Today, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) received an open letter with hundreds of signatures criticizing missteps in its flagship publication Science and in Science Careers (described as “the leading resource for job listings and career advice in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”), missteps that “reinforce damaging stereotypes about underrepresented groups in STEM fields.” Retraction Watch broke news of the letter last week. Buzzfeed spoke to a number of authors and signatories, and has the full text of the letter (and the complete list of signatories) included at the end of its article.
As someone whose work encompasses the question of how members of scientific communities at different career stages and with different amounts of power share a world with each other — and as someone who signed the letter — I want to explain my concerns about the more problematic pieces in Science Careers.
The career situation for early-career scientists in recent decades has not been easy (and there’s a sense that things have gotten appreciably harder than when senior scientists in their 60s and 70s were early-career). There are lots of early-career scientists looking for good advice on navigating in a space where permanent jobs and funding seem to be in short supply, but where there's also an expectation that being a scientist shouldn't preclude really participating in things like childrearing, eldercare, spending time with your partner, or doing something you enjoy that isn't science. You might hope that the Science Careers pieces would reliably provide that kind of good advice.
In too many instances, however, the advice they gave and the exemplars they presented for how to succeed were often just terrible. We’ve discussed Alice Huang’s column suggesting that an early career scientist bothered by her advisor’s attempts to look down her shirt should ignore it, with a smile. More recently, a “Working Life” essay offered a recipe to get noticed for a faculty position that involved working 17-hour days while leaving one’s spouse to take on essentially all the childrearing and domestic responsibilities (despite the fact that the author’s wife was also a PhD scientist, and that this distribution of labor amounted to sacrificing her career advancement for his).
Advice and exemplars like these identify a high price for success in science. They mark science as a realm that is a bad fit for folks who want to parent their kids or to nurture their partners' career aspirations, for scientific trainees who expect that the senior scientists training them will treat them as potential colleagues rather than as sex objects. They also offer advice that’s unlikely to be especially effective, for example by assuming, without any good empirical basis, that more hours at work means better productivity, or that an advisor who leers at trainees can be expected to provide good mentoring of the early-career scientists at whom he’s leering.
My big concern is that Science Careers has dispensed advice that didn't just assume the status quo (where inclusion of scientists who are not White men is still very much a work in progress), but that actually bolstered that status quo. Why worry about work-life balance (either as an individual or as part of an institution or a professional community) if Science Careers is telling you the path to your success is making the "life" part someone else's problem? Why work on getting advisors to stop leering at advisees if the good counsel dispensed by AAAS is for the advisees to pretend they don't notice their being leered at? The assumption is that the status quo isn’t going anywhere — that it doesn’t need to go anywhere — and that good career advice should be tailored to the narrow project of responding successfully to the selection pressures that exist right now.
Even just giving good right-now career advice is a more complex problem than Science Careers editors seem to have grasped, since dynamics around race, gender, age, disability, etc., within scientific communities can have an impact on what "works" and what resources are best suited to tackle a problem. Getting a range of strategies to respond to a situation, taking at least some of these complexities into account, would surely give folks looking for advice more to work with.
But I’d argue that it’s a problem to bolster the status quo without considering the question of whether the particular selection pressures in place are good for the scientific community or for the shared project of knowledge-building, either in the short term or the long term. Career advice that goes no further than giving immediate strategies for working too many hours, sacrificing work-life balance, or swallowing microacressions or abuse with a smile end up maintaining conditions in the scientific community that just won't be acceptable to lots of smart, creative people who could make important contributions but who would also like to be treated humanely.
If AAAS is serious about advancing science, it needs to take a hard look at these conditions, and to exercise leadership in changing them. The organization needs to think about career advice not just in the context of what will help scientists or scientific trainees respond successfully to conditions that are in place right now, but also in the context of how members of the scientific community, individually and collectively, could create better conditions.
Science is read by AAAS members (among others) across the career lifespan. Advancing science is not just a matter of celebrating knowledge that scientists have built, but also involves creating conditions to support the knowledge-builders, including scientists from groups not yet well represented in scientific communities. It also means reminding more senior (and powerful) members of scientific communities of their responsibilities for the longterm well-being of knowledge-building communities and of their most vulnerable members. These responsibilities extend beyond giving advice to help early-career scientists survive the status quo — there is a duty to change the status quo, especially when the status quo treats people unfairly or inhumanely.
In other words, AAAS ought to be taking some leadership for mobilizing senior members of the scientific community to make things better for their intellectual offspring — and Science Careers could be doing this by highlighting places that folks with more power in institutions and scientific communities ought to be stepping up and addressing the standing conditions that make things grim for folks trying to get their scientific careers launched.
Maybe this isn't where AAAS wants to exercise leadership. That's fine. But I think it's time for them to work out how to run Science Careers so it doesn't make things worse for early career scientists, or for the longterm health of the scientific community as a whole.
