Stovepipes and how they confuse and frustrate
The title of this post suggests a treatise more than a lowly blog post, but, I'm a busy proposal writer, so I'll have to settle for the post. A friend sent me a link to a Gartner newsletter yesterday, and the title was "It's official. Collaboration is a top business priority." That's good news for me since I'm a collaboration researcher. It's nice to know collaboration is a priority for someone besides me. I clicked through the newsletter and even visited the website for a conference Gartner is hosting called the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.
I use "stovepipes" to refer to the isolated, vertical towers of thought and work into which we've organized ourselves. I think I picked it up while serving on SI's dean search committee where we spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted to avoid stovepipes in SI. We're an interdisciplinary school, and we wanted to recommend a dean who would encourage intellectual respect and collaboration among the disciplines rather than stovepiping them. Ok, so, now I'm concerned about the stovepiping that happens between academia and the business world. This is not a new concern for me, but it's one I haven't written down for public consumption yet. It worries me that a summit like Gartner's can take place and that academia neither talks about it nor attends. I don't mean to imply that Gartner's summit is the be-all, end-all and that it's going to change the world forever, but it could be something interesting. It concerns me that when I wanted to study newcomers in an organization, I was thwarted by lack of connections to organizations. Instead, I ended up studying newcomers to an academic environment and then interviewing (a year later) for a serendipitous opportunity to study newcomers in a public company. Man, I hope I get that internship. I digress.
The divide between academic research and business research seems to be growing. Is it growing? Am I just more attuned to it now than I have been? What can I do to get more connected to businesses so that I can learn from them, and so that my work can have some real world impact? I don't want to be a messiah with academic knowledge; I want to get my hands dirty outside the lab. What would the cost to my academic reputation be if I were to focus on collaborations with industry researchers and managers? Where is the tunnel between the stovepipes?
Stovepipes aside, Gartner's summit has one of the most male-dominated presenter lists I've seen in a quite a while. I hope overall that their company is more diverse. That said, I'm curious about the summit. I do wonder what collaboration technologies are on the horizon. I'll be paying attention, for sure.
Best Jobs of 2008: Professor
U.S. News included "Professor" on its list of 31 best jobs for 2008. That's cool. They even provide an executive summary of why they like it so much. They're right that tenure is pretty sweet, if you can get it. They're not so right that being a woman helps you land a tenure-track job though. Beware the popular press. Well, all the press really. Just beware.
I don't mean to be a stampeding feminist, well, maybe I do. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that the gender gap in tenure-track hiring and tenure awarding is not closed, and women are most certainly not getting the advantage U.S. News claims.
Quick look at references about gender bias in tenure-track hiring:
Stenpreis, R., Anders, K.A., and Ritzke, D. (1999) The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study. Sex Roles. 41(7), 509-528.
von Anders, S.M. (2005) Why the Academic Pipeline Leaks: Fewer Men than Women Perceive Barriers to Becoming Professors. Sex Roles. 51(9-10), 511-521.
Chronicle of Higher Ed - 11/6/2006 - AAUP Report Blames Colleges for Gender Inequity Among Professors
Feminism shouldn’t be dead
I've begun to pay more careful and meaningful attention to gender and gender politics lately. Those of you who know me know that this is not an earth-shattering change for me. What's different about this change is not that I'm thinking about gender politics but that I'm getting frustrated. I even emailed with my mom a couple weeks ago about a number of misogynistic encounters I'd had recently. I was asked illegal questions about my age and gender in a job interview. I heard my colleagues use "young" to describe a woman and "inexperienced" to describe a man - the two were nearly indistinguishable on paper. I watched Shut Up and Sing and was appalled to see that calling women "sluts" for exercising their civil rights was considered acceptable behavior. And tonight, I read an article on Forbes.com that made me cranky.
Here it is: In Pictures: How to network without saying a word
You'll notice that the first few tips are about how to use one's tie and jacket to make an impression as "strong." Argh! So many things happening there. I read the text version of the article too, just in case it was less gendered. While it helpfully provides "he or she" instead of just "he" when referring to what a person might do, it does not succeed in speaking to or for women. I'm not letting this get to me too much though because the whole premise of the article offends me. People should not be treated as means to ends, but this article encourages readers to "appear authentic." Why not just be authentic? Wouldn't that be better?
Where did the feminists go? Our work is not done.
For Girls, It's Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too (from the NY Times)
Male-female gap in income grows (from the Denver Post)