Welcome to the Dollhouse

….is a film about the brutal and Kafkaesque experience of a girl in junior high school (in America). It basically portrays how cruel kids can be to each other. Dawn Wiener (aka “Wiener Dog” to her classmates) is the central character who is psychologically tormented by both family members and classmates primarily because she is somewhat nerdy, unattractive, and exudes a “victim vibe” that seems to attract bullying.

I often think about this film whenever I contemplate how things in the workplace/field of science are not much different from the schoolyard.

We’ve all (male and female) experienced instances in which we are not treated with respect. For women in science, however, disrespectful and unequal treatment is fairly insidious and very difficult to articulate, much less prove.

I realize that some women, particularly younger women, entering the field of science think that all these “feminist” problems were solved back in the 60s. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. A number of recent reports suggest that female scientists still lag far behind their male counterparts (see previous posts). The fact that many members of the new generation of female scientists seem unaware of this is quite disturbing.

There are many reasons for lack of progress, which include lack of mentors, family-work conflicts, and others. The point is that we have enough obstacles without having to deal with subtle discrimination. The point of articulating recurring problems is not to complain or whine about unfair treatment, but to raise awareness in both the potential victim and the (sometimes well-meaning, but clueless) perpetrator. And possibly this articulation will suggest ways of dealing effectively with these situations so that we can concentrate on more important things.

So, over the past few months, I’ve been collecting examples of ways in which female scientists are marginalized, discouraged, or undermined. Some of these are from my own experience (some as recent as this month), some have been forwarded to me by other female scientists, and others have been gleaned from blogs written by female scientists.

What I find interesting is the similarity among examples reported by other women. In the past, the ways that women (and other minorities) were discriminated against were quite consistent and blatant. It seems that although the means are no longer so blatant, there are still consistent themes.

Here is my list so far (in no particular order):
1. Deja-vu: You make a valid point, but it is ignored. Later (sometimes minutes after), someone else (usually male) poses the same idea and only then is it acknowledged by others. This is a direct putdown of you and your ideas.
2. Do I Exist?: A male member of a group consistently ignores you in meetings, looking only at other males in the group and directing questions or comments to everyone except you. No, it’s not your imagination.
3. Alpha Male: A male scientist tries to get you to turn over your dataset or method (that you’ve spent years or your career developing) to them, with no offer of collaboration. This often happens right after you give a presentation. The implication is that you do not know what to do with such excellent data; whereas he, the alpha male, does.
4. Subordinate (Insecure) Male: A male, typically a lackluster scientist, upon hearing about your research, announces that he’s already doing that study or “has the paper ready to go”. In fact, he doesn’t. He’s just threatened by someone who has actually completed work he wishes he had done.
5. We All Look Alike: You are often confused with other female scientists (despite major differences in appearance). This behavior is a dead give-away that you are not considered to be an individual, but a member of a group of “not-so-important others”.
6. Misplaced Chivalry: Men frequently offer their help in telling you how to do something or even try to intervene physically (even if it is your job or your project). When you politely decline their assistance, they protest that they are only trying to be nice, helpful, etc. Actually, they are undermining your authority (whether consciously or not).
7. Inappropriate Comments: Women are more frequently judged based on their appearance than men. People feel free to comment on your appearance, often in the context of an overall assessment of your abilities.
8. Call Me Dr.: You are frequently referred to as “Miss”, “honey”, “young lady”, or titles other than your correct professional title (Dr.). If you think this is the result of ignorance, ask yourself if your male colleagues with Ph.D.s are often mistakenly called “Mr., Boy, “Little Guy”, or “Sonny”.
9. Boy’s Club: You hear about a lunch or meeting that you were not invited to or an email that was sent to all your male colleagues, partners, or coworkers, but somehow you were left off the list of correspondents. Once is an oversight. Twice or more is a pattern.
10. Territorial Imperative: Other male scientists attack your work like a pack of wild dogs pouncing on an innocent rabbit, making outrageous accusations and hinting at your incompetence. Some write nasty letters to you, telling you how you misinterpreted your data. A few call you to demand that you stop working on THEIR TOPIC. Others write directly to journals trying to get your papers withdrawn. Still others actually go to your field site in an attempt to collect data to refute your previously published research that disproved their pet theory.

We can deal with isolated incidents or slights by ignoring them; but when they occur regularly, it gradually eats away at our confidence. The frustration can even lead us to subvert our principles (so as to be accepted by the crowd) or even behave like our tormenters.

Which brings us back to “Welcome to the Dollhouse”. The film is a spot-on portrayal of human behavior in an unrelentingly hostile environment. Dawn Wiener is so starved for acceptance that when a bully orders her to meet him after school so that he can “rape” her—she actually shows up for it. The bully is also abused, and so on…

Cruel and Unusual?

“The writing in this paper is pedestrian and plodding.”

“The author shows minimal understanding of this topic, and this paper actually moves the field backwards twenty years.”

“The approach used in this study is unimaginative and the experimental design contains serious flaws.”

“This author has no idea how to write a proper abstract.”

Sound familiar?

Part of being a scientist is dealing with criticism. If it’s constructive criticism, the comments will help you prepare a better article or other science product. I get annoyed when someone fails to thoroughly critique my paper and instead offers platitudes: “This is a great paper—I can’t find anything wrong with it.” Well, I doubt that anyone has ever written something that could not be improved upon. Such comments don’t help you.

On the other hand, some reviewers, editors, and others are less than nice in delivering critiques of your work. They may even make unfounded statements or raise ‘red herrings’ that are difficult to rebut and waste your time.

Students are rarely taught formally how to deal with private reviews, much less public criticisms. In the previous post, I described some ways to deal with public criticism (letters to the editor or a formal comment on a published work). Most scientists go through their entire careers without having to deal with such criticisms. Actually, I find that the more novel, surprising, interesting, and controversial papers are the ones that are publicly attacked most often. So, in a way, these are compliments.

The contents of letters to the editor or comments are often not unlike the criticisms raised in reviewer comments. They point out erroneous statements, failure to cite the relevant literature, methodological flaws, poor writing, etc. The key message in the previous post for dealing with criticism was to respond only to the scientific aspects and ignore any personal or other comments that caused an emotional reaction in you. It's difficult to ignore these things, but it will pay off in the end.

Techniques for Dealing with Aggressive Scientists

A few people have written to describe their experiences with aggressive scientists who, for example, write scathing reviews or letters to the editor about published papers with which they disagree. Although most journals strive to “tone down” the vituperative nature of some of these writings, this is not always entirely successful.

Also, any scientific paper can be picked apart on various conceptual, methodological, or statistical grounds. This is mainly because scientific articles are at best simplifications of the full suite of questions, approaches, and interpretations one might include in conducting a research project and in preparing the article.


In addition, editorial restrictions on article length limit the details that one can include to explain the array of considerations that went into the decisions made in the course of the study and manuscript preparation.

In other words, in writing scientific articles, we often find ourselves open to attack on many grounds.

How do you deal with an attack on your work? In this post, I focus specifically on the most public of attacks: the letter to the editor or a formal comment. How you respond to such an attack is crucial to your reputation as a scientist, because all of your colleagues will see the exchange in print, and both the criticism of your work and your reply will be publicly available to anyone (including your employer).

In general, you must understand first what the journal wants. Most editors want to publish a reply that is of interest to the readers. They could care less whether your feelings have been hurt or whether the author of the critique has a personal vendetta against you. They are only interested in the SCIENTIFIC aspects of the interchange. The more you stick to the science, the better you will look in the long run.

If you have a strong need to rant, then I suggest you talk to a trusted colleague or write out all your emotional reactions in a letter that you never send. Get it all out of your system.

Now you are ready to deal with the situation and deliver a devastating reply.

The key point you want to keep in mind in preparing your reply is what your objective is: to expound upon your work and how important, exciting, and insightful it is. Look at this as a golden opportunity to elaborate on your original paper and at the same time derail your attacker.

This often proves to be ridiculously easy. Most of the people who write such letters (and many of them never see the light of day) are insecure and try to compensate by attacking anyone they perceive as a threat to their status. This means that they typically cite their work ad nauseam in their letter/comment. What this approach does is open the door for you to critique their work in your reply.

If you are lucky, your attacker will be a mediocre to poor scientist, and you will have lots of fodder from which to choose. This does not mean you should do a tit for tat rebuttal, but a creative assessment/review of the literature that happens to include your attacker’s work.

If possible, your reply should be structured so as to characterize the disagreement as being one based on two conflicting viewpoints (yours being the more relevant one, of course). For an example of how to write such a reply, see this Comment and Reply. (I can only point you to the abstracts, but they will give you an idea of how the author replied to criticisms)

In the next post, I will try to outline some steps to writing such a reply.

Photo by Doug Jansen: http://www.pbase.com/dougj

Primitive behavior in males?

This is a continuation of the previous post regarding territorial behavior that seems to be prevalent among the more aggressive scientists. I told a story earlier about a male competitor trespassing on my field site.

Another time, I published a review paper. A male scientist, who had published one of the papers I reviewed, wrote to the journal demanding the retraction of my paper. His argument was that he had already studied this topic and closed the book on it twenty years earlier and that there was no need for any further work (particularly by an uppity woman!). He tried to criticize my statistics (to further question the validity of my work), but in his zeal confused variance with standard deviation. In my reply to the editor regarding this guy’s comments, I calmly pointed out that much had been done in the twenty years since his work and that my paper summarized and analyzed data from many sources, his being only one of many. I also pointed out his apparent unfamiliarity with even the most basic statistical principles. The journal refused to publish his letter or consider retraction (and basically told him to “take a hike”); my paper has been cited many times in the succeeding years.

I’ve since heard several stories from other female scientists who relate similar experiences. In one case, a colleague had studied a particular ecosystem and in her paper had included a species list. One day, she got a phone call from an irate scientist (male) who apparently studied a rare species that was included in her species list (not a focus of her study). He told her that this was “his species” and that she could not work on it. She assured him that she had no interest in “his species”.

Another colleague tells of a male coworker scrutinizing a recently published paper of hers and then reporting to her supervisor the occurrence of several “errors”. She was able to show that this coworker was mistaken about these “errors”, but her supervisor remained annoyed with her, not the coworker.

I’m sure these things happen to male scientists occasionally, but so far I’ve not found any who have experienced such extreme territoriality from other males. If you have such a story, I’d really like to hear it.

The Territorial Imperative

Imagine you have an opportunity to conduct research in a specific wetland in a remote location and subsequently spend years studying that particular ecosystem and publish several papers on your work. You have permission to work in this particular site and have established permanent plots that you plan to continue monitoring in the years to come. You then hear that another researcher (senior male) has traveled to your study site (without permission) to specifically gather data to “refute” your earlier findings. Sound unbelievable? Well, this happened to me a number of years ago.

The way I found out was that this person presented their findings at a major conference and even reported his intent at the beginning of his talk. He had published a couple of papers earlier on the topic, so apparently felt that this was “his field”. Several colleagues in the audience told me about it later (I was not at the conference). They also reported that the presentation and the data this guy presented were so lame, that no one had the heart to challenge him (Huh?). He never published any of these data. But I always wondered if his efforts to attack my work were due to a sense of “territoriality”. Did my being female have anything to do with his sense of entitlement and apparent belief that he could trespass on my study sites? Does this happen more frequently to female vs. male scientists? To junior vs. senior scientists?

Mistaken Identity

My husband recently ordered a book called simply “Wetlands”. He, of course, was expecting a treatise on our favorite ecosystem, but instead got a novel that has nothing whatsoever to do with swamps and marshes. The amusing part of this story (besides the fact that my husband orders books without checking to see if their content is what he’s looking for) is that the book is actually a novel about an 18 yr old female who is fascinated with her bodily functions and just about everything that polite people avoid discussing (and even thinking about).

The novel opens with the main character, Helen, entering the hospital for anal surgery necessitated by a “shaving mishap”. She is the child of divorced parents and fantasizes about getting them back together, which leads to some of her more bizarre actions in the novel. To keep her mind off the intense pain from her surgery, Helen muses about her anatomy, past sexual/physical encounters (that leave nothing to the imagination), and various personal hygiene practices. Charlotte Roche, the author, proceeds to describe in increasingly disturbing and shocking detail Helen’s sexual adventures and personal habits. At various points, the reader cringes and thinks, "Oh, no. She's not going to do (say) that!"

Just to give you an example, Helen, after her surgery, convinces one of the male nurses to take some photographs of her rear end so she can see exactly what was done to her. She is totally unembarrassed, reasoning that he knows why she’s there on the Proctology ward and has seen it all before. He obliges, and then Helen uses the photographs to quiz her surgeon when he makes his rounds. She takes no prisoners.

The book is apparently causing an international sensation, having sold over 1 million copies in Germany and is being published in 26 more countries. Reviewers are comparing it to "The Catcher in the Rye" and "The Female Eunuch". Others (mostly male) are calling it pornography and disgusting. I found the book to be a hilarious condemnation of Madison Avenue and their vision of women as perfect (we don’t smell, excrete, etc.) and who sell female products to mask our bad odors, leaking bodies, excess fat, and all other features that are natural but somehow repulsive (the underlying message of these advertisements).

My husband hated it. I loved it. Which seems to be the gender pattern among other readers.

I read it in one sitting, marveling at how the author (this is her first novel) created such a complex, interesting, and memorable character. There is an interview with Roche here that is quite good. Notably, Roche, who is the antithesis of Helen, apparently wrote the novel to explore the psyche of a woman who is totally immune to the repressive hygiene industry and to what has been deemed “civilized behavior” by women.

“Wetlands” was a much more effective argument against the misogynistic visions of Madison Avenue than the sanitary, intellectual book I just read: The Beauty Myth (see previous post).

Oh, the original title, in German, is Feuchtgebiete, which translates roughly as ‘wetlands’ or ‘moist patches’, is the fictional town where the novel takes place. It also clearly refers to other types of 'damp areas'.

Wetlands is available as an e-book on Kindle for $9.99 and also on Amazon. Warning: this novel is not for the squeamish.

Odd (Wo)Man Out

At dinner the other evening, one of the women present described an experience she had as a student taking a course in a male-dominated field (forestry and wildlife management). She was not majoring in this field, but wanted to take the course. She was the only female in the class. No one provided her with advice about how to dress properly for field trips, particularly one involving a prescribed fire (in which an area is burned to promote wildlife, for example). She had worn the wrong type of shoes and her feet got somewhat hot/burned. Another dinner guest who had majored in forestry explained that this was the “culture”--to distinguish between those who are insiders and those who are outsiders. A favorite tactic was to fail to provide guidance in preparing for field trips and wait to see who showed up improperly attired.

I too remember taking a forestry course and being the only female. Several of my fellow classmates petitioned the professor to kick me out of the class because I “would slow them down on field trips”. I don’t know what he said to them, but they did not get their way. Of course, they proceeded to make my life miserable on field trips. On the last day of the class, however, the professor (who was a tobacco-chewing “good ole boy”) was telling the class how much he had enjoyed teaching us and said, “Oh, by the way, some of you were concerned about the “young lady” in our midst. You will be happy to hear that she has the highest average going into the final, including field exams.” That was one of my most satisfying moments.

Such “cultures” are rapidly changing, but some apparently live on, albeit in more subtle forms. Often, we are unaware of being the odd person out—that key information is being provided to our colleagues, but not to us; that our counterparts are being paid more or given more resources; that some colleagues are given the benefit of the doubt while we must prove ourselves again and again.