Women in Science Part 2

In part one, I told my boring story of how I got into science without anyone telling me I couldn't because I was a girl. I wanted to put my story out there not as a "See? It's not really a problem. These people are exaggerating" but to show that this huge, widespread problem doesn't have to be. I didn't grow up in some science or feminist utopia. I know one other woman made it through college with a science degree without anyone telling her she couldn't, and she was homeschooled by two engineers. We shouldn't be the outliers. We shouldn't be considered lucky for having been encouraged or at least not actively discouraged. We should be in the majority, with those who were discouraged the outliers who ran into the few bad eggs.

And it's a big problem. I've heard the horror stories, seen the surprised looks when students walk into my classroom and see me, a woman, standing up there ready to teach them. I've had female students come up to me at the end of the semester and tell me how happy they were to have a female teacher, because they are interested in physics but were afraid that we were all, their words, "men or old cranky spinsters".  But it is honestly  shocking to me that there are so few women in my classrooms, or that I would have to serve as some kind of female-breaking-into-science role model. Am I in a 21st century secular classroom or what?

The problems pop up all over the place. It's not just people with outdated or misogynistic ideas discouraging girls the farther they get in their education. It's the fact that women in science is presented as this new thing, instead of us having been here all along, just kind of hiding. That scientists are socially inept man-childs. That to be a good scientist means having no life outside the lab. The fact that lab equipment is all designed for use by men.

I don't completely know what the solution to this is, either. I know what things should not be included in the solution. Things like telling women scientists to marry starving artists. Yes, this was the advice given to us by the feminist speaker at the Undergrad Women In Physics conference I attended. The logic being that a  starving artist would be willing to follow us around wherever our careers might lead, would be willing to take care of the house and any children because they would just be so grateful to be eating. The way to more women in science should not be paved with turning men into Betty Drapers. It should not include pink science sets. It should not including trampling other people and it shouldn't involve superficial changes.

I think a part of the solution needs to be scientists speaking out, not just as physicists or biologists, but as people. Something that nearly scared me off of grad school was the perception that I would lose who I am for that opportunity, and I have heard the same sentiment from the young women whom I teach. We don't want to be pigeonholed as housewives, nor do we want to be pigeonholed as scientists. There needs to be an explicit acknowledgement that you can be a human being with relationships and hobbies and be a scientist.

A trickier thing is to push for more inclusion of women without making their inclusion about their gender. The "we want to make sure we show off the women in our department" mentality is just as insulting (to me) as setting us up for exclusion. Include me because I am a scientist and my work is interesting, and make it possible for me to attend. Don't include me to make quota.

Science, and society, needs to do some soul searching. It is a painful absurdity that half the population is implicitly and explicitly pushed away from making the kind of discoveries that change the course of humanity. How much farther could we be if we didn't waste half of our intellectual resources? Scientists want to show that science is the way forward for humanity, they need to start proving that they aren't willing to leave half of us in the dust.