ECCV 2016 Daily - Wednesday

Zeynep: When I was a PhD student, I was much less open about it. I couldn’t handle the conflicts very well so I would just ignore, and basically do whatever I wanted to do. I would not reply to those people. Now, that I have more experience, and I have seen other examples, now I think that it’s important to speak your mind, to tell people that this is not the right way of giving advice. This is very discouraging because there is already a lot of male domination in our field. If anyone gives that kind of career advice, this becomes even more discouraging for women. I think that this is maybe one of the reasons why women don’t want to continue in postdoc. They suffer so much. ECCV Daily: You work now with Bernt Schiele at the Max Planck Institute . Tell us more about it. Zeynep: It has been fantastic. He is very, very supportive of women. I think maybe he treats women differently, in a good way. Because, sometimes we get emotional. He can handle it very well. You know that he is supporting you, even in difficult situations. He doesn’t have to, but he supports you. ECCV Daily: In which situations do scientist women become emotional? Zeynep: Maybe when the student you are working with, usually a male student, becomes very frustrated and becomes aggressive toward you. Then, you have to keep calm, be cool, and not get extremely angry or apologetic. ECCV Daily: Do you think young people might not respect your role only because that role is occupied by a woman and not by a man? Zeynep: Yes, sometimes. I’m not saying that for everyone this is the case, but there might be some situations. I have had some experiences like that. ECCV Daily: If you would give advice to a young man entering this profession, what would you say? Zeynep: Just ignore the fact that your supervisor is a woman. Treat her as a man. ECCV Daily: Do you think men can ignore that the other person is a woman? Zeynep: I don’t know, but they have to. They have to force themselves. ECCV Daily: What advice would you give to a young woman entering this profession? Zeynep: If they want to do it, they should do it because the field really needs more women. I encourage everyone who wants to explore, just to explore. ECCV Daily: You said that you need to be strong to address all of these kind of issues. What if that person wants to explore, but she is not strong enough to deal with the pressure? Zeynep: Then they can find a mentor, someone to talk to, someone to take advice from. That mentor can come from the computer vision community, among the people that you have interviewed perhaps, or from their Women in Computer Vision 13 ECCV Daily: Wednesday