Still here

I'm still here. Having an almost calm work semester. Particularly compared to previous deadline ridden ones, this one is easy piecy. My personal life is complicated to say the least but it's nothing I can blog about. Some things I can't even tell my best friends about. So let me get to the most juicy things I can possibly write semi-publicly about without hurting anyone or get fired. Actually my job is very safe and Sweden is liberal, I could probably even sleep with my students and still be okay. But I try not to do that anymore. Not that I didn't have someone just yesterday who made it quite clear that if he got just a hint of a chance he would take it.

I wish I could fire people though. The job security in Swedish governmental institutions (universities go under this category) makes it completely impossible, in fact after several meetings about a particularly difficult case, it turns out that because we are such large employer, we have to try to find another role to the person first, even if that is in a completely different department. So we are stuck with a person who cannot perform their duties. At all. Then we are also stuck with a person who makes other people's life miserable. Anyone around him gets a nasty comment and he has no lid whatsoever to put on his negativity. I have others threatening me they will leave if he stays and I can't get rid of him. I had a good chat with one of the people affected yesterday and he said some interesting things about the situation, which helped. I got a plan now and it's not pretty. Luckily I have no sense of closeness to this place, I'm an outsider and I don't plan on sticking around. My weakness is that I care about people, particularly when I get to know them. Even Swedes. Then I just want to go and hug them and tell them to take a day off and be good to themselves. Tell them not to worry. I'll wave a magic wand and make their problems go away. Except I can't do that and when I go home I don't care anymore.

I'm a bad boss because I do people favors. I twist and turn the truth and make sure I can keep the people I like and let the ones go that I don't like. Without looking at the bigger picture because I don't care about the bigger picture. I'm sure a lot of old white men in CEO positions do the same but it doesn't make it better. Right now my one consolation of a boss is leaving and a new one is entering. Someone I don't trust the least. Again I have to play a game and do people favors such as manipulating work tasks and cover up the truth. And it turns out I have a lot more power than what I initially thought and I am of the 'its easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission' type person, so at least I do things. And I have no patience with people who do not do things, which unfortunately there are many of here. Or complain about working more than their allotted 37 hours.

Yeah, my work is dull and full of a lot of listening to people I couldn't care less about but at least I have my tiny research group and 1-2 days of research fun per week. I long towards each Friday which is research day and I get to work from a cafe and home. Today was one and i got one page on a paper written. At least that's something.

The baby penalty

As a female academic with a child, not to talk about my early and continuing perpetual desire to have a family, the discussion of academic career and children has always been relevant and worrying to me. Having read all the books (Mason, Hewlet, Hewlet and of course Sandberg) makes me acutely aware that anything I do in my professional life I have to do better, faster and more rigorously than others to get ahead. I have to keep focusing on research, papers, networking and politics without skipping a beat. I repeat to myself the age-old saying (that Charlotte Whitton has been credited with): "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men. Luckily, this is not difficult." Because I have to keep my sense of humor to get through the day. I find all these statistics and anecdotes indicating that children hurt women's career where they are an asset to men's, hugely depressing, not only for myself but also for all the other women who are not getting the most out of their life because they have to change career track and ambition level. These women are not contributing enough to society with their intellect because that is the duality of the downside: women don't get to contribute intellectually because they can't keep high level jobs and they are not happy with their lives because they had to give up careers or turn down ambition level to make ends meet. The ones who, like me, attempt to 'have it all' (like this is an unfair demand!) end up torn in half from this attempt, either compromising a career or compromising togetherness with our children.

And it is really hard to sell yourself, being someone who have made choices favoring the family for most of my career. I sometimes envision myself adding the following to my CV, right after me leaving the US and the top institution where I was, and the resent years, in the employment section and publication section: "The change of affiliation was due to family reasons and my priorities to my family took center stage for a short while, as I tried to maintain my professional contacts and publication record. The gap in my publications is in no way a reflection of a sudden lack of ambition or lack of ability, but simply a reflection of serious personal family complications. Future level of work will again reflect my true ambition level and opportunities".

I'm not sure how this would be interpreted but my big fear is always that people see my publication record and think "Oh, she had such great potential. Then something happened and she is clearly not dedicated anymore". Yes, something happened. I had a baby, got divorced and had to start all over in a new country with few potential collaborators and a scarce research resources (in Sweden, for example,  you don't 'get' PhD students, which has been detrimental to my research and career development). All in 2 years. But I am just as dedicated as I have always been, I'm as ambitious, if not more, as I always was and I still want to 'make it' in the academic system. I want to do interesting and valuable research, I want to publish and I want that solid, (semi)permanent well-payed position, no matter what the name of it is. I want the opportunity to do good work. And that's bloody difficult when you have to pick up a girl at 4:30pm and somehow feed you and her dinner while answering all the emails you didn't get to during the day, grade papers at night while the dishes are growing moldy and feeling guilty that the girl was watching an hour of TV while you were trying to review a paper.

If I were to be part of the statistics I would stay in this position, publish three workshop papers a year and never make professor. Ironically I'm already ahead of the US statistics where women stay in temporary teaching positions, get tenure much later and do too much administrative work to publish. So apparently I do have some sort of potential. I just need to find out where I can build on that because it is certainly not here.