I’d like to point y’all to a posting about She’s Such a Geek and the ensuing discussion over on SSAG contributor Suzanne Franks’ blog, Thus Spake Zuska. Suzanne, aka Zuska, wrote about someone who asked her for suggestions for books about women in science. Zuska suggested a couple of books, including SSAG, but the person responded that they didn’t feel our book was appropriate to put into high school libraries.

Zuska suspects that the “inappropriateness” of the book is due the fact that several essays have to do with sexuality and the female geek and perhaps some frank language. And she goes on to argue that you can’t have an honest discussion about women and science without acknowledging these issues. Here’s an excerpt of what Zuska writes:

A “role model” book for young girls has to address sex and sexuality. It has to show what it’s like to deal with the vast majority of boys who are intimidated by smart women; what it’s like to deal with the ever-present comments on your sexuality in the workplace; what it’s like to discover your sexuality within and because of your geekhood. I think these are the kinds of true life stories that can help girls, as much as or more so than one more nicely varnished volume about the handful of women who’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Writing about the intimate and personal lives of women geeks, and putting that writing into the hands of young girls, is a political act with the possibility for great reverberation. So it’s no wonder some people are going to be reluctant to find such writing “appropriate”.

Of course, you should read her complete entry.

Zuska is right that the truth isn’t very easy or welcome, because it can be a threat to the status quo. She’s talking here about the discussions of sex in the book, but I also think it’s important to talk about how science and technology careers are sold to girls as well. The thing is, the thinking seems to be that to inspire girls to keep up with science and technology, you have to keep it relentlessly positive, talking about how many opportunities they have and how great it is to be someone who’s succeeded in one of these fields. And it’s true—girls really do have lots of opportunities in the scientific and technical fields if they stick with it, and many women do succeed there. Inspiration most definitely comes from having good things to aspire to.

But not every female science/technology career thrives, and for a variety of reasons that can be very different from why men leave. It could be said, with apologies to Tolstoy, that happy careers are all alike, but every unhappy career experiences its own set of obstacles and setbacks. And I think that we shouldn’t sugarcoat the very real issues that a girl could face in her future if she’s considering going into some of the tougher technical careers.

For example, physics is a very beautiful science that can see some very ugly hierarchies, competitiveness, and people who don’t consider their effect on other people, among other things. (I’m sure it’s the case for other sciences as well; I just happen to know physics from experience.) But growing up in suburbia and hearing about the corporate politics that my dad had to deal with in the insurance world, I made the mistake of thinking that, because science seemed pure and beautiful, the scientific working world would be, too. (Back then engineering didn’t seem sexy enough to me, being so damn practical and prosaic, with its coefficients for this and all that focus on how things worked, not why.) And because I felt in my element at college and did well enough to be rewarded with fellowships as further encouragement to continue on to graduate school, of course I continued my education, extrapolating that things would continue to come up roses.

But they didn’t come up roses, partly for reasons that I was unprepared for. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that graduate school would be hard—no, I’d seen and talked to the graduate students around my undergrad campus. What I didn’t know at the start was how it’s better to take on a “less ambitious” problem that will get results and build your confidence as a researcher than to be the student to help a new advisor pioneer a new avenue of research. The latter might get you glory if it works out—or else lead to a world of frustration if it doesn’t. I didn’t know that one advisor managing two graduate students working on a single project is a very tricky situation, even if one of the students isn’t feeling a little paranoid about whether or not she belongs in graduate school since she can’t make even the least bit of headway in getting her part of the project to work even after a year and a half of effort. (Note to advisors who choose to tread into the dangerous 3-person dynamic—always make sure all three people are present whenever any change in the project is decided upon so that everyone can buy in to it. Decisions made in casual meetings of two people without informing the third are sure to breed suspicion.)

There’s lots of mistakes I made—and I’m sure many others have done as well—which are obvious to savvier people. But how savvy about the scientific world can you be in your early 20s—or teens? That’s where sugar-free books like She’s Such a Geek come in. Even though I didn’t get the physics career that once upon a time I had my heart set on—and though it took a while to get deprogrammed, now I see how leaving physics after my Ph.D. was the best decision for me—I still thought it would be important to tell my story. Because some young women may come up some of the same setbacks that I did, but at least I don’t want them to make my same mistakes.

Mine is not the happiest, most inspirational story, but I think it’s a necessary one for a bright, eager young woman: just because your math and science classes have been smooth sailing so far doesn’t mean that some weird political situation or other misstep couldn’t happen to you. And it can befall at any time: a good friend of mine who stayed in physics ten years longer than I did recently quit an industrial research job which from the outside looked quite enviable. But she wasn’t allowed to work on projects that she proposed and had the background to do, was ordered to launch a new research program in a field in which she had very little experience, and wasn’t given the resources to attack this in any meaningful way. And since the guy running the lab is a Very Big Name in the field, she didn’t have any recourse. If you were in the lab, who would you want to be aligned with—Marginalized Female Scientist or Very Big Name? And I don’t know what her chances are for getting hired elsewhere as a mid-career scientist in her specialty without Very Big Name’s letter of recommendation. This is how it can be in physics, my friends—and this isn’t the only story of that ilk that I personally know of, either.

And that’s why I participated in the discussion further down in the comments on Zuska’s post, when a poster named Carpenter mentioned how it was sad to read the essays in the book about the women who left academia (this includes mine). I responded to Carpenter that most everyone who enters physics, male or female, winds up leaving academia, because there are more prospective physicists than there are eventual jobs for them. Until people know this, plenty more will get sucked in to physics by the beauty, elegance, and intellectual cachet, only for an inevitable exit. Just like lemmings over the cliff.

I’m not saying women can’t do physics—I did, and I did so respectably well, getting two papers into the journal Physical Review B (and I was a single author on one). If you are disciplined and willing to do the work, you don’t have to be a genius to earn a physics Ph.D. at a good school. But I want all those bright young people—I’m talking to guys, too—to answer for themselves why they would want to go into a shrinking field. And I hope that the sort-of downer essays like mine help to give a more rounded picture of what to consider that goes beyond the sales pitch you’ll probably get at any physics department desperate for the next wave of warm bodies to do the grunt work in their labs.

(P.S. Just so you know, I still love science and technology. But I’m a lot more cynical about the system.)

This entry was posted by Kristin A. on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Sex & gender, Career advice, True confessions, Zuska, Zuska, Zuska!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.