Carview!

CARVIEW

MOTORHOMES

Select Language

HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:51:55 GMT content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 vary: Accept-Encoding x-cache-enabled: False link: ; rel="https://api.w.org/" link: ; rel=shortlink x-httpd-modphp: 1 host-header: 6b7412fb82ca5edfd0917e3957f05d89 x-proxy-cache: MISS x-proxy-cache-info: W NC:000000 UP: content-encoding: gzip In Baby Attach Mode – Just another Scientopia site

Close Menu

On racism in The Netherlands

babyattachmode February 20, 2020 cultural differences / diversity / moving

I grew up as a white kid going to a mostly white school in The Netherlands. For a long time I thought everyone was the same, regardless of their skin color. I thought it was funny when we called the one black kid in our school the N-word. We laughed, he laughed and nobody ever asked if that hurt him. He never said it did, but now I’m not sure what he actually felt. We all felt that in The Netherlands, we were liberal and everyone was the same, and we could say that to each other. Since then, I changed how I think about issues like these and the start of that change happened when I briefly lived in Cincinnati. Coincidently the same city where recently a Dutch soccer coach resigned for using the N-word.

I lived in Cincinnati for a winter* about 15 years ago. One day I went to visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a museum about African American history. It is the day that opened my eyes to the fact that we are not all the same. For one, I was one of the few white people there and that was a first for me. I had never felt before what it felt like to be the only person with my skin color and it made me think back about that one black kid in my school and how he must have felt. I stood there feeling what that felt like and at that moment I walked past one of the replica ships that brought slaves from Africa to the Americas and noticed the ship had a Dutch flag. This was history that I had never been taught in school. I looked around and realized that my ancestors had potentially enslaved the other visitors’ ancestors. And how very recent it was that this had been abolished. This experience instantly made me understand a little bit better** that we’re not all the same and that it is not up to us (the white majority) to define what we can and cannot say.

However, the Dutch response to the fact that this soccer coach was fired is exactly this: even in the press conference the Dutch general manager of the team admitted that the coach wasn’t sensitive to American culture, meaning basically that in The Netherlands it would have been okay to verbally abuse black people without consequences. And this is the defense that he gets over and over, not only from mostly white guys on twitter but also in mainstream media: that the US is ‘overly sensitive‘ and at least in The Netherlands you can ‘just be yourself’.

It’s easy to sit in your white people bubble and not worry about whether your words hurt others because you’re in a privileged enough not to have to worry about that. It’s much harder to experience the discomfort of realizing you are racist and you have said racist things. Yet if I compare that discomfort to what I now imagine the discomfort of the only black kid in my school to have been, I’m pretty sure mine is nothing compared to his.

*Not necessarily the season I would recommend for living there.

**Although I realize that I can never feel what being black and subject to racism feels like.

When conversations in the real world go faster than on twitter

babyattachmode July 22, 2019 advice / diversity / personal posts / women in science

On twitter, I’ve been part of discussions on sexism more than once, and on twitter, the #9replyguys are incredibly useful in analyzing what happens in a conversation. But the other day, I was in the midst of a discussion in real life that was sparked by someone calling out a sexist joke, and I realize how much harder it was to analyze what happened and respond in a constructive way.

The following thing happened – and I omitted some details to make sure nobody recognizes themselves in this description, because it is about the experience, not the actual people – : I was at dinner with a few guys and 2 women (of which I was one). We were having a good time, until at some point one of the guys made a sexist joke. To add insult to injury two of the guys high-fived each other after the joke and laughed about it. The other woman called this out, said that she really did not appreciate this joke and the high five, especially from guys that she felt were our allies. And instead of apologizing or even just acknowledging the sexist joke and the behavior that followed, the guys got angry and defensive. They said that they weren’t sexists, and “can we not even joke anymore?”. And we needed to explain over and over why we were offended (and at some point upset as well) before they would even start to think about an apology. And then the worst thing happened: they made us question what even happened, and whether the joke was even made as we remembered it in the first place.

And I hate to admit it, but the conversation just went too fast for me to make it a constructive conversation, and to analyze what happened. After the fact, and when I discussed what happened with the other woman, we could point to nearly all the 9replyguys tactics in the conversation, but in the heat of the moment we both just really felt overwhelmed. And it made me wonder: is this a matter of practicing? Should we make a board game where you need to call out 9replyguys-like responses to sexism/racism and other isms so that we collectively get better at recognizing them for use in the real world?

Eight years as a parent

babyattachmode July 21, 2019 parenting / personal posts

This week marks my 8th anniversary as a parent. BlueEyes turned 8 and during nights when he was a baby that wouldn’t want to go to sleep and wake up to nurse about a million times, this day seemed ages away. I guess all the clichés are true that the days go slow while the years go fast. All of a sudden BlueEyes is a person who is not only funny and athletic but also kind and caring about other people.

And I have learned over the past 8 years that there is more love in my heart and more patience in my body than I ever thought there would be. Still some days it feels like there is not enough patience. But realizing how fleeting this time is, makes me finally able to appreciate the moments, instead of just bracing for the turmoil of parenting to end.

Do we change individual women or do we change the world?

babyattachmode April 5, 2019 advice / diversity / everyday sexism / life in the office / mentoring / role models / women in science

I want to write a post, but it is more likely going to be a bunch of incoherent thoughts, that I’m going to write down anyway in the hope that it will make them slightly more coherent. As the long time readers of my blog now, I have cried at work more than once (and even if something doesn’t make me cry you can often hear in my voice what I think about something), and over the years have received different advice on what to do about this. (this is of course interesting in itself: that people value the energetic, optimistic end of the emotional spectrum, but want to change the other end of the spectrum).

The most valuable advice in my opinion that I have received on this topic was to prepare a meeting that you know might make you cry over and over and over until you can say what you want to say, and answer all the potential questions that might come up without crying. Practice, practice, practice until your brain can no longer surprise you with tears that come out of nowhere.

Other advice I received was: don’t say anything if you feel you might become emotional, take calming pills if you know you might become emotional, seek out help from a psychologist to understand better why you become emotional. Most of this advice comes from more senior women by the way.

And from this article, I realize that this is not only about women becoming emotional, but women receive similar advice about being funny at work: “Gender stereotypes that influence how women are related to and perceived at work extend to humor, according to a new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study authors were conducting separate research when a female executive in the oil and gas industry made a poignant admission. “She mentioned that she tries to not be seen as funny,” says Jon Evans, study author and leadership researcher at the University of Arizona. “That didn’t initially make sense to me, so I asked her more about it. She told me that female mentors had told her that being funny can result in her not being taken seriously because she’s a woman.””

And last but not least, we’re still telling women how to dress for work.

Now I understand that at work you are expected to some extend to look and act in a professional way, but how productive is it to tell women to bend over backwards in order to behave ‘professional’. And in what world do we live when acting professional at work means leaving half of your funny, emotional personality at the door? (I know the answer to this question: it’s called the patriarchy.) However, I’m not only emotional but I’m also optimistic (which sometimes makes me emotional), and seeing Jacinda Ardern’s empathic leadership style makes me very hopeful that one day we won’t need to fit into the box that is being placed in front of us, but we can create our own.

Working parents and the number of choices we need to make

babyattachmode March 12, 2019 cultural differences / Decisions / life in the office / parenting / women in science / work-life balance

Next Friday, all the schools in The Netherlands go on strike to protest for better education and more investments in education from the government. I understand and support this. During a previous school strike, I read that some large companies offer free childcare for their employees on that day, and by that they solve their parent employee’s problem of how to figure out childcare on that day or their need to take a day off. I asked my company if they would do the same and they were pretty quick to say no to my request. This means I will only be working an hour that day and not 8 hours. And this in turn, got me thinking about childcare choices and parents’ abilities to join the workforce full force or part-time. This is particularly relevant in The Netherlands, where we are below average on the glass ceiling index.

Just to be clear: I am not saying that everybody should work full-time and I don’t believe you need to work full-time all your life in order to have a fulfilling career. But the mental load of arranging childcare (and other types of care work) falls disproportionally on women’s shoulders, and that is what I want to address here.

When my company said no to arranging childcare for me, I realized that every time you need to arrange something small like this, it comes with having to make decisions. I was reminded of one of Obama’s productivity secrets: thathe always wears the same outfit so he can avoid decision fatigue when it comes to the really important decisions. I think it works the same way with arranging childcare: when it is one large decision (for example: hire a nanny) you avoid decisions fatigue much more than when you need to make decisions about arrangements every day.

I’ve probably written about this on the blog before, but when we lived in the US, our daycare only took babies for 5 days a week, because they wanted the babies and the teachers to bond. Everyday, there were the same babies and the same teachers and just one decision. In the Netherlands, putting your baby in daycare for 5 days a week is seriously frowned upon, because “you don’t have babies to have someone else take care of them”. So people (and with people I generally mean women here) make all sorts of arrangements in order to get work done: one day with one grandma, one day with the other, one part-time day and 2 days in daycare is a construction you often see. But this leads to many more decisions: when a grandma goes on vacation, or when you need to swop days at work because of big presentations. And then when kids go to school this continues because school ends early in the day, with a lunch break you can have at home and a Wednesday afternoon completely off. The quest on how to organize continues in school and becomes even bigger. This got me thinking if the more decisions we make regarding childcare, the smaller our mental space becomes at work to make decisions and be productive. So if – as a nation – we are really serious about closing the gender gap and smashing the glass ceiling, shouldn’t we first make sure that women don’t have to start the day already tired of making sure they can even get to work?

On efficiency and joy

babyattachmode February 1, 2019 Uncategorized

Recently, science twitter observed the annual recurrence of the discussion: should scientists – and in this case specifically postdocs – have kids and when?

I don’t want to go into the fact that having kids is a very personal decision that a PI and/or employer should not interfere with here. What I thought is interesting when these discussions surface, is that often people feel the need to defend having kids by saying that it made them so much more efficient in the lab (I even did that myself!).

But looking back at the months in which I ran 2 cohorts of rats in operant chambers while at the same time preparing and recording from acute brain slides and on top of that pumping milk twice a day, only to fall down in exhaustion when I came home with a baby who slept poorly, I wonder if I didn’t overdo it back then. And it made me draw this very unscientific description of how in my opinion efficiency affects joy and creativity:

I believe that there’s a certain optimum amount of efficiency that leads to happiness and creativity. But at the other side of the spectrum I think that too much efficiency, like in my example, leads to the puddle of disgruntle, where you don’t even have time to chat with people around you and to enjoy the fun of your work.

So looking back, I would advice my younger self NOT to be so efficient, but instead realize that having a baby means that for a certain period you can’t actually do ALL TEH THINGS, and that joy is perhaps equally important as efficiency. Or perhaps more important.

Who gets to shine in the spotlight?

babyattachmode January 25, 2019 advice / everyday sexism / industry / life in the office

Earlier this month, I was in a meeting where an intern presented the results of their internship. When it was time for questions, the supervisor was the one to quickly chip in and answer the questions without giving enough space for the intern to answer first. I’ve seen this happen over and over both in academia and in industry: whether it’s an intern, PhD student, postdoc, or basically just anyone in a meeting, there is so often the supervisor or boss who steps into the conversation to take the spotlight by answering a questions or making a remark. And sure, sometimes it is time for someone higher up the ladder to step in and say something, but more often than not that person is stealing the spotlight from someone lower up the ladder.

In industry, with its large matrix organizations, it is often the case that there is a whole team behind a presentation that the leader of that team is giving, often without the people of the team in the room. So whether or not that team leader gives credit to the team is invisible to the people who have done most of the actual work.

So what can you do when you notice that your boss or someone else higher up is stealing your opportunity to take the spotlight and get credit for your work? I think for women this is an even more delicate topic because wanting to show your ambition can be perceived as being difficult and not being a team player. My current strategy when I feel I’m not getting the credit I deserve is to talk to people around me, both people at my level and at higher level just to casually share my ideas and views, so that when they hear them being presented by someone else, they hopefully remember that I also took part in creating them. And I ask for opportunities to present, but that doesn’t always work because the hierarchical chain is quite large where I am and sometimes it feels like everyone in that chain wants the spotlights and there’s only so much room for people to shine.

And when the spotlight is being stolen with everyone in the room, like in the example of the intern who isn’t given the room to answer questions, I speak up and say that I want to hear what the intern has to say before the supervisor shares their opinion.

What about you? What do you do when you feel the spotlight is being taken from someone who deserves it?

Does your project spark joy?

babyattachmode January 22, 2019 advice / life in the office / work-life balance

Until recently, I had ignored the Marie Kondo craze about cleaning up your house. But when I wasn’t sure what to watch next on Netflix I fell down the rabbit hole of the new Netflix series Tidying up with Marie Kondo and I caught up with the rest of the world. Except that I still haven’t watched Game of Thrones yet, but that’s not the point of this post.

What I realized when I watched the show, is that the KonMari method is not really about cleaning up, but it is about mindfulness and about feeling what you like and don’t like by answering the question “does it spark joy?”. When I had a meeting to discuss projects for the coming year, I realized that some projects spark joy whereas another project does the opposite. It destroys all joy, even though it was a project that I initiated myself two years ago. Back then, I was super excited about initiating this project, but now when I think about the work I have to do I feel this heavy inability to get started on it. And in contrast to an old sweater, I cannot simply thank this project and throw it away. I have to figure out why this project has stopped sparking joy and I think it has something to do with the fact that to me it is very unclear what the endgoal of this project is, and with the fact that I want to look further into the future for this project than some of the other people involved in the project. Maybe also something with unclarity about ownership of this project and a shared vision of what success looks like.

Losing the spark of joy in projects has happened before, and then I solved that (and other unhappiness about not getting funded) by leaving academia. This time I’m determined to stay with this project – at least for a while – and figure out how to find the spark of joy back.

On being allies

babyattachmode January 16, 2019 diversity

Science writer Ed Yong wrote an article for the Atlantic about new research on trans identity in childhood. I personally think it is well written and uses inclusive and respectful language.

However, in the response to it, I also read this tweet of a trans woman who expresses her annoyance with people who love this article but have been much less respectful before.

I mean, a man had to say it before anyone believes, right? ?

(This is obviously not targeted at Ed Yong, but at society.)

— Björn Jörges (@b_jorges) January 16, 2019

I remember a similar sentiment after the “Everything you know about obesity is wrong” article that appeared late last year: why do people only start listening when men who do not belong to the group they write about (whether it is trans people or fat people) say something that the group themselves has said before? It makes me wonder: because on the one hand we want people who hold the majority of power (i.e. men) to be allies for minority groups, but at the same time we don’t want the scenario that only when men speak out, we believe the minority group. So how do we act as allies in such a society? I don’t have a clear answer but I think it starts with listening and amplifying voices of minority groups. Is there a way to do it right, or is it 2 steps forward, 1 step back into a more inclusive society?

2019 will be the year of personal branding

babyattachmode January 2, 2019 Academia / Decisions / life in the office / new job / personal posts

The thing that shocked me most as a recovering academic is that in academia I had a very clear goal that I was working towards, namely becoming a university professor with my own lab doing my own research. When I left academia, I lost that laser sharp focus on the goal entirely. In the beginning that wasn’t so much a problem because I seriously enjoyed learning new things and understanding how my new environment worked. However, after a while some days started to feel like I was just moving things around without any clear goal in mind. I would do the work just to please the people around me (and because I get paid for doing it of course). It became more and more clear that I needed to replace the academic goal with some other goal, although perhaps it does not need to be as rigid and laser sharp as that one.

As I wrote at the end of December, 2018 was the year of contemplation and getting a better idea of what I want. I’ve worked on listing the things I like and dislike doing, but I feel like I need to do more work in crafting that vision of where I see myself and what I want to do. That’s why I’ve made the theme for 2019 “personal branding”.

I don’t particularly like those words, because they sound a little like you’re only showing the shiny, happy version of yourself, but to me they actually mean the opposite: to figure out your authentic self and feel strong enough to bring that to work. One aspect of that is that I tend to pile on as many projects as I possibly can, but I lack focus. Over the break I realized that this might just be because I don’t want to fail and doing many things is both an excuse to not to everything 100% but also is a way to spread my changes that at least some of the projects will work out fine. I need to stop doing that and figure out what it is that I want to be known for and then focus on doing just that and embracing the larger chance of failing.

Perhaps this is the work of a lifetime, but no better day to start than today, right?! Happy 2019 and please share your theme in the comments, if you have one!

Original Source | Taken Source