“‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’; Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility. The numbers from other elite scientific institutions suggest they’re not alone.” (New York Times) is about three elderly biologists who are suing their employer for gender discrimination after they were replaced with younger employees, purportedly due to their failure to raise sufficient grant money.
Life is great if you’re a scientist identifying as a man:
Some current and former Salk employees identified Wylie Vale, Ron Evans, Stephen Heinemann and Rusty Gage as the men who, along with Verma, seemed to enjoy extraordinary resources and status (though only Verma was mentioned in the lawsuits). These men, titans in their fields, spoke often at faculty retreats, and on milestone birthdays would reign over symposia in their honor.
If anyone typified the male “rock star” scientists said to have held sway over the Salk, it was Verma. As of 2015, he was the Institute’s highest-paid scientist
The Institute’s 2015 Form 990 shows that the purported superstar male scientist, Inder Verma, raked in total comp of about $437,000, i.e., about half of what a dermatologist running a cosmetic laser clinic in the neighborhood might earn. (The article also shows that Verma’s career was ended by accusations of sexual harassment, something that would have required a lot more work to achieve to inflict on a dermatologist running his or her own clinic.)
The article definitely shows the superiority of medicine as a career to science (see “Women in Science” for more on this topic), for humans of all gender IDs. By getting their jobs at Salk Institute, these women were among the most successful scientists of their generation. Yet their earnings were much lower than what a medical specialist could obtain, their years of earning were cut short involuntarily, and they had limited choices regarding where in the U.S. to live and work.
From my comment on the article:
There are great biology research institutions all around the world, at least some of which are run by people who currently identify as women. If there are great scientists who identify as women who are being held back at male-run places, why wouldn’t they simply move to the female-run places and accomplish their world-changing research there? The NYT informs us that women can be hired for 70 percent of the cost of equally qualified men. So the female-run and female-staffed science labs should have a huge edge over competitors. (One part of the article that rings true is that success in academic science is all about the Benjamins!)
[Response from a virtuous reader: “Sigh. I am weary. … Some humans who identify as men will never get it.” Yet if men are so generally clueless, how is it that at least a few have been credited with some scientific discoveries? Nearly all of those who “get it” are women, but a handful of outlier males “got it” and were sufficiently observant to function in science? Or behind every credited man there is the woman from whom he stole everything? (see Katherine Clerk Maxwell, for example, the likely true developer of Maxwell’s Equations, or Rosalind Franklin, to whom all credit for DNA structure should go)]
There should be no shortage of female-identifying labor. The article says “the biological sciences are one of the only scientific fields in which women earn more than half the doctoral degrees.” (but maybe a lot of them change their gender ID to male after graduation in order to soak up the privileges that are reserved to male scientists?)
Readers: In a world that funds science more lavishly than at any time in history and in which changing institutions is as easy as getting on an Airbus, why wouldn’t the brilliant female scientists gather in their own institute and crank out the Nobel prizes?
[Top-rated comment by NYT readers:
How many diseases have gone uncured, how many scientific discoveries not made, because men’s priority is their own power, and do anything and everything to hold on to that power and keep women down? They will never give us equality voluntarily.
Isn’t this a great argument for a women-only research?]
Related:
- https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/04/12/black-hole-photo-back-to-the-lone-genius-in-science/ (in which a young female engineer is credited by media, politicians, and the public with for 100 percent of the achievement of a 200-person scientific collaboration)
- https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/09/20/75-percent-chance-of-career-failure-considered-in-a-positive-light/ (shows the blinders that successful scientists wear. They are stellar examples of selection bias, but they imagine their own tenured-at-a-top-institution career as typical of what someone who enters physics grad school can expect)
‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’
Was it about the penis envy?
There are great biology research institutions all around the world, at least some of which are run by people who currently identify as women.
In a world that funds science more lavishly than at any time in history and in which changing institutions is as easy as getting on an Airbus, why wouldn’t the brilliant female scientists gather in their own institute and crank out the Nobel prizes?
Once again, a ridiculous comment. Are there enough research institutes “which are run by people who currently identify as women” to accommodate all women scientists? In other words, do all of those institutions currently have enough open positions for all of these women? Have you checked that?
It’s not so easy to pick up and move to the other side of the world. You regularly complain about your town, your state and your country and yet you never pick up and move to Singapore. Beyond that, the women in question are presumably not simply doing “science” research. Most likely, they’re working in some specific specialty of biology which would limit the number of institutions that it would make sense to work at.
Vince: It wouldn’t need to be an immediate reshuffling of the genders in science, though presumably scientists who identify as men could simply swap positions with those who identify as women so that, on a net basis, no new positions needed to be created in order to achieve single-gender institutions (scientists with fluid gender might require some rapid month-to-month or week-to-week swaps). Note also that it needs only to be the “brilliant female scientists” who gather in female-only institutions. Only a handful of scientists are “brilliant” and actually do change the world in some noticeable way.
It is not easy for academics to move to the other side of the world? My friends in U.S. physics do this all the time! They gather in CERN whenever it is necessary to get their research done. Academic friends in other fields do it every seven years during their sabbaticals. Universities are also uniquely positioned to bring in foreigners as workers. They often have special deals with their respective governments to streamline the work visa and/or immigration process. Universities also may own housing near campus. It is much easier to be pulled into a country by a university than it is to try to push one’s way in. (See https://www.augusta.edu/ipso/international/internath1bvisas.php and https://world.utexas.edu/isss/dept/visa for how it works in the U.S., for example.) Academic science was one of the first industries to be globalized. James Watson, for example, was a postdoc in Copenhagen following his PhD at Indiana University before doing his famous DNA work with Crick at the University of Cambridge. That was in the 1950s. (Watson also provides some support for the idea of female-only labs: “The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.” and “[As a female scientist] you won’t be taken seriously if you have children”; wouldn’t women, who are more than half of Biology PhDs, be better off working without guys like Watson? (let’s assume that male scientists haven’t changed, but are only more guarded in their speech now that they’ve seen what happened to the plainspoken Nobelist Watson).
Why don’t I move? Aside from friends and family being here, the big reason is that, unlike the scientists in the NYT article who identify as female, living where I live is not keeping me from doing the things that I want to do. I pay a higher tax rate than I would in some other parts of the U.S. and in some other countries, but my productive activities are not constrained.
[Some additional reasons: The U.S. remains perhaps the greatest place in the world for having fun with light aircraft. Massachusetts is one of the lowest tax states in the U.S. when it comes to aviation (aircraft purchase, parts, maintenance, flight instruction, rental, are all exempt from sales tax; there is no property tax on aircraft; we like to talk “progressive,” but stop short of taxing anyone’s Gulfstream!). Emigrating from the U.S. does not get one out from under U.S. taxation (actually there is an enormous “exit tax” to pay so it is cheaper to stay here unless your circumstances are special, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Saverin ). The countries that I think are nicest generally exclude immigrants who are my age (they need some of our politicians to educate them on the economic benefits of immigration by the low-skilled, the elderly, those needing $millions in medical services, etc.).]
I had a friend whose senior management had a doctorate in some biological field but then she went on to get a law degree. She worked for a pharmaceutical company. We lost touch when they moved next to the DuPonts of Connecticut.
He was a stay-at-home dad (i.e. lazy bum) like me.
Perhaps these women were fleeing the oppression of that hotbed of sexual discrimination: Antarctica!
Phil: How do they explain how clueless men are constantly able to steal credit from brilliant women? Wouldn’t that make them…not clueless?