But everybody has good intentions. God forbid I forget that
how can you be so dismissive of men? I am a physics graduate student and I spend literally every waking minute of my life in lab. It's really embarrassing to admit, but it's been 3 years since I've had sex or had a social life outside of lab. This is self-imposed - I'm chasing a dream, but surely 3 years of complete isolation, devoid of intimacy of any kind can at least compare to being "left out of meetings"?
also as a Phd student you shouldn't expect to be "given work". You make research proposals and execute them, no?
Academia is a lot of things, but Feynman's era is long gone, the golden age of physics is in the past now. I don't know you, and I don't know your situation. But I have known a lot of people that may be like you, and I have know a lot of situations that may be like yours.
Generally, these days, grad school isn't about the work, it about the network. If you want to stay in the ivory tower, networking is your job. If you want to get out and do something else, go through the classes and just learn that stuff. Get the experience, but do not put your soul in this, you will not find the rewards you are looking for in a lab. Hell is other people, yes, but so is Heaven.
From this teeny-tiny bit of a comment that you left, almost nothing to reasonably go on really, it sounds like you need to get out of the lab. It sounds like you want a partner, a girl/boyfriend, and you should probably do that, and it is ok to do that. Save the python script, put down the polarizer, go to ask someone to a dinner. If your advisor freaks, so be it, they aren't a person that you should be trusting if they don't hold your well being above the work.
Do not put your advisor's career first, put yourself first. It's ok to do that.
Woah there. Your lack of sex is NOT my problem. And you're also describing almost exactly my experience in grad school, for most of my time there. Get out of the lab. Make some friends and blow off some steam. Maybe hire a sex worker, if that's such a priority for you.
The situation at my company is ridiculous. Men are literally being assigned to do work on the very topic of my PhD thesis. They're bewildered by the complexity, and the smart ones come to me for help. The others just wing it, and get shit results quickly.
I'm not a PhD student. I have a PhD and a decade of professional experience. I make research proposals and they're silently handed to men, and I'm kept out of the loop until they get stuck and drop a stinking-hot emergency in my lap. My proposals include reasonable research outlooks and timelines. But they ignore my expertise and expect me to produce 6 months of research in a week. Which could be entirely avoided by inviting the subject expert to meetings about the research she kicked off.
My point about the overworked men is that they're working hard but not smart, while I'm under-utilized. We'd all be happier, the company would be more successful, if I was kept in the loop. Sexism is bad for everyone, oddly enough.
I never said it was your problem, in fact I mentioned that my problems were "self-imposed". I simply stated that I have problems that exist as well, with comparable, or worse severity to yours, despite being male. I asked how you could so easily dismiss these problems. You then promptly dismissed my problems. Maybe people don't want to work with you because you have no social skills.
Also the solution to your problems is a lot less drastic than “hire a sex worker”, it’s doing the more common action of leaving your job.
In case of a management problem you may have a chance of turning each person to turn the tide?
Everybody always knows stuff doesn't work optimal but does not have the guts to change it. That's why we need strong women.
As a new faculty member I had to scramble to find researchers in other departments with similar interests to mine and to join up with on a proposal. I had to trawl through their websites to specifically find women and it felt like stalking and it made me uncomfortable. Emailing these women felt creepy and selfish.
However I want to work with anyone I can. Were it not for this specific requirement I would happily had taken the time to contact people and get to know others organically.
Ultimately it’s nothing compared to the despondency you describe and I did get in touch with some great people that I hope to work with in the future. Perhaps this experience was necessary if jarring.
I cannot offer you anything other than good intentions. I’m an engineer and I work with fluid mechanics. I want to work with the people who do the actual work, not the parasites who do all the talking.
This sounds like the experience of almost every employee in every industry. Very, very few people get to work on truly influential and interesting problems. And from what I've seen at several big companies, no one simply gets asked to do that kind of work (in a meeting or otherwise). If you want to do that kind of work, you have to find a way to contribute yourself. If you wait for "duties" to be assigned to you, you'll get assigned the work no one else wants to do.
On one hand I get the idea of trying to assume positive intent because wrongly assuming negative intent can make a situation much worse, but I still hate the idea.
First, it gives negative intent the ability to hide and pretend to be positive intent. Not many people will do this, but the ones who do can use it to great effect and cause significant damage they won't be held accountable for.
Second, it contradicts our standard actions elsewhere. If a stranger asks a kid if they need a ride, do we tell the kid to assume positive intent? No, we inform them to assume negative intent. We measure the situation of either option on a case by case basis and only then determine what is safe to assume (and in the example I give, it is more prudent to assume negative intent).
Third, it has an implicit idea that positive intent is good enough. That isn't always the case. Sometimes it is, but especially when it comes to leaders in an organization, specifically those with power and compensation to match being a leader, the demand is higher than just trying to be positive. We need people who have the knowledge and experience to do more than just having positive intent.
When you higher a security expert, do you hire someone who will try to achieve security and count that as good enough, or is the demand for their to be realized results and failing to achieve those results lead to negative consequences unless there is adequate explanation.
When someone is parenting a child, is trying good be a good parent enough, or do we demand a certain level of competence in parenting and remove children from those who fail to reach a certain level?
Fourth, there is a double standard in application. Every time someone tells me to assume positive intent, they were assuming I didn't already have the positive intent in doing so. And dare you point it out, you will be seen as assuming negative intent about their assuming negative intent. This alone isn't really a major issue, but it generally represents a larger double standard on application of such rules.
intent can't separate actions from their necessary consequences, but it is important to consider before imposing additional consequences on a person.
Alentejo, the part of the country where I work, has the greatest suicide rate in the country (~28 suicides/100k in the coast region, 19 suicides/100k in the interior region, when the national average is around 10 suicides/100k).
Some say isolation, ageing alone, the economic crisis and poverty and unemployment are to blame. I suspect alcohol consumption has a lot to do with it.
Just a few days ago someone I knew ended his own life. I was away visiting family, and sadly I could not attend the funeral. He knew my great grandfather. I believe he was sick and didn't want to suffer anymore.
>I believe he was sick and didn't want to suffer anymore.
Just out of morbid curiosity: if you were in this situation -- quite old, quite sick, the very fabric of your body reminding you it's time to go, wouldn't it make sense?
With a spouse, there's obvious pressure not to. Without one, I feel like I'd do it. Ideally, I'd go somewhere where assisted suicide's legal so that I can end things neatly -- much bureaucracy, such dignity. uwu Not have aid workers find some messy or creepy corpse and depress the locals. (At $1,500[0], though, that may be a luxury.)
0: https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/1023/How-Californ...
I talked to some local people about it, and it seems his disease was treatable. I don't know if he was in pain, but I do know he was still working as usual until the day he took his life.
This might not sound honest, but it's how I'm expected to talk
Loving the downvotes. I've literally been reprimanded for pointing out a pattern of sexist behavior -- 'cause apparently, counting to three before bringing it up to management is SO unfair
All of it sucks, and while I do not know your situation much, I'd say certainly keep on the lookout for better environments, and very specifically: find good/directional questions to ask in interviews that give you some leading indicators. I've worked for companies that seemed awesome at interview-time and then turned out to be toxic hell-holes. No company will say "we have a toxic culture"; you have to ask the right questions more subtly to get that info. (I wish I knew what those questions are; I haven't had to endure an interview process in many years; yes I realize how lucky I am; maybe others have suggestions?)
Not sure how many options you have, but keep them all open, the positive ones anyway, and I wish you the best.
Your original comment seems tangentially related at best. Gender issues, physicists, programmers, office politics... while the article is about farmers, economics, maybe genetics. I get you work with suicidal individuals, but beyond that superficial observation I don't see how what you originally wrote contributes. Maybe I'm just too thick. If you'll excuse me for saying so, you also seem to be spoiling for a fight.
FWIW just-barely-related top level comments tend to attract some downvotes.
You're probably just not being clear, but it looks like you agree with them. Just because they think they're being progressive doesn't mean they actually are.
This is a complex phenomena.
But if women start using more lethal methods we will see the ratio of male:female deaths by suicide change.
To prevent suicide you want to address the misery that causes people to feel suicidal, and since women report similar levels of misery we need to give them some focus, and that focus is currently weak in research and prevention efforts.
I've heard women attempt three times as much as men, but how much of that is explained by the fact that once you complete, you can no longer attempt. Had every one who succeeded failed, how many more attempts would they have added to the total?
It is kinda like the paradox where planes should have armor in the places they don't get shot, because the planes shot in those places are the ones which crash and are never in the data set to measure.
No, I don't think that at all.
Because we are seeing the beginnings of method substitution in the data, especially for older women.
> Why are they not using them now?
We don't know, which is why it's a complex phenomenom.
We can make guesses. We can guess that women find it easier to access support than men, that women are less isolated than men and so more likely to be found after an attempt, that the elements of contagion around suicide and self-harm prime men and women differently so they use different methods.
Research is tricky and we don't have much.
It describes the huge amount of services around that person trying to keep her safe.
https://twitter.com/SashaInquest
Twitter isn't a great format for this.
The coroner introduces the jury to the court and describes what their role is: https://twitter.com/SashaInquest/status/1122801091794677761
Here's the coroner introducing the case: https://twitter.com/SashaInquest/status/1122810288682803201
Here's the chronology of events: https://twitter.com/SashaInquest/status/1122816136586899456
It seems strange at first that concern for apperance and tidyness but given that suicides usually involve skewed priorities.
> Globally, death by suicide occurred about 1.8 times more often among males than among females in 2008, and 1.7 times in 2015.[4][5][6] In the western world, males die by suicide three to four times more often than do females.[4][7] This greater male frequency is increased in those over the age of 65.[8] Suicide attempts are between two and four times more frequent among females.[9][10][11] Researchers have attributed the difference between attempted and completed suicides among the sexes to males using more lethal means to end their lives.[7][12][13] The extent of suicidal thoughts is not clear, but research suggests that suicidal thoughts are more common among females than among males, particularly in those under the age of 25.[11][14]
The method matter when it comes to outcomes. With suicide it means men die more, with domestic violence it mean women die more.
Addressing the misery that causes people to cause violence against themselves or others is a good idea. What ever priority we want to use for one is likely a good choice for the other.
edit - there is a vicious little set of incentives in certain corporate environments that almost guarantees bullying and fucked up mind games unless the manager is some kind of a saint. Mix stack ranking and any kind of external weighting on a manager and they will comply with the weighting by hiring the person they can get to fail the stack ranking so as not to screw with their project team. And unless this person is lucky enough to be oblivious, they have just entered hell.
Maybe you are not welcome because you advocate "diversity aware hiring practices", not because you are a woman?
Yeah, we have only one woman programmer on our team of 14. She's also one of the superstars. (In most interviews, we ask questions because we wanted to find out what the candidate knows. In her interview, we asked questions because we wanted to learn things.)