I think my paper might be held prisoner, but I don’t know why or when its sentence will end.

We have this result that’s pretty cute, but our first choice journal returned it without review as not hot enough.

So I thought a bit about where to send it, and since it was written as a letter and honestly should be a letter, I decided to send it to a professional society journal that has a letters section and that has a flavor similar to the original journal.

It’s been a month and nothing, except that someone looked at it at the start of week 3 and changed its title. The status says it’s still with the editors,  so it wasn’t sent out for review yet. (For reference, in my field the expectation is that an editor will do something in no more than a week. Occasionally it’s longer, but that’s an exception rather than the rule.) I have sent a couple of email inquiries, and nothing. My last email even said,  politely, “$hit or get off the can,” as in, if you don’t want it, fine, let us know so we can go elsewhere. Still nada.

I worked with the assigned editor before while he was at another journal, where I publish often, and he was always slow and very invasive (he’d change titles and make us change font in figures, things like that). I was so happy when he left that journal, because he was a veritable hurdle for my work in a specific area — not even negative, just slow and very anal. Now he’s at this new journal and he definitely hasn’t gotten any faster in responding. The new journal publishes some good papers, but it hasn’t lived up to its promise — I bet people never wanting to send there again, like I’m feeling now, has to do with it. You can’t have a high-impact-factor journal in my field if it takes you a month to even touch a paper.

My student is getting antsy; he wants his paper published, and I understand that. In most other journals, we’d already have the reviews in or would be close to getting them.

At this point, I am inclined for my next communication to simply be a notice of withdrawal. The question is how long to wait. Another week?

What say you, blogosphere? What have you done in the past in the case of nonresponsive editors who seem like a black hole for papers? 

Over the past few months, I have made some notable mistakes in how I spend my time and energy.

***

I participated in a funding-agency panel, led by a program manager who’s not funding me. At the same time, I had a bunch of proposals to mail-in review for a program manager at another agency, who is actually funding me. I prioritized the review of the proposals for the panel and was late a few days with review of some of the proposals in the mail-in batch.

Why was this a bad idea? The program manager on the panel was not at all interested in what I had to say, and was visibly annoyed with me whenever I opened my mouth.  I think he envisioned I would just silently fill the double-token position (theory plus female). I put a lot of effort into the reviews for this panel, and I prepared really well to present the proposals where I was the lead, but I don’t think it mattered (except perhaps for the potential awardees); the program manager was not impressed. Sure, I met some nice panelists and I read some nice proposals. (Btw, all the cool kids are using 11 pt Times New Roman for proposals.) But, I could have and should have just stayed home, because this program manager will never give me any money.

For this, I was late with the proposal review for the program manager who has been unfailingly supportive for years, both with money and with giving me high-visibility service, and who has been very appreciative of my work and contributions.

I will never again so stupidly prioritize the work for the people who haven’t already shown me support or kindness over those who actually have.

***

All the proposal reviewing has cut into my publication plans. I postponed the submission of a couple of papers in order to deal with the review load, and all  I have to show for it is… A bunch of not-yet-submitted papers and a bad taste in my mouth because I ended up going to the stupid panel.

***

As I wrote before, instead of working on a proposal, I am finishing up a paper from hell for the conference proceedings.

I am only stuck doing this because I promised I would give a talk to an industry colleague, and from there on this talk has been a gift that keeps on giving (not) — it seems ever more money and more time of mine keeps sinking into this favor.

I must become ridiculously discriminating about the conditions under which I am willing to give an invited talk.

***

Ever since much (all?) of NSF went to a single submission window for unsolicited proposals, and with restrictions to only submit one per cycle to a given division, people have been creative about finding ways to target multiple programs.

Last year, I received good reviews for one of my proposals, but no money. There was not  much I could improve, and from the program manager’s feedback I figured they simply didn’t want to fund that type of work. But, there was another program where the proposal would nominally fit. Unfortunately, over the past few years, the interim program manager there was extremely discouraging of the type of work similar to mine. Finally, a new, longer-term person took that position, and is again welcoming the proposals akin to what I do. This new manager gave me very specific feedback and encouraged the submission to his program in the fall 2016.

What’s stupid about all this is that a colleague from another institution wanted us to write a collaborative proposal to the same program and I went with that instead. The joint proposal was a ton of work and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it turned out that well. I also got stiffed in the budget. I would love for us to get funded, but I am not holding my breath.

So I blew my annual shot at this program by prioritizing what turned out to be a not particularly strong collaborative proposal over a very good, polished proposal of my own.

***

Working on this collaborative proposal ended up being way more time than I had envisioned and had cut into my single-PI submission to a different division. The latter turned out okay, but could have used another week of polishing.

So the less-than-great collaborative proposal ended up being in the way of not one, but two of my single-PI proposals.

***

The common theme is that I am not self-serving or discriminating enough when people want my time and effort. Yeah, I know I write about this a lot… It’s a work in progress.

I am miffed with myself for making some of these stupid choices, which ended up with more unnecessary work for me, took me away from the much needed relaxation time, yet will not only fail to benefit my career, but have explicitly thwarted other important maneuvers.

Weak, xykademiqz. Your game is weak.

The (faux) field of credit dynamics studies the motion of intellectual attribution in scientific collaborations.

The first and second laws of credit dynamics are:

1) A vast majority of readers mentally attribute each research paper to just one of the authors in the author list.

2) The attribution of a scientific paper always flows toward the most famous author in the author list, regardless of who actually conceptualized or did the work, or where the best-known author is in the author list.  

Corollary 1:

Even though you, as a graduate student or postdoc, did all the work and are first author, everyone likely thinks the paper is your advisor’s intellectual baby anyway.

Corollary 2 (lies at the intersection between the field of credit dynamics and the field of patriarchal bull$hit studies):

If the case of similar seniority and fame, the credit will always flow towards the male and away from the female scientist. A sizable offset in seniority and fame has to exist in favor of the female over the male contributor in order for the community to start attributing the work to her and not him. 

***

From Corollary 1 follows that, when you are a brand new assistant professor and you write your first few grants, those grants cannot be proposing trivial extensions of the work you did in your PhD or postdoc group. Why?

First, those papers are not really your papers. They are mentally attributed to your famous PhD/postdoc advisor, even if you feel ownership of them 100%. You have to come up with something that will be your niche, not the next 3-4 papers that you would have done had you stayed there for an even longer postdoc.

Second, I have seen many junior faculty spend tremendous amounts of time writing many, many grants that will all get dinged in review as too incremental, because the proposed work looks like it could just as well be done in the PI’s former lab, and much faster anyway.

The following seem to be some of the biggest issues people face when they become PIs, especially if they trained in famous labs:

a) The new PIs overestimate how highly they are really regarded once they are no longer basking in the glow of the advisor’s big name.

b) They overestimate how much they can do with their own startup package, a brand new lab, and brand new students while, honestly, not knowing yet how to really do the PI job, because all they know is a flush, well-equipped lab, full of experienced people and working like a well-oiled machine.

c) They view the work the same way they did as postdocs, looking at the next several experiments and a handful of papers, rather than realizing that their job is to develop an entirely new research program for the next decade or so, and with an often modest initial budget.

When you are a new PI, with untrained graduate students and limited resources, you have to think much harder and smarter than before. You have to think at least 5 nontrivial steps beyond the obvious extensions of your PhD/postdoc work. You have to develop a unique style in picking interesting problems to work on. The problems you choose to work on better not be of the low-hanging-fruit variety, because with a group that’s both untrained and small, you are unlikely to get to the easy pickings first.

I am midcareer and I still revel in identifying a hard, perhaps long-standing open problem and solving it by relying on my group’s unique expertise, much more so than I care for being yet another participant in the latest fad. While the latter yields more citations in the shorter term, the former warms my heart and is, I believe, ultimately a much better justification for me having a place in science at all.

A colleague from industry is co-organizing a fairly major conference in his field. He invited me to give a talk in the session he’s in charge of. I said sure, mostly as a favor to him. But, it turns out that I am responsible for all the expenses, including registration, and it’s not a conference I would normally go to. Okay, I can live with that, although the money is not trivial and I could have spent it differently. But, being that this is an important conference with considerable industry presence, showing my face there won’t be a total loss, and the networking will hopefully mean better job prospects for my students.

Then, at the eleventh hour, I find out that there is a mandatory paper to write.

I know there are fields like CS, where conferences are the primary mode of knowledge dissemination. In contrast, in my field and many others, conference papers are virtually irrelevant; they get neither read nor cited, yet they persist as a myth of relevance in certain old-fashioned subareas, so I occasionally get blindsided, like I just did, into writing a paper I don’t give a toss about. However, the paper cannot completely suck, since it’s going to be on the web for posterity, so I am now spending my weekend writing a full-length paper for a conference I don’t care about, when I should be working on a proposal or, you know, actually having a weekend off once in a blue moon, like normal people.

At this point in my career, the answer to “Would you come and give an invited talk?” is mostly:

Thanks for the invitation, but before I can respond, please let me know which expenses you plan to cover (e.g., registration, lodging, travel).

Apparently, I now also have to add:

Do I actually have to do any of the following:
— have the talk recorded;
— make slides available to the organizers ridiculously early (i.e., more than 15 min before the talk; have you actually ever met an academic?); 
— make my slides available on the web for posterity; 
— write a paper (that I don’t want to write and that nobody will read)? 

Grading and despairing… The following comes to mind, as I look at all the instances of the abomination that is the axis with two arrows:

 

 

Yesterday, I looked up a former classmate of mine, B. We were in high school together; I haven’t really thought about her since we graduated. She is now a pediatrician back in my home country.

When we were in high school, she was what we used to call (loosely translated) a “crammer.” A crammer would be someone who crams, someone who works really hard at memorization, who just stuffs information into their head, without necessarily asking why or how any of it fits together.

The system I went through was different than in the US. In high school, you’d choose a profile (mine was math and natural sciences), and once you’d chosen a profile, your curriculum was set. In math and physics, we had tests, but we also worked on the board in front of the class. I distinctly remember her (and several other people, of both genders) really struggling to set up and solve problems. I don’t think she was dumb, but she put in enormous amounts of effort and still could never get an A in either math or physics, even though she had all other As.  I also remember a couple of other people whose GPAs were not very  high, but who were good at reasoning through math or physics problems.

Why did I think of B?

Because I had the first midterm a couple of days ago in my large undergraduate class. Usually, I hold all-day office hours before the exam, so I got to see a number of students and work through problems with them. And a few reminded me of B struggling on the board.

I am not sure what to do for these kids. They all came in with high GPAs and were among the best students in their high schools, but  a good 60% should not be in this major or any physical science major at all. Yet, here they are, and they are not going anywhere, because their tuition dollars are coveted. I have been trying to figure out how to describe what I see, and it’s not easy. It is a perfect storm of being sloppy, having inadequate math background despite having cleared all the calculus courses (whenever I see people trying to take the curl of a scalar field, or they tell me that the divergence of a vector field is a vector field, I die a little inside), and just not being willing or able to think things through. All this manifests itself as overarching shallowness. I see these students trying to just somehow quickly tunnel through problems, pulling out equations from the book or memory that make no sense while on the surface seem like they do (i.e., they involve many of the right letters), but the actual thinking is completely absent from the process. There are no words that I say more often in office hours than, “Stop. Don’t rush. Think. What is going on here?” I spend a lot of time in class and discussion setting up each problem: drawing, describing the framework out loud, explaining what each step means and and how it translates to math, then solving the resulting equations. I know I try my best and I assume most of my colleagues in the courses before mine do their best, too. And for many students it all clicks and they do great. But for 60% it doesn’t seem to, almost as if they don’t want it to. They come to office hours not to learn, but to do well on the test. I post practice problems and they don’t even attempt to do any of those unless they have solutions. These kids just speed through everything and just want to be done. As if they deliberately don’t want to retain anything, or as if turning on the brain requires too much energy.

(An aside: It blows my mind how bad people are at drawing. I am not talking about becoming a comic-book artist here. I am talking about sketching simple geometric objects better than my 5-year-old: a circle or an ellipse; a disc, a cylinder, a sphere; a cube — oh, my God, the crimes against art committed on the cube! Very few students can sketch what looks even remotely like a cube in perspective, rather than like something  that Picasso vomited. A surprisingly high fraction never resort to sketching anything, even though, in many courses, visualization is immensely beneficial to  solving problems.)

Our colleagues in the humanities often argue that the humanities courses are necessary in order to instill critical thinking. I feel like we in STEM really try to do the same, but with the help of math. I don’t think we are particularly successful; it’s just that our STEM crammers come out with degrees that on the surface look more employable, even though these degrees — sadly — don’t guarantee that their holders can actually apply reasoning to problems within their discipline.

I have to stop reviewing other people’s stuff.

Raining criticism on people really bums me out. I am in the middle of a panel (yes, again) and just feeling desperate. (It doesn’t help that I am a double token: token woman and token theorist on an experimental panel). Of the batch of the proposals I reviewed, most were really very good: well written, engaging, feasible. But, during discussion, you find that one person’s feasible is another person’s incremental. One person’s exciting and transformative and worth taking a chance on is another person’s unconvincing and needing a third mountain of preliminary data. Ripping apart good proposals so we could justify funding only 15% is a freakin’ slaughter of science. NSF funds good science; it also doesn’t fund probably 3x as much science that’s just as good.

One panelist didn’t give anyone more than a G (E-excellent; V- very good; G – good; F – fair; P – poor) and gave several people a P. G already completely eliminates a proposal from the running. Nobody should get a P, that’s just downright mean; P basically coveys that the reviewer thought you were a total moron. There were several proposals that started with scores like E/V, V, G, P. Seriously, the same proposal is both excellent and poor?

The worst thing about NSF peer review in particular is that the reviewers raise all these issues that may or may not hold water, and you have no opportunity to defend yourself. Even if the reviewer is very wrong, unless someone who understands that is on the panel, was assigned your proposal, and is also not a know-it-all a$$hole, the unfounded criticism stands and sinks a good proposal.

I want to read papers and enjoy them and admire people’s cool ideas. I am tired of hunting for things not said, or tangents not addressed; I am tired of hearing of the minor flaws others hunted down and blew up into fatal weaknesses. I want to believe that most people are serious scientists, and if they have ideas for which they painstakingly collected preliminary data and wrote a proposal on, that they are usually serious, willing, and able to to do the work.

It also makes me desperate in the face of writing more proposals of my own. Somehow, whatever I write, however I write it, it’s just not quite there. People say my proposals are good and that I just have to keep resubmitting, that the successful people wait it out, but what’s the point? If you don’t get funded the first 2-3 times, the field moves on. Formerly competitive proposals get stale.

I’m gonna get some beer at the hotel restaurant, bring it to my room, and work on panel summaries.

As I mentioned before, I am in a subfield with very, very few women. My general field seems not to be quite so bad (even though it’s overall well under 20% women); I have female colleagues in the department whose subfields seem to have more women and be generally supportive of women. Mine seems to be really, really weird. I often complain here that men this or men that, but the reality is that often I don’t know if something is wrong with me individually or if it’s a male/female difference, because there are no women other than me that I could compare with. (I complain about men in my profession a lot, but just in case it’s not clear, let me state for the record: I don’t hate men; quite the contrary. I love men. I love men as much as you could imagine any straight woman who’s also a mom to three boys would love men (that’s a lot, by the way). Which is also part of the reason why all these men, wherever I turn, drive me freakin’ bananas.)

In my smallest subfield (defined as the 300-person community, whose conference I am on the advisory board of and never miss), I am the only senior woman with any sway. There is one woman who’s more senior, but unfortunately for reasons I can’t really discuss here, she’s not held in very high regard and is largely ignored, even though she’s a very capable woman who’s done great work. I try to boost her signal whenever I can, but it’s not enough. There are no junior female group leaders or even anyone on the way to becoming one. The European and Asian groups are all male and they look at me like I’d sprouted a second head if I hint that there’s something wrong with a 50-person sausage-fest research group. The subfield’s footprint in the US is not very large, so there are no other women here either, other than the occasional grad student or postdoc, all of whom eventually vanish.

***

I am slated to be on a grant-review panel in the near future. The panel is on the experimental arm of one of the topics I work on. Every single proposal in the roster is written by one or more men. Every single panelist but me is a man. Maybe I should introduce myself with “Hi, I am Xykademiqz from the University of New Caprica, and I am here to be the token woman for this panel.”

***

However, what prompted this post has to do with papers.

Whenever I submit to Prestigious Society Letters, this is usually what I get:

Referee B, Round 1: There’s nothing wrong with the paper, it’s interesting and correct, I’m just not feelin’ it. It’s just not hot enough or cool enough for PSL. Send it to Reputable Society Journal or More Applied Letters instead. 

I revise, clarify, try to make my case better, bend over backwards to address every single bit of minutiae. I may request an additional or different referee, if I feel one has been particularly hostile.

Referee B, Round 2: Nah. Nice try. Still not feelin’ it.

Because I am not a fan of wasting time, I occasionally do but usually don’t dispute this decision, and I transfer the paper to Reputable Society Journal or More Applied Letters. But, generally, all referees have to be swooning over my paper for it to make it into PSL; if even one of them is unimpressed, it’s a no-go. I have certainly seen the same editor send a paper by a heavy hitter (it’s always a man, of course) to as many referees as needed until one is finally impressed, even though I and another referee both were not, and then have the paper published.

***

A few months ago, a student and I submitted a paper to a journal and one of the reports was just nasty. It basically called us idiots and mistakenly pointed out how we didn’t know how to properly label our own system’s parts. It did point out one correct thing, which is that we claimed was one novel aspect was actually done somewhere we didn’t notice. I felt so ashamed! I am always really very careful that we have a very comprehensive review of the literature, that all the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed, so I was so embarrassed and I felt like I had failed my student that I had allowed us to submit a manuscript in which that one thing was overlooked.

In contrast, about two months ago, two European men wrote a paper and submitted it to PSL. Basically, what they are doing is solving very, very accurately an approximate model; their super-accurate solution is a total overkill, because their model has well-known limits of validity that they don’t seem to appreciate, so all the added accuracy is totally unnecessary. They already published a couple of high-profile papers with the same general idea. Now they wanted to introduce a phenomenon that comes from the overkill solution, gave the phenomenon and some of it aspects specific names, and made a big fuss about it. The problem is that the phenomenon they talk about already exists within a much more broadly applicable and rigorous (and thus complicated) theoretical framework, it already has well-known names for its parts, and the whole thing has been around for over half a century and is definitely not what you would call obscure. They showed a blatant lack of knowledge about the general framework of the field and the applicability of their model. I wrote a collegial but essentially scathing review, detailing the above. If I received such a review, I would retreat with my tail between my legs, and would likely be licking my wounds for a while. I would not attempt to resubmit to PSL at all, or possibly anywhere.

But I now see that they have resubmitted to this high-profile journal (the paper is back with the editors). The authors might have asked for a new reviewer; we’ll see if I get it back. I am dying to see what they could have possibly argued against in my report. I met one of the authors once, and he sure has an enormous ego. I often wish I could have such a giant ego. Where could I get myself one? A giant ego is like a huge marshmallow buffer around you, protecting all of your breakables from the people who try to throw metaphorical punches at you.

I am always polite to referees, and try to address every issue they raised, even if I don’t agree. I am also always impressed when people take the issues seriously and respond carefully and professionally when I am the referee. But I would be lying if I said that I’d never received ridiculous displays of chest-thumping, especially from male scientists with huge egos, in the form of a rebuttal letter. Sometimes I think, “Why do editors even forward this as a rebuttal? This is completely unprofessional.” I have also received equally unprofessional reports myself, and I guarantee that I have never written such a nasty, vicious, dismissive report as I occasionally receive.

I wonder how many people are just assholes (in which case, why do we collectively let them get away with it?) versus how many get this macho need to dress down a paper written by a woman, who seem to get off on showing me my place.

(I can’t even think how often the same thing happens in panel reviews. I dare not think, because I have two proposals in review, and will write another one that’s due in a month.)

***

Sorry I am such a downer on the blog these days, but this is what’s been on my mind. I suppose this is how you lose women from science. It’s the women like me,  who we’ve been doing this for years, and who stop to ask, “Why the f*ck am I doing this? This is stupid, unfair, and has nothing to do with the quality of science. And why is the world full of chest-thumping a$$holes?” This $hit is like radiation poisoning; it compounds, until you feel so sick that you really have no wish to keep going.

I have loved you, science, for so long, but you don’t really love me back. You usually tolerate me around as long as I don’t make much noise, but when I piss you off — the uppity bitch that I am — because I apply for a grant or send a paper to a journal above my station, you slap me, spit on me, and give me a cold shoulder.

Dear readers, I have a question for you. But first, a bit of information.

This week, I am substituting for a colleague who’s away at a conference and teaching his own large undergrad course. I teach this course often, so lecturing is no big deal. I subbed for the same colleague in the same course a few years ago, when he taught it last.

This colleague is… Not the department’s most coveted teacher. He means well and he prepares, he’s just… Not a very effective communicator. That’s a well-known fact in the department, and we don’t bend over backwards to have him teach undergraduate courses, but he still has to on occasion (and it really makes no sense to effectively reward poor classroom performance by having him teach only graduate courses or undergrad electives). Anyway, this is all to say that I wasn’t particularly surprised that a few students came to ask me, “Could you please keep teaching this course for the rest of the semester?” Flattering, yes, but I obviously cannot, and they know it. I did tell them they could come ask me questions about the course if they needed help.

I have developed an extensive set of lecture notes for that course, and I am pretty sure the colleague uses them to prepare for his lectures (he has all my materials). The last time I subbed for him, I offered the students my lecture notes, they jumped on the offer, so I posted the notes online and gave them a link. The colleague said thanks, but thereafter many students stopped coming to class for him, and I think he blamed it on them having my lecture notes.

From what the students communicated to me this week, they don’t actually have much material to study from. While I am pretty sure the colleague  uses a standard textbook, it seems many students are confused as to what the text should be or if there even is one. I mentioned my notes in class, but then I asked the colleague if he would be okay with me giving them the notes, and he said he’d rather I didn’t. So I didn’t.

But now a couple of students approached me about the notes, and one just asked about them in an email.

This is my question. What do I tell the student who explicitly asked for the notes in an email?

On the one hand, these students pay tuition and I think it’s everyone’s duty to help them succeed as best they can. The students happen to have been exposed to me and would benefit from something that’s easy for me to give away (the notes). However, the colleague said no, so I am not posting them for everyone to see. But I should answer something to the student asking for the notes explicitly.

The options are (not all of them are serious, obviously):
a) send the student a pdf; b) give him a hard copy of the notes; c) either a or b, along with swearing the student to secrecy with a blood oath; d) tell the student I can’t because his instructor said not to; e) tell him I am sorry but I can’t and that the instructor has the notes, and if he feels the class should have them, he’ll post them; f) ignore the question; g) ignore the colleague’s wishes and just give everyone the notes.

I cannot imagine that I would say, to someone offering students an additional resource, “No, please don’t,” unless I thought the source was scientifically misleading or incorrect (which my notes are not). The more resources, the better, especially if they are inexpensive (don’t get me started on predatory publishers, churning new editions of $200 textbooks every two years even though they contain nothing but 200-year-old physics, thereby preventing the students from getting used copies or reselling their own; I know it’s business, but the greed is just disgusting).

What say you, blogosphere?

I declined to review a paper for a Glam Mag after having already accepted, because they’d been bugging me every two days to submit my report. “OMG if you don’t do it in 24 hours we will have to find someone else”!!! So go find someone else and stop annoying me. FFS. As if we are all sitting on our hands here.

***

I have to review 1-2 full proposals per day, every day, for the next two weeks. Don’t ask.

***

I am teaching a large undergraduate required class with no TA support. Again. The undergrads are adorable, but there are ~100 of them. I will die grading exams.

***

I was offered a pretty major professional service role. It’s one that would allow me to have a say in how large amounts of money are to be spent; one that would lead to a multiyear commitment to serve, and would be about a month of additional work per year. It’s an honor to be offered this opportunity, and part of me wants to take it, but most of me is just so exasperated at the thought of having even more work on my plate… All the time away from my kids, even less time for research… Then my husband, who is really supportive of my ever-increasing and ever-more-demanding and varied service, aptly put it, “It might be a good experience to have under your belt, but will be full of pretentious [non-expletive qualifier removed to preserve ambiguity] men… Will you enjoy this?” No. I most definitely will not. And at the end of the day, this is the main reason I won’t be taking this service role. I don’t think I can take such a high concentration of pretentious [non-expletive qualifier] men, talking down at me/ignoring me/generally making me work very hard to be taken seriously over multiple years… Not when I can just say no.

***

I have no wind in my feminist sails left, at least not right now. This coming summer, at least two of the conferences I am involved with have all-male speaker rosters. Sometimes I wait to see if anyone brings up the lack of women among speakers; nobody ever does, because I am the only woman on the advisory board or the program committee. What’s even worse is that, even when I do mention the lack of women speakers, nothing happens anyway.

I am one thinly spread token woman, partaking in way more service than a person should. I cannot be the sole force ensuring diversity across multiple professional communities.

I just want to be left the hell alone and not have to deal with yet another email thread or a conference room chock full of dudes whom I am supposed to gently nudge into thinking of a female colleague, any female colleague, who might be worthy of inviting.

This is a point at which I simply don’t expect anything more.

Somebody else can be the token for a while.

***

It is hard to convince myself that I need to write even better grant proposals when I routinely see all-male proposal rosters when I review. If I am the only woman in a proposal roster, guess how many panelists will feel that the proposal of this unnatural candidate absolutely has to be among the 1 or 2 that get funded? Exactly as many as can think of a woman invited speaker without prodding.

***

Apropos nothing: I love watching Middle Boy’s basketball and swim practices, and he really enjoys having me there. I love watching him and his friends play together as part of a league, and I yell and cheer like the most obnoxious of those dads who pretend to coach from the sidelines. I love watching Eldest and his teammates swim. I don’t care that my kids win, but I care that they give it their all and have fun. But mostly I love to watch them as it cheers me up; it lifts my gloom and brings me joy. Kids’ sports are awesome, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.