Difficulties in Conference Socialising

I recently went to a conference in Chicago. I had an excellent time and met lots of great people, but as at every conference I had a bit of a dilemma every time I met someone new - do I come out, when do I come out, how do I come out?

As anyone who knows me personally, and some people who only know me online will know, I'm very out. In every aspect of life, home, work, the hairdressers etc.  I just can't be bothered with the whole hiding who I am thing.  Plus I've got a wife, I spend a lot of time socialising with her, and I'm not going to play the pronoun game every time someone asks me what I did at the weekend.

However, I know lots of people who like to keep their private lives out of work.  They might be out in a general way, but they tend to keep quite about it.  But when you go to a conference the world of work merges with your social world. You're often meeting people in a social way, but it's still work.  The people you're talking to after a number of drinks in the bar might be a possible future colleague or collaborator or boss.  So there's always that split second of decisions, which camp does this new interaction fall into.  Future friend, future colleague, both, neither?

Then there's the heteronormitivity of conferences (maybe of science in general?) which I find a bit overwhelming.  I tend to think that people go away from conferences remembering me as the lesbian who talks about transposons (possibly without remembering the bit about transposons).  This is probably not even true, but the fact that I find myself having to come out over and over (particularly if my wife has come along to take advantage of a tagged on holiday) to people who assume everyone, including me, is straight (and I don't look straight), makes me hyper aware of it.

Although I've talked about conferences here, I think it extends quite a bit into more general areas of academic life.  We're expected to spend so much of our time and energy trying to make it in this career that there is often little room for friends outside of work, forcing people to mix social and work yet again.

I'm thinking of putting a project together to see how other LGBT people find this work socialising issue.  It's only in a concept stage, but stay tuned for more info.

Homophobia, STEM and the NUS

In 2011 my girlfriend (now my wife) went to the NUS LGBT Compaign Conference. She and a number of her fellow delegates were particularly disturbed by the following motion that was passed by the conference:


604 Homophobia in Science

Conference believes:
1. Students of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects suffer the highest amount of homophobia from staff and other students than any other subject areas.
2. Due to overt homophobia displayed by members of staff or lecturers, LGBT STEM students are far less likely to reveal their sexuality.
3. Because of this institutional homophobia LGBT people do not feel safe or comfortable studying STEM subjects so are more likely to chose a more liberal subject.

Conference further believes:
1. The grades and mental health of science LGBT students suffer due to the homophobia
2. Less LGBT people go into STEM subjects due to isolation and perceived homophobia

This motion was brought by some non-STEM students and passed by a conference that was overwhelmingly made up of arts and humanities students. So I wondered if there was any basis in this and whether it was mostly based on arts vs science prejudices and assumptions.

I was particularly worried about the 2nd point "Due to overt homophobia displayed by members of staff or lecturers ..."


If the points made here are true, then this is very serious and action needs to be taken to change things. Overt homophobia could well be an illegal and sack-able offence in the UK if it was detrimental to a students ability to participate in their course.


If these allegations are not true, then this motion may well add to the assumption that STEM subjects are homophobic, increasing the difficulty in encouraging LGBT+ students into STEM subjects. I would hope that this outcome is the exact opposite of what the conference were hoping to achieve.


As a response to this, I set up a survey. However, not being a social scientist and having a full time job doing other research I didn't really have the time to chase up responses and I didn't really feel I had enouh data to publish properly. So, it now being a few years down the line, I thought I would report the results here instead. However, if any social scientists are reading this and would like to help take this research further, I would be happy to talk about a collaboration...


Results


We asked both LGBT defining respondents and non-LGBT defining respondents to answer the survey and had approximately equal numbers of response:








Both LGBT defining and non-LGBT defining students reported very low numbers of having seen homophobia by STEM Staff (should be pointed out that not all respondents were STEM based and so some many have had limited exposure to STEM staff).


LGBT:



Non- LGBT:




Here are the comments that were left by those that had seen homophobia:

- Friends neglecting, and change of attitude as if my identity was finally known due to something I did

- Very mild, due to carelessness rather than malice. Use of "gay" as a mild pejorative, stereotyping of LGBT people (e.g. gay male == always camp, gay female == always butch), etc in conversation. I've never seen what seemed to be deliberate malice, just things that could contribute toward an unwelcoming environment for anyone feeling vulnerable about their orientation.

- Jokes and comments - on one occasion about another postgrad who was not present. However, mostly the level of homophobia has felt consistent with the 'outside world'.

- Disparaging remarks, said in joking manner, about gay members of staff but highly offensive e.g in reference to anal sex or other gay stereotypes

There were also some comments which suggested that Transphobia was a big problem, however I have not address Transphobia as it was not mentioned in the original motion.


It would have been nice at this point to see whether the numbers of homophobic incidents were similar in other departments, however we neglected to ask this (see, I said this wasn't my field).

We were interested in whether the atmosphere or perceived atmosphere had an effect on whether people come out or not and how comfortable people were in their department. The majority of respondents (LGBT only) did not feel that the atmosphere in their department had any effect on their decision to come out to people. It was also encouraging in that of the people who were influenced by the atmosphere, more people suggested it was welcoming rather than not.

The majority of respondent did not feel isolated due to homophobia in their departments. However, it is disappointing that in the UK in the 21st Century we should have any respondents who felt they were isolated.






If we split these questions into STEM responders and non-STEM responders. We see no real difference in response for the question of whether the atmosphere in the department encourages or discourages people to come out. The vast majority said that it didn't make a difference, this suggests that question 2 of the motion is not true.





The responses on whether the department felt isolating were slightly different between the two groups, however this may be partly due to the small sampling.




Finally, we asked whether perceived departmental homophobia had an effect on the choice of subject.



It appears not.


Conclusions

Although the rooting out of homophobia in academia as elsewhere is an ongoing project, there does not appear to be a pervading culture of homophobia in STEM departments as the NUS seems to believe. 'Overt Homophobia' does not appear to be preventing STEM students from coming out and does not appear to be affecting LGBT students choice of subject.


Although, I'm sure the vast majority of students had no idea that this motion was passed, statements like this can actually be hugely damaging to the perception of STEM subjects. It may be that in the past these subjects were filled with a macho homophobic culture, but in the 13 years that I've been studying and working in STEM I have never come across it.


If any LGBT students are reading this and thinking about heading into STEM - do it. I think you'll actually find that it's a hugely welcoming and rewarding field to work in.

Does the Journal really matter?

I was reading some blog posts on which journals you should send your paper to and what strategies to use to decide.

http://conservationbytes.com/2013/06/06/learning-how-to-fail/
http://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/advice-how-to-decide-where-to-submit-your-paper/

And it made me wonder - Does anyone actually sit down and just read a journal through any more?

I used to do it with Bioinformatics, it got sent to our lab, so every so often I'd just sit down and read the journal through.  The only time I do this now is during occasional down time when I'm at a conference, since they tend to give out journal editions for free.  It seems like a waste of my finite time resources these days to read through a journal.

What I do instead is just search for what I'm interested in and read the relevant papers.  And here comes the important bit.  I read the papers regardless of where they are published.  I probably won't even look at what journal they're in until I have to make a note of the reference, which considering I can add it to my Mendeley library with one click, may not be until I'm just about to submit a paper, some months down the line.

So if I work like this, I'm assuming at least some proportion of other people do too (I'm thinking this is likely to be skewed by age, but not necessarily).  It just seems to me to be another reason that the whole impact factor / prestigious journal thing is redundant.  I don't read the papers because they're in Nature, I read them because they're interesting, so other than a line on your CV what is the actual point in trying to get your paper published in a high IF journal?

Making the peer review process public

I've just had a paper accepted by PeerJ (hurrah!).  I'm really happy about this as I love their ethos:

"We aim to drive the costs of publishing down, while improving the overall publishing experience, and providing authors with a publication venue suitable for the 21st Century.  Our tag line is : "Your Peers, Your Science. Academic Publishing is Evolving" and we are committed to improving the process of scholarly publishing."

Coming from a very small field which isn't often thought to be very exciting by those outside of it (transposon evolution), a publisher who doesn't care whether the research is 'exciting' or not is a great thing for us.

Another thing that I've really liked is that they encourage the reviewers to sign their reviews, although they don't have to (ours didn't by the way).  I think this is great, it makes for much more honest and positive reviews and prevents competitors putting road blocks in your way (we don't really have any competitors, but still...).  My boss however is a bit worried that if you were critical of a powerful group, it could end up costing you.

Which is why I think the next point is so important.

PeerJ are also encouraging authors to make their review process publicly available.  This would hopefully prevent any repercussion as the rest of the community would be able to vouch for whether you had been fair or not.  It would also keep us honest.  A further thing that I've enjoyed about this is that it shows that no-one is perfect.  Papers getting reviewers who just go, "yes publish it" is basically unheard of, so you can see that even scientists that you're totally in awe of have to go through the same process.  This is particularly great for Phd students and ECR researchers who can suffer from imposter syndrome due to the habit of suggesting that we were perfect the first time around that goes on in academia.

It's this habit that has left me feeling rather unstuck.  I'm sure you can tell from the gushing that I'm a big far of  transparency, I love these innovations.  However, when I got the email saying would I like to make my peer review history public, I suddenly wasn't sure.  Standing out there among the few who are doing it and saying  "I'm not perfect" is kind of scary.  My boss isn't that keen, but then having been in academia for longer, his habits are more ingrained.  I think I'm going to do it, but it does seem rather a leap into the unknown.

The highs and lows of academia (and my other potential career)

When I was in the 6th form, 3 of my A-levels were a fairly normal mix - Biology, Chemistry and Maths.  Loads of people do that.  What they don't normally do is include Theatre Studies.

I loved acting, really loved it, and by all accounts I was quite good at it. I thought about doing it professionally.  The thing that stopped me, and has in fact stopped me continuing in an amateur way as well, is the constant fear of rejection and the highs and lows that go with performing and ending a run.  I was never very good at handling it, I'd take the rejection too personally and when I was in a show, it was all that mattered and once it was over I had a massive emotional crash.

So I decided not to pursue acting and went into science instead.  Only no-one told me that it's exactly the same!

The application for grants,short term jobs and the submitting of papers are all very similar to the casting process.  You're putting your work out there, you're saying look at me, like me, like what I do.  And the chance of rejection is pretty damn high.  Even once you do get a paper accepted (or get a role), if it's important enough to get noticed you get some people who love it, but equally you'll get some people who really hate it.  And they'll be happy to tell you so.

There are also massive highs and lows.  I just had a paper accepted for publication by PeerJ, an open source publication with an ethos that I believe very strongly in.  This gave me a massive high, a 'you know what, I'm actually good at this' feeling.  It was great.  But very soon afterwards I remembered that in 3 months time I won't have a job any more and I crashed back down to Earth.

I seem to have ended up in a career with lots of the problems that I rejected another one for, and I really didn't see it coming.

When's it right to quit?

The PhD student in our group just quit her phd (if you read this, I hope you don't mind that I'm writing a blog post based on it).  She's got a new job lined up, if not for a while, and pretty much everyone agrees that it seems like the right thing to do.  I knew she wasn't happy, I knew she didn't want to end up an academic, but it still kinda feels like a shock.

It seems strange that I'm surprised that someone else would leave a PhD that they hated.  After all I did it and it was absolutely the right thing for me (although I now have one in a different field).  I'm a big advocate of people not slogging away at things they hate, make the leap, do what's right for you.

But there's an undercurrent that says, if you leave halfway through your PhD you're a quitter.  I suspect that lots of people continue on for this very reason.  Maybe that's why so many people have a terribly hard time with their PhD.  Obviously for people who want to stay in academia and in that field it's probably best to just slog it out, but if you don't want to be an academic anyway, what are you doing it for?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not encouraging people to quit.  I'm not one of these people who think you shouldn't get a PhD if you don't want to go into academia, either.  But you've got to want to do it.  There are a lot of things I think need changing about academia and the concept of the quitter (you get it if you bail out after a postdoc as well) is definitely one of them.  Everyone should be free to follow the path that's right for them without other people looking down on them

Twitter is the Old Boys Club we can all join #1 & #2

I went to a comprehensive high school, I went to a Red Brick University. My parents know people, but not 'those' people.  Oh, and I'm a woman.  All those 'Old Boys Club' networks are pretty closed to me.

The thing is, from what I can see, there's a 'New, Old Boys Club' and it's twitter.  These old fashioned clubs were basically a way of getting to know the people who mattered, getting an in with the important people.  And twitter can do that for you.

I was going to write a really long post about all the ways twitter can help you in the way 'Old Boys Clubs' could, but it was REALLY LONG!  So here are just a couple and I might elaborate in the future.

#1 - Talking to people at the top of your field

One of the great things about twitter is that you can send a tweet to pretty much anyone and if they reply, hurrah!, and if they ignore you, no harm done, and if they think you're an idiot they probably won't remember who you are in the real world anyway.

All of this makes it much easier to get a dialogue going with 'important' people, the kind of people you probably wouldn't approach at a conference unless they were old buddies with you supervisor (i.e. Old Boys).  And if you did approach them at a conference and found you had nothing to say, or only things they thought were stupid etc., that could be pretty embarrassing.  But twitter removes that for you.  So go and tweet the scary people, you never know who'll find you really interesting!

#2 - Job Adverts

My contract is coming to an end, so I've been looking for jobs.  I check jobs.ac.uk everyday.  But the 2 most interesting job adverts came from twitter.  

The first one, I sent out a tweet saying "Anyone know of any postdoc jobs going in Bioinf or comp genetics?".  And someone replied and I got an interview, I didn't get the job, but you can't win them all.  Another job was posted on twitter recently, one I didn't find on the job websites, and I've applied and I've got an  interview.  Fingers crossed this time.

So although I check all the websites regularly, the really good jobs came from twitter, jobs you wouldn't necessarily find otherwise, because this is the insiders network.