Category: academia

About the first women in logic workshop

About a month ago I attended the first Women in Logic workshop. I presented the partial results of a paper with Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo on translations of resolution to sequent calculus proofs. The workshop was open to everyone, but every submission must have been co-authored and presented by a woman. In the end, the audience was composed of mostly women, with one man attending all talks (kudos Francesco!) and another showing up for one of the invited talks. As you may imagine, I’ve had long discussions with different people about this kind of event, before and after. I had my reservations as well. Is closing up in an almost-exclusive event the right thing to do for inclusiveness? What about other minorities? What exactly are we trying to accomplish? If there is a lack of women in logic, what is the root of the problem? I thought it would be worth attending anyway, not only because it was in Iceland, but to see for myself what it would be like. When the program was out, I must say I was a bit disappointed, as there was no space for the discussion of what I thought were the important questions, but only scientific talks. And those were quite diverse (you may imagine the broad range of topics when the only restrictions were logic and co-authored by a woman).

Finally the day came, and as the hours went by and presentations were given, something interesting happened. These women were comfortable. Most of the time, I could not see the usual stiffness, result of nervousness and stage fright, so commonly witnessed during presentations by both men and women in big conferences. The speakers were calm, talking in a usual speed and stopping to explain things on the board or on the slides. They looked confident. The feeling was not that of an aggressive audience, but of a supportive one. So, what changed?

In my view, it was not the fact that there were mostly women in the room. More than that, it was the mindset of the speakers themselves. Somehow they go in front of this audience thinking it will be ok, and then it is ok. Why do they think it will be ok? Maybe because these are other fellow women that get as nervous as they get when presenting to an audience of old white men. Maybe because they can finally relate to the audience. Maybe because they think that women will be less critical and nicer with the questions. Whatever reason you choose, regardless if it is true or not, if it makes you feel more at ease, it works. In the end, it is impossible to predict if the audience will be “nice”, or if you will get mean questions or harsh criticisms (ok, it might become a bit easier to predict once you get to know the people 😉 ). All you can do is think of an “it will be ok” reason to calm you nerves. Here are some suggestions that work with most audiences:

It will be ok…

  1. … it is not my PhD defense.
  2. … half of the people will not pay attention anyway.
  3. … more than half of the people are not experts in this area and I probably know more than them.
  4. … it is only 30 minutes of my life.
  5. … I can always reply honestly that I don’t know.

The usefulness of a workshop such as the women in logic one, in my opinion, is to show women that they can do this. They can go there and present and take the questions and criticisms. It is a bit more scary than presenting to the walls of your bedroom, and a little less scary than presenting at a big conference. The crucial thing is to take the next step, and get out of the women-only shell. The last thing we want is to create a clique inside this already small community of logicians in computer science.

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As an after-note, lack of security is hardly a women exclusive issue. This makes me think that a larger part of the academic community could benefit from this kind of friendly low-profile workshop.

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As an after-after-note, the lack of security and self-confidence is, in my opinion, the main reason why women sometimes do not pursue the careers they want. I have heard more women than men saying “I don’t think I am good enough for this”, and I say it myself sometimes. This is hard to overcome. It is good to remember that there will be people believing in you even when you don’t. Also, don’t try to do everything alone. Hardly everybody does. Ask for help. Ask for people to proof read your first papers, to listen to and give advice on practice talks, to discuss ideas for your projects… you will see how much people are willing to help, and how much you can learn from it.

PhD thesis

Finally! It is done 🙂
Not officially published yet, and still waiting for the defense date, but upon seeing these copies it feels like it’s over. There is an online version here, if you are curious. I recommend the reading of the first chapter, which was written to be understood by all (yes, I mean *all*) people.
Thanks everyone for keeping me sane while working with crazy things!
And yes, it has a white cover with pink letters.

About researchers and politicians

These days I’ve been thinking a lot about politics… I realized this is a problem around the world, and politicians are usually seen by non-politicians as bad people. Non-politicians usually think that politicians are greedy, selfish, lazy and that, in the end, they are not interested in helping society whatsoever. Of course most non-politicians have their exceptions, that one or two politicians that they really believe in, and if they are not doing enough, it’s because the system does not let him. I started thinking if it was possible that so many people in politics really did not care about doing some good for society. I mean, this should be their main motivation for getting a job there in the first place, no? So what happens??

There is an interesting experiment in psychology called the Milgram experiment, where some people, test subjects, are told to give electric shocks on another person if they do not memorize some words correctly. Although the learning person is already screaming in pain, most participants do not stop giving the shocks, since they were told so. At a first analysis, the results of this experiment seem quite disturbing… How can people be so mean? It was just a stupid experiment, they could have stopped once they realized the other person was in pain, right? Well… not really. I mean, yes, they could have stopped, but a deeper (and less sad) analysis of the whole thing takes into account the environment in which this test subject was. And you have to keep in mind that you might just as well be one of the people that continues to give shocks.
Yes, yes… but what does this have to do with the politicians?

The point is that, it’s very easy to judge from the outside. “He should have done this, he shouldn’t have voted for that, he shouldn’t have accepted that money, how can he be so unethical??” But we don’t really know the point of view of somebody who is on the inside. It is actually easier to follow the rules as they are posed then to try to fight them… Even if you think that they are wrong.

As I thought about this, I realized that it happens to me, and most researchers and PhD students I know. We are all very aware of the way universities decide which people to hire: they check our publication list. Of course they don’t read all of them, and I doubt if they actually read the titles carefully… They check how many there are and in which conferences/journals they were published. There is a huge discussion on whether this is the right thing to do, and most researchers I know, young or old, agree that this is not a very good system, and the relevance of the publications should be taken into account, no matter where they are published. But as we go into this academia field, we are pulled by the current and we believe the only way to survive is publishing… So we become one of those people that try to publish no matter what. We behave as if we accept the system, even though we disagree with it. And we think: “but what can *I* do? I am just a PhD student…” Everyone knows that it’s up to us to end this journal industry and to change how we are evaluated, but who’s brave enough to start this? If this person is alone (or only a few), she’ll certainly perish… It’s a high risk to take. So no one takes it, and we are swallowed by the system, just like the politicians we so much condemn.