The fatherhood bonus: Have a child and advance your career

The careers of different men progress at different rates. That’s just as we would expect. Higher performers are rewarded; lower performers slow down. Our accomplishments guide our careers. Good workplaces are meritocracies — do your job well, and you’ll get ahead. That’s what we believe.

Or, at least that’s what we want to believe. But after a few years on the job, we start to wonder. Other factors seem to play a role.

What about parenthood? Does that figure in to how we get evaluated? Does fatherhood affect the careers of men? How are fathers perceived when we’re asked to appraise them?

We know how it works for women. There is a motherhood penalty, and it’s not related to performance; evaluation in laboratory settings of otherwise identical files in which the only difference is parenthood proves this claim. If you’re a mother, that will affect how your job performance is perceived. Negatively.

Is there a fatherhood penalty, too?

It seems not. In fact, it seems that there’s a fatherhood bonus. Fathers don’t simply outpace mothers in the workplace; they even outpace men who don’t have children!

The motherhood penalty: It’s not children that slow mothers down

There are fewer women at the top because they have a different work/life balance than men, it is claimed. Mothers’ careers progress slowly because they are mothers — because they have to spend more time on their children.

There’s some appeal in this explanation; it seems intuitively correct. Mothers have greater childcare responsibilities than fathers. And while we may hope for a different division of labor some day, we speculate that these work/life realities explain why women who are mothers are on slower career tracks than men.

It’s the realities of daily life behind the statistics that in fact explain the statistics. Correlation becomes causation. But that’s a mistake in how we think. There’s more to the story.

New approaches to quality control in publishing

There are four key components to publishing, and they’re all about to change.

Ten years from now, publishing will be done in ways that we are only beginning to envisage. Politics and profit will of course compel these changes. But the specific innovations coming our way will be driven by a generation of tweeters, bloggers, status updaters and Wikipedia editors.

How to get more women professors: success on the top of the world!

With focus and commitment, the University of Tromsø has become Norway’s leading university for gender balance. New statistics have arrived and they reveal that 27.4% of our full professors are women.

Tromsø is better than any other institution of higher education in Norway, and it is well ahead of the national average of 23%.

The Board of the University has articulated a goal of having 30% of our highest academic positions occupied by women by the end of 2013. Our progress has been steady and salient. In 2007, 18.3% of our professors were women. In 2008, it was 20.1%. At the end of 2009, we had reached 22.4% and last year we were at 24.6%. Today, we have reached 27.4%!

This progress reflects major investments in faculty development.

Publishing in the Adjacent Possible

The link below takes you to a video of my talk at the 6th Munin Conference, at which the theme was Enhancing Publications. In the talk, I explore Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the Adjacent Possible and imagine what it might mean in the context of thinking about the future of scientific publication.

A very slightly revised text of this talk will appear in a subsequent post, and a much briefer blog on the topic will also appear in these pages soon.

The Munin Conference is an annual international conference on issues related to open access and publishing, held at the University of Tromsø. (Note that the video of the speaker and the video of the non-slides can be exchanged by clicking on the right side of the screen on “Swap Media Elements.”)

Publishing in the Adjacent Possible

(My talk from the 5th Munin Conference was entitled Open Access: The competitive advantage; the link takes you to the YouTube video.)

What happens when we have no students?

(Talen min fra åpningen av MONS 14 finnes på  slutten av denne bloggen.)

What should universities and colleges do when students don’t want to take our courses? What if no one wants a degree in German? What if Art History only attracts a handful of students?

We read often about the lost value of humanities degrees for the students who take them and how institutions lose money by maintaining a broad offering. Should we just shut those programs down?

What does it mean to be a classic university with credible breadth? How can we reconcile our ideals, our identity and our mandate with financing systems that fund us based on the number of students we produce?

Social media and blog traffic: 4 tips that work and 2 that don’t

Traffic to my blog has jumped recently. Twitter and Facebook are the trick.

I’ve been blogging for just over 6 months. While I’m writing this entry, my blog will be visited for the 9,000th time. 2,000 of those visits came in October, and over 4,000 more have come in November.

Most of my visitors have been referred to my blog by social media. More than 2,000 have come from Facebook while just under 1,000 have come from Twitter. Only a few dozen have come from LinkedIn.

Here are six ways I use social media — four that work for me and two that don’t.

Spanish professors are sexist

Spanish professors hold women back. The system is easier on men. Women have to do significantly more to reach the top.

This is the clear conclusion of the Spanish government’s White Paper on the Position of Women in Science in Spain. Men, the White Paper concludes, are 2.5 times more likely than otherwise identical women to become a Professor. (Libro Blanco: Situación de las Mujeres en la Ciencia Española)

When comparing men and women of the same age, with the same amount of time since their PhD, the same field of knowledge and recent academic production in terms of articles and books published, as well as dissertations or theses directed, we see that the probability of a male Associate Professor being promoted to Full Professor is 2.5 times higher than that of a woman with similar personal, family and professional characteristics.

Many countries have similar problems. In the United States, the National Science Foundation reaches the following conclusion.

Four crucial steps for hosting a successful write-in

Keep writing. Every day. That’s what the experts say.

Maybe you just have time to write a single paragraph. Can you summarize what you wrote yesterday? Can you write a few notes about the next section in your project?

Find your strategy and stick with it. Don’t succumb to Writer’s Block — but if you do, read Seth Godin’s clever piece on Talker’s Block. It helps!

What about your colleagues? How can you help them to write more and better? I tried to do that recently by hosting a write-in. As part of my university’s Promotion Project, I took about 40 academic staff members away for five days of writing.

Here’s what I learned.

There are only 3 reasons women don’t make it to the top

It’s true in higher education, it’s true in law firms, it’s true in hospitals (it’s even true in monarchies!): women can get far, but they can’t get all the way to the top.

In Europe, fewer than 10% of universities are run by women. In Fortune 500 companies, about 17% of lawyers are women. Even in a relatively egalitarian country like Norway, a man in healthcare is much more likely than a woman to achieve a position of leadership.

There are only three possible explanations for the lower numbers of women at the top level of these organizations.

How I use my blog and Twitter to get on op-ed pages

In my short life as a blogger, I’ve had success converting my blog posts into op-ed pieces. Publishing in traditional fora gives increased impact, which motivates me to blog more. It demonstrates that social media and blogging can lead to crossover into traditional media.

I search on Twitter to identify relevant hashtags and to find users with similar interests. That alone led to my 7th blog post being published. I made a posting on Twitter, tagged a user I had identified as potentially interested, and almost immediately received an email asking for a modified version of that essay for their publication.

This led to the development of my blog post 0.01% inspiration: The failure of research into Negative research results are important, which appeared in Research Europe as their View from the Top commentary on July 21, 2011. I have another posting that I think they’ll like, and I’m about to give them “first refusal” on publishing a version of that one.

I used a more direct strategy for the second blog entry I got published.

Opacity in scientific publication: Do journals discriminate?

Watson & Crick’s 1953 article in Nature revealing the double-helix structure of DNA was not peer reviewed. Many scientists claim this paper presents the most important discovery of the 20th century. The peer review system is what gives science integrity. Yet this paper was published based on the evaluation of the editors that it was obviously true.

One great discussion at the European Gender Summit in Brussels gathered editorial representatives from some of the most important scientific journals in the world, including the Lancet and Nature. That’s where I heard this story.

A pervasive theme at the Gender Summit was the connection between transparency and fairness, or between opacity and discrimination. When processes are not clear, open and transparent, prejudice comes into play, and the result can be unjust.

Where do these two topics overlap? Are there senses in which scientific publishing is secretive or opaque?

Fix this blog!

What makes your blog successful? How can you get more readers and more comments? What leads someone to “subscribe” to your blog? How can you use your blog to feed your other activities ?

I’ve been blogging for about 6 months, and these questions become more and more salient for me. I love generating the content, but I know the form could be much better. Can you help?

I’m going to describe here what I think I need to improve my blogging experience, and if you do this kind of work, please get in touch. Indeed, if you think I my description of what I need is incomplete, I’d like to hear about that, too.

Because I so often advocate transparency, I’ll try to give a picture of the facts for this blog of mine, especially regarding the numbers. As of right now (11.11.11), I’ve had 5,829 hits total since my first entry on May 6th, 2011.

Equality targets as a leadership tool

A decision to implement equality targets is a decision to pursue quality.

Equality targets should lead to increased gender balance. And increased gender balance leads to many improvements, such as employee satisfaction and, concomitantly, the productivity of the organization.

The concept of targets is the heir to the concept of quotas. And the claim that quotas feed quality is certainly not a familiar claim.

On the contrary, when I speak about the importance of achieving gender balance in research organizations, I often ask audiences to tell me what they think the most common objections to quotas are.

Can you imagine what kinds of answers I get?

Breakthrough knowledge: Research, education and universities

Discovering something no one knew before is research. Discovering something that you didn’t know before, but someone else did, is education.

I love the idea of universities. I spend my days with people who work to understand something better: the universe, the world, societies, brains, kids, change, books, and more. That’s research. What do we know? What do we think we know that might be wrong? What do we have no clue about? Every day, some researchers at every university figure out something that no one knew before. A breakthrough!

Peer evaluation is not objective: Academia and Law Firms

Academics believe that universities are meritocracies, or at least that they should be. And we’re not alone. Lawyers think the same about law firms. We all think that our workplaces should reward our accomplishments. If you’re the best researcher, you should win the competition for funding; if you’re the best lawyer, you should be promoted to partner.

The bad news, I’m sorry to report, is even worse than we might fear. Our systems aren’t meritocratic — they simply can’t be. On our own, we cannot avoid taking a rich set of factors into account, even when explicitly instructed not to.

As I learn more about careers in law, I am increasingly struck by the similarities to academia. And when it comes to peer evaluation, there is a growing body of research from both sectors showing that women and men are judged differently.

The European Gender Summit

In less than a week, hundreds of men and women who care about the intersection of science, policy, and gender, will gather in Brussels for the first European Gender Summit. It’s a high-powered event, sponsored by the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the European Commission and many other partners.

Why is this meeting being held? What is it about? What can we hope for?

The results of research are crucial for the future economic health of Europe. Research generates new knowledge, and new knowledge can in turn yield innovation and commercialization.

Because the results of research are so important, we must use everything we know to create the conditions for great results. And one thing we know now is that gender can positively affect the quality of research.

The royal glass ceiling: Why can’t women be kings?

It is proposed that laws be changed in Great Britain to allow a firstborn child to inherit the throne, even if that child is a girl who later gets a younger brother. In other words, the line of succession may become gender-blind, which should be encouraging to girls and women, says the Queen.

Many royal houses have made this move in recent decades, but none of them have achieved true gender equality, none of them have systems in which women genuinely are equal to men.

A woman still cannot reach the pinnacle of a monarchy — a woman, so to speak, cannot become king! 

The Nobel Peace Prize’s problem with women persists

The Norwegian Nobel Institute’s reply to my critique of this year’s award takes my thoughts to Henrik Ibsen: Be what you are, complete and whole, not a divided, piecemeal soul. (Det som du er, vær fullt og helt, og ikke stykkevis og delt.)

The reply is at times predictable — hiding behind a particular interpretation of the statutes of the prize — and at times irrelevant — pointing out that the Peace Prize has a few more women laureates than any other Nobel Prize.

It is also at times tone deaf, suggesting for example that a Peace Prize Committee made up of four women and one man (the chair!) can’t seriously be criticized on a matter regarding women. (Is this committee structure even legal in Norway, where public committees are supposed to have 40% of each gender?)

But the real problem with the reply is that it ignores the core issue.

The Norwegian Nobel Institute’s Reply

The Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, has replied to my essay on this year’s award, The Nobel Peace Prize’s Problem with Women, which was published in Norwegian in the national newspaper, Dagbladet, under the title Kvinner på billigsalg on the internet, and the more tame Nobelkomiteens kvinneproblem in the paper version.

I reply to Lundestad at a broader level in my next posting, but I simply wanted to make his October 21st, 2011, text available here to those of you following this matter from afar. The translation of his letter below is mine.