Geeks, sex, gender, and physics
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.)
January 21st, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Thanks for writing this post. As a CS professor who mentors most to all of our female majors and potential at some point or another, I often struggle with this whole “sugarcoating” issue. I *want* these bright, talented young women to be CS majors and to thrive as CS majors, but at the same time I want them to be more aware of what’s going on around them and what they might encounter, either in our own classrooms/labs or once they leave here. It’s hard to know when and how to be honest without completely scaring them away. Stories, from you and from all of us scientific/technical women, can be very useful, in both getting the point across that this is not an easy path, but in also showing both good and not-so-good ways of handling these inevitable situations.
January 21st, 2007 at 1:11 pm
oops, that should say “and potential majors”. My brain is working faster than my fingers, apparently.
January 21st, 2007 at 5:31 pm
[…] It does not surprise to me to read about what Absinthe has gone through inside a scholastic laboratory. The hierarchy is the male organism and female Absinthe is seen as an intruder. The enemy is the male hierarchy. […]
January 21st, 2007 at 8:42 pm
hi
I just to reiterate the point, my complaint was more that in book of essays by women, its hard to make the multiple essays about leaving academics not seem especially gendered. I know well that women in physics face an uphill battle and may have their own reasons for leaving, but I still the book would benifit from an essay about th large numbers of people who decide to leave that included both sexes.
January 21st, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Id also like to mention that when I was in grad school, there was a big deal being ade about advisors properly guiding and advising students. This is a huge crack in the grad pipeline, advisors neglecting students, encouraging them to take oral candiacy qual which the students then failed(this is the advisors fault), or having students waste away for years on project not going anywhere. In addition some grad students just get dismally bad advice from proffs when they first come in about the balance between qualifying exams classes and research. It would be great to have a warning about these kinds of problems ahead of time.
In my own first year I got some horrific advice about classes which I was lucky enough to have completely ignored. In spite of this narrow escape I would also have liked to have a faculty mentor around to tell me to trust my gut, which was advice I passed on to younger grads.
January 21st, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Hi Carpenter, the decision to have a section of the book about women who “dropped out” of geekhood came from the fact that we had a bunch of really incredible essays that dealt with that issue. We certainly hadn’t planned on including that as a section, but once we saw that it was such a major theme in people’s experiences, we felt we had no choice. And because this was a book only about the experiences of female geeks, we couldn’t really represent men’s experiences as well. It would be interesting if someone found a way to capture both — maybe a whole book about people who drop out of the academic sciences, featuring both men and women?
January 22nd, 2007 at 2:20 pm
charlieanders,
thanks. and it’s totally awsome to actually be able to converse with ppl who put together a book I just read. yay for multi-media.
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:25 am
Undergrad programs are usually reasonably well-planned - if you just plow into the curriculum and keep pushing, you’ll get through. Even a disastrous relationship with a professor can, at worst, derail your progress in a single class. All the problems are ultimately solvable. Just be a good kid and you’ll be OK.
So we get our bachelors’ degrees, and we run merrily into graduate school, expecting that hard work and enthusiasm will carry the day there, too… and it turns out that grad school offers all sorts of deep, mucky interpersonal and technical pits where you can get badly, badly mired; you need a sort of caution bordering on cynicism that you never needed - that I certainly had never developed - before.
January 23rd, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I know Carpenter means well…but it just drives me nuts that sooner or later, in every conversation about women’s issues, inevitably someone will at some point say “but what about the men?” I get so friggin’ tired of hearing that on my blog. My blog, and SSAG, are about WOMEN. It is pointless and frustrating to ask why there is no discussion of men leaving science in SSAG, or why I am not talking about men’s issues on Thus Spake Zuska. Because obviously, SSAG is about WOMEN, and TSZ is about WOMEN in science and engineering. Have a conversation for 5 minutes in which men are not the center of the conversation and people get frantic. Why aren’t we talking about the men?
Please note that this is not Carpenter-bashing. What I am doing here is trying to point out a very, very common social phenomenon. That is, just as nature abhors a vacuum, society abhors a conversation in which men are not the focus. With a whooshing sound, someone must swoop in and try to redirect the conversation to its proper focus, men. You wrote a book about women’s experiences in science and engineering? Why didn’t you also talk about what it is like for men, since many of their experiences are in common? So what if there are things that are particular to women you wanted to talk about? You have a blog about women in science and engineering? Why are you always talking about women? What about men’s issues in science and engineering? Men have a hard time of it too, you know.
And then women, because we are so polite, engage the person who wants to talk about men, and offer helpful suggestions like yes, maybe there should be a book that examines whatever issue it is that the person is suggesting we should spend our time on instead of whatever it is we WERE talking about before we got derailed.
Gahhhhhhhhhhhhh.
January 23rd, 2007 at 5:12 pm
I’m so glad to read this post. So glad someone else sees the situation as it is (way too overcrowded, most people will end up leaving with shattered dreams). I’m in the midst of leaving academic astronomy (two great job offers, and I’m on my way to another interview), and it feels great. Other postdocs used to tell me I’m ‘cynical’ and I shouldn’t ‘give up’. They appear to be happy to toil away until they’re 40 with the hope that they might get something permanent, but that is not for me.
It is a shame, science is fun and interesting, but I can’t encourage anyone to pursue that path. Only a very few will end up with the job they had in mind when they started. Engineering on the other hand, seems to have good career possibilities.
March 5th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
[…] I know, nobody likes to think of the possibility of bad things happening to them. Neither did I, and it didn’t keep misfortune at bay anyway. (I’ve written about this before.) But I’ve harped on it before, and I’m going to harp on it again: women in science need to find mentors—which is not necessarily synonymous with your grad school advisors!—in order to learn the way to play the science game that nobody teaches girls in school but which you need to know to succeed in the male-dominated science world! And we have to keep sharing our stories, which is why I love this Scientiae blog carnival. If we don’t know that we’re not alone, we can’t begin to change the status quo (and there’s a heck of a lot of status quo to change). […]