Dear Science*

You write a nice magazine. Sure, it's no Nature, but we still read it.

However, each time I download a pdf of your work, it comes with a totally useless front page. This cover page says something stupid about the citation and copyrights of the work (I don't know, I never read it) and then lists other articles I might be interested in**.

News flash, I'M NOT. I'm interested in reading THE ARTICLE I DOWNLOADED, thanks anyhow. And now when I go to print, I have to type in the "pages" field "2-5" or whatever, so that I don't have this useless piece of junk in front of everything else.

Maybe no one ever explained this to you, but pdfs are designed for printing. Yes, they're also nice to collate in your Papers or whatever, but the entire reason Acrobat was invented was so that one could transmit complex pieces without messing up the layout....for ease of printing at the other end. Yet here you have taken this beautiful, simple idea and inexplicably screwed it up by taping on a cover page, like you're a goddamn seventh-grader turning in a class report. Why, why?

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* You too, J Neurophys
** J Neurophys, hilariously/irritatingly, lists Medline search terms on the front page. I recently noticed a pdf where the front page listed "HIV--AIDS" as a relevant topic. The authors were talking about lobule HIV (H-IV) in the cerebellum.

The good news is, we're not alone

A recent article in Newsweek tackles the issue of gender discrimination in journalism--even at Newsweek itself (though perhaps a bit soft-pedaled, that part). The authors tell an all-too-familiar storyline:

1) Sexism was really, really awful when women first started making major inroads in the workplace (the women at Newsweek were called "dollies;" they were told outright that women didn't write).
2) Now things are much much better!
3) Except.

Except men wrote 88% of the cover stories for Newsweek last year ("and two of those used the headline 'The Thinking Man.'"). Except women still earn less than men. Except women are still underrepresented on the masthead. Except, except, except...the equality isn't so very equal.

What I find interesting is that the type of metrics and stories that women tell about discrimination at today's magazines are so similar to what I hear in the sciences. Replace "cover stories" with "speaking invitations at conferences." Replace "underrepresented on the masthead" with "underrepresented on the faculty." Replace "earn less" with, uhh, "earn less."

In the biological sciences, women who join with confidence in graduate school are still disappearing, particularly at the postdoc-to-professor transition. Men still represent ~80% of the faculty.

(My department recently held a faculty job search. When I complained that an overwhelming percentage of the invited candidates were male, one faculty member told me that the department had recently hired several women, so I shouldn't worry. Well phew--thank goodness we've filled that quota! Now we don't have to concern ourselves with inviting the ladies for a while.)

The article made me think that efforts to address women's stymied progress in the sciences cannot be confined to financial solutions, like providing better campus childcare, but need to confront the systemic cultural attack on women.

Though, campus childcare would be a nice start.