Consider how you balance the demands and pleasures of this season. Have you found ways to make progress on your must-dos while also taking time for your family, friends - and yourself - and being in the moment of this time of year? Or are July and August just another month for you?
He found that for most of the contributors this isn't just holiday time:
Well, sadly, the vast majority of contributors were in various states of juggling catch-up and preparation for the academic year, many putting work well ahead of themselves and their loved ones at what is supposed to be the time of relaxation and renewal in the Northern Hemisphere. But they are not all tales of woe and frustration. Even those pushed to their limit still wrote about little things they remembered about why they loved summer so much at one time.
Alice and ScienceWoman at Sciencewomen has posted the June Scientiae blog carnival has a great roundup of posts from women scientists and engineers about moving forward - either in the past or how they plan to in the future. There are lots of great posts, so go read!
I was surfing about (doing research, I swear!) and stumbled on some disturbing information. I may be infected by The NERD! The symptoms?
Heightened interest in intellectual and academic pursuits, including but not limited to biology, chemistry, physics, geology, anthropology and even psychology
Obsessive behaviors including but not limited to collecting, memorizing, reciting and hoarding of intellectual materials
Inability to understand how others are not fascinated by their particular nerdy fetish
A lack of fashion sense, or at least a bizarre one. (e.g. this )
Pronounced interest in emotionally mature and complex materials like advanced physics or computing
Pronounced interest in emotionally immature materials like comic books and animated television
Finds puns particularly funny, for no obvious reason
Abnormal levels of attraction to other infected people, who they consider “smart” and “interesting”
Prone to creative outlets of their obsessions like shanties or themed haikus
Embraces the title of “geek,” “nerd,” or “dork” willingly - possibly a little too excitedly
Yup, looks like I've caught it.
But I am not alone. It is currently estimated that "25-50% of the world’s population is infected, with numbers continually rising." And NERD Infection site founder Christie Wilcox (who blogs at Observations of a Nerd) has reason to follow the epidemiology of the disease very closely: as this week's Science Channel Geek of the Week she is almost certainly infected herself.
There is currently no treatment or cure, so all I can do is spread my NERDiness about in hope of finding solidarity with others who share my condition. Nerds rule!
Katherine Haxton at Endless Possibilities 2.0 asked for life snapshots of the time-capsule variety for this month's Scientiae carnival. There were so many responses, she had to post them in two parts: Part I, Part II
I found it moving to read so many stories about people overcoming professional obstacles, and persevering through personal issues, and even medical problems. Not every story has a fairytale ending, of course, but simply being able to move on and move forward after life throws you a curveball is a powerful ability.
Between the holidays, getting ready for ScienceOnline09, and reading Anathem (which will probably result in a post) I've really gotten behind in posting here. I've also been spending a lot of time reading other people's posts. I don't know if it's because people had a bit of vacation, or have been thinking about the past year, or just chance, but there seem to have been a lot of interesting discussions over the past few weeks.
I've included brief excerpts below to give you the sense of posts, but I really recommend following the links to read both the posts and the comments.
Many of us women don’t have a female science next door neighbor, or even another female TT department-mate, who might understand our unique issues and teach us how to function effectively in a male-dominated environment. If we did, having a group where we could get the support and mentoring we need from people with like experiences to help us climb the academic ladder successfully, wouldn’t be such a pressing issue.
Academic science is a very hierarchical structure in which one climbs up the ladder by following some very exact steps. Yes, you can come into it from the outside, class-wise, but you have to start from the bottom and follow those steps "to the T" if you are to succeed. But those formal steps were designed by Victorian gentlemen scientists, thus following those steps turns one into a present-time Victorian gentleman scientist. But not everyone can or wants to do this, yet some people who refuse are just as good as scientists as the folks inside the club. If you refuse to dance the kabuki, you will be forever kept outside the Gate. The importance of mastery of kabuki in one's rise through the hierarchy also means that some people get to the top due to their skills at glad-handling the superiors and putting down the competitors with formalized language, not the quality of their research or creativity of their thought.
And there's a lot more food for thought on his post.
So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It's that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table. In science and engineering, where men dominate the top ranks but also have an advantage in numbers, it's likely that the same explanation applies, rather than the innate differences cited by Summers and Irwing.
I felt like I was living a double life and constantly denying one half of my identity -- turning parts of myself on and off and disguising the others so that people only saw what I allowed them to see -- was emotionally draining and it left me feeling isolated in every sphere I interacted in. It left me feeling guilty when I let one part of my life creep into the other and it left me feeling depressed that I could not recognize my full identity for fear of being shunned in either sphere. I realized that I would not be able continue to function this way and be successful in either sphere. And with that, I opened the dam between the two spheres and have allowed them to blend together.
Greg Laden: The natural basis for gender inequality This is a thought-provoking look at naturalism, primate behavior, and how it might relate to gender inequality in humans. The comments get a bit heated - or at least one dude does.
She goes on to talk about how work "experience" used to be defined, visually speaking, as a ladder. Just keep on climbing and hope for the rewards on your way up. But a new paradigm is taking over, one that looks less like a ladder and more like a "lattice"--a shape that allows for stepping off and stepping back on, caretaking for children and aging parents, working non-traditional hours, taking detours into various fields, developing various skills etc. In this paradigm, success would be less defined by one's years of experience or status within a particular linear framework, but the quality of one's work, the breadth of one's experience, one's capacity for reinvention and adaptation.
Lee Kottner @ Cocktail Party Physics: by invitation only This is quite a rant that compares the sexism in Christianity with the sexism in science, then takes on Dawkins' selection of writers for the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. I can't do it justice by taking a snippet, so just go read her post.
Scientific meetings offer tremendous learning and networking opportunities for students. This is especially true for students who are members of traditionally under-represented groups. Though you may be one of a few brown or young or feminine faces at the conference, many societies are working hard to get you at that meeting and to keep you coming back.
Female Science Professor: Just Call Me F As a PhD and/or an academic, how do you like to be addressed? Dr. Isis (who has been blogging up a storm the past few weeks) also weighs in: That's "Dr. Little Missy to You!
Supposedly, your level of street smarts has more to do with your upbringing than almost any other single factor. People who know how to come in and play the system usually learned those skills early on, from their parents. Or maybe if they did certain activities after school.
This is a critical skill, but you don't learn these things in class.
However, here's where things get really interesting for women in particular.From what I can tell, street knowledge is really hard for women to get.
Christina Pikas posted the slides from her presentation at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience. She looked at how science blogs were interconnected, and was able to identify subgroups in different scientific specialities and was even able to pick out a troll. She also found a high level of connectedness between women's science blogs:
What was interesting - and most definitely worthy of further investigation - is this cluster of blogs written mostly by women, discussing the scientific life, etc. The degree distribution was much closer to uniform within the cluster, and there were many comment links between all of the nodes. This, to me, indicates other uses for the blogs and perhaps a real community (or Blanchard's virtual settlement).
Juniper Shoemaker lays bare her long journey from English to genetics: part 1, part 2, part 3. English majors can indeed make great scientists.
Astarte's Circus: At Ease With Her Age Most of Octogalore's post isn't about women in science directly, but discusses women and aging and appearance. And this part is directly relevant:
My aunt, who got into Harvard Med, wanted to be a doctor. My father, who also did, wanted to be a teacher. She was told “don’t BE a doctor. Marry a doctor.” He was told that literature was effete and that he would not continue to get love and admiration if he didn’t pursue the medical route. When he fainted at a gory video and had to be taken from the room, of course, it was clear things were a bit off.
He is now still teaching at 73, and still making much less than a first-year lawyer, but loves what he does. My aunt never did enjoy humanities and ultimately stopped working. When her kids left the home, she found herself at loose ends, with the fields she was most interested in having high entrance costs for a middle-aged woman who’d been out of the work force for twenty years.
So should you be "extra careful of to avoid being marginalized?" No. Because that will happen anyway. If being the department's "Black or Brown Female Scientist" means that you have the chance to be present and give others a chance to see themselves where you are - I say go for it. Be that "Scientist." Be strong, take lots of deep breaths, and always be humble. And know that you are not alone.
I hope that I am winning a way which others will keep open. Perhaps the fact that I am not a radical, and that I do not scorn womanly duties, but deem it a privilege to clean up and supervise the room and sew things, etc., is winning me stronger allies than anything else… I am useful in a general way, and they can’t say study spoils me for anything else.
~ Ellen Swallow Richards in a letter to a friend in 1872. She was the first woman admitted to MIT, where she earned a BS in chemistry in 1873.
I was browsing through the videos in MIT's TechTV collection and stumbled on "The Social Beaver". It was filmed in the early or mid-1960s, and depicts "typical" student life at MIT. It spends a few minutes focusing on the few women who were enrolled there.
In the embedded the video below, the segment about "girls" starts at about 6:15.
Looking back 45 or so years, the whole campus appears terribly old-fashioned. The filmmakers seemed to want to emphasize how "normal" the girls are. We see them relaxing in the girls-only dormitory ("no men allowed") in what the narrator calls "typically feminine fashion": knitting, chatting about boys and dates, and singing around a piano. Of course they study too, but "the studious beaver is also the social beaver"1, and one young woman turns out to be doodling an evening gown instead of boning up on multivariable calculus.
What is particularly striking to me is where the young women aren't. The film shows all the different extracurricular activities open to students - the newspaper, the yearbook, band, radio station, rocket design club, a variety of intramural sports, student government and more - and all you see are male faces. It wasn't just because women "chose" to not participate: of all the sports in MIT's extensive intramural program, only sailing and fencing were open to women. While women were at the Institute it seems that they weren't really part of the Institute.
Of course part of the reason we see so few female faces was that women only made up about 5% of the student body in the 1960s. They wouldn't be particularly visible even if they did participate in campus activities. But they also had to contend with the attitude that all they really were interested in was boys and babies. Take, for example the 1964 symposium on Women in Science and Engineering hosted by MIT. One of the invited speakers was well-known psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim2 who stated:
As much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.
That's a helluva broad brush to paint half the human population with. Any woman who was focused on her research and career, happy to be single or childless, or uninterested in dating men would be considered unwomanly, at least by Bettelheim's standards. I doubt he was alone in that attitude, considering that even today many people still assume "normal" women are primarily interested in marriage and children. It's the usual no-win situation: traditionally feminine are assumed to not be focused on their careers, and women who focused on their careers were aren't "normal" women.
1. Yes, you have a dirty mind. However it may be noted that the sports teams at MIT are currently called the Engineers, rather than the Beavers.
2. Bettleheim is best known for popularizing the "refrigerator mother" explanation for autism. The idea is pretty much how it sounds: "emotionally frigid" women cause their children to become autistic. This has been discredited here in the US, but apparently is still a popular notion elsewhere.
Jessica Alba is currently filming An Invisible Sign of My Own:The film is a coming-of-age drama based on Aimee Bender's quirky novel about a 20-year-old loner named Mona Gray (Alba) who as a child turned to math for salvation after her father became ill. As an adult, Gray now teaches the subject and must help her students through their own crises.
"The most fundamental thing a mentor can do for a lab is to help to maximize a lab's productivity," Shapiro says. "That's based on creating an environment of collaboration and respect."
She set the tone by allowing people in her lab to work to their strengths, provides projects for students that should show rapid success, provides fast feedback, and carefully follows the progress of everyone in her lab. And in what I suspect is a crucial ingredient to her success, she also carefully screens people who are interested in joining her lab, taking into account the opinions of her students and postdocs.
Not only are there are lot of bloggers on the list, many bloggers submitted more than one post, so there are a huge number of entries. The judges have a tough job ahead of them.
Howdy readers. I'm back from my trip to New York and ready to blog again. Actually I have been blogging on my (usually infrequently-updated) personal blog, so if you'd like to see some photos from my trip you can check them out over there.
December is the time that we prepare to close out one calendar year (or semester) and begin another. We stand on the threshold between the new and the old. As a way of honoring the transitional nature of this time of year, I’d like to challenge you to think about all the doors that you have opened and closed this year.
As one door closes, another one opens. Likewise, as one door opens, another one closes. [...] Feel free to write about a specific episode, or use this as an opportunity to look back on the entire year. Or write about something else entirely.
Entries should be submitted by December 28 at midnight.
Some interesting links I've collected over the past month or so:
ScienceWoman chronicles a day in her life as a 2nd year assistant professor with "an almost 2 year old": Part 1 (midnight - 8:39am), Part 2 (9:10am-5pm), Part 3 (5:20pm-midnight). ScienceWoman does not get much sleep!
There's a discussion at Dr. Isis's blog about whether (and how) women scientists should be allowed to "express their femininity". There are lots of comments (including mine), representing a wide range of opinions, from "I can't take feminine women seriously" to "I love being a girly girl" and lots in-between. And there is more discussion at ScientistMother, Candid Engineer, Professor Chaos, and Zuska's.
Also, the I think issue of trust is different in our community than in other parts of the science blog universe. Most of us are not using women-in-science blogs as a way of increasing our scientific knowledge. They are certainly no substitute for reading journal articles or time at the bench, field, or model. We are using women-in-science blogs to to learn from others, get tips on career development, cooking, paper-writing, and child-rearing. We are using women-in-science blogs to participate in a community of people who work in scientific/engineering fields and are interested in combining our demanding career with *some* sort of life outside the lab. And in this sort of community, it seems to be less important whether the blogger is Ariel, an astronomer in Arizona, than whether the blogger can provide insight into how to reach for the stars while keeping your feet on the ground. (And commenters too have such an important role in this community when you provide support, constructive criticism, sympathy, and encouragement).
But here's the thing: making a workplace more family friendly is a fight that cannot be one by women alone. Women cannot be the only ones making a ruckus in the workplace and fighting with themselves, their peers and their bosses to effect change. If we make a nurturant woman's workplace more friendly but not her partner's, it means the woman is always being flexible, always ceding her own wishes, because it is more permissive in her workplace.
The researcher also points out that using female bodies to illustrate body parts that are identical in both sexes is a recent development. “Up until virtually the 1990s, male Caucasians were used exclusively to represent anatomical bodies, with female bodies appearing only in fragments to represent their sexual organs.”
Barral points out that these biased views persist, with an image appearing in the popular science magazine Mente y Cerebro as late as 2003 that made the female brain appear to come between that of a child and an adult male in the evolutionary process.
They were happy to bring their babies into the field as long as conditions permitted. And they have what seems like a broad definition of acceptible conditions. For example, Macdonald took her baby Iona while she did her research in the Arctic:
When we got to the Yukon in March, the temperatures were well below freezing (-13ºF, -25ºC) but balmy by northern standards, and our baby was just nine weeks old. On the first day of field work, we snowshoed to the research site with Iona strapped on. We had to outfit her for cold weather and protect her from the sun. We had to carry both Iona and our field gear, and learn when and how to change a wet diaper in the deep snow.
Three Lehigh students came to help me with the fieldwork for three weeks, while my husband took care of our baby. I had to pump breast milk far from electricity or the warmth and power of the car, so I modified my pump to make it battery-powered and portable, and fit it into a backpack with the rest of the gear. I pumped on many a snow bank.
As someone who prefers a climate-controlled environment, I find that hard to imagine. But Joan and her family are obviously of hardier stock than me.
Both Joan and Maura are fortunate to have helpful spouses and other family members who share the child care responsibilities so they can focus on their research. They list the lessons they learned while with their babies in the field, and conclude it's good for everyone:
Fieldwork is good for babies: It teaches them adaptability and a love of the outdoors. Their exposure to students is mutually stimulating and fun, and they benefit from a strong relationship with their caregiver, whether that is a parent, a grandparent, or a nanny.
Fieldwork is good for mothers: It helps you maintain a field program and your involvement with students. Outdoor time with your baby blends interests. Exercise at this stage is key for your psyche (and physique).
That sounds great.
(via ScienceWoman, who notes it's trickier with a toddler, and Zuska)
The Feminist Press's Women Writing Science project has launched a new site, Under The Microscope. From the press release:
Sponsored by and developed with IBM, Underthemicroscope.com offers a wealth of continually updated information, including input from visitors to the web site. Currently the site provides the opportunity to post personal stories, feature and guest blogging, news about science, and links to related resources. Within the year the site will include more social networking opportunities, tips on careers, tips for parents, expanded links to science-related sites, and mentoring. Ultimately the site will provide information about internships and scholarships as well as serialized chapters of Women Writing Science publications that can be downloaded free of charge and an online book club.
[...]
Initiated by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Women Writing Science will publish books of biography, fiction, history, career profiles, and how-to-survive guides presenting women as both scientists and as writers about science. Women Writing Science will also provide free teacher guides describing lesson plans and strategies for using the books in science curricula. These materials will be easily downloaded from Underthemicroscope.com .
Pat at Fairer Science has the scoop on the ultimate study on the effct of gender on wages: it looked at what happens to men who changes their gender to women and women who change their gender to men. They found "women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the study earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female, even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs earned an average of 1.5% more."
The study, to be published in next month's Notices of the American Mathematical Society, identifies women of extraordinary math ability by sifting through the winners of the world's most elite math competitions. It found that small nations that nurtured female mathematicians often produced more top competitors than far larger and wealthier nations.
Overall, however, parent support and expectations emerged as the top support in both subjects and genders for middle- and high-school students. Also powerful for younger girls were engaging teachers and positive experiences with them.
The study confirmed that old stereotypes die slowly. Both boys and girls perceived that teachers thought boys were stronger at math and science. For boys this represented a support, while for girls it acted as a barrier.
Cognitive Daily had an excellent three part post about recent studies from the journal Psychological Science in the Publish Interest on the "science of sex differences in science and mathematics"
Last October Dr. Confused, who has a doctorate in aerospace engineering, had a series of guest posts on Feministe about her experiences in science, the leaky pipeline, gender roles, sexism in everyday professional lives, and being a mom.
A father was making a wild attempt to placate a gaggle of second grade girls. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" he asked. There was a litany of typical answers: a teacher, a mom, etc. But I stood up and proudly announced that I was going to be a scientist. The man gave me a stern look over his glasses and very firmly said, "Women ain't scientists." This was my first introduction to ignorance in science communication.
The Source Event Part 7 Jan Bogg, Director of the Breaking Barriers Programme at the University of Liverpool, offers advice for women considering a career break, including how to stay in the loop while on maternity leave.
1) Is the tendency for women to prefer people-oriented careers over science inherent or shaped by society?
2) Does anyone think “Title Nining” science is a good idea? Is it fair to punish research institutions if women just aren’t as interested in science as men are? Are there better ways of discouraging sexual discrimination, without discriminating against other successful scientists, both male and female?
Shelly Heller, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Mt. Vernon Campus of The George Washington University, has a request for participants in a study about women scientists who have left the academic career pipeline:
In an effort to understand the pipeline of women professors in science and Engineering we are conducting a NSF-sponsored survey on women in career breaks (voluntary or not). We are starting to interview such women to help us determine better ways for such people to be reintegrated into the pipeline. Of course, replies will be aggregated and no names will be attached to specific replies.
We are trying to reach as many women as we can. Are you such a woman? Do you know of any such women (must have PhD in science/engineering/ math/social science)? We have a few criteria:
PhD attained: yes or no ( we are seeking those who have completed their degrees)
Interest in academic employment: yes or no
Any employment post-PhD: yes or no -
Years in career break: less than 5
Please contact Shelly Heller at wlp (at) gwu (dot) edu
It seems like many of the successful women scientists I've profiled here have careers that follow a fairly straight path, from youthful science fairs to long hours in the lab and field as graduate students and postdocs. I think it's interesting to read about scientists whose careers took a more roundabout route. One such scientist is Olivera "Olja" Finn, Professor and Chair of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Immunology.
A recent profile in Science talks about her non-traditional (at least for a scientist) background. Finn grew up in the former Yugoslavia aspiring to direct plays. That changed when she met American college exchange student Seth Finn. Despite her youth - she was fresh out of high school - they married and moved to the United States.
After briefly attending college in California and Indiana, she ended up in Puerto Rico, where her husband was serving in the Coast Guard. At the urging of her father, a theater manager with geology and biology degrees, Finn had followed the technical track at her Yugoslavian high school. In Puerto Rico, her scientific ambition blossomed. For an undergraduate project at the Interamerican University in San Juan, where she completed her bachelor's degree in biology, Finn figured out missing steps in the life cycle of a hookworm that circulates among humans, birds, rats, and cockroaches. The work involved poking around seedy areas of downtown San Juan and picking up roaches as big as a tablespoon, but she loved it. "The life of research--getting data and making hypotheses--consumed me," she says.
The Finns also started a family, and she entered graduate school at Stanford with an 7-month-old infant. Her husband was also working towards his Ph.D. in Communications at Stanford. After earning her PhD and a two-year postdoc she joined the faculty of Duke University, chosen because her husband already had a position at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Finn and her husband took turns going for advancement. After Seth's job led them to North Carolina, the choice to move to Pittsburgh was hers. For 4 years, Seth commuted every week between Pennsylvania and North Carolina before being hired by Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
Despite making choices that might seem detrimental to a career in science, such as starting a family before graduate school and letting her husband's career determine where she attended university and started her first lab, Finn has been quite successful.
Nearly 20 years ago, she discovered the first cancer antigen, a tumor molecule that elicits a reaction from immune cells. And despite spending her youth in Communist-run Yugoslavia, Finn has climbed the academic ladder in the United States--she is chair of immunology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and has served as president of the American Association of Immunologists. She argues that interweaving career and family is essential. "I don't think we live long enough to do things sequentially."
And she thinks that having a family while young was a good deciscion:
If you think you'll have more time for parenting later in life, you are wrong, she says.
Carrie Miceli, who was Finn's first graduate student and is now an immunologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says she followed Finn's example, although she waited until starting her own lab to have a child. "It was great to see a woman with kids and a family who was not talking about what a compromise it was," says Miceli.
But what I wonder is how much support Olja Finn received from her husband while in graduate school. Having a husband who shares the child-care duties would obviously make a tremendous difference, since graduate students rarely have enough money to hire full-time babysitters and taking care of an infant while working in the lab would be very difficult.
Finn's laboratory is currently working towards developing a vaccine is designed to prevent colon cancer.
"The field has advanced faster because of her," says Martin Cheever, a medical oncologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. Finn deserves credit not only for her scientific insights, he adds, but also for her devotion to nurturing other scientists' research and fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations. Without such prompting, "cancer biologists and immunologists [usually] sit on their own sides of the fence," notes immunologist Ralph Steinman of Rockefeller University in New York City.
More information:
For more discussion of the Science article see "Olja Finn: Science Goddess" at the Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship blog
I got the following request for information from Brita, who is looking for cartoons to illustrate class handouts:
As a new biology teacher certification candidate, I was sad to see my class syllabus covered in cartoons portraying male scientists. I'm having a hard time finding ones with women in the lab coats that aren't hugely offensive. Any recommendations of where to look for some showing us working hard?
She's checked out PhD Comics, but that is more about grad school angst than women working as scientists. What she's looking for is along the lines of cartoons with scientists who happen to be women, rather than jokes about dating or other "female" topics. I can't think of any off the top of my head.
This blog is dedicated to the women in science and engineering, past and present. The links below are a work in progress. Feel free to e-mail me at peggy.kolm (at) gmail (dot) com with suggestions or comments.
Peggy Kolm is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
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