangled up. (I keep imagining every Olympic ice skating champion for the past 30 years trying to simultaneously do a routine in a small ice rink. Crash. Tangle.) And when dislocations tangle, they get stuck, and it gets more difficult for the crystal to change shape -- the rock undergoes "work hardening."

And it strikes me that women scientists (or women in lots of fields) can experience a kind of work hardening. Valian argues that women constantly face little setbacks as a result of "gender schemas" - expectations about differences between women and men that lead people to overrate men and underrate women. For example, in academia, maybe a woman gets slightly weaker letters of recommendation, and then is hired by a slightly less prestigious institution, and then gets slightly weaker reviews of grant proposals, and gets slightly less funding, and then is less likely to be invited to collaborate on important projects, and then is not invited to participate in an NSF panel or to give invited talks, and then she's a weaker candidate for, say, the Young Scientist Medal at GSA. All those little qualitative things add up to a far weaker CV, and might result in getting delayed promotion, or receiving a lower salary than men, or not getting invited to join the National Academy of Sciences. The molehills become a mountain. But there's more to it than that. Those little things are exhausting, and it's easy to come to believe that, you know, maybe I didn't deserve tenure. Maybe I'm not that great of a teacher. Maybe my research isn't very exciting. They tangle together until the thought occurs: maybe I would make a pretty good stay-at-home mom, even though I'm happiest when I'm out in the field with a student, brainstorming alternate working hypotheses for a rock that doesn't make sense.

Dislocation glide happens under conditions of high differential stress and fairly low temperature. But with higher temperature - with just a little more energy - dislocations can "climb" - they can move out of each other's way and let the deformation continue. The work doesn't get easier with time, but it doesn't get harder, either. It reaches a steady state (which sounds really Zen, doesn't it?) as dislocation creep (which doesn't sound very Zen).

And I wonder. How much energy, exactly, is necessary to achieve the steady state of dislocation creep in the work world? And, well, will somebody figure out how to add water to the system so that pressure solution can take over? Because there are definitely times that I would prefer to dissolve away and precipitate someplace where the stress is lower.