Black Lives Matter, and White People Need to Act

It has been a week since #ShutDownSTEM and #Strike4BlackLives on June 10, which was a day to give Black academics in STEM a brief rest and non-Black academics in STEM a time for reflection, education, and planning to eradicate anti-Black racism from our institutions.

Courtesy of header images from WeRepSTEM

Resources and personal experiences poured in through Twitter (especially the #BlackInTheIvory hashtag). The first thing that became immediate is that I have a lot of reading to do. The second thing is simply that reading is not enough. We cannot have this movement end in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year. We all need to work to disrupt the status quo of academia, and there have been calls to action (Michael Eisen’s editorial and Black in Computing’s open letter are just two of many examples). So, in my small way, I’ve made a plan of action.

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Pandemic Edition Part 1

My last post was in the fall, when I was transitioning from sabbatical research to teaching.  Since then, needless to say, much has happened.  Like all institutions that continued teaching, Reed College finished the semester completely online.  I managed to finish my classes and the semester has officially concluded. As for next fall, we will see, but one thing is crystal clear: even in-person teaching will not be like it was.

First, some congratulations are in order:

• Congratulations to all Reed 2020 graduating seniors!  You finished your time at Reed under exceptional circumstances, and we will never fully know how hard that was for each one fo you.
• Congratulations to all Reed faculty and staff who carried off a pretty much successful experience overall, given the situation.
• Congratulations to anyone who completed this year in a way that was safe and kept others from getting sick.

Next, I’m excited to say that undergraduate research is continuing at Reed through remote fellowships, and I have a bunch of students and post-bacs doing computational biology research. Read more about their plans in my kickstarter post on the Reed Compbio blog: Summer 2020 Research | The Pathway Not Taken

Finally, I went back to my creative roots during the pandemic and designed a new compbio lab logo – expect to see it on future posters!

There were numerous challenges this spring, many of which were shared by other colleagues. However, these comprised only a tiny sliver of the hardships that people have faced in the past months.  I’ll write more this summer about how the pandemic has affected research and teaching at Reed. But for now, I feel lucky to be safe and able to continue doing what I love.

 

Sabbatical Part 8

It’s summer, and faculty have submitted their grades, attended their last faculty meeting, and have gleefully moved on to full-time summer research.  Faculty on sabbatical have a few more precious months to wrap up the year’s worth of research projects before returning to teaching.  Sabbatical is not over, but the end is in sight.

The last few weeks were a whirlwind of meetings – first to Memphis, TN to the NCWIT Summit, where I received an Undergraduate Research Mentoring award.  I ate some hot chicken, saw the Grand Ole Opry, and did some novice line dancing.

I then flew to Madison, WI for the Great Lakes Bioinformatics conference.  It was a great meeting – the talks presented new and innovative ideas in bioinformatics and computational biology.  I gave two talks — a research talk on hypergraph connectivity measures for signaling pathway analysis and an education talk on undergraduate engagement in computational biology through conference attendance.  Materials related to these talks will be posted on my website in the next few weeks.

Madison and the University’s campus has changed a lot since I was a kid, but I was excited to introduce the Great Dane Pub to some folks.  I also probably talked about cheese curds more than I should have.  I also caught up with other liberal arts computational biology faculty: Layla Oesper from Carleton, Catie Welsh from Rhodes, and Getiria Onsongo from Macalester.  Undergraduate institutions in the midwest are certainly stepping up their computational biology game!

Summer research is now in full swing, with three students and two post-bacs working on a bunch of different projects.  I’ve also taken advantage of the outstanding (dry!) Portland weather to get back into playing ultimate frisbee – my last sabbatical goal is to not get (too) injured.

 

CMU professors resign due to sexism in the workplace

Yet another example of how sexism can creep into academia: as CMU’s business incubator became more prestigious, its female founder’s role became marginalized.

Read an interview with Dr. Blum in NEXT Pittsburgh: Lenore Blum shocked the community with her sudden resignation from CMU. Here she tells us why.

Coverage from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: 2 CMU computer science professors — including founder of Project Olympus incubator — resign

NIH Funding by Gender – A Rollercoaster Ride

Nature came out with a News article reporting that, for women who land a large NIH grant, their mid- and late-career funding tracks about the same as men.

Leaky pipeline for women scientists dries up after they win first big grant

Sounds promising, right?  But there’s more to the story.  The original article published in PNAS by Lisa A. Hechtman et al, gives more details (including those listed below).

Good news: women now earn more doctorates in the life sciences, comprising 55% of the recipients in 2016.  This trend has held since 2006, according to the NSF’s statistics.

Data plotted from NSF Table 14: Doctorate recipients, by broad field of study and sex

Bad news: according to the same table, the gender gaps are still large for physical & earth sciences, math & CS, and engineering.

Data plotted from NSF Table 14: Doctorate recipients, by broad field of study and sex

But that’s for another post.

Bad news: despite the gender parity in doctorate recipients, women are underrepresented among assistant professors (even accounting for a postdoctoral research delay).

Bad news: women submit less than one-third of NIH research proposals, according to the NIH.

NIH Research Project Grants by Gender

 

Good news: women who do submit NIH research proposals are as successful as men in obtaining first-time grants.

Good news: the paper studied “funding longevity” among first-time grant awardees between 1991 and 2010, and found that women’s success in securing funding over their careers in this cohort were nearly as good as men (there’s still a gender gap, but it’s small).

Bad news: other gender differences exist when comparing men and women in this cohort of investigators, though the differences are smaller than the previous numbers.  For example, women are less likely to attempt to renew grants and are less successful in the NIH grant renewal process, which is a factor that leads to sustained funding for both genders.

So a mix of good news and bad news, some signs of progress, and indications of where career support may stop the “leaky pipeline.”

Twitter

An online presence has become an important professional networking tool, and offers a low-stakes way to connect with the public. The social media giant Twitter has been leveraged for this purpose, and articles at venues such as PLOS Biology and AAAS have promoted Twitter and other social media for use by scientists.  At a time where we increasingly emphasize Open Science and Open Data and manuscript preprints are becoming commonplace (even in biology), Twitter is yet another way to communicate your research quickly.

Me, crawling out from under a rock.

So, I decided to join Twitter (@anna_m_ritz).  I know, I’m slow to the game.  Joining is like jumping off the high dive — social media is something I was used to doing a long time ago, and something I can do again but it’s going to take some work.  I’m getting the hang of it — the following, the liking, the retweeting, the tweeting — and I was struck by some immediate reactions. Naturally, I thought I’d write a blog post.

 

I immediately felt more connected to my scientific community.  Reading tweets about scientific accomplishments (preprints, talks, posters, publications, grants, awards) and frustrations (data availability, proposal rejections, sexism in STEM) put these ideas in the context of happening right now.

Twitter is the place to advertise, even in science.  This means tweeting your recent manuscript, a new postdoctoral position in your lab, or an upcoming talk at a meeting.

There is so much to catch up on.  My list of bookmarked tweets of relevant preprints grows by the day.  I’m comforted by the fact that these preprints are papers I’d see months from now and need to read then. So I’m saving my future self time…?

Most of the people I follow are men. For now.  This is depressing, and came about because I started with following my computer science colleagues who are, let’s face it, mostly men.  I’ve been seeking out women in the field to follow, and hope to achieve a better balance here.

Prickly Women

The Inside Higher Ed blog just had a short opinion article by M. Soledad Caballero and Aimee Knupsky at Allegheny College about the praise of “Prickly Women.”  A quote from the article appears below.

Why academe should honor prickly women (opinion)

They are known throughout history as the “killjoys,” the “ice queens,” the “hysterics,” the “ball-busters.” They are the “Prickly Women” — the women who don’t let things go, who stand up for themselves and others, and who question the status-quo of structural inequities and outdated institutional practices. They stick out decidedly among the “bro-hood” of academic administration.

Despite the negative connotations and perceptions they incite, Prickly Women have exactly the kind of insight and persistence needed as the crises in higher education continue to mount.

Time-to-parity for women publishing in STEM fields

A recent paper by Holman et al. in PLOS Biology presents a new look at the gender gap in publications for millions of authors from over one hundred countries in over six thousand journals.  You can interact with the data through their  web app.

The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?
Luke Holman, Devi Stuart-Fox, Cindy E. Hauser, PLOS Biology 2018.

The authors present the current author gender ratio, its rate of change per year, and the estimate number of years until the gender ratio comes with 5% of parity.  A few notes below the image…

Figure 1 from The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?

Here are the first things I noticed:

1. The estimated percent of women authors “maxes out” at 50% (there’s a Figure 2 that includes fields with a higher percentage of women).
2. arXiv.org – the preprint server that began as a mathematics and physics venue – has particularly poor percent of women authors.
3. First author percentages tend to be “ahead of the curve” for each discipline, while last authors lag behind the numbers for all authors.  In many fields, first authors denote who did the most work, and last authors denote who funded the work.  My hunch is that a higher proportion of women get papers as graduate students and postdocs, whereas fewer women make it to senior-level faculty as heads of a lab.
4. On a positive note, more women are publishing in the fields than before (the rate of change is mostly positive).

The paper’s supplementary figure S3 shows data for Computer Science (from arXiv).  Based on current trajectories, only two sub-categories (Information Theory and Robotics) hope to see gender parity within the next 50-100 years.  We still have a long way to go.

Changing Demographics of the Biomedical Workforce

Thanks to Mike the Mad Biologist’s blog, this article (from January 2017) resurfaced:

The new face of US science : Nature News & Comment

This study looks at census data to determine the demographics of PhD recipients in the biological or medical sciences.  The authors characterize a biomedical workforce that is fundamentally different from previous generations.  Their infographic contains the main trends:

Heggeness et al, The new face of US science. Nature Comment, 2017

 

 

 

Racism in academia – not surprisingly, it’s everywhere

Zuleyka Zevallos, an applied sociologist who does policy research in Australia, just wrote an excellent blog post about racism in academia.  While it speaks directly to researchers and faculty, it’s worth a read for anyone.

Racism in Research and Academia – The Other Sociologist  by Dr. Zuleyka Zevallos

From https://othersociologist.com/2018/01/13/racism-in-research-and-academia/