Later that day: “Um… oh… uh… no, Dear! I swear I thought it said ‘suffering.’ Please let me back in the house.”
Shocking Fact No. 1: If you put a woman’s name and a man’s name on the exact same job application for lab manager, the woman is described as less competent and will be offered less money.
Shocking fact No. 2: If you show the results of that experiment to faculty members in scientific fields, the men are less likely to believe the results. They say the research is flawed and the findings are suspect.
Question: What happens if you change the results of the resume experiment? Will those male faculty members still think the research was shoddy? Or will they believe the new results because it fits with their pre-conceived notions about hiring?
On this week’s show, we discuss some new research that gives hints as to why gender bias in the scientific community is so pernicious. How can you solve a problem when not everyone will admit that the problem exists in the first place?
And before you leap to judgement about those unenlightened pigs, be sure to check your OWN implicit biases with these simple tests.
Everyday Sadism
We’re also celebrating Halloween with a murderous IPA from Shipyard Brewing in Portland, Maine. It’s the “Little Horror of Hops,” and the mascot is this handsome devil:
We enjoy the bitter brew, and Daniel reveals the darker side of our taste preferences. Recent research implies that people who enjoy flavors like coffee and beer are actually more likely to express psychopathic tendencies! That explains a lot about the Hello PhD hosts…
We hope you have a Hoppy Halloween (see what I did there?) and please tweet your #ScaryScience costumes to @hellophd.
If you believe the newspaper headlines, you’ll be ready to dismiss Jake as another statistic. After all, the odds of a soldier returning from war and getting an undergrad degree are not good, which makes his dream of earning a PhD sound like a pipe-dream. But don’t believe everything you read in the papers.
The skills that help a soldier survive on the battlefield can be distractions in the classroom.
The Cost of Coming Home
While the men and women fighting overseas will periodically make the evening news, few of us pause to consider what happens to the veterans who return home. After World War II, the GI Bill helped pay for many of those vets to go back to college, training them for civilian jobs and leveraging their unique skills to bolster economic growth. But our societal appetite for war has waxed and waned with each conflict, and with it, our support for the troops returning home.
Instead of handshakes and expressions of gratitude, many vets return to uncomfortable questions and awkward stares.
So what happens when a soldier like Jake leaves the danger, camaraderie, and daily structure of an active war zone and sits down in English 101 with a group of teenagers scrolling Facebook on their laptops? Short answer: he doesn’t fit.
Science for Soldiers
Enter John Schupp, a chemistry professor who wanted to change the patterns that lead to high veteran drop-out rates. By applying a scientific approach, Schupp experimented his way to a system that could help veterans not only fit, but excel.
In this week’s episode, we unpack Jake’s questions about how he will get back to school and achieve his goals in biomedical science, and Dr. Schupp will be our guide. He tells us how to make science training accessible to all veterans, but also, why it should matter to every one of us.
Jake wrote:
I am a disabled military vet who was going to school under the GI bill. However over the course of my time in college I suffered a mental breakdown that lead to my GPA plummeting and my leaving the small liberal arts college I was studying at. This has left me uncertain as to what my future will be but the one thing I know for certain is that I want to finish my undergrad and get my PhD. Now I’m probably getting ahead of myself. I have several things that I am concerned preclude that for even being an option for me.
1) I am concerned that I am too old I’m currently 27 years old 2) I am concerned that I may have burned my bridges having dropped out 3) Though I’ve received help from the VA for the issues I was dealing with at the time, I’m concerned that I’ll have a recurrence of those problems.
Any advice for getting back on track would be greatly appreciated.
You say vee-EN-na, I say vie-AY-na
Also in this episode, we sample Devil’s Backbone Vienna Lager. This tasty brew from the Blueridge Mountains of Virginia really takes Josh back to his roots.
References
Dr. Schupp shared a treasure-trove of information that you may find valuable. You can reach him at schuppjd@tiffin.edu
