How do you want your eggs?

I read about the South Korean stem cell research team today. You know, the one that made big news earlier this year with their (now questioned) findings in stem cell research and cloning. It's been in the news a lot this year. After the initial press, there was a big hullabaloo about the accuracy of the findings of the research. I wasn't following it all that closely at the time but I do recall there was also some talk of how eggs used in the study had come from one of the researchers. I recall that the stories I read at the time had something about them which conveyed the sense that the female researcher was the one who was guilty of unethical behavior by having donated her own eggs. Right. How selfish of her to undergo that risky procedure. I remember wondering at the time "What if a man had made a similar sacrifice? Would he have been vilified in similar vague ways?" In an effort to exorcise the phantom images of the off beat renegade genius scientist who tries the life savingvaccine on himself which were needlessly banging about in my mind, I decided to stop reading the news reports on this.

But now there's a little more of the story coming out. A headline about the research team piqued my curiosity. According to a recent report, Professor Hwang (the PI for this team) is now being accused of coercing junior female reseachers on his team to "donate" their eggs for the study. In an article reprinted in The Seoul Times, it is reported that one of these junior female researchers may have been a graduate student of Dr. Hwang's.

Ok for those of you who don't know, donating eggs is nowhere near as fun as donating sperm. Here's an excerpt from a 2004 article in Nature about Hwang's research:

"....Researchers were surprised that so many women were prepared to undergo this procedure for a research project. Side effects of the treatment can range from general discomfort and emotional stress to clotting of the veins or stroke. "It's a painful procedure and there is risk involved," says Jose Cibelli, a co-author on the paper who studies cloning at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "It would never fly in the United States."

As part of a community of researchers, the expectation that you will participate in a study, that you will offer yourself without complaint for data collection purposes does exist. I'd say the expectation is stronger and the level of participation is greater the lower your status. In my time as a grad, I've seen ethical violations that are similar at a very basic level to the ones alleged to have been perpetrated by Dr. Hwang. Being one of the only native speakers in a Linguistics department meant I was cornered on a regular basis by Europeans brandishing print outs of the most fucked up sentences imaginable.

Please rate which sentence is worse:
'Which pictures of themselves did Mary think that Peter said John showed her?'
'Which pictures of themselves did Mary think that only Peter said John showed her?'

Overall, I viewed those experiences as minor irritations, but there was a bit of risk for me socially since I was not shy about saying when my native speaker judgments did not agree with the judgments predicted by the dominant theoretical leanings. Once, when I refused to change my answers, a Bulgarian woman screamed "You are not being enough of a linguist!" at me over my lunch. I was a first year grad student who clearly didn't know even her own language! As it turns out, if I had stayed in that department long enough, I would have developed a finely honed ability to supercede my own instincts (linguistic and otherwise). I do believe that partly from the perception of my "deviant" sentence judgments, I got a rep among the other linguistics grads as some kind of contrarian with a less than staggering intellect. Neither of these is a good reputation to have as a grad, but I think the former is worse because if the shit hits the fan you'll find your peers who could help you will not stand with you. In fact, they may take a certain amount of glee in stepping on your neck while you're down.

Fortunately, in my current research context, we're all "scientifically" minded enough that we know we would be guilty of cardinal sins if we were to (a) yell at a subject (b) throw a shit fit over data that doesn't fit our hypotheses. Here however, there are more real experiments being run. This means means an increased need for subjects, and thus more chance that you may find yourself giving up an hour or so of your time to sit in a chair and be bored shitless by words or word like letter strings flashed on a screen. Sometimes we grads engage in this as a quid pro quo, i.e., "I run in yours if you run in mine". Occasionally, we are encouraged by faculty to run for one another. The latter bothers me more. And both bother me in that when grads run grads, all our human subject training seems to fly right out the window. I recently agreed to check out a student's study and ended up with him assuming I would participate before he even finished explaining the procedure to me. I thought he was explaining how it worked so I could decide if I wanted to participate. Turns out he was already up and going and measuring data. Not wanting to mess up his data collection, I continued to the end. Ultimately, this was a bad choice for me since the dependent variable was measured using a device that measured hand grip force and I have arthritis. My peer encouraged me to grip it as hard as possible. After the first time I did it (and said "ow!"), I refused to grip that hard again. The experiment was over pretty fast, but the sore hand lasted over a day. By all the human research standards, even what little negligence this student displayed could have gotten his and any associated study suspended. Now, consider what Dr. Hwang is accused of doing.

I have a feeling that in the not too distant future, we will be reading about Dr. Hwang in the human subject training modules. Even if his graduate student was never explicitly told by him "you must do this or else!", the status difference alone is enough to make giving free consent for an invasive and painful and therefore high risk medical procedure impossible (see this link on infertility treatments for a description of the egg harvesting procedure).

But there is something else about this that really deeply bothers me. It seems clear to me that the Hwang methods represent a horrible juncture of the grad-subject assumption and sexism. Treating your female grad student as if she were a Premarin mare can probably be described legitimately as an instance of extreme sexism. However, I think this sort of outcome is not unlikely in an institution with a sort of more free floating sexism . By "free floating sexism" I mean the undercurrent of supposedly implicit, non-threatening sexist crap that we all know exists in academic environments. E.g., the attitudes that allow an invited speaker to make "take my wife, please" type jokes during an academic talk; the beliefs that underlie a senior faculty member telling his female advisee that she doesn't need as much funding as other grads because she has a husband to provide for her; attempts to question Nancy Hopkins' abilities as a scientist because she so visibly and vocally complained about Larry Summers' idiot rantings (see also this item from the Washington Post for some relevant examples of that "subtle" sexism from Hopkins' experiences). The sexism is not all that subtle, not really, but is made free floating - insubstantiable, intangible, and infinitely ambiguous - through the sometimes social but mostly academic conventions which allow plausible institutional deniability for sexism as the or even a motivating factor in unethcial, illegal, or harassing behaviors or contexts.

Let's consider some of those conventions. Myths like the "liberal academia" make it nearly impossible to address sexist behavior or the consequences of it because they state that sexism does not exist in higher education. If it does, it happens in the margins. It is undergrads dormitory grab ass games gone too far. It is one lone professor who forces himself on an unsuspecting 18 year old who will "do anything for a higher grade". Sexism can't be as much a part of the environment as the air I breath or the food I eat at a colloquium dinner because according to the liberal academia myth, faculty are just not capable of sexism. Its so...base. These enlightened and rational individuals may make a jokes here and a reference there but everyone knows these are made out of a higher sense of cultural satire. This one is so hard to fight and is so horribly insidious. I think this one is related to the belief that only the most egregious acts, like unwanted sexual contact or making advancement contingent on consenting to such contact, constitute reportable harassment.

Then there is the habit of using scientific inquiry to mask personal sexism or bigotry. Take Larry Summers. Or, for example, a TA might always use sex as a variable for every single example in a cognitive psychology class. Apparently such a person expects there are measurable and valid differences in male and female performance on cognitive tasks. Without discussion of the different social histories for the two genders, and with "gender" and "sex" treated as fully synonymous terms, this is nothing short of blatant sexist bullshit that the students not only must endure but possibly be tested on. If you fail to see the bigotry here, replace "sex" with "race" and think about it again. Pick your favorite social dichotomy, insert, experience reaction. Consider trying to study while experiencing reaction. Consider working and sharing office space with this TA.

Outcomes like those in Dr. Hwang's study are obviously part of the cycle of sexism in the academy. In fact, practices like Dr. Hwang's seem to be a result, the logical - albeit extreme - conclusion of such sexism. This style coercion of research associates would not have been possible without the social structures and hierarchies set up and enforced even in a context tainted only by the free floating sexism I discussed above (as opposed to a culturally condoned and institutionally accepted sexism that may exist in other culturally based academic environments). We are set up for this kind of explotation because it is not just the sexism that we experience, implicitly only if we are lucky. We also experience the lack of response which pervades modern academic institutions and which tells us any complaint will cost us dearly so it had better be air tight and sure. Even in the free floating sexism evironment, female graduate assistants and junior faculty may feel they have more to lose if they are not perceived as "team players" who give their all and then some. And even here in the supposedly liberal gender equal American university, they may in fact have more to lose.

In my own experience as a grad, I have watched as faculty nearly knock one another over to mentor male grads. Among other things, this gives the male grads a very practical advantage by way of increased opportunities for multiple pre-dissertation publications. I can honestly say I have never seen the faculty going as far out of their way to mentor female grads. Note that I am not asserting all male grads get this beneficial treatment. They don't. But I have not seen one single female grad student get the royal treatment I have seen doled out again and again for male students who, while they are certainly smart and industrious, seem in all ways to possess potential equal to their female counterparts. The edge they have is that someone chooses to believe in them and that someone has the funding power to back that belief up. This can really take you a long, long way.

Another source for extra challenges to female grads can be the inherent and implicit devaluing of female researchers' contributions to research projects. This can sometimes be ameliorated by a strong policy of fearless self advocacy. I'm a big fan of ensuring in advance that working as a researcher on a project will result in appropriate credit - co-authorship, pay, or course credit (or some combination), depending on the nature and amount of involvement. Unfortunately, I have noticed many of the female grads are not comfortable bringing up subjects like this with their academic advisors or research supervisors. I guess the reluctance is due to the years of brain washing, er, um, I mean socialization we get. The cherry on this cake is that even if the women do overcome the years of gender socialization and learn to pre-emptively speak up and self promote, they may still very well face bias or harassment from their peers, their supervisors, and their advisors which limits opportunities in areas like authorship, funding, assistantship duties, work space, physical resources, and evaluation of the worth of their contributions and efforts.

I read the Hwang articles and I think the sexism that underlies the coercion of junior female researchers to "donate" eggs for stem cell research is the same kind of sexism I see in academia in this country. It's just that this one situation is an example of how far this kind of sexism can go in a cultural context where it may have even fewer checks than in the American system. I sometimes think the backlash to the second wave of feminism is still tipping us towards this extreme end in the American universities. I.e., when complaints about harassing, abusive, demeaning, limiting, or coercive behavior in the academic professions are so readily and easily dismissed a priori, we move towards a context where something as bad as what Hwang is accused of seems not only believable but likely.