Added weight

I've been dithering over writing for this scientiae, and over what to write. As a new blogger contributing something for a carnival is both a scary idea and a way to ease my new-fledged blog into one of the communities it would like to be part of (helping IT to gain weight), so it seemed like something I should definitely do. But getting past the title to a possible contribution was hard. Is hard. You see, I'm... well built. a full-figured woman. obese. sturdy. substantial. large. outsize. stout. buxom. Rubenesque. I take up a lot of physical space. I eat when I'm stressed, angry, frustrated, depressed, over-worked. I've done all of those a lot these last few years. And, in a society where carrying excess poundage is seen as a character flaw, a sign of lack of willpower, my physical weight ironically down-weights my words and my presence.

I'm not going to write about physical weight, but about this second kind of weighting; about the values, the weights, attributed to different peoples' words and to different parts of the academic job.

I am a scientist. I have a lot of patience for slowly amassing data, I love designing and implementing sampling strategies, I like grappling with a problem, turning it round and round in my mind until I can find a loose thread and begin to tease out a possible solution or new direction. I know how to shape my findings into neat little packages for presenting or publishing. I like knowing something no-one else knows. Like a kid with a screwdriver, I want to know how the world works and am never happier than when taking the back off the clock and peering inside. I can think clearly and systematically, synthesise literature, read pages of mathematics. I am also a human female, and I like to be nice to people, I like to help, I love to be needed, I want to be liked. I cry when I'm upset, and have a very hard time NOT crying when someone is overly critical of me or when a paper is rejected. I'm imaginative, I daydream a lot, I think about things sideways, backwards and upsidedown. I can be intuitive. I'm loyal. I'm domesticated (in a messy kind of way). I love my friends and my family and cats; I hate ironing and grape-flavoured boiled sweets (North American people - purple sweets should always be blackcurrant. Grape is a major disappointment). I try to be better, kinder, wiser, to grow in faith and as a person. I value integrity above conformity.

This is me. All of me comes to work and goes to conferences, not just a brain with the emotion/personality nodes disconnected. Yet in academia, passionate words and speech patterns, especially from an 'emotional', 'overly dramatic' woman, are down-weighted as indicating character flaws or 'emotional investment' which is intrinsically a bad thing - as scientists we're meant to be coldly objective (we all know the 'she's aggressive and pushy, he's ambitious and has leadership qualities' situation). I want to be warmly objective!

The lesson I'm trying to learn this year and next is that when I try to 'play the game' using externally set values for the things I do and am, I will be off balance - the weights of the different parts of my life will be wrongly distributed. It is up to me to recognise the true weight of things, and to distribute them appropriately for efficient and enjoyable carrying.

In my current context, success is measured by salary (and therefore promotion to the rank of 'Professor' where salaries are not set on a national scale but can float free). Success is measured by grants successfully. Success is measured by publications in the 'top-ranked' journals and invitations to speak at prestigious meetings. Time spent on teaching is time that doesn't really count. Time spent on collaboration, unless it will bring money to my institution or get me a first/last authorship paper in a top-flight journal is poorly spent.

I'm not saying that these success metrics aren't valid or important. Unpublished data might as well never have been collected. Grants enable me to do more and to do it better, as well as train and influence the next generation of scientists. But when they are the only indicators, it's like trying to carry a very unbalanced load. Each failure - and there are constantly failures, papers rejected, grant applications failed, others getting promoted younger or being praised more publically - causes a big wobble.

Some of the other things I do take up time and space in my life. They feel relevant to being a good university, a good person, a good scientist. For example, I've learnt that my passion helps me communicate effectively and run good classes - one of my favourite comments from a student evaluation was "It's impossible to fall asleep in Dr B's class even when you've been up all night, she's too enthusiastic". My empathy for others, my willingness to take the time to listen and to support, means that students seek me out. Listening to a student and asking the right questions to help them work out a solution to a problem takes several times as long as telling them an answer, and added up over many students means I might get one less paper out this year. Collaborating and sharing ideas and software and data, editing the English of a paper for a non-native-speaking colleague, refereeing papers carefully and writing long reports, and taking the time to compliment and encourage others, all mean that I can easily spend more time coaching/supporting than doing. Each of these acts has weight, but it's a weight we're often encouraged to dismiss, deny or minimise.

By treating these aspects of the job as less weighty, I end up berating myself for underachieving and feeling like a failure. "I did nothing today" often actually means "I saw three students, taught a class, had an email exchange about why so-and-so's data is making the model play up, ran so-and-so's data myself, found the problem, sent a long message explaining the problem and the work around, popped into the lab three times to check what was going on and lend a hand, talked to the technician about whether we needed to get some new sample bottles or could clean the old ones, wrote a reference for someone, prepared a handout, took two phone calls... and didn't do anything that will directly lead to a publication or grant".

No wonder I feel burdened at work, yet at the same time feel that I'm a light-weight failure as an academic and a scientist.

Sciencewoman and Alice subtitle their blog '...being the change we want to see'. Re-weighting the different aspects of our jobs as scientists and our lives as human beings is probably the key change I want to see; so I hope that in learning and living this lesson, I can help to create an environment where statements about the equal importance placed on teaching, contributions to the community, administration and research in appointments and promotions to faculty positions are no longer glib marketing speak greeted with a cynical look but are taken for granted. And where passion, emotion and intellectual abstractions can be mixed in a conversation without anyone making judgements about anyone else. And while I'm dreaming, I'll have a pony... :-)

By acknowledging the weight of every aspect of my job, I hope to feel like a successful scientist and academic more often, and to actually get my workload in balance (and maybe that will give me a solid place from which to tackle my physical weight issues?).

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