I generally keep up on news and research on women in academia, regularly speak with female colleagues and mentors about issues that affect university women, and keep a notebook of critical reflections on my own experience as a female academic. But I’ve been thinking a lot more about these things since reading a couple of recent articles on the successes of MIT’s gender equity efforts, and their unintended consequences.

For example, the NYTimes reports that enormous strides have been made in the past ten years, but broader societal biases against women make particular attitudes more resistant to change. For example:

“While women on the tenure track 12 years ago feared that having a child would derail their careers, today’s generous policies have made families the norm … [N]ow women say they are uneasy with the frequent invitations to appear on campus panels to discuss their work-life balance. In interviews for the study, they expressed frustration that parenthood remained a women’s issue, rather than a family one. As Professor Sive said, ‘Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast’.

[...]

And stereotypes remain: women must navigate a narrow ‘acceptable personality range,’ as one female professor said, that is ‘neither too aggressive nor too soft.’ Said another woman: ‘I am not patient and understanding. I’m busy and ambitious.’ Despite an effort to educate colleagues about bias in letters of recommendation for tenure, those for men tend to focus on intellect while those for women dwell on temperament.”

Although I don’t have children I can fully empathise with the first point; it would annoy me too. But the second point really gets under my skin.

When I was a child, this was the attitude that compelled people to remind me that I am prettier when I smile. (I may very well be, but why is prettiness or the appearance of happiness more important than what I actually feel?) As I grew older, this was the attitude that prompted people to ask me what was wrong, when I was simply sitting quietly and thinking. (God forbid I enjoy the life of the mind!) And now that I am a professional academic, this is the attitude that has allowed people to feel justified when they’ve said things like my teaching and service are more important than research (why can’t they be equal?) Or that my personal interests should follow the interests of the group (why must I come second?) Or that I should be more supportive (what if I don’t think something should be supported?) and less critical (why can’t I have a position of my own?)

It remains that many of the qualities that get male academics acknowledgment or promotion are ones that too often get female academics a reprimand. In fact, Inside Higher Ed reports some research in this area that might help explain why women still do not tend to get promoted as quickly as their male counterparts:

“[P]eople of both genders automatically favored male authority figures over female ones — even if they professed to hold the opposite view. Their subjects associated men with high-status traits, such as being competent or competitive, and women with communal ones, such as kinship and nurturing. They also tended to reject or dislike women who vied for authoritative roles.”

And when women’s academic successes are actively acknowledged and supported, some men and women still doubt that they were due to actual merit:

“The perception [remains] that hiring and promotion standards are more relaxed for women than they are for men. ‘In discussions I hear others saying “oh, she’ll get tenure…because we need to have women”‘ … Some women found themselves questioning whether their own hiring was due to their sex and not their abilities. ‘I felt I was invited to interview because I was dazzling,’ one said, ‘but now I wonder…’.”

This situation is all the more tragic when we consider that the opposite is actually happening:

“If anything, women are held to higher standards, said some who were interviewed. ‘I always feel that female candidates are not treated the same,’ one MIT professor related. ‘People give male candidates the benefit of the doubt. The demands for women candidates are higher, they are more scrutinized’.”

“No one is hired without what Marc A. Kastner, the dean of the School of Science, called ‘off-scale’ recommendations from at least 15 scholars outside M.I.T. … ‘No one is getting tenure for diversity reasons, because the women themselves feel so strongly that the standards have to be maintained,’ Professor Kastner said.”

I know that we’ve come a long way, but we’re still not where I–and plenty of others–want to be.

Related: Reading: “a sense of belonging to herself”

I own all of Lynda Barry‘s books and I’ve read them all, like, hundreds of times. I totally love them and think she is totally awesome. Seriously.

I was first introduced to her work in the 1988 documentary, Comic Book Confidential. She was one of very few female comics artists represented, and I was impressed because she told stories about girls that were really funny instead of really pathetic. (Spending time in Marlys’ world is still one of my favourite things to do.)

But it wasn’t until 2002′s One Hundred Demons that Barry’s work hit me on a visceral level and became relevant to my research. The book gathers seventeen influential demons from Barry’s childhood and adolescence, like “Girlness” and “Hate.” Barry calls this kind of storytelling “autobifictionalography” and it was the first time I think I really understood that there is a productive, evocative, telling space between fiction and non-fiction.

The second revelation came with 2008′s What It Is and 2009′s Picture This. Both are ‘how-to’ books, the former on writing and the latter on drawing, but they are also, and sometimes even more so, ‘why’ books. They are about creative experiences, and how even the most “non-creative” people always already have them. They represent, to me, the triumph of everyday creativity and the polar opposite of elitist (professional?) art and design.

Writing this now, I wonder why I don’t cite Lynda Barry as often as I cite, say, Sarah Pink? Both have taught me how to tell stories about my research, but I give formal (i.e. academic) credit to one more than the other and that’s just not cricket. (Sorry Lynda!) I’ll definitely correct that in the future.

Anyway, if you want to get to know her work, Drawn&Quarterly will be publishing Everything! later this year and here’s Barry’s Amazon page. And if you’ve never heard/seen her speak, it’s a real pleasure:

Lynda Barry–Cusp Conference 2009 (Pt 1)

Lynda Barry–Cusp Conference 2009 (Pt 2)

I’ve been looking at “farm to fork” food traceability in an attempt to articulate how “grower to garment” wool traceability is similar and/or different. (Don’t get me started on what either has in common with surveilling, er, tracing people…)

Here’s how IBM’s Smarter Food initiative frames the food problem and solution:

“Food is as fundamental as it gets. And our relationship with it has changed with every year. Just ten years ago, most consumers were focused on eating a diet low in fat. Biotechnology was extremely limited in its application and considered somewhat dangerous. And few people knew what organic meant or why it mattered. Today, the picture is one of heightened challenges. Food prices are soaring. Shortages have sparked unrest the world over. The threat of salmonella poisoning prompts the recall of millions of U.S. eggs. And every year, ten million people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases. At the same time, consumers are hungrier than ever for information about their food. They are better informed about nutrition and more aware of the environmental and societal impacts of everything they buy … With innovative digital technology and powerful solutions, IBM is making sure food is traced properly as it passes though an increasingly complex global supply chain. IBM is also making that food heartier through biological research. The future of food starts today.

Pet food. Lettuce. Peanut butter. Baby food. Milk. These are just some of the high profile recalls we’ve seen in the last year. Consumers worldwide are worried—and rightly so. Is their food safe? And where did it come from? One solution is track and trace technology, including 2D and 3D barcode and radio frequency identification (RFID). This allows us to track food from “farm to fork.” And now government regulations and industry requirements for quality and traceability are driving food producers worldwide to provide more detail on products. With an increasingly global supply chain, that detail must be comprehensive and reliable. And with that detail, companies can realize added value as well, such as a streamlined distribution chain and lower spoilage rates. In fact, consumer product and retail industries lose about $40 billion annually, or 3.5% of their sales, due to supply chain inefficiencies.”

IBM: Setting the Table for a Smarter Planet (pdf)

And here’s a series of articles on traceability:

Ten examples of brands dishing up details on food origins
App for shoppers rates how brands address forced & child labour
Swedish dairy uses tracking numbers as a ‘still-made-here’ marketing tool
Supermarkets offer increased food traceability, for info and safety
Site alerts consumers to product recalls that affect them

Or how about a more DIY, hands-on approach?

C&T2011 Workshop > Food(ing): Between Human-Computer and Human-Food-Experience

But the question remains: do people want or need the same information about products that they don’t eat, like clothing?

Tracing the history of what you buy
Zque: Ethical Wool
Icebreaker: Sustainability + Baacode
Patagonia: Footprint Chronicles
Rapanui Clothing: Traceability in Textiles
TEDxZurich: Robin Cornelius wants to make clothing traceable

And is there a difference between what we want to know and what we need to know?

Update: Siobhan O’Flynn extends this from “field to fork to feet,” or “bags at least”: You Gonna Eat That? And Wear It, Too?: A Restaurant in Brooklyn Sells Bags Made From the Hides of the Very Animals It Serves on Menu

People who read this blog are well acquainted with my interest in pervasive computing and sheep, but I’ve been working on a smaller project for a few years and this year I want to turn it into something more substantial.

I’ve been thinking about it as technologies of menstruation, but I think that menstrual machineries is much catchier, and actually more in sync with what interests me. Machines comprise any number of devices that turn, shape, mold or finish things, and machinery refers to the machines constituting a production apparatus. Menstrual machineries, then, comprise all the devices (material and social) that produce menstruation, and by extension, the menstruating woman.

A quick look through the Museum of Menstruation will give you a sense of the incredibly rich visual and material culture associated with menstruation throughout history, and existing cultural histories range from the  academic to the popular. But I find myself imagining something more along the lines of a catalog of machines: absorbing machines, collecting machines, cleansing machines, relaxing machines, etc.

One of the reasons I find menstruation so interesting is because it makes me wonder about inconspicuous consumption; the $13 billion a year feminine “hygiene” industry produces vast amounts of materials that are effectively hidden from (public) view. Rebecca Ginsberg published an interesting 1996 article on the topic: in “Don’t Tell, Dear” she explains that the consumption of tampons and pads does not lend itself to expressing identity or status as clearly as the consumption of other products because their use is expected to be as discrete as possible. These acts of discrete consumption put women into particular relationships with their bodies, as well as offering other people particular ways of understanding the menstruating woman.

[Image: Screen capture from Libra Invisibles TV advert.]

The “Aisle 8a” episode of animated sitcom King of the Hill does a brilliant job of showing how uncomfortable certain people can be around menstruation, even if it only means going down the feminine “hygiene” product aisle at the local store. And, indeed, any time I’ve lectured on the topic there have been men who expressly tell me that 1) they are uncomfortable with the subject, or 2) the subject is inappropriate for public discussion. I’m fine with the first–all sorts of things make me uncomfortable. But the second quite offends me; I don’t like the idea of shrouding biological processes in mystery and I don’t like the idea of censoring people’s everyday experiences. And it’s that last point that drives this project for me.

What form does this story need to take in order to discourage people from dismissing it out of hand?

Related: Cultural discomfort as design challenge?

I’ve been looking for historical NZ fiction that takes place on farms or includes sheep, but the setting and/or topic don’t appear to have been very popular. (Stories of small towns abound, however, often in a dark gothic tradition.) Taking a break from my searches, I remembered some brilliant Warner Bros. cartoons featuring Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf.

Cartoon legend Chuck Jones created Sam and Ralph for a series of shorts with music by Carl Stalling and voices by Mel Blanc:

Don’t Give Up the Sheep (1953)

Sheep Ahoy (1954)

Double or Mutton (1955)

Steal Wool (1957)

[I can't find an online copy of this, although it does appear on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 3 DVD]

Ready, Woolen and Able (1960)

A Sheep in the Deep (1962)

Woolen Under Where (1963)

The cartoons are part of a long tradition of anthropomorphising animals, with added allusions to labour relations as Ralph and Sam punch in every morning to do a full day’s work. As the foreman, Sam’s job is to protect the flock from worker-Ralph’s constant attempts at theft and harm. In the cartoons from the 60s I love how Ralph uses new technologies to beat Sam to the clock every morning but still never gets the sheep; I also love how they go home each night before going back to the same thing again the next day. It’s an endless cycle of nature and culture, rank and file–mundane but serious stuff, beautifully drawn with lots of gags.

But all this makes me wonder if humour (not irony) should drive our Counting Sheep scenarios. I posted earlier about how Country Calendar spoofs can be really good at this, but I’m also really wary of what happens if it’s done poorly. For example, in their discussions of critical design Dunne and Raby warn:

“Humour is important but often misused. Satire is the goal. But often only parody and pastiche are achieved. These reduce the effectiveness in a number of ways. They are lazy and borrow existing formats, and they signal too clearly that it is ironic and so relieve some burden from the viewer. The viewer should experience a dilemma, is it serious or not? Real or not? For critical design to be successful they need to make up their own mind. Also, it would be very easy to preach, a skilful use of satire and irony can engage the audience in a more constructive away by appealing to its imagination as well as engaging the intellect. Good political comedians achieve this well. Deadpan and black humour work best.”

But what if humour is only an element in a broader genre? Take soap operas, for example. Some people feel compelled to distance themselves from such “low-brow” forms of culture, but regularly engage in, and thoroughly enjoy, stories and gossip about the everyday lives of their friends, co-workers, neighbours, etc.. Academics have long argued that soap operas work as social binders and provide ways for viewers to formulate personal opinions and identities. But let me bring this back to sheep: I recently read a blog post that has stuck in my brain like you wouldn’t believe. UK-based ethical knitwear designers The North Circular occassionally post updates from the flock’s shepherd, Ernest, and this is the kind of story I’m talking about:

“July seventh, sheep are all clipped finally! All except for 6, that is, who will have to carry on sweltering until the ITV film crew can get here to film. It was pandemonium. These were all the frisky ewes who have just had lambs. I was up at 5am, gathered them all in a pen. Dave the shearer arrived and then it started raining, classic, the only rain to fall in 3 months. Clipping was abandoned and shearer went home saying he would be back when it cleared. Let the sheep back into the pasture. At midday Dave the shearer said he was coming back, as the sun had now made an appearance. Could i catch the sheep?!? if only. Izzy called to ask if she could come with the film crew – managed to politely says not a good time. Next thing, the shearers wife called Izzy, she wasn’t happy – no she was absolutely furious -the three of us, shearers wife, Dave the shearer and I had been running circles round t’ fields trying to catch them fer very long time and Dave the shearer was on the verge of walking off, shearers wife thought he was going to have a heart attack. Bit woolly if you ask me but, I put the film crew off, they want wildlife episode not soap opera drama! Shearers wife raged at Izzy, Do you have any idea how naughty your sheep are, how absolutely impossible they are to catch and handle?! you should come and see my flock, see how good they are, so you can compare your wild ones to them! We visited Dave the shearer this afternoon sheepishly bearing his cheque and a box of fruit and vegetables. All was forgiven after a few strong brews!” [emphasis mine]

First of all, this is is a good story. But here’s the most interesting and important bit for me: Ernest knows what story ethical wool marketers and media want to capture, and it isn’t what actually happens on the farm. The real story, and what I think is actually the better story, is full of humourous mishaps. Nature, as NZ’s brand suggests, may be 100% Pure but it’s not 100% cooperative. Sometimes it rains when farmers want to be shearing, and that reality makes for all sorts of inconvenience. But if we tell the story of that “failure” instead of waiting for a “perfect day” then we learn something about people as well. First, we learn that nature and animals are always already apprehended by, and through, people. We learn something about social interaction, like relations between farmers, business owners and mass media. We also learn about relationships between people and animals, and between men and women. We even get glimpses of shearing as seasonal and migrant labour, as well as competition and reciprocity between farms. These are the stories of wool production worth capturing and sharing. They can deeply affect or move people, and the foibles remind us that we are part of the story. I’m not convinced these stories do the same because I’d argue that people actually want “soap opera drama” more than “wildlife episode” or sterile quality assurances.

[Update: Edited the last two sentences in response to Twitter comment by Laura Allen.]

This week’s RunningHot! conference was the best overview of the interests and concerns of NZ’s research community I’ve received since moving to Wellington almost a year ago. I learned about some fascinating research initiatives, met some wonderful people and got a much better sense of how things work. I went back to work today with the knowledge that I’m not alone, and with renewed hope for an incredibly stimulating and satisfying research career here. And perhaps it’s precisely because I felt this sense of excitement that I was more than a little disappointed we didn’t spend more time discussing strategies for valuing and supporting collaborative research, or coming up with concrete actions for tackling some of the big problems. I mean, I love thinking and talking about things, but not to the exclusion of doing and making things. I really hope that the organisers will consider facilitating a series of workshops before the next conference, as I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like the opportunity to follow-up on some of the challenges and opportunities that were so well presented.

But to be fair, I’ll happily take on the challenge to do and make some things myself. I won’t ignore Helen Anderson‘s call to up the “stroppiness quotient,” in the sense of continuing to ask the hard questions and insisting that we can do more and better. I’ll apply to take some Women in Leadership courses. And I’d like to become involved with the Oxygen Group, or something similar. I’m really looking forward to the Mobilities Research Symposium later this month as a way to make new connections, and I can’t wait to organise the School of Design’s Culture+Context: Brown Bag Lunch & Lecture Series next year. But, most of all, I’m excited about getting into my new research project and starting to make new connections between researchers and farmers, industry and government, ideas and practice. I’m grateful to be working in a country that I think actively supports emergent researchers. I know not everyone agrees, and the system isn’t perfect, but there is no equivalent to the Marsden Fund Fast-Start programme in Canada and I simply wouldn’t have had the same opportunities that I have here.

All this talk of collaborative research and leadership also got me thinking about the value of mentoring. Of course, geeky girl that I am, I began with a little research on the topic. First, in a recent article in the Journal of Sociology, Maureen Baker reported that most of the female academics she interviewed in NZ did not expect to be promoted to (full) professor before retirement. This alarmed me because I most certainly intend to join the professoriate, and because I’ve already been told how incredibly difficult it will be, I want to better understand what the obstacles are. According to the article, most cited a “lack of intelligence and/or ambition; insufficient time, energy or publications; or no desire for additional responsibilities. Several women also mentioned that ambitious academics are viewed as ‘tall poppies’ to be cut down” and one woman professor went so far as to say that “the more you climb, the more of a target you become and the less support you get” (Baker 2010: 321). I was especially disheartened to learn that some women lacked the confidence to apply for promotion even when they wanted and were qualified for it, because of a “lack of collegial recognition and esteem” (330). In a related journal article (pdf), she notes that “academic mentoring has been related to productivity, promotion and career satisfaction but fewer female academics report that they have been adequately mentored” (Baker 2009: 34).

Poking around online a bit more, I learned that many young female academics seek out, or are paired with, older women mentors. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Unfortunately, many end up finding the mentorship uncomfortably reminiscent of a mother-daughter relationship, or find themselves tied to mentors who could be considered perfect exemplars of what Ann Darwin calls the “volatile dimension”: neurotic, overbearing, egocentric, outrageous, vindictive, contradictory, self-centred, wild, eccentric, opinionated, stressed, cunning, hard and picky. Um, thanks but no thanks. First of all, everyone deserves a sane mentor. But I also need to believe that mentor-mentee relationships don’t have to be one-way relationships in which I’m forever destined to subserviently and unquestioningly absorb someone else’s wisdom, while simultaneously being denied the opportunity to offer something of value in return. It’s really important to me that I’m able to cultivate the kind of collaborative relationships with my postgraduate students and colleagues that can support greater two-way exchanges. I’m not arrogant or naive enough to believe that this will be possible or desirable with everyone, but I hope to learn to recognise the opportunities when they appear.

So I’ve signed up to take part in VUW’s Academic Mentoring Programme, which is quite formal and highly structured, but I’m also interested in building a more bottom-up, dynamic and informal board of advisors. I found a few articles from a special issue on new visions of mentoring in Theory into Practice that really got me thinking about collaboration and co-mentoring. Janice Jipson and Nicholas Paley rightly remark that “no one gets there alone” and go on to describe a collegial and personal relationship that creates a “shelter…in which [they] can encourage, support and critique each other in the trying out of ideas, feelings and action.” I’m fortunate enough to be able to immediately identify the person who fills this role in my life and because of this support I can confidently move on to identifying additional people. Business folks suggest a group of three: someone several levels above you in your own organisation; a high performing peer; and someone great who works elsewhere and in a different field. They also suggest finding people that both support and challenge you. I’ve already got a bunch of men and women in mind, so wish me luck!

My current research investigates relationships amongst people, animals and the land on NZ sheep stations. In the new year I’ll start fieldwork in places likes these:

Sheep Station NZ

Bendigo Merinos flow across the land

Shearing a Merino