C. M. Carollo case — Astronomer girls object to working at night! Professor censured!
It should not be news that men and women are treated differently at work. But we need to face that women are among the worst who attack top performing women. The Carollo case in Switzerland is taking down one of the top female astronomers in the world because some young women thought:
Seriously. These young ladies didn’t want to be bothered on weekends? In grad school? It’s research. That requires committment. Meetings that go until midnight? Really? These girls actually went into astronomy and didn’t understand that you see stars at night? That is farcical. This reads like something out of “The Onion”. Astronomer girls object to working at night when stars are out! Professor censured!
I don’t think a discussion of the Carollo case can be complete without talking about how women are as bad (if not worse) at expecting their mentors to be nurturing mommy figures. It starts with behavior such as Laris DeSantis discusses.
As a female faculty member in the earth and environmental sciences — a field in which women are grossly underrepresented — I am often seen as a “mom” in the department. Students expect me to take care of them, and when I provide advice or constructive criticism, it is often met with a defensiveness that students don’t exhibit toward male colleagues. So, what do you do when you don’t agree with your mom? You go to your dad or other parental figure. In this case, that father figure is the department chair. When my students have an issue with me, they frequently run across the hall to his office.
These girls in Switzerland did exactly that. They ran across the hall to daddy. And guess what? Daddy shook his finger at this female professor for not being mommy.
However, targeting of women by women goes far beyond running to daddy. Linda Katehi became somewhat infamous as the chancellor who ordered Occupy students removed by 5:00 that afternoon in 2011, which made Occupy famous worldwide in the Lt. Pike pepper spray incident. (I said as much to a group of those students and they agreed. They were trying to make it happen again)
It was some women at the Sacramento Bee would not rest until they took Linda down. Those women included the editor in chief, Joyce Terhaar, and a reporter, Diana Lambert. Diana went on radio in the area to carry the crusade.
It was a woman, Janet Napolitano, who as UC president, went after Linda. Janet refused to share documents with Linda and obstructed journalists and Linda by foot dragging on FOIA requests and censoring them. I know this because I was teamed with a journalist on it. That is not the behavior of a fair and honest broker.
Now, Linda can be hard to like sometimes. She’s not a touchy-feely sort of person except with family and close friends. But she was an excellent chancellor, head and shoulders above the previous one, and arguably the best in the UC system during her tenure by many measures. She left her position with a faculty committed to excellence, where the previous administration had literally said, “What’s wrong with second best?” She cleaned house when it was needed, getting rid of a dysfunctional dean of the medical school whose missives to the media were clownlike self satire. UC Davis now has an endowment over $1 billion, where it had none.
While it’s true that pepper spray was used and caused students pain, at UC Berkeley at the same time, skull fractures resulted from clearing out protesters. Pepper spray you recover from. Skull fractures mean permanent brain damage usually. But nobody would go after UC Berkeley’s chancellor for causing permanent brain damage. Nobody would look into him, and UCOP obstructed some minor attempts to do so so with more FOIA obstructionism. Many chancellors in the system (and many professors) had the kind of side appointments that Linda did. She donated the proceeds of those appointments, which nobody else did. One of Linda’s faults was that she tended to be optimistic and sometimes overly trusting of representations made to her. She also had complete confidence in her managerial abilities which were considerable.
What happened to Linda Katehi is how it works for women. Women are targeted for not acting like a nice mommy should. Other women hate them for not being nice sweet motherly people, perhaps more than men do. That is certainly my experience. Until this is understood and discussed, there cannot be anything remotely resembling equality for women in academia.
A professor like Carollo has a responsibility to to the world. Part of that responsibility is that graduate students who do not qualify should not finish. Yes, there can be abuses of that. But failure to be mommy to grad students? No. That is not abuse. Telling grad students that they need to get to work? That is not a failing. That is doing the job. Men tell grad students to get to work all the time, although in my experience, men hold back with women in many cases, particularly now.
(Trust me, if anyone knows about abuse of graduate students, it’s me. I did major battle in grad school with vicious little men despite being top of my class. Arguably I had to do battle because I was top of my class. I still have those files.)
