Anti-acknowlegements
Anti-acknowlegements
114 comments
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Related:
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He really didn't coin the term for her specifically, as nice as that sounds.
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normalize it to the point that the anti-acknowledgements name names
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This seems to be the Netherlands (TU Delft). Maybe it's normal there.
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I don't think so. Academia is still a pyramid system, and a lot of people want a post-doc or not burn bridges
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Shoutout to the physicists dismissing biologist experiment design as a whole instead of across sexual or gendered lines.
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I don't really understand how that one was a problem if they're also a physicist, or even if they're a biologist. Nothing wrong with some fun rivalry.
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There's always rivalry between physicist and biologists. Or chemists and biologists. Or biologists and biologists. Damn biologists, they ruined biology!
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When I was at college us physicists would joke about the biologists and the chemists and the mathematicians and the engineers, and in turn they'd joke about us, and we'd all have a good laugh over it.
I suppose it would come down to the context and how it was said.
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My mom is a biologist and complains how physicists always come into biology, try to reinvent everything without looking at any prior work, and then fail to execute their (sometimes interesting, sometimes not) method
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There is an excellent Science channel on Youtube and Nebula with a Physics PHD who's made some eye-opening content about harassment and misogyny in STEM and Academia.
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She’s a great science communicator. Another famous Youtuber (Captain D) called her “the Jenny Nicholson of science” her Dark Matter video is my favorite, though her Gell-Mann Amnesia video is a “must watch” imho.
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Watch her dark matter video. And the follow up. But for the love of God, dodge the comments. SO MANY people read the title of the video and then went to make comments calling her wrong, even though she spent like an hour specifically addressing the arguments they make.
Dark matter is not a theory. It's a problem. Fuck!
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Love her videos! Really opened my eyes to a lot of this.
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Here are two videos on that subject that are great to start out with
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I recently got recommended her channel. She's amazing, like Jenny Nicholson but for science.
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Fucking relatable.
No thank you to the hundreds of years of chemist men taking credit for women's discoveries.
No thank you to the old white Persian man gate keeping chemistry from Ukranians and older women in my class.
No thank you to the sexist math book author who used shoeless women in a kitchen as a word problem example.
No thank you to Amazon for banning my 15 year account for calling the sexist math book author out in reviews.
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White Persian?
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Fuck these misogynistic pigs, idiots like these need to be called out more often. It's too bad she couldn't give names out and completely humiliate and ruin them.
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While I agree with the first part of what you said, I don't think the longterm solution is to call out individuals and make their lives horrible. It sure is a good way to maybe deter a few people from doing those misogynistic things. But what we need is actual structural change. It shouldn't be possible these people to do such things in the first place without being sanctioned. And we should educate people more on feminism and intersectional struggles in general.
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counterpoint: many people fundamentally need to be shamed if they're being shitheads, or they will never improve. The important part is just that they also need to be given a clear way to redeem themselves.
Naming and shaming is part of the structural change.
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For anybody having difficulty reading the text:
Anti Acknowledgements
There have unfortunately also been people who have been less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, because I know I am not unique in this experience.
No thank you to the physics study association that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a 'stripper name' within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of "computer girl". No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to 'apologise' months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so "no hard feelings remain hopefully". And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was "surprising" that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with "you should consider it". No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists "don't know how to design an experiment". No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the executive board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up to a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted.
I wish I could tell you this has all made me stronger somehow but in reality it has only shattered my confidence. You have made me feel like I do not belong in science and I cannot forgive you for that.
-Rachel
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I appreciate her telling it like it is and not bowing to a pressure to please.
Found an article speaking more about it, if anyone is curious about the context/her work.
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This just makes me sad. How can science advance, if we gatekeep one half of human population? In my academic career I have consistently found women to be smarter and better than men. Yet, these misogynistic ideas seem to persist. We deserve better than old farts with even older bias heading the institutions that make up our society.
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It's exactly that is why they're kept down. Tiny men are afraid that they won't seem as smart as the woman in the room.
As a man, I try to be different. I mentor the women around me and encourage them to do more, be better. I successfully got one of my mentee to negotiate her salary just yesterday even though she felt uncomfortable doing so. Try to be the change we need
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Never understood why some people so desperately need to be the smartest being in the universe. You're a magic meat computers running on a system of hormones so complex that tweaking their balance just a bit can cause unforseen permament consequences. None of us have the right to call ourselves "smart". Just chill and do your best.
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I don't mentor anybody. I am not smarter than anybody and frankly I am always learning from everybody, at all levels of experience.
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When I was in elementary school, we always had a table at the back where the advanced students would do more difficult stuff than the rest of the class while not being completely isolated. The table was always me and 5 or 6 girls. When we graduated high school, I was the top-ranked boy - and the 22nd-ranked student overall. I just took it completely for granted that girls were smarter than boys (although I did perceive the very strong anti-intellectual culture among boys which seemed more impactful than native abilities).
It wasn't until I went to college that I started encountering the belief that men were fundamentally smarter than women, even though every college and university I've attended had more women than male students and the women had much better academic performance. That was my first taste of the power of group delusion.
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It cannot
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Half way through the Hidden Figures movie I started to realize that the racist sexist people in charge really deserved to lose to the Russians.
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I read the first sentence in that big paragraph and thought "wow, going straight to the biggest problem right out of the gate instead of building up to it, huh?" Then I kept reading and realized the entire paragraph was about that same thing. Holy shit, that's a lot of sexism!
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Bravo to the exceptional bravery on display here. I'm sure the majority of PhD graduates, including myself, wish they'd had the gumption to name and shame the suppressing factors contributing to a toxic academic environment. Reading this makes me kind of appreciative that my troubles were only administrative mismanagement and an inexperienced supervisor.
Also what the hell is up with TU Delft? It's only partway through March and this is the second time this year that I've seen a PhD candidate publicly call out the institute.
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This sounds like the University of Ottawa. Watching physics professors sexually harass the few women in our class was disgusting.
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Unfathomably based.
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Acknowledgmen't
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Beautifully spoken
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Reminds me of Sabine Hossfelder, a physicist, who had made some similar experiences.
Proof that educated people can still be immensely stupid and be utter human trash.
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Love the part on the video where essentially she says "I was given my first research position thanks to a grant for women. Also, there should be no research grants for women". Piece of shit.
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To be clear, you are criticising Sabine for saying there should be no research grants for women? If so, you perhaps misinterpret her meaning?
If I know Sabine at all from her videos, she would have meant that in an equal world, grants aimed specifically at either sex should not be necessary.
That's quite different from a "raise the drawbridge" stance - but I'm a casual viewer, so please be kind while putting me right, if warranted.
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Does anyone have info about the lawsuit
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Not a physicist but fuck it is so relatable.
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I don't understand the "computer girl" one, did the technician think that her being a woman meant she was doing computer science instead of physics?
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If a man told you he worked with computers, it'd be odd to raise an eyebrow and respond "Are you some kind of computer boy?". The technician treated this woman's work as something special because she was a woman. In other words: A man that works with a computer is still just a man. A woman that works with a computer must be something special, a computer girl.
And bonus points for calling her a girl, which is just a little bit more infantilizing.
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I'm not sure of the timeframe of this, but it could be referring to the time when calculations were done by women by hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers
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could be referring to "mad men" era secretaries as ibm era computers were just better fancier word processors/typewriters
edit: or maybe like IT helpdesk staff who are like janitors (i.e. they don't see a difference between calling environmental services for a clogged toilet vs IT for a bricked computer)
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can't wait to experience that myself!! 🥰
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I don't think it's that funny, just a sad defense for not being able to recognize that someone belongs at the conference instead of among the customer service staff.
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A dot point list would have made this more readable. Just saying.
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It may be in a scientific paper, but this is more of an anecdote about the various issues the author encountered, rather than something intended to be actionable and clearly delineated as you’d expect in the body of a scientific article. Therefore a more literary style is appropriate for this section.
My mental model is that bullet points are for when you expect a reader to go over the points with a highlighter, prose for when you want to produce an emotional response. This feels more like the latter.
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Yeah i agree with you. I feel like prose is for free-style text, which doesn't claim to be rigorous. Bullet points always feel like there's more rigor involved.
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The irony in how badly you are missing the dot point
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and she should smile more too right? god you are a cunt
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Is this satire?
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Hero.
I love everything about how she's calling out the culture in her realm of academia and casting it in Stone by being the first pages of her book.
Sucks it all happened. But proud to have it justly put on blast.
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Absolute legend
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why is this rachel too scared to name names?
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And this burden of proof is on the accuser.
I don't doubt the stories, but a court would see it in a different way for a good reason. It's hard to find a solution between slander and rightfully calling someone out.
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Yes yes, intelligent woman be intimidating to some people.
But how old is this, is it still that bad? The "computer girl" could be around 2000.
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It's from this year.
https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/a-no-thank-you-to-the-person-who-assumed-i-was-the-coffee-lady
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But surely equality has been achieved in the last few months, this all feels so very January. People are so much more open minded now than in those dark days of the past. Why waste time even discussing such outdated attitudes that totally and completely disappeared in February and are certain to never return?!
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...the dissertation. Which means years of being at a university, though granted it's unlikely to be 25.
Feminist Hacker Barbie is the proper meme response to that and that's 2014/15, but chuds tend to live under rocks so that might explain it.
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Boy did this comment backfire.
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It's all in the wording, but I think it's also the contradiction between the first and second/third sentences.
Yes yes, intelligent woman be intimidating to some people.
Acknowledges that intelligent women are intimidating to some. It also uses present tense, which implies the author knows this is still the case.
But how old is this, is it still that bad? The "computer girl" could be around 2000.
Ah "it". Which it? That some people are intimidated by intelligent women or that the author encountered a ton of sexism?
I think it's ok to ask how prevalent sexism still is these days, especially if you personally experience it / don't participate in a field dominated by the opposite gender.
Something like "I thought society would have finally realized this behavior wasn't appropriate after me too, is that not the case?" sounds less tone deaf.
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You think old men in academia are up to date on their misogyny? Why?
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What she has been through is awful.
I wish though that more people knew the difference between an Acknowledgements page and a Thank You page.
This should properly be titled Anti Thanks.
Acknowledgements should only cover individuals and institutions whose contributions are a direct factor in the material body of the text.
Edit: I see a surprisingly large number of you have, or plan to, amateurishly shoehorn your parents, best friends, favourite barista, and pet cat into your phD Acknowledgements.
Spend the 10 cents on having an extra page of front matter; your future publisher will thank me.
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You should let her know so you can make your way into the next printing
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Bold to assume I'm not in this one.
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Sucks.
Live and let live, man! And preferably with no sexism!
114 comments
Name dropping TU Delft is surprising to me! ETA: found more info here, but not about the lawsuit piece.
https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/a-no-thank-you-to-the-person-who-assumed-i-was-the-coffee-lady
Yeah... Not that surprising to me. TU Delft hasn't been doing so hot. They literally have it all. Corruption, harassment, nepotism. But if you are not a PhD student you shouldn't be too affected by any of these.
Thanks so much for these links. I haven’t had time to look into Dutch sources. I have two good female friends doing their PhDs in other universities in the Netherlands in the sciences, and I’ve never heard anything even remotely close to this! They love their positions.
Thanks. I only heard about Delft from a woman studying there, and didn't hear any complaints. I guess PhD students cannot run as easily, so they get the short end :(
Actually, I was loosely considering applying there, this made sure I won't. That stuff needs to be made more public, so that their reputation noticeably suffers. Only then will people care to enact change.
I'm curious there, too.