You, sir, are totally wrong!

I got sent an article (Schwartz. 2008. Journal of Cell Science. doi:10.1242/jcs.033340) which genuinely addresses how I feel, but only at the very beginning when the author is quoting someone else:

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

As soon as the author starts talking, he starts getting it all wrong. Here's his thesis:

I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It’s a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is
immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

And here's what I'd like to say: I think that my PhD program has not only given me a very clear idea of how hard it is to do research, I think that my PhD program has given me a very clear idea of how hard it is to maintain one's sense of worth while being constantly surrounded by people who think they are more valuable and worthwhile than you are simply because they have earned a PhD, or a faculty position, or a nobel prize or whatever. I think that my PhD program has also given me a clear idea of how hard it is to work inside of a hierarchical profession, dominated at the top by men, which inherently refuses to recognize new ideas while they are still new. Also, a profession which maintains its own sanctity and value to the point that anyone who seeks to criticize the system (e.g., the smart woman that is the subject of this man's essay) is labelled as one of the outside intruders who never understood or cared enough about its basic tenets. Let's all recall the Harvard incident. To me, this is the perfect example, not just of sexism in science but of non-science-ism. Scientists who have been successful seem to absolutely refuse to admit that anything could ever be wrong with the great institution of science. It's got to be the fault of the person rejecting science. There is no other option. Science is sacred, science is holy, science is exactly as it was intended to be by its maker, hold on, I mean by the big bang...or evolution...or whatever...