academic rage moment

[jinian]

My former advisor asked me to edit a rebuttal letter for someone else's paper (from Nature! pretty exciting!), and I am doing so. Come to find out that the third reviewer has addressed the authors as "Ms [Lastname] et al."

EXCUSE ME.

The first author is not a Ms. She is a Professor, in actual fact, but Dr. is the default courteous address in paper submissions. I got called Dr. as an undergrad, because that is just what you assume, because it is offensive to lowball someone's title. And unless this reviewer is of the first author's specific ethnicity, it's not bloody likely that they were able to discern gender from her name. They would have had to go look her up, in which case they would have seen her qualifications. Or they've met her, which would be worse.

She probably doesn't mind this as much as I do. I am really mad right now.

Comments

[heavenscalyx]

Fucking scientists. Fucking fucking scientists.

This is one reason I never bothered to finish my damn PhD.

i continue to have things to say about this

[jinian]

It's getting better, but god damn it is still bad. We really need anonymized submissions. They fix this shit.

There's this complex phase-diagram looking thing in my head when I consider why women leave science. The intersection of failure to accomodate life plans reasonably, fucking prejudice and systematic disadvantage, and the amount of proof each individual requires to realize things are getting better too slowly to help her (combination of stubbornness, scientific mind, etc.).

Supposedly now we have parity up to the postdoc level, and people are patting each other on the back for it as if that were going to help. Yep, women are now fully occupying the exploited labor stages of academia! Huzzah! Never mind that the next steps are deeply fucked!

Re: i continue to have things to say about this

[heavenscalyx]

I'm glad to hear that there are improvements visible from the inside. I hoped things were getting better, but I could barely see a difference between the academic grad student world of 1990 and what I could see (from the outside) of the academic grad student world at a bleeding-edge research institute in 2010. There were still all-male wunderkinder littering the ground (and the desks and the offices) being acclaimed and kowtowed to by male and female senior researchers alike, while the women of similar age, level, and brilliance were doing the shit work in the labs, grinding through until they hit their 40s, when some of them might possibly get tenure (and thus security) somewhere.

(AND OH GOD ONE OF THEM WAS THE SON OF ONE OF THE PROFESSORS I DEALT WITH IN GRAD SCHOOL. TWO GENERATIONS OF MALE WUNDERKINDER.)

(Oh, my gods, the Speshul Snowflake Golden Boy ASSHOLES I was forced to try to get information from, and who ignored my emails, meetings, phone calls, texts, and even similar methods of contact from their MANAGERS when I asked THEM to put me in contact with them... some of them I would like to see fall into the slushy waves of Nantucket. If only I knew what they looked like.)

(*peers at that* Hmm, I appear to still harbor some RAEG, even a year and a half after escaping that acrid hellhole.)