Personalities In Academia

I've pared down the list of RSS feeds to which I subscribe, and I'm returning to news websites to get my news. I wasn't better informed scrolling through hundred of unread items every day. While there is certainly bias in how news outlets choose the front page stories, I'm willing to accept this in exchange for some ordering by importance of the stories presented to me. The result is that I can spend more time reading the blogs that Google Reader has suggested to me. A number of which are by women in science or math and are quite good. (I should add them to my blog-roll)(eesh, I don't like that term at all.) Not surprisingly, a few of the posts are about being a woman in a male dominated field. 

As a guy I'm less likely to see sexism, although a few women in my department have described encounters with men that were simply shocking. Even if there were some doubt of the veracity of these stories, the percentage of women in my department decreases as one goes up the ranks -- there are a fair number of female grad students, proportionally fewer female post-docs, and only one woman on the tenure track -- suggesting something widespread that causes women to leave math at a rate higher than men. What makes sexism so pernicious is that it isn't the only hurdle in academia. For example, a visiting professor told me of a department at a large university where the topologists and geometers were trying to drive the analysts out. (I'm an analyst, by the way.) A woman looking back on the wreckage that was once a promising career might have a hard time ascertaining the degree to which sexism was to blame. 

When compared to the software world I left, there are some striking characteristics associated with academia that, I think, make it more susceptible to sexism. First, the skills associated with software engineering are much more easily delineated and can be assessed quickly. Many of the places I've worked had a technical component to the interview process. While this isn't always the most enjoyable part of the interview process, it does allow a technically savvy interviewer to get a general sense of the interviewees skills in a matter of minutes. By comparison, if a math department were hiring a graph theorist and didn't already have a graph theorist, it would be quite difficult to understand the interviewees technical strengths. I imagine that the hiring process would be based more on the personalities of the people involved. Second, the supply of good software engineers does not meet demand, so once someone has been hired and demonstrated her or himself to be competent, managers will bend over backward to keep him or her happy, even if this person is socially different. As you might imagine, this happens from time to time in the software world. Again, assessing the competence of an employee is easier in the software world, and the employee isn't on the hook to sell her or himself. Finally, software offers avenues of advancement other than promotion e.g. learning new languages and honing one's design skills. Indeed, I've met software engineers who actively avoided promotion. The upshot of all this is that, compared to academia, software does a better job assessing people based on objective measures of skill, does a better job supporting people doing software, and provides avenues for growth without competition.

Whether these factors play a role in the lack of women in math, I can say that its my experience that women are not nearly as underrepresented in software. At all the large software places I've worked many of the top engineering positions were held by women who did great jobs. It's a little weird going to conferences and seeing so few women.