Zatera Ul

Joy had a long, and good, post about being in Generation X. I could relate to much of it, though not all. Part of the reason, I think, is parental age: my dad is much too old to be a Boomer, and my mother falls right on the edge. So they were far from ever being hippies or yuppies, never got divorced, and I was never a latchkey kid. Certainly they never drove a BMW. Another factor is timing within the generation: for me, a recession hit just about the time I entered high school, and I had to wear the same few clothes to school over and over and over. Then, two days before my Ph.D. defense, some idiots flew a couple of planes into skyscrapers. What a wonderful time to graduate and try to find a job. (It worked out ok, I went and did hands-on work for a year; it was refreshing after being locked in a basement lab for six years.) Anyway, these have contributed to my economic pessimism.

Then I’ve been reading some about The Fourth Turning, which theorizes that American history has been running in four-generation cycles, and we’re coming into the next great Crisis. I don’t entirely buy their theory, though I do think crisis is already here and that there’s much more to come. I would like to believe that my generation will take much more of a role in resolving it than the authors of this book project.

Another thing that ties into this is the Gray Ceiling. I had heard about it before, but didn’t think it applied much to me, since I’ve never worked in a larger corporation myself. (Though the company I did end up working for was a very small company founded and populated by refugees from a large corporation, who were perhaps escaping the gray ceiling there.)

Then it occurred to me to ask: why was it so hard for me to find a college teaching job in physics? The biggest reason is that the federal government subsidizes science graduate students heavily, leading to excess Ph.D production (only about 50% of physics Ph.Ds end up working in recognizably physics-related jobs). But the next biggest reason is that Boomers are occupying all the tenured positions, and not leaving them yet. Most of the entry-level teaching is done by cheap teaching assistants, or by almost equally cheap adjunct professors stuck in “adjunct hell” with discouragingly slim opportunities for advancement to more stable employment.

Advocates for greater “equality” in physics say that the path from undergraduate physics student to tenured professor is a “leaky pipeline” for women. The percentage of women in physics diminishes significantly between undergraduate and graduate school, between Ph.D. and postdoc, and from there on into the levels of professordom. I myself don’t care how many women are in physics; probably there should be more than there are now, but if it ever comes close to 50%, I’d think there was something wrong. Physics requires strong mathematical and spatial reasoning skills, and those are not evenly distributed between the sexes. Anyway, now I am thinking that the pipeline is not only leaky, but also quite clogged at the far end.

So I have no guilt at all about “wasting” my Ph.D by staying at home and reproducing. (In fact, I think that the greatest contribution that I can make to science right now is to have children and pass on my mutant genes!) (Also, if it is such a waste, where are the recruiters that should be beating down my door and offering me shiny new cars to come work for them??) Nor do I regret spending the time to get the Ph.D. I got a husband out of it, finally, and six years of practice at living comfortably on a low income, enough that I can easily pooh-pooh Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dime as a very amateur attempt at starting from scratch. (As in: Woman, why art thou eating fast food instead of getting thyself to a thrift store to obtain for thyself a $5 toaster oven in which to bake thyself some potatoes!?!)

All right, that’s enough overgeneralizing for now. Back to real life.