I also finished a complete draft of my dissertation and shipped it, in advance of my defense which takes place on Friday August 28. Plus I found a place to live in Chicago, and am in the midst of packing for the move. And, I got my very first smartphone for my birthday — a BlackBerry Curve 8900. I can’t say it has changed my life, but I do really really like it. With all this stuff going on, I feel like I should say something wise and profound about change or new beginnings or something, but I have no idea what that might be. Mostly, I am just taking things one day at a time so it all doesn’t get too overwhelming. I am totally thrilled to have been given this fantastic opportunity for the coming year, and am going to do everything I can to make the most of it.

the note is titled, “Yours, Mine, and (Not) Ours: Social Influences on Group Information Repositories” and is about some results from my dissertation research. i interviewed users of CTools, a learning management system that also includes support for creating sites for sharing files with a group of people, similar to shared folders. i think the most important finding from this research was the subtle, pervasive and enduring influence that social factors had on the information structure of the CTools sites, despite the perception that such information repositories are for “storage”, and not social systems at all.

also: i’m still on the job market, and looking for a postdoc position, or a permanent position in an industry research organization.

i’ve spent much of the last week rewriting my research statement—or, as i’ve started thinking of it—my manifesto. i have presented my dissertation research several times now, and talked with a bunch of people about it; i feel like my story has become more clear and focused, the more i have talked through it. dissertating can be a very isolating experience, so i guess one thing i’ve learned through all this is even if you’re not quite sure what you’re talking about yet, it *really helps* to get out and tell your story anyway. you’ll be glad you did.

so, in lieu of my own ‘words of wisdom’, here are two links from the NY Times that have me thinking about the job search again today:

Humanities Ph.D.’s Are Anticipating Hard Times – NYTimes.com

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”

Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller? – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com

Nearly every occupation has the gap — the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the size of the paycheck brought home by a woman and the larger one earned by a man doing the same job. Economists cite a few reasons: discrimination as well as personal choices within occupations are two major factors, and part of the gap can be attributed to men having more years of experience and logging more hours.

I also don’t self-identify as a feminist, because for me the word “feminist” has sortof radical and militant connotations, and I just don’t get worked up enough about “causes” and advocating for change on a large scale. I’m all about arguing for and inspiring local change, but fighting something as institutionalized as gender stereotypes isn’t how I want to spend my time.

But. I read this opinion piece about sexism in media coverage of the democratic candidates on the NY Times website by Judith Warner, and one part jumped out at me:

It’s a cultural moment that Andrew Stephen, writing with an outsider’s eye for the British magazine the New Statesman last month, characterized as a time of “gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind.” A moment in which things like the formation of a Hillary-bashing political action group, “Citizens United Not Timid,” a “South Park” episode featuring a nuclear weapon hidden in Clinton’s vagina, and Internet sales of a Hillary Clinton nutcracker with shark-like teeth between her legs, passed largely without mainstream media notice, largely, perhaps, because some of the key gatekeepers of mainstream opinion were so busy coming up with various iterations of the nutcracker theme themselves. (Tucker Carlson on Hillary: “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” For a good cry, watch this incredible montage from the Women’s Media Center.)

Stephen is not the first commentator to note that if similarly hateful racial remarks had been made about Obama, our nation would have turned itself inside out in a paroxysm of soul-searching and shame. Had mainstream commentators in 2000 speculated, say, that Joe Lieberman had a nose for dough, or made funny Shylock references, heads would have rolled – and rightfully so.

Watch the montage. It is startling, and it made me sad, and a little bit angry.

This article on livescience.com mentions results from an analysis of media coverage in the first month of the presidential campaign, conducted by Erika Falk at Johns Hopkins University, who studies how the media cover women candidates in American politics. She found that:

Clinton was more likely than Obama to have her legislative title (senator) dropped, and to be referred to by first name or by gender. While 59 headlines contained “Obama,” just 36 included “Clinton,” and Obama was mentioned in 84 stories compared with Clinton’s 55.

The article also says:

This “dogged persistence and toughness” is a great leadership trait, that is, if you are a man, according to Nancy DiTomaso, a sociologist at Rutgers Business School in New Jersey.

A leader must be both competent and likable. Social and political scientists tend to agree on this trait pair.

“Almost all the research in this area tends to show that women who are perceived as competent are simultaneously perceived as not nice,” DiTomaso said, adding that “nice, not competent,” also go together.

That’s a tall order for Clinton and other aspiring female leaders.

“The dilemma for white females is that the stereotype does not include many features related to leadership,” Keating said [Caroline Keating, a psychologist at Colgate University]. “Stereotypically females are affectionate, charming, talkative, submissive, weak, understanding, gentle. Power-related or leadership words — tough, loud, arrogant, aggressive, adventurous — are associated with males typically and things masculine.”

Keating added, “The perception is that she is quite competent; it’s just that she’s hard to like. Why is that? Because she’s quite competent.”

You might think I’ve gone off the deep end a little bit here, with all these links to articles about gender and politics and leadership. What does this have to do with research and science? Well, reading the above reminded me about a paper I came across a couple of years ago. Take a look at this abstract, from a paper published in 2003 in Discourse & Society:

This study examines over 300 letters of recommendation for medical faculty at a large American medical school in the mid-1990s, using methods from corpus and discourse analysis, with the theoretical perspective of gender schema from cognitive psychology. Letters written for female applicants were found to differ systematically from those written for male applicants in the extremes of length, in the percentages lacking in basic features, in the percentages with doubt raisers (an extended category of negative language, often associated with apparent commendation), and in frequency of mention of status terms. Further, the most common semantically grouped possessive phrases referring to female and male applicants (`her teaching,’ `his research’) reinforce gender schema that tend to portray women as teachers and students, and men as researchers and professionals.

So, it seems that for women, even if you’re not planning on becoming a CEO or the President of the United States, and all you want is a tenure-track faculty position, gender stereotypes are a force to be reckoned with. I don’t really want to think about it, but there it is. I don’t want to go through my life looking for instances of discrimination, feeling like I’ve succeeded in spite of misogyny or failed because of it. I can’t control the lens through which others view me, and the negative effects this may have on my future. But, I can control whether I allow myself to become discouraged — and I’ll certainly be doing my part to prove those stereotypes wrong.

the good news, though, is that this gives me a bit more time to crank out those three papers i’ve been working on this summer, which will make me a stronger job candidate. and, at least i won’t have to look for a postdoc.

and the really good news is that i have an advisor-approved outline of the research i plan to do for my dissertation, and it is time to start looking for committee members. that’s going to have to wait until after the GROUP paper deadline, though.

proposal outline [ PDF ]

The Editorial Charter of TOIS isn’t too helpful either. There are two bullets that seem relevant:

Organizational Interfaces for Information Access and Social Impact of Information Systems: adversarial computing and information access; social networks; the effects of information access systems on groups, organizations, and communities; social constraints imposed on information systems such as legal and privacy concerns.

Design and Evaluation of Information Access Systems: Design principles for information systems, including long-term storage, versioning, and preservation; methodologies for evaluating information systems.

I think my research fits in there somewhere… but come to think of it I’m not sure the questions posed in the call for papers fit exactly within the Editorial Charter! I still feel like it would be a good idea to give it a shot.

I had a similar experience when I was a first-year phd student in a cognitive psychology department. Towards the end of my first year, I had a tough meeting with my advisor where she told me that I would never make it out of the program if I continued down the path I was on. My work was too applied — it would not contribute to theory in cognitive psychology — and therefore I would have a hard time putting together a dissertation committee from that department. I was faced with a choice: stay and reinvent myself, or try to do my own thing somewhere else. I decided to leave the program.

Here I am, towards the end of my 3rd year in an interdisciplinary phd program at a different school — my 3rd Big 10 school! I wish there was someone here who would have this same kind of talk with me. I have been working on my own projects, feeling like I was making good progress, for the past two and a half years. When I receive feedback at milestones such as the annual review or prelim exam it is generally very positive. But as I get closer to the moment of truth — the academic job search — I can’t help feeling like I wish someone would sit me down and tell me the truth about how I measure up. Assuming anybody knows that kind of “truth”.

I wish I knew who to ask: am I on the right path? Do I need to figure out how to reinvent myself if I ever hope to get a job when I’m done here? Should I quit while I’m ahead and settle for less than I want out of a career because that’s all I’m qualified for? I just don’t know how to get this kind of difficult advice.