Tacit Knowledge Sharing and Negotiations
Facing a myriad of challengers and biases, tacit knowledge sharing became a key strategy for the Chinese-born women scientists and engineers to overcome difficulties and advance careers. This chapter explores the main categories of tacit knowledge that th
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TACIT KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND NEGOTIATIONS
IMPOSTER SYNDROME AND PEER NETWORKS
Facing a myriad of challengers and biases, tacit knowledge sharing became a key strategy for the Chinese-born women scientists and engineers to overcome difficulties and advance careers. This chapter explores the main categories of tacit knowledge that the Chinese women community shares on a regular basis. Like many female scientists and engineers, the Chinese women I studied suffered severely from “imposter syndrome,” which is a psychological term for the phenomenon when individuals have trouble internalizing or acknowledging their accomplishments. While this kind of behavior has been described in a report from NASA’s conference on Women in Astronomy and Space Science in 2009, there has been little follow-up research on this proposed syndrome. While it is entirely possible that male doctoral students also suffer from symptoms caused by low selfesteem, the findings from the current study show that forming peer networks is a primary coping strategy for many Chinese women.1 In this study, all of the women doctoral students had excelled in a competitive pool of graduate school candidates, entered prestigious doctoral programs, published at least three journal articles during their doctoral studies, and were working diligently towards their academic professional goals. However, their fear of “not being good enough” or being considered “unqualified and stupid” constantly made them abstain from many interactions with professors and intellectual exchanges at major conferences. Instead, these students turned to postdoctoral and junior researchers rather than their advisers and colleagues for effective feedback and scholarly assistance. As one woman explained: I do believe that it’s important to talk to different people in your department. I feel sometimes the senior people in your group can be even more helpful than your adviser … They are in the same group and they’ve been through all this [doctoral program] and they know what it is like to finish a project and what it is like to finish doctoral education in your field. So sometimes they can give you more specific suggestions that can be more helpful to your research. This participant elaborated on her strategy of dealing with her constant feelings of “fear” and being “lost,” which involved interacting with senior peers in her research group. These “senior peers” could be more advanced doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, or staff researchers. Some women turned to their 133
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postdoctoral peers for guidance in the areas in which their advisers were not specialists. For example, a physical scientist discussed the reasons why she turned to postdocs for certain types of feedback: My adviser is a good scientist and she has great ideas but she’s not a great programmer. She doesn’t do all those technical stuff. So if I had a question like that, I would go to a programmer or I would go to a junior research staff or postdoc. They would tell me what to do. It’s usually turn to postdo
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