Dream job?

Today I did something I haven't done in a very, very long time. I updated my cv and applied for a job. WS has done the same - it turns out they are advertising 5 jobs at the same time, at a top research university, in our favorite country. Unfortunately, our chances of getting two offers are virtually zero. It is a country where I know very few female professors, even less married ones, and none with more than one child. They have absolutely no plan for hiring couples; in fact, the expectation is that a wannabe professor should be free to move from one side to the other, and the way taxes work means that if the professor's spouse stays at home the professor's income receives a bog boost.
Of course despite the law being framed in completely gender neutral terms, the not surprising upshot is that women professors are few, far between, and childless.
Looking at my cv I was less than impressed. You can almost recognize my children's faces in the big, gaping holes: in the publications list, but also in the participation to conferences, periods of study aborad, etcetera. Now I have started being productive again, although as usual it takes longer than I thought. Yesterday I worked the whole day, so hard that I got a backache. Today I took it a bit easier. I have also decided to study a new topic, like if I were a student, from scratch. So now I'm going to switch off the computer, and go buy a new notebook and a few coloured pens: I was able to learn new stuff at 18, so I will just do what I did then, and hope it works.

Healthy relationship with advisor

I laughed so hard when reading this PhD Comicstrip. I score 4, and I can't imagine how I forgot the name of my advisors' advisor (actually, I am uncertain between two). It might help that the answer to questions 1 and 2 is the same for my advisor and me.
Even sadder, I think most of my students score 4 on me. But the answer to question 5 is really secret.

Does anyone remember how women got the right to vote?

This almost brought tears to my eyes. Especially since the vote to women in my country was granted after my own mother was born. And I'm pretty sure we didn't learn almost anything about the suffrage question at school, especially not that it involved violence, and special leigslation, and it took so damn long.

Are wet nurses really back?

So now everybody's discussing whether it's moral/sanitary/yucky to have a woman other than the mother breastfeed a baby. As someone who has personally breastfed her own babies (no outsourcing here!) I have a pretty clear opinion about this.

I don't find it yucky, either in the for-pay or in the for-free version. It has been done for centuries. In an ideal world, all mothers would be able to nurse their own kids all the time, but there are many reasons why this is not the case and outside help is required. I find somebody else's breast milk less yucky than formula.

The sanitary reasons seem bogus. Most women don't have any condition that can be transmitted via breast milk, and most of those who do either know that or can easily find it out: for instance, in my country every pregnant woman is routinely HIV-screened, and a woman who hasn't been pregnant can't breastfeed.

Also, I think a lot of what we hear about having kids grow up in a sterile environment seems grossly exaggerated. Newborns, especially preemies or kids who already have health problems, must of course be sheltered, and for them a milk bank offering pasteurized breast milk seems a very good option; but elder kids aren't that delicate.

At age 7 months my daughter would happily crawl on all fours on the playground, where older kids were or had been running together with their parents; when she was tired, she would sit up and suck her unwashed thumb. She didn't get any disease at all. And she kept being nursed for many months after that; I don't see how sucking another (averagely healthy) woman's breast would have been worse for her.

To this must be added that I loved breastfeeding, and never had problems with it. Had I been born a few centuries earlier than I was, I would have been a partial invalid due to my poor eyesight. Also I am not good at most physical work, which is what my (largely illiterate) ancestors did until the generation before mine. But there is one job that I could have done with pleasure and success: the wet nurse!

Household duties and mathematical life

Here I try to focus on my work as a mathematician, but of course I also have the duties of every normal human being. In particular, today I spent quite a lot of time doing my laundry with an unfamiliar machine, and even more drying it with very mysterious objects (a real waste on a dry and sunny day).

As part of my lesser duties to the mathematical life, I went to lunch with a group of colleagues, and attended a really good talk by a young member of the Institute I'm visiting.
I have a long-standing prejudice that dutch mathematicians are trained to become really, really good lecturer: it goes back 20 years now, and the counterexamples (if any) are few and far apart. Today's talk confirmed the prejudice: it was very clear, extremely well organized, and managed to finish quite on time.

I received a sad email telling me that one of the top two applicants for our forthcoming postdoctoral position has accepted a (much better) offer somewhere else. I must admit not being too surprised, since I thought he was way too good for us; still, I hope the other outstanding candidate doesn't vanish the same way.

I have started studying a very beautiful book that a colleague has lent me: unfortunately, the library here doesn't have it, and as usual buying it will take at least two weeks. Of course had I been staying in the US I would have gotten it tomorrow (and cheaper too). It is part of the work for the project with UCo, and might help me understand what is really going on. At least I'm learning a beautiful piece of mathematics, something that a research scientist rarely has time to do (that might actually be a good topic for a detailed rant one of these days).

I also did write a couple more pages for the paper with WS, which hopefully is really going to be ready any day now.

WS and I are also discussing a much more serious issue, namely if we want to stay where we are or try to move to a different country. We both agree that in the country we are now we are in an optimal situation, but the question is whether somewhere else we could live better. Of course I am scared as hell at the thought of moving a whole family, have the kids get used to a new town/school/language etc, learning to fight with a different burocracy, and in general moving to a country with a lower precentage of female mathematicians (basically any move will have that effect).

On the other hand, as professors it is hard to move once you are 50+, and WS, despite looking like a teenager and for some things reasoning like an 8-year old, is not that terribly far away from the half-century mark. So if we want to go it better be soon, and whatever move we make is very likely going to be the last one. It is kind of comforting that I am not the only Female Science Professor entertaining similar thoughts of moving as a mid-career academic couple.

Working together

Many mathematicians prefer not to work alone. It is basically for the same reason why people who go mountain climbing don't go alone; having somebody nearby, as you explore an unknown and difficult territory, can help you avoid pitfalls and desaster, or find a brilliant shortcut. Plus, in the occasional breaks from intense thinking that must occur to preserve mental sanity, you have someone around to chat with.

I usually prefer to choose my coworkers among people I am close to anyway. In fact, I wrote my first joint paper with WS, who at that time was just a Wonderful Boyfriend. The next joint paper was written with FCo, my (so far only) female coauthor, a close friend who had been a student with me, on a topic which was very close to both our theses. I am very proud of that work, because it is the first of my papers where I didn't just prove the theorems but significantly contributed to the statements. All my papers so far had been suggestions of my advisor, except for the joint work with WS which was based on an idea of WS.

You may guess the next logical step: I wrote a paper with Ununderstandable Coauthor UnCo, a close friend of WS who had been a student with him. With time, I think that UnCo and I have also become friends. I am not sure because I still find him quite ununderstable, though.

A the same time, I started a collaboration with another friend who was had been a student with me: I'll refer to him as ImCo, for impressive coauthor, since when he applied for a job at the university where I was working, a colleague told me how he had been so impressed by this particular candidate. Except he used a word in my language which is much stronger than impressive, and which made everybody laugh. For the record, ImCo did turn down our offer, and has since only worked in Impressive Universities.

Excluding PD's and S's, my youngest coauthor is NeCo, my nervous coauthor. He's an extremely smart person who tends to worry overmuch about any mistake he might possibly make. When he's not talking about himself, which tends to be a very gloomy topic, he's a very pleasant person to spend time with; he also drinks precisely the correct amount so that, when having dinner together, we can order haf a liter of wine. NeCo works in a different country, but not too far away, so hopefully we'll see a lot of each other in the future.

I'll keep updating this page, so as to have all the coauthors together.

Working on a holiday

Today is a holiday in the country I usually live in, but not where I am now. I got up late. I'm ashamed how late it was... but it's all the fault of being at the Opera yesterday evening - and that is of course Good For My Culture, right? - and not at all to do with the time spent in a Tapas bar afterwards.

I spent half an hour talking to S#7, cleverly avoided S#4, and devoted the whole afternoon to working with my coauthor who's here, whom I'll refer to as my Ununderstandable Coauthor (UCo). UCo is also the one who thought of going to the Tapas bar to begin with, so it's all his fault (it's always somebody else's fault). UCo and I are working on a paper which needs methods from a field we are not at all familiar with. So we get all the hardship of learning from scratch something new, without the help of an advisor or of anybody else, and while having "grownup" pressure to publish. Plus, of course, not only white hair abound on both of our heads, but also the inside of said heads isn't as smart as when we were students in the last century.
So it's all pretty hard, and there's always a very nontrivial risk that whatever we end up producing, if nonempty, will be declared unreadable by people who work in our field and trivial by people in the new field.

Tomorrow morning I will have to get up early to do my laundry, and then I have scheduled a Skype chat with PD#1 and S#7 to discuss our joint work. The next few days are going to be really intense.