Depends on the purpose. For documents (especially those on which people work collaboratively over long periods of time) I find YYYY-MM-DD ideal. It spares the issues around day or month first when Europeans and people from the US work together, the document are easy to sort and, if it takes more than a year to complete the project (as is often the case in research) things don’t get messy.

The fourth kind is the reason I hardly ever pet any cat XD

I was actually joining the chat to write that things are not that different in biology. I have a PhD and 7 years of postdocs behind me. Over the years I have :

• been denied a management position because “the team was only men, who wouldn’t listen to me” (spoiler alert, they put an incompetent guy in charge who screwed up massively and I ended up taking over, successfully).
• had a boss who systematically doubted my opinion (while he was not a specialist of the topic) but listened to the very same argument from a male colleague
• had male Masters students who could speak uninterrupted during meetings when I couldn’t
• got denied a tenure position for a guy with the same profile (literally the same topic and same labs) but much less experience than mine (like 5 years younger) This last one broke me, I ended up quitting academia

Thanks for sharing your experience, I’ll keep that in mind!

Omg you’re making me freak out. I had to quit academia a year and a half ago (after 7 years of postdocs) and, after a bad experience in the private sector (techy start up bitch who was just plain insane), I’ve been struggling for 10 months to find a new path and a job…and I’m still nowhere near finding something I’m afraid.