I remember my first major grant rejection (long time ago, and many since then). I had led a blessed life in that regard; every grant I’d written had been funded and I expected this one to be no different. When I opened the envelope, however, and read the notice that I had not been funded, I was stunned. I cried. I smoked (having quit months before). I kicked my trashcan so hard it put a dent in my office wall. I was demoralized and felt like a failure.

However, when the tears dried and I un-crumpled my trashcan, I read the reviews, and they were actually really helpful. They pointed out some important stuff that I used to re-write the grant, which also was not funded, but on the 3rd try (the old days) it was funded. I learned that the “failure” was an opportunity to do better and that I had to reframe it as such. I learned to actually look forward (sort of) to failure, and that it can ultimately get me I want to go.

“There is no such thing as failure.”

When you read the quote above, what’s your reaction? Do you think it’s untrue? Silly glass-half-empty stuff? What if I told you that only you have the power to decide whether or not something is indeed, a “failure?” Obviously, I believe this is true as evidenced in the above vignette. In fact, I’ve come to believe that the word “failure” has no place in our vocabulary.

Why?

Remember when you played the “opposite day” game when you were a kid? You’d play practical jokes on your family and friends and release some passive aggression in the process of claiming “opposite day.” It was great—you could call the cutest boy in the class “ugly,” and then take it all back by simply exclaiming “opposite day!” But, the end result is the same; you still would have acknowledged his cuteness.

Well, let’s play the game. What if today, failure really means success?

How can you acknowledge your success, even as you utter the word “failure”? Well, you can point out:

a. everything that was learned in the process of getting to where you are now—surely not everything goes to the scrap heap

b. that simply being able to recognize everything hadn’t gone according to plan, or achieved the desired outcome (i.e. “failed”), is in itself a positive outcome

c. that the specific path you took this go round, clearly wasn’t the right one and so it has successfully been eliminated and will not be repeated

d. that you’ll know to do things differently in the future

e. that the experience has enabled you to grow in some way

“Failure” is feedback. “Failure” can simply be a great way to get us to pause in the midst of our process, and get some critical information to indicate that we may need to change direction, try something new, continue our learning, or shift our focus. Imagine what would happen if we didn’t get that feedback, and continued endlessly along the wrong path, toward the wrong goal, or without ever learning a new approach? The thought is pretty scary, isn’t it?

Failure then, can really be seen as positive feedback—information that gets us on the right track.
For, without it, we would surely be lost. The key then, is to identify it quickly, and change direction, try something new, or shift our focus.

Here are some tips:

 Always have a clear idea of where you want to go and continue to re-evaluate it as you move forward

 Identify specific milestones or markers along the way, to let you know you’re on the right track and celebrate each success

 If something doesn’t appear to be working, or working fast enough, don’t hesitate to try something new

 Continually learn—from others with whom you work, seek out experts, find others who may have traveled down a similar road before

And always remember:

“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down”

“You NEVER fail until you stop trying”

“If you are not making any mistakes, you’re not really doing anything with your life”

Last week, the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women published a report entitled “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey”, which details its findings about it’s assessments of Associate Professors at private and public institutions. Among the key findings are:
“On average, it takes women from 1 to 3.5 years longer than men to attain the rank of
professor, depending on the type of institution in which they are employed and
regardless of whether they are single, married, or divorced or have children.

Women on average and across all institutions report that they spend less time on research and writing (7.7 hours a week) than men do (9.7 hours a week), and spend more time on grading or commenting on student work (7.5 hours a week) than men do (6.0 hours a week).

Men report greater job satisfaction than women in almost all cases; women at the rank of both associate professor and professor feel less authority, autonomy, and control over
their work lives than men do. Women report very high satisfaction in only one of nine
categories: having the authority to make decisions about the content and methods in the courses they teach (85.9% report being “very satisfied”).”

Wow. None of this is a surprise, but the last part is particularly interesting to me. As a recently promoted Full Professor, the Associate Dean in charge of the Tenure and Promotion Committee for my college and a Professional Tenure Coach, I am very familiar with the “stuck in rank” phenomenon among Associate Professors, regardless of gender, but had not appreciated the disconnect between job satisfaction and gender that may play a role in the degree to which men and women seek promotion to Full Professor. It’s clearly not just that women are parents and men are not. It’s clearly not just that men get mentored and women do not. There is a more pervasive issue at play here, and I think it has to do with differences in how men and women are socialized to communicate. At the core of this is that men are more comfortable asking for and getting what they need, and can say “no” more easily than women.
One book (and now website) that does, in my view, a really nice job of discussing these differences and providing strategies for women seeking to develop stronger communication styles is Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (http://www.womendontask.com/_. Although I hope things are changing, my experience has always been that assertive men are often viewed as “Strong, decisive, and clear-minded” and assertive women are viewed as “Aggressive, b*tchy, and pushy*. In the close halls of the academy, it only takes a few perceptions of one (male or female, for that matter) as difficult, non-collegial or entitled for some serious damage to be done to one’s ability to get a fair shake in the political world of the University. It does mean one cannot succeed, but if the wrong people get fed up with a faculty member, the path to promotion to Full can be rockier than it needs to be.
I wonder if the tendency of women to take on more and more, to have more porous boundaries between work and home, and to hesitate to say no contributes to their extended time in rank and to their reduced job satisfaction? As strong, smart women, we can take control of so many things in our lives, but when it comes to admitting that we don’t have additional capacity to take on more, we may have a hard time, and as a result, impede our own progress. Key here is for women (and men, for that matter), whether academic or not, to prioritize valuing their own time and energy as much as we value that of others. If we do that, we can more easily stay on track for promotion, feel satisfied and appreciated at home and work, and meet our goals for both.

Check out this small piece I wrote on work/family balance for the Chronicle: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/04/2009040301c.htm?top20

I really had fun writing it and it condenses some of the hard lessons I’ve learned in my own career.  I hope it’s interesting and useful for you!

Clearly, those of us who have survived, for better or worse, as women in academics, and specifically, in the Sciences, know full well that even though it *should not* be happening according to the statements and policies of out Universities and Professional Societies, inequity and frank discrimination are still a part of our lives.  I remember so clearly the meeting in which, as a graduate student, my PhD advisor said once when I disagreed with him, respectfully, about a lab issue, that it must be “that time of the month” for me, since I spoke up for myself.  Needless to say, I found another advisor.    Then there was the time when I was offered a prestigious postdoc fellowship in a great immunology lab, only to be told by the PI, “Well, we’re glad to have you, but please tell me you’re not going to crap up your career by doing something stupid like getting married and having kids”.  Time to move on-  again.

I wish these stories were isolated cases, but from my conversations with many colleagues, sadly, they are not.  We’ve all know for a long time that the academic pipeline is leakier for women than for men, and even leakier for members of underrepresented minorities.  Numerous studies have, over the years, tried to identify the variables that lead to greater loss of women in academic science departments.  Inside Higher Ed did a great piece reporting on the findings of a National Academies of Sciences panel formed to examine existing studies in 2006. 

Among the panel’s findings:

• “A series of cognitive and other studies “have not found any significant biological differences between men and women in performing science and mathematics that can account for the lower representation of women in academic faculty and scientific leadership positions in these fields.”
• Although women fall out of academic science at nearly every stage of the pipeline, women are underrepresented on faculties even in fields in which they have reached relative parity. They make up only 15.4 percent of full professors in the social and behavioral sciences and 14.8 percent in the life sciences, despite having earned more than 30 percent and 20 percent of the doctorates in those fields, respectively, over more than 30 years.
• Women are “very likely” to face discrimination — sometimes deliberately but often inadvertently — in “every field of science and engineering. (Minority women, the panel notes throughout the report, often face a double whammy.) The discrimination results from a combination of built-in biases that make them less likely to hire a woman than a man with identical accomplishments, of evaluation criteria that “contain arbitrary and subjective components that disadvantage women.” For instance, “characteristics that are often selected for and believed … to relate to scientific creativity — namely assertiveness and single-mindedness —” are both given greater weight in hiring and promotion than traits such as flexibility, diplomacy and curiosity, and “stereotyped as socially unacceptable traits for women.”
  • From Inside Higher Ed, 9/16/2006, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/19/women

Depressing, huh?  I especially think the last part of these excerpts, addressing the fact that traits of assertiveness and single-mindedness, critical in science, are looked down upon in women.  This speaks to gender differences in how men and women are socialized to communicate.  One book (and now website) that does, in my view, a really nice job of discussing these differences and providing strategies for women seeking to develop stronger communication styles is Women Don’t Ask:  Negotiation and the Gender Divide (http://www.womendontask.com/_.  Although I hope things are changing, my experience has always been that assertive men are often viewed as “Strong, decisive, and clear-minded” and assertive women are viewed as “Aggressive, b*tchy, and pushy*.  In the close halls of the academy, it only takes a few perceptions of one (male or female, for that matter) as difficult, non-collegial or entitled for some serious damage to be done to one’s ability to get a fair shake in the political world of the University.  It does mean one cannot succeed, but if the wrong people get fed up with a junior faculty member, the path to tenure and success can be rockier than it needs to be.

The good news, however, is that I am optimistic that things are looking somewhat brighter in the academy for women than they did when I was a junior faculty member (12 years ago)-  more of us have made it through the ranks and are in positions of administration where we may be able to help pave the way and improve climate.  Senior academic women and administrators can work to educate our colleagues in the senior ranks and actively and personally support younger women experiencing “learned helplessness”. Learned Helplessness is Psychological phenomenon in which lab animals (or people, frankly) learn through direct experience that no matter what they do, their behavior and performance does not translate into the expected or desired outcome, and then, when contingencies change such that those efforts could or would make a difference in outcome, the subject is too tired of trying and failing to try again. Most of us who are female (and male, for that matter) academics have experienced this phenomenon to some degree; our success is only due to being helped up to try again by a senior mentor, and having that renewed effort may off. Sadly, even trying yet again cannot always overcome frank discrimination and inequity, but with the help of some of us who have weathered the storm and have taken positions in Universities that may be able to catalyze some positive change, overcoming learned helplessness in the academic world may be a little easier, and strong women and men can be recognized for their clarity of thought, commitment to science and academics, and their ability to contribute great things to the changing academy.