Note: This article was first written in Chinese on October 24, 2017 and translated into English in 2018. A post written on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging website) in 2013 by Feng Gang, a sociology professor from Zhejiang University, has recently resurfaced and led to a heated discussion online. My friend and colleague suggested that as a leading blog in China that aims at promoting gender equality, Ms-Muses should publish a response. Therefore, I take the initiative to write this article. I would like to start by sharing my experience growing up from a little girl (in a patriarchal society) to a university professor (with research interests in gender relations and social inequality). I will also provide some relevant research findings later in this article.
Ever since I was little, my mom, along with my friends’ parents, had always told us, “Women should not work too hard. It is far more important for girls to marry well than anything else.” Yet, under such childhood environments, I became a feminist.
Although I was always at the top of my class from elementary school to junior high school, all my teachers, even my mom included, kept reminding me that getting good grades in my early education did not necessarily mean that I would still get good grades later on. In contrast, although my male classmates were not as hardworking, and their grades certainly were not as good, they still often received praises from teachers and parents saying, “You are so smart; you will have really good grades if you just put in a little bit more effort.” To this day, I still remember one math teacher in my elementary school, who had a respectable reputation in the district, commented in my homework: “Yue’s academic performance is good, but she is not smart. She’ll have to work hard to make up for a lack of intelligence.” In high school, I got into the “Olympic Class” in which students were trained for international science Olympiads. We had to learn three years’ worth of math, physics, biology, and chemistry in Grade 10. I had a hard time catching up to this kind of pace and my grades began to drop, which seemingly confirmed the conventional expectation that “girls would eventually fall behind boys in school.” My math teacher even arranged a one-to-one meeting with me, suggesting that I should drop out of the “Olympic Class.” Looking back, I am actually very proud of my younger self. Despite being a powerless little girl, I was brave and determined enough to tell the powerful male teacher, “No, I am not quitting. I want to stay.” (To some degree, I also feel grateful that he respected my decision at that time.) In order to stay in the class, I worked extra hard throughout the rest of my high school years. I wrote down every question that teachers discussed in class, and then went over it again on my own. The next day, I asked my friends to explain to me the harder questions that I did not understand. I scored only 46% in math exams for a long time, but in my last year of high school, my mark went up to 92% for the first time. At the time I felt very satisfied with my progress. However, my math teacher said to me privately, “You did well this time…(pause)…but it was mainly because the exam was easier”. In fact, up until the end of high school, I maintained my math average at 92%. How can I still vividly remember things that happened over ten years ago? It is because these kinds of encounters have made me realize how bumpy and difficult the road to success can be for women. In addition, in every mock exam, nine out of the top ten students in my cohort were female. Yet, our Chinese teacher made a comment in front of the whole class, “There is only one male student out of all top ten students in sciences; this is very abnormal. In an older cohort, there was only one female student among the top ten students; that’s the way it should be.” Even as a high school student, I already wanted to start a revolution in class. Why was it considered as “abnormal” for female students to achieve academic excellence? Why was my performance in math attributed only to hard work, but not to my intellectual ability? Why did the teacher think it was only because “the exam was easier” when my math grades significantly improved? Looking back, my reactions were quite immature at the time. I used my rebellious adolescent way to show my resentment. For example, I would sleep through my Chinese class, eat my breakfast during early morning classes, and remain seated while my teacher demanded me to stand still for a certain period of time. During my senior year of high school, I remained among the top students in my cohort. Eventually, I went on to a prestigious university in Beijing. Strikingly, I encountered a male professor in college who expressed his belief in class that “women do not belong in academia.” I found it extremely ridiculous that he could make such remark when he had so many outstanding female colleagues and had a daughter as well. In graduate school, there were many incidents where my friends, who worked in male-dominated fields, told me that “male graduate students in the department always get together and gossip about the female professors who all seem to be beautiful blonde women.” All these experiences sparked my interest in gender studies. From undergrad, to grad school, and PhD, I met numerous inspiring and accomplished female role models whom I looked up to. Their hard work, rigorous research, and passionate curiosity, along with their genuine desire to provide support and guidance for students, aspired me to push forward. As I got to know more about gender research, I realized that girls have been outperforming boys for a long time in the classroom. According to U.S. historical evidence, girls had long surpassed boys academically in secondary school. One reason why women lagged behind men in attaining tertiary education was that most universities did not accept female students (DiPrete & Buchmann 2013). It was not until the inception of the Seven Sisters (colleges) that most universities began accepting female applicants. Currently, in the United States, about 60% of the bachelor’s and master’s degrees and 50% of the doctoral degrees are awarded to women. Even in China, women have surpassed men in college enrollment ever since 2009 (Yeung 2013). Nevertheless, even today, we still see comments such as “less than 10% of female graduate students take academia as their career path after graduation.” Professor Feng Gang should ask himself: Is it really because women are less competent? How come we never question whether the academia is really female-friendly? Women still take on a greater share of the housework and childcare burden. Balancing familial and domestic duties with work is something that most female PhDs and professors have to consider and worry about. Claudia Goldin (2004) found that by their mid-30s to mid-40s, college graduate men managed to achieve career and family about two times as often as women. A lot of times, women are put into the predicament to choose between their career and family, but this is seldom a problem that men have to face. Even if women work harder to balance both work and family, they may still be unfairly evaluated as less ideal workers who will eventually drop out of the workforce for familial duties. Shelley J. Correll and her colleagues (2007) conducted an audit study in which participants evaluated application materials for a pair of equally qualified female job candidates who differed on parental status. The results showed that mothers were perceived as less competent and less committed to their work and were even recommended for a lower starting salary. This is my story. I believe every woman has their own story to share, a story that “nevertheless, she persisted.” Hillary Clinton once said, “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.” It is numerous women’s effort and persistence that enable positive change, inspire action, and move communities forward. In short, every country should advocate for feminism and gender equality, not because women are men’s mothers, wives or daughters, but because “women’s rights are human rights.” The opportunities, successes, and accomplishments that women enjoy today are attributable to the perseverance and hard work of many generations of women. Throughout their lives, every woman faces gender discrimination both blatantly and covertly. Here, I would like to pay my tribute to all the women who have persisted, regardless of how many times the society has made them doubt themselves. I also want to ask everyone to stop judging girls and women based on stereotypes, because bias is what holds many women back. Author Note: Here is the link to the original article in Chinese: "一位‘坚持走科研道路’女学者的自白." The author, Yue Qian, would like to thank Christine Yang for her assistance with translations from Chinese to English.
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Note: This article was first written in Chinese on April 19, 2017 and translated into English in 2021.
After graduating in the US with a sociology PhD, I became an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). This is a tenure-track position, meaning that the institution will appoint us for a few years followed by a performance evaluation. If we pass, we are granted tenure. If we fail the evaluation, we would have to pack our bags and leave. It has been nearly ten months since I started my position in July 2016. Reflecting on my first year of being a pre-tenure faculty member, I have gained some insight that I would like to share. Time management During my first year, I needed to teach three new courses. Therefore, I spent a great deal of time doing course prep. Given my previous training, I was more familiar with academic research on China and the US. Now that I am working in Canada, I hope to also teach my students about research on Canadian families. Hence, I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with the current state of Canadian family research. Evaluations of teaching only make up a relatively small fraction of our tenure promotion evaluations. Even so, in my view, teaching involves direct interactions with students that can have significant impacts. If we are not well-prepared, there is almost immediate—and oftentimes face-to-face—negative feedback from students, which can take a huge toll on our emotions and self-esteem. Plus, I enjoy sharing my knowledge, so I consider it an intrinsic reward to inspire students through the research I like. In my teaching, I also encounter many eager and thoughtful students with high levels of critical thinking, and it is always a delight to exchange ideas with them. Our department head was very supportive of my research and accommodating of my work habits. In my second semester at UBC, I needed to teach two courses. The department had originally scheduled me to teach for 1.5 hours every day from Monday to Thursday. When I found out my schedule, I immediately wrote an email to the department head expressing some concerns I had. I typically need large chunks of uninterrupted time to conduct research, but teaching from Monday to Thursday would lead to a fragmentation of my time and thus a reduction of my research productivity. Subsequently, with the support of the department head, the staff responsible for scheduling helped me arrange my courses to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays only. Before I graduated with my PhD, my advisor urged me that I should allocate at least two days a week to research while on tenure track. For this reason, my basic work schedule involved teaching and addressing other related tasks on Tuesdays and Thursdays while concentrating on research on Mondays and Wednesdays. I usually worked on my research in my study room at home instead of going to my office. This helped to reduce my commuting time, avoid other external distractions, and establish my spatialized rituals (as recommended by Helen Sword in her book Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write). I usually spent Fridays doing course prep whereas, on weekends, I tried my best to get some rest. Although the plan sounded well-structured, my Mondays and Wednesdays intended for research were frequently interrupted by other matters, so in reality, I had less time for research than planned. In my personal experience, if I do not block out time for my research, I will easily be carried away by other matters, but everyone works differently. For example, I have colleagues who wake up at 5 AM every day, work until noon, and spend the afternoon taking care of other tasks. The key is to figure out what strategies work best for you and to stick to them. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of pressure for pre-tenure faculty members. If we want to keep a sustainable lifestyle and remain highly engaged with research in the long run, we have to find a work-life balance. Otherwise, we will easily experience physical and mental burnout. When I was a grad student, I tried all kinds of stress management techniques: online shopping, exercising, playing the piano, binge eating, and drinking, to name a few. Some were healthy coping strategies, while others, not so much. After I came to Vancouver, I actually had little desire to shop or binge eat; I drank but only moderately. What is my new stress reliever? At the end of every workday, whether I was teaching or doing research, I would inevitably feel exhausted, hollow, and ‘brain-dead.’ To counter this, I have started practicing hot yoga regularly, which always makes me feel rejuvenated after every session. I try to do one hour of hot yoga four to five times a week. I chose this exercise partly because I have always liked doing yoga, but mostly because a yoga studio is five minutes’ walk from my apartment. The convenient distance and the fact that I have already paid for monthly membership give me no reason to slack off. My hour-long yoga sessions are really a time when I can take my mind off other things. I also have friends who run, weightlift, or play tennis. The key to staying healthy is to overcome our inertia and get a fitness routine off the ground. Challenges at work I do not think I look particularly young among Asian appearances, but regardless, I am still relatively young as I went straight from undergrad to grad school and then to my current job. At the same time, I am an Asian immigrant woman. These demographic characteristics of mine make my work a bit challenging. What bothers me most are the challenges of teaching. In one of the courses I taught, I had a five-minute quiz at the beginning of each class time to make sure students had read the assigned articles. I soon realized that out of the 75 students in my class, many (there always appeared to be 5–10 per class time) left either after handing in the quiz or in the middle of the class. These students did so without seeking my permission or even informing me. It also happened that the classroom door was in the front of the room, so every time they left during class, it was very disruptive to me and to other students listening to the lecture. Although roughly only a tenth of the class did so, their detriment to my mood and self-esteem outweighed the positive impact of the majority of the students who were well-behaved and engaged. I was very troubled at the time, so I communicated with my colleagues to seek their advice. My colleagues validated my experience that, as a young female instructor, classroom management did sometimes pose a challenge. It was disheartening that sociology students, who learned about social inequalities in class, would perpetuate these “inequalities” based on age and gender (and, to some extent, race and immigrant status) in their daily interactions. I also spoke with a female colleague in the department who is an excellent instructor. She said she faced some of these challenges when she was younger, but one of the advantages of aging was that it became relatively easier to gain respect from students. Although compared to her male colleagues, she has more of mom-like authority than professor-like authority, being older makes it easier for her to manage her students. As I later reflected, Max Weber proposed three kinds of authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal. If traditional authority was harder for a young immigrant minority woman to attain, I needed to establish rational-legal authority. For example, I will include “arrive no more than five minutes late and no early departures” in my syllabus next year. In addition, when I teach in the future, I plan to do pop quizzes—sometimes at the beginning of the class, sometimes at the end. In this way, I can check not only whether students have done the readings in advance but also whether they have paid attention in class. Hopefully, I can rely on established rules and expectations to promote positive student behavior and create a better classroom atmosphere. Social support As I transitioned from grad school to work, one of the biggest changes I have noticed is that suddenly there is no one else at the same stage as me. Demographers have always placed great emphasis on the concept of “cohort,” meaning that there are some commonalities among people who experience the same event at the same time. During grad school, there are usually five to ten students admitted in the same cohort. When we had to write a paper, prepare for PhD candidacy exams, or look for jobs, there was always someone to exchange ideas with and we could encourage one another. After we graduated and start working as faculty members, almost all of our colleagues are in different life stages and at various points of their careers. Everyone’s life and work priorities also differ. All of these make it difficult for pre-tenure faculty members to find a companion to forge ahead with. If there are any regrets from my first year of work, it would probably be the fact that I did not take the initiative to greet others or make friends since it takes time for me to get comfortable around others. As a result, I had hardly talked with several of my colleagues despite having worked in the department for nearly a year. Before I started working, my mentors shared their experience with me and advised me to take the initiative and try inviting every colleague out for coffee or lunch to increase my visibility in the department. However, such advice is difficult for introverts like myself to follow. Still, I do communicate frequently with my colleagues who are near my office. I have never been one to be afraid of asking questions. If I had a teaching or administrative question, I would immediately communicate with the department head, my assigned faculty mentor, or my colleagues in the adjacent office. Don’t forget about your past social support system! When I had questions or felt confused, I still sent emails to my mentors from grad school. They always replied to my lengthy emails with patience and helped me through many difficulties. In addition, I keep in touch with my former friends, especially those who have just started their tenure-track job. Although we live far apart, we are at similar stages of our careers, facing similar pressures and worries. Now, I am sharing my experiences in the hopes that you can feel the social support of the larger academic community. Research progress In my first year at UBC, I spent a considerable amount of time and energy doing course prep, teaching, and managing the classroom. On top of that, I moved across the border, was adapting to the new environment, and had to deal with all kinds of administrative procedures and immigration paperwork. Because of all these things, I did not publish any new articles. My takeaway is that it is a major challenge to start any new projects in the very first year of the tenure track. After starting my job, I submitted a paper and received a “revise and resubmit” request. Following a long period of revision, it was finally accepted. All of my papers that are currently under review and the ones that I am currently writing were initiated during my grad school days. They were “work-in-progresses” from back then, and now I am just starting to wrap up these projects. I feel that the “research pipeline” often mentioned by my mentors is quite important. It is crucial to plan well in advance and decide which papers need to be published before we are on the job market as well as which papers we need to write, submit, and get published as soon as possible while on tenure track. The peer-review cycles and processes are out of our control, so the only thing we can do is to keep writing and submitting, and to submit again if our paper is rejected. Besides, I think writing a sole-authored paper is an extremely lonely endeavor. In a sole-authored project, I will be the only person who knows the research thoroughly. Thus, it is difficult to discuss with others when I come across problems during the research process. Without a collaborator to keep me accountable, I often lack the motivation or the self-discipline to continue my work. For example, one of my sole-authored papers was rejected, and it has been almost half a year now, but I have yet to start revising it. So in reality, “keep writing and submitting, and submit again when rejected” is easier said than done. It is even harder to put into practice when it comes to working on a sole-authored paper. All things considered, I am fortunate to have many reliable and compatible collaborators whose research interests overlap with and complement mine. At the same time, they also are my friends and form my social support network. I have collaborated with them to publish various papers. After receiving my PhD, I have collaborated less with my advisors. Now, my primary collaborators are almost all friends of mine who, like me, are in the early stages of their careers (or towards the end of completing their PhD). We are all similar in terms of our work habits and work pace, and we share the same pressures of earning tenure. Moreover, everyone’s moral sense is very similar, so there are not any disputes or estrangements stemming from the division of labor or authorship. We should cherish collaborators who are compatible with our work abilities, research interests, and professional ethics. They are my collaborators but above all, valuable friends. Of course, the issue of how many articles you should work on alone and how many to collaborate on with others also needs to be adjusted and planned according to your institution’s standards and expectations for tenure and promotion. If you are at a university that discourages collaboration and places a lot of emphasis on sole-authored work, you will have to stick it out and do your own research no matter what. This is what I have learned so far. Inevitably, personal experience has its limits. For example, since I started my job, I have had less contact with my family and friends (especially those in China). Oftentimes when I called them, I tended to rush through the call. I am aware of this fact and feel very guilty towards them. However, as a single and childless person, I still have more time and freedom at my disposal. By contrast, assistant professors who are parents face the pressure of earning tenure on one end and the struggles of parenting on the other. They cannot control when their children cry or how their children behave, so they face different challenges in balancing work and life than I do. That being said, it would be such an honor if anything I have shared resonates with you. Author Note: Here is the link to the original article in Chinese: "在加拿大当助理教授的第一年:如何管理时间、情绪和研究进度?." The author, Yue Qian, would like to thank Doris Li for her assistance with translations from Chinese to English. Dr. Yue Qian was interviewed by ELLE China (March 2018 Issue) as an example of inspirational women in their early 30s.
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Yue QianAssociate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia Archives
April 2024
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