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 It's not just people with outdated or misogynistic ideas discouraging girls the farther they get in their education.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.

Women and Science Part 1

There has been a lot of very good discussion lately on how women are treated in our society. It's a discussion that needs to happen, though it's a terrible shame people had to die for it to happen. The discussion has been going on long enough now that it has started to group off into subgroups a bit. One of the discussions on my twitterfeed for the a few days  was about how women still face discouragement when they try to enter STEM fields, with women sharing stories of subtle and not so subtle prejudice.

It's a discussion that I could probably be expected to enter. On paper, I look like the right kind of girl to have experienced this kind of thing. I came from a strongly religious background, I went to a small high school and a Christian college, entering a field with some of the worst male/female ratios. Someone somewhere along the line should have told me I shouldn't go into physics, right?

Fact of the matter is, no. No one in my life ever told me I couldn't do science. I had a handful of people tell me I couldn't be a pastor because I was a woman when I thought that was what I was going to do with my life (oddly enough, one of them was a chemistry teacher). But no one ever said or implied that I couldn't do science because I was a girl. Through my entire growing up, I was given the opportunities and encouragement to explore whatever interested me. The fact that I landed in science feels less like "I beat the odds! I am woman, hear me roar!" and more like "I followed my natural inclinations and talents and this is where I landed".

Though I am nearly 100% certain this was not their intention, my parents gave me what, in retrospect, was a fairly gender-neutral choice of toys growing up. I had baby dolls, a toy kitchen, dress up clothes and play make up. I also had a big bucket of blocks, a wooden train set, an erector set, an a tool belt with kid-sized real tools. I got a microscope and an EZ Bake. If I expressed an interest in something, they got me books on the subject or took me to the library and helped me find what I wanted using the card catalogue or the computer*.

So I read mystery stories, fantasy stories, books on bugs, plate tectonics, and anatomy. At my grandma's house I read the encyclopedia, I experimented on one of her many spider plants, I cooked weird things and found out what was inside bath beads. For a science fair my dad helped me build a contraption exhibiting different types of levers ending in connecting a circuit with a ball bearing and lighting a small bulb. He explained the physics of musical instruments and other things. No one ever told me that I shouldn't explore any topic I found interesting.

In school, I will admit science education was a little haphazard. On the bad side of things, my seventh-grade science teacher was actually qualified in english, not science, and we learned more about his college hockey career and the three types of rocks he could pronounce than we were supposed to. He thought the preserved frogs we were supposed to dissect smelled too bad and left them to soak in buckets of water over spring break. That wing of the school was unusable for a week after spring break since it turns out that when you wash the preservatives out of dead frogs and leave them in a 90 degree classroom, they rot pretty quickly.

But my high school physics teacher was a legend in my school. Physics had a reputation for being an easy class compared to the other sciences taught at my high school because he didn't believe in busy work (which the biology teacher was famous for). He had two classroom spaces that had been joined together into one mega-classroom, one half having a traditional lecture set up and the other half having lab tables. Everyone knew he kept a tea kettle and a hot plate in his backroom, because you could hear the kettle whistle 15 minutes into class time.

He was a brilliant teacher. He had a very simple philosophy--if you wanted to learn, he would spend hours with you, working on a single topic until you were solid on it. If you didn't, he wouldn't heap worksheets on you--you just had to take your D and not complain. He would lecture for the first 15 minutes of class, pause to get his tea, come back and answer questions we had articulated in the meantime, then set us free to the back tables to work on problem sets. We could ask him questions, and he would guide you to the answer while never giving you the answer. When you were done, you could do anything that wasn't disruptive (a small group of us worked on the NY Times crossword with him). He worked on a budget of pretty much nothing. The books were 20 years old and falling apart, and he had only one working set of equipment for each topic, if that. He improvised, he used youtube videos, anything to get his point across. He convinced me that no matter what else I wanted to do with my life, I wanted to study physics.

Sidenote: As a testament to how great a teacher he was, even among the students he failed, the legend/myth grew around him that when he retired, that science wing of the school would fall. We turned out to be half right--the year after he left they discovered they needed to retrofit that wing for asbestos before they could finish an expansion of the school, and that part was indeed destroyed.

In college, the physics professors were indeed mostly male, but we had almost 50% female physics majors during my years there (we had a minor celebration when we realized at one physics department tea time that there were more females than males there that day).  My professors were never anything but supportive of the young women in their classrooms, all without making us feel like a special class of citizen. The only questioning of my abilities that I ever got was with regard to my ability to lift heavy things. But since I'm 5' 1", I can't say I really blame them, even if I did prove them wrong.

I did research with a great professor who guided me from the student-who-takes-orders stage to being in charge of his labs and coordinating between members of the project. I learned valuable skills in macgyvering lab equipment, finding what you needed in odd places and managing people. I never felt like a second class citizen. I was a physics major. The fact that I was a woman meant that I could go to the Undergraduate Women in Physics conference, but had nothing to do with my intelligence or my prospects. They were excellent role models, as physicists and as citizens.

Strangely enough, the first time I encountered anything that I could have construed as sexism with regards to my being a physicist was after I had already been in grad school for a semester. I just laughed in the commenter's face. It seemed so anachronistic. It was ridiculous, a weird joke. But no, they were serious, and far from alone in their opinion.

So, that's my story. A non-exciting story of how a young woman faced no opposition when she set her sights towards science. A story that I wish were commonplace, and I hope I can help make unremarkable.

*Yes, I know how to use a card catalogue. I don't know if that shows my age or the slowness with which my town adopted computers in the libraries.