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Comment by Malarkey73 | Hacker News Reader

OK this is a shame... but a quick look at the authors CV (on her webpage) shows that she graduated in 2007 and has two scientific publications, neither first author... which is OK for someone who appears to be 2 years into a PhD.

But reading her story I got the impression that she had been ground down or had been unfairly stepped over for years and was leaving in despair. I got the impression she chose to do an MS and PhD because she was being unfairly ignored despite a shining academic record ... but she started them in 2010 just 3 years after graduation.

So it reads like she has made a possibly sensible choice that academia is not for her. But it also seems graceless given here lack of experience to smear everyone around her.

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I think it's interesting to hear from people like her with both experience in academia, and industry experience (especially from people who went back into academia, not the ones who got industry jobs then never wanted to go back).

If you ask someone who spent 30 years in the Catholic church whether the priesthood is a good move, you'd expect them to say that the good outweighs the bad. The same is true of people who spend 30 years in the education sector.

Found the academic! Your post comes off as highly judgmental, right from the start.

Her lack of experience does not mean she cannot have an opinion, and cannot point out that she's being abused.

If such a line of reasoning is common place in academia, then I'm extremely happy I didn't pursue further study.

Well I think your reply comes off as highly judgmental :P but hey its the internet.

I actually think her general points about the problems in academia are correct but her particular story just smelt wrong.

The common place academic line of reasoning is hopefully to check the facts behind claims.

Parenthetically, but recently it seems that academics have formed some kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome regarding their careers, where a tenure-seeking goonswarm piles on anyone who points out how toxic academia has become.

Not that the academy ever needed an excuse for its viciousness(to paraphrase Sayre's law, the politics are so ugly because the stakes are so small), but these days it seems like many academics compete to prove that they deserve abuse. Philosophy professor? You deserve nothing more than to eat dogfood in an unheated flat! Grad student? Be grateful for the chance to be sexually harassed and/or emotionally abused by a credit-grabbing tenured sadist! PhD candidate? You're a worthless drain on productive society, just like the rest of us! How dare you try to negotiate a job offer! How dare you point out that grad programs are human-destroying slaughterhouses of hope!

I've never felt better about my decision not to go back to grad studies. And I've never felt worse about never feeling better.

What do you mean exactly by "graceless" here?

I think it's great of her to detail her experience, which must be a difficult process.

She has made the choice that academia is not for her, yes, but that was not for any academic reason: if we have any interest in improving academia, we should look at those reasons and see if we can't be more supportive to human beings in academia.

It must be a difficult process for her readily identifiable adviser to realise he has been labeled a sexist all over the internet by someone who has been in the lab for a couple of years.

That said I'm all for a better deal for PhD students. They have a terrible deal.

You're suggesting it would be better if we cover up sexist behaviour?

(Aside: I personally agree with the female professor's comment - it would have been better if factually sexist behaviour was pointed out directly to the source to give them the opportunity to recognise it. But, behaviour like this needs to be called out somehow.)

Really? - I'm suggesting we cover up sexist behaviour.

No I'm suggesting if you are going to publicly accuse someone of sexism you should have something to back that up. I'm suggesting as you note yourself that it's unfair to say nothing and then suddenly post accusations on the internet. I'm saying that if her adviser is an asshole he wouldn't be the first - but there is nothing in her post or her circumstances that really indicates this.

Did we read different articles? Because I read multiple, very clear and specific accusations of sexist behaviour from several sources.

There is actually no comment about whether or not her adviser is an asshole: you are drawing that conclusion yourself, presumably from the behaviour described.

Its like this adviser is necessarily going to be a sexist douche to the author's face, yet this adviser never graduated a female PHD student (which the author had to find out from another channel) and the conference the adviser run hasn't had any women represented for a period of years.

Just because someone isn't directly disrespectful to you to your face doesn't mean they don't have bias or aren't sexist. It is not incumbent on the people with no power in that kind of relationship to provide evidence to satisfy your disbelief.

How do you know this is strictly because he is sexist?

What if I'm a hiring manager, and I had 50 applications, 25 Male, 25 female. What if all the female candidates were really bad, and I ended up hiring 10 men? Is that sexism?

People are really reaching. I have yet to see a direct case of male vs female sexism on HN. It's usually heavily extrapolated and begging for an implication.

he has been labeled a sexist all over the internet by someone who has been in the lab for a couple of years

The word "sexist" does not appear in the article. Not even once.

I am guessing it were examples such as, "My former adviser has never graduated a female PhD student", that made you think "sexist"?

Notice that the conclusion and the label are yours, not hers.

>OK this is a shame... but a quick look at the authors CV (on her webpage) shows that she graduated in 2007 and has two scientific publications, neither first author... which is OK for someone who appears to be 2 years into a PhD.

"It's shit like this that ruins academia", or: notice how otherwise trained and educated scientists immediately fall into the Fundamental Attribution Error when evaluating publication records. Ceteris paribus, a scientist with more publications is probably better. However, it is quite rare for all else to be equal, and especially when someone can raise specific arguments regarding an atypically toxic work environment, we should expect that the toxic environment may have "artificially" hurt their publication record.

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