The changes that have taken place at MIT changed my life including my extreme feelings of marginalization. I feel supported, included, and protected from gross inequities by the network of tenured women faculty and by the now many more enlightened male administrators and colleagues who are aware of these issues. I feel included at MIT by seeing women in powerful administrative positions, seeing women winning the awards they deserve, seeing more young women able to have families and a successful career. However, I still sometimes feel excluded from important professional activities. Many men who are in positions of power within and outside MIT still work only with men, or with women ten or more years younger than they are, but they seldom seem able to work with women their own age as equals.Female academic, from a new MIT report
14 years ago
Some of the professional lurkers here may be surprised to hear that I was once a respected young scientist. It was fascinating to observe, over the decades, the precise inverse proportionality between my increasing feminist awareness (and lessening attractiveness) and the ability of complete strangers to accidentally plunge knives into my back. I guess there must be some entertainment value in commiserating with others on the annoying presence of whining outsiders in such an otherwise perfect world. Oh well, then, I guess I'll get back to searching for funding for yet more seminars that I will probably never give ...
ReplyDeleteSomebody seems to have finally proved that guess that every pair of finite Hilbert space bases has a vector that is unbiased with respect to both: http://math.stackexchange.com/q/28413/8536
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