CCL: Computational Chemistry, algorithms, and the people who create them

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 9:11 PM, Salter-Duke, Brian James brian.james.duke[]gmail.com <owner-chemistry]~[ccl.net> wrote:

Sent to CCL by: "Salter-Duke, Brian James " [brian.james.duke^^^gmail.com]
The suggestion of organize your own conferences has been made several
times. We are not talking about relatively small local conferences. The
Congresses organised by IAQMS, along with the WATOC conferences, are the
most important international conferences in our field. We can not start
> from scratch. We have to reform and develop what we have.

You are correct that many women in our field are excellent and stand
on their own efforts. That is why they should be invited as speakers and
session chairs to these international conferences.

We can and must complain about the situation with this conference to be
held next year. There is time to change things.

Brian Duke.

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:23:55AM -0500, Jim Kress ccl_nospam:kressworks.com wrote:
>
> Sent to CCL by: "Jim Kress" [ccl_nospam[-]kressworks.com]
> Hi Chris and other responders,
>
> Just so you can be more aware of my context and perspective:
>
> In my career in industry, I made it a point to find and promote the most
> qualified engineers and scientists I could locate. I do the same in my
> current nonprofit scientific research organization. The only characteristic
> I care about are is the person I hire better than me (since I believe the
> best people higher better people than they to work with them).
>
> One interesting result of this philosophy was that I wound up with a large
> number of women working with me and advancing their careers as a result of
> my ensuring their superior qualifications and WORK PRODUCT were made well
> known to ALL levels of management. I did not do this out of a sense of
> Political Correctness, since the really qualified, hardworking, superior
> female engineers and scientists were offended when they thought that was the
> criteria which was to be used to govern their advancement. I did this
> because they EARNED it.
>
> One example is a good friend of mine. She EARNED a BSCE, BSEE, MSEE from U
> of M Ann Arbor. It wasn't given to her due to her gender, girth, nose size,
> etc. She WORKED for it. She pushed herself to the limit of her (extremely
> high) capabilities and EARNED her credentials with honors. She then went
> into the work force and EARNED her senior management position, where she is
> responsible for a $1 billion of business products, WORKING her way up > from a
> starting engineer to her current management position. She didn't whine
> about gender diversity, she IGNORED it. When people tried to use it as a
> tool on her behalf, she BERATED them for doing so. She was, and is,
> defining herself by the quality of her WORK, not the physiological
> configuration of her genitalia. She became, and is, the best Engineer and
> Engineering Management in her company.
>
> She did not whine, mope about and claim "discrimination". She did not
> boycott or expect a collective of her colleagues to advance her due to her
> gender. She refused and denigrated that approach.
>
> In fact, when I showed her the CCL emails she was incensed and disgusted by
> the inadequacy and refusal of the complaining women (and men) who were
> signing petitions, talking about how horrible the people were who disagreed
> with the complainers as well as the organizers of the ICQC.
>
> She has succeeded on her own merits. When she met a barrier, she WORKED
> around it. She didn't just stop, whine and complain. She WORKED with the
> people with whom she needed to advance her career. She didn't organize
> boycotts of them.
>
> Bottom line: don't whine, complain, boycott, etc. against so-called "gender
> inequity", work around it. Organize your own conferences, Demonstrate your
> own abilities and superior qualifications. Get rid of the "entitlement
> mentality" and go earn and/ or make your own place in the field. That's
> what real, successful people do.
>
> Jim
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-chemistry+ccl_nospam==kressworks.com]-[ccl.net
> [mailto:owner-chemistry+ccl_nospam==kressworks.com]-[ccl.net] On Behalf Of
> Christopher Cramer cramer- -umn.edu
> Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2014 10:24 PM
> To: Kress, Jim
> Subject: CCL: Computational Chemistry, algorithms, and the people who create
> them
>
>
> Sent to CCL by: Christopher Cramer [cramer__umn.edu] All,
>
> I've been a CCL member since 1989 or so. (Is that about right, Jan?)
> During that time, I have not posted particularly frequently; but, when I've
> felt that I could contribute in a productive way, I've done my best to
> advance our field and assist friends and colleagues by commenting on issues
> raised in this forum.
>
> The recent exchanges about ICQC 2015, focusing on the lack of gender
> diversity in its original speaker list, and the subsequent back-and-forth as
> to whether that is a suitable topic for CCL, or even an issue to be
> concerned about in general, prompts me to this post. Especially, I feel
> obliged to reply to Jim Kress, in what I hope is a respectful fashion.
>
> Jim, you make a living at computational chemistry, i.e., it probably pays
> your mortgage. Moreover you are a supporter of CCL with actual dollars;
> thank you for that -- your generosity benefits all of us. As such, I can
> understand how for you, the value of the forum is in the degree to which it
> helps you stay on top of the nuts and bolts of the field, and in that regard
> I hope that my own occasional posts on topics like partial charges,
> solvation models, etc. have proven useful to you. We've also exchanged
> email outside of CCL, including very recently, in what I hope has always
> been a cordial fashion.
>
> However, I now hope that you will accept that I, as an academic who is
> charged in part with training the NEXT generation of computational chemists,
> may have a more expansive view of what is appropriate for CCL than your own.
> > From my point of view, if there is something that is hindering the most
> efficient progress in our field, even if that "something" might fall into
> the dreaded area of "social science", then attempting to address it through
> CCL is not merely appropriate, it is worthy of advocacy!
>
> You (and others) raised the question of whether the selection criteria of
> the ICQC 2015 organizers was known, whether anyone had contacted them, etc.
> Actually, one of the organizers posted on a separate mailing list (devoted
> to molecular dynamics), that the 26 male speakers had been selected from a
> slate of 27 (evidently, the one woman had failed to respond). He was shocked
> that anyone might think that inviting 3.8% female speakers might be regarded
> as inadequate. He went on to note that upon reviewing the end result, he
> then solicited suggestions from IAQMS members for some remaining speakers,
> asking in particular for women. Certainly, if _I_ were a woman, I'd be
> thrilled to know that my chief qualification for a subsequent invitation was
> not my science, but a desire to achieve gender balance after the "real"
> speakers were selected. For the record, you can find this post at
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1402&L=molecular-dynamics-
> news&F=&S=&P=13069
>
> Jim, I've trained roughly 100 undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral
> co-workers. I admit that it pains me that I KNOW that the women members of
> that group will face discrimination that will make it much harder for them
> to achieve their full potential than will be the case for my former male
> co-workers. I say that not because I subscribe to a belief in "evil" (as you
> put it), but rather to an acceptance of the extremely well documented
> phenomenon of implicit bias. We are all creatures of our culture and,
> worldwide, there is a culture in science that works against women that
> reflects hundreds of years of history and tradition. There is a lot of
> scholarship in this area, but the most recent example was published in PNAS
> in 2012 and showed that, when presented with resumes for lab managers that
> were in every way identical except for the name of the fictitious
> individual, scientists (men AND women) ranked the man significantly more
> highly than the woman and offered "him" a !
> starting salary significantly higher than that offered to "her". These
> weren't "evil" people, they were just people formed by their own backgrounds
> and experiences. The PNAS study is available at
> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109
>
> But, let me come back to the bottom line, Jim, which I suspect you
> consider important. What if it's a woman who has the next big breakthrough
> idea that advances our field dramatically? And, what if she can't get that
> idea recognized as quickly precisely because implicit bias slows
> appreciation for her scholarship? You'll suffer, too, as you won't be able
> to offer your clients a service that you otherwise would have become more
> rapidly aware of. We all like to believe that cream rises to the top, but,
> in all honesty, "it's not what you do, it's who you know" goes a long way in
> science, too. Aurora Clark has already posted eloquently here on the topic
> of how proactive steps to increase diversity propagate to the next
> generation, so I won't belabor this point.
>
> Returning to the specifics, I've been around in this field a long time. I
> think that I can legitimately claim to have earned a certain level of
> experience to comment. Do I think that the International Academy of Quantum
> Molecular Science is ridiculously dominated by old white guys? (I say this
> as an old white guy.) Well, yes, I do. Have I attended ICQC meetings and
> been struck by the cronyism in the field and the repetitive speakers
> rosters? Um, yes, I have. Happily, I am at a stage in my career and a level
> of privilege that I can say suicidal things like this and not. really. give
> a damn. But the call for a boycott by my colleagues Professors Carter,
> Gagliardi, and Krylov was not motivated by a one-time gaffe - it followed
> years and years of frustration, and the ICQC 2015 speakers list was the
> straw that broke their respective colloquial camels' backs.
>
> You called this entire discussion "politically correct". Hmm. Politics is
> the means by which groups of people come to collective decisions. Taken at
> literal face value, politically correct sounds like a good thing to me. In
> the United States, once it was politically correct to abolish slavery,
> provide women voting rights, eliminate school segregation, eliminate
> anti-miscegenation laws, and, most recently, secure the marriage rights of
> our gay and lesbian citizens. If advocating for gender equality in science
> puts me in the same category as earlier advocates for any of those
> positions, call me proud to have them as compatriots.
>
> Some full disclosures: (1) I'm married to one of the three women
> signatories of the original call for a boycott. I'm ridiculously proud to
> have her as a partner. (2) As an Associate Dean, my portfolio includes
> responsibility for trying to increase the representation of women and
> underrepresented minorities in my college's graduate students, postdocs, and
> faculty. I care about that passionately. (3) The ICQC organizer to whom I
> refer to above is a member of the editorial board for the journal for which
> I am Editor in Chief. Small world, no? (4) I write posts that are way too
> long. Sorry.
>
> Chris
> --
> Christopher J. Cramer
> Elmore H. Northey Professor and
> Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
> University of Minnesota
> Department of Chemistry and
> College of Science & Engineering
> Minneapolis, MN 55455-0431
> Phone: (612) 624-0859 (Chemistry)
> Phone: (612) 624-9371 (CSE)
> --------------------------
> Mobile: (952) 297-2575
> Email: cramer:umn.edu
> Twitter: :ChemProfCramer
> Website: http://pollux.chem.umn.eduhttp://www.ccl.net/cgi-bin/ccl/send_ccl_messagehttp://www.ccl.net/chemistry/sub_unsub.shtmlhttp://www.ccl.net/spammers.txt>

--
Brian Salter-Duke (Brian Duke) Brian.Salter-Duke]^[monash.edu
Adjunct Associate Professor
Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Monash University Parkville Campus, VIC 3052, Australia

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