ICWIP: Day 1 - plenary talks

The format of the conference consists of several plenary talks, as well as several parallel workshops. One of the workshops is simply personal professional development, intended to benefit workshop participants. The other four workshop are really working groups that will meet and make conclusions and recommendations about assigned topics: attracting girls to physics, site visits and improving the climate for women, successful proposals and project leadership, and organizing WIP working groups. The US delegation met before the beginning of today's sessions to figure out which sessions to attend: I'll be going to site visits.

The first thing on the program is "Opening Ceremonies," but our delegation did not actually get up and march or dance or anything. Rather, it might have been better named "Introductory Remarks," because several VIPs got up and make short speeches to welcome and open the meeting. Rather than list all the speakers, I want to comment particularly on just a few:

• The chair of the LOC, Prof. Youngah Park, used to be a professor of physics, but successfully ran for office
  as a member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea. So she can now influence public policy with regard to women in science, rather than simply agitating as an academic. How inspiring!
  
• Doyoon Byun, Ministry of the Ministry of Gender Equality in South Korea, mentioned that 5% of Korean GNP will go to R&D: I wonder how that compares to the US?
  
• Elisabeth Giacobina, Director of Research of CNRS in France, emphasized the need for childcare, choosing between career and family.
  

The four plenary talks from the morning were scientific talks by women physics from different countries on different topics. The talks were all very good and extremely interesting, but rather than discuss their science here, I'll focus on their personal stories:

• Prof. Young Kee Kim from Fermilab & U of Chicago: fifth of five girls in her family, with one brother. She credited her parents and teachers for encouraging her studies and treating boys and girls equally.
  
• Michèle Leduc from Ecole Normale Supérieure, CNRS: went to Ecole Normale Supérieure back when it was divided into girls and boys schools, and argued that more girls went into science before it became integrated. Credited her feminist mother for saying that girls should have their own careers.
  
• Minka Ritsch-Marte from Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria
  
• Maki Kawai from Univ. of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan: her mother was a physicist, so didn't see anything unusual about pursuing science. Married and had 1st child as grad student, 2nd child as postdoc, and lived apart from her husband for several years. Noted that being a human being and scientist were not necessarily compatible.
  

ICWIP: Seoul-searching

(You knew I had to make at least one Seoul pun, right?)

Last week, I gave talks at three universities here in Seoul: Sejong, Seoul National University (SNU), and Yonsei.  The basic schedule has been the same: arrive, get oriented, give talk, go out to dinner. There have been varying amounts of pre- and post-talk chatting with people, depending on whether or not I arrived in enough time, and whether or not the custom was to give students time to chat with the speaker.

I had a particularly interesting conversation at SNU, where my host was a woman. We poked some fun at the stereotype that all Korean parents want their kids to become medical doctors or lawyers: apparently the stereotype holds both in South Korea and the United States! Anyway, she thought that this attitude made careers in pure science unpopular in South Korea: people are more interested in practical careers, devoting more interest and resources to technology and engineering than esoteric pursuits like astronomy. It's funny, because even though professors are very highly respected in South Korea, they don't necessarily get paid much. On the other hand, lucrative professions (i.e. lawyering) aren't as well respected, but everyone wants their kids to pursue them anyway. It seems you can have either wealth or esteem, but not both at once.

My impression is that at least in astronomy, women faculty in Korea aren't necessarily doing a whole lot worse than their US counterparts. I didn't get the sense that the departments I visited had any lower representation of women faculty than the US. Then again, it's a pretty small sample size: I only saw the three departments, and each has less than 10 professors. Then again, perhaps if the field was more competitive, it might be more of an issue. Certainly there were plenty of female students in all the departments I visited. Then again, most of the students seemed to be undergrads.

I also had an interesting conversation with my mother's best friend from college, who is a retired professor herself. She noted that South Korea's population is aging rapidly, and complained that people these days just weren't interested in having babies. I noted that perhaps women would be more willing to have babies if Korean society weren't so insistent on traditional gender roles. She told me that it sounded like the sort of problem which needs a lot of social activism, so even though she worries about these kinds of issues, she's too busy to spend time doing anything about it. And really, who does? When you're busy with your day-to-day work, keeping up your house, taking care of the kids, and whatever else life chooses to throw your way, it's that much more effort to fight against cultural attitudes, which is a lot like trying to fight smoke with a sword. However, someone needs to fight that battle, and perhaps the first battle is to figure out what a better weapon might be.

It's been extremely interesting comparing and contrasting cultural attitudes in Korea versus the US, and I look forward to hearing about other countries at the ICWIP meeting this week, too.

ICWIP: Day 0

I checked in to the hotel and registered for the ICWIP today. At the reception, I met up with several members of the US delegation, many of whom had arrived just within the hour. I was impressed that they were still standing.

We decided to go out for dinner together to start to get to know each other. Now, despite having been in here in South Korea for a week and a half now, I hadn't been to this part of Seoul before and my Korean is merely passable, not great. Anyway, we ended up at a barbecue place, which wasn't so good for the vegetarians, but they made do with bibimbap. I kept not quite understanding the waitress, and finally she got fed up and demanded why the heck I had such trouble understanding, and I apologized and explained that I'm really from the US so my Korean isn't that great, and that seemed to smooth things over.

So that's my story about international relations for tonight.

Back again

Well, my regular blog at http://youngstellarobject.net is experiencing technical difficulties, again, which will be unresolvable until Monday at the earliest. Something about being in a foreign country makes solving technical difficulties stateside difficult.

Anyway! I'm here in Seoul, South Korea to attend the 3rd International Conference on Women in Physics which I'm totally psyched about! I had planned to blog about it all along, which is why I'm all grumpy about my blog server being down, but glad I have this here backup blog instead.

Stay tuned, more will follow. If I have the time, perhaps I'll even blog some about the week and a half I've already spent here.

Back from the dead

youngstellarobjects.net is back online! w00t!

Blogtrastrophe

Good thing I never got around to deleting this blog, because it may just come in handy right now.

Due to catastrophic server failure, youngstellarobjects.net is temporarily down. I'm not clear about how to get the word out, and not quite web-savvy enough to figure out how to redirect that url to here until things are back to normal.

Anyway, here's hoping the interruption will be brief.

Changing with the Times

I've changed a lot over the years. Once in a while it will hit me: I've become a grown-up with a job and kids and mortgage payments, and not a carefree teenager anymore, although from the inside I don't feel like I've changed much at all in the past 15 years. Unsurprisingly, many of the biggest changes are correlated with major steps on the academic ladder: high school to college, college to grad school, grad school to postdoc.

A lot of the changes I've gone through in the past relate to scientific knowledge and sophistication. To illustrate what I mean, I'll relate it to the way graduate students give talks:

• 1st and 2nd year students give too much background information because that's all they know.
  
• 3rd year students have learned that they can skip some background information because everybody knows that stuff.
  
• 4th years skip too much background because they assume that if they know something, everyone must know it too.
  
• The 5th year and beyond is all about recalibrating.
  

Hopefully by the time a student finishes, they've adequately calibrated how much background to give, but don't count on it.

One of the members of my thesis committee once gave me the following advice: When you start out, you have an idea, and you hold onto it because you're afraid you'll never have another good idea again. By the time you're where I am, you have all these ideas, and you start giving them away because you have no time to work on them yourself. That's when you know you're ready to be a professor.

Another friend of mine created a whole theory about it, called bogosity theory. Bogons, which are packets of esoteric information, are emitted by professors. Students absorb these bogons. Gradually, they absorb more and more of them and become grad students. Eventually, their absorption rate slows, and they begin emitting bogons as well. Finally, they become full bogon emitters, or professors, in their own rights.

If that's really all it's about, the the spontaneous generation of ideas, then I feel like I'm totally ready to be a professor. I could really use a small army of minions grad students. However, it isn't just about having good ideas. It's as much about politics and networking and self-promotion and schmoozing as it is about writing papers and winning grants. My postdoc years have been a lot about becoming savvy about self-promotion and trying to get over being an introvert.

This is where I see being a woman becomes a real disadvantage. At earlier stages, it's easier to argue that it's all about the quality of research. But when it comes time to apply for faculty positions and tenure and all that, it's more about the impact of your research. This is where the networking comes in: you gotta give talks, go to conferences, talk important people up, promote your ideas, yadda yadda. You need to find people who will promote your ideas for you as well: advisors and mentors. Then social conditioning comes into play. It's hard to break into the old boys' network. Heck, it can be hard to speak up when you're talking informally in a group where you're the only woman. It's hard to get over the social conditioning that says you should be quiet and meek, and someday Prince Charming will notice that elegant but little-cited paper of yours and swoop in with a job offer on a silver platter.

I am hoping, really really hoping, that in the job cycle next year or the year after, I will land a tenure-track job. If I can't line up a tenure-track position after this postdoc, my career as an astronomer will pretty much be washed up. I know that even after that, I won't be able to rest on my laurels until I get tenure, but I'd rather not think that far ahead just now. It seems difficult enough just to clear the next hurdle.

scientiae-carnival