I told the truth in my essay “Job Security” in She’s Such a Geek, but what I didn’t tell you is that it’s not the whole truth. Yes, I did have the debacle of my first research project, and that shook my confidence about my chances for success in the highly male-dominated field of physics. My interactions with certain male students and the messages rattling around my head about women’s abilities influenced me to decide that it would be for the best if physics and I parted ways sooner rather than later. These things are all true.

But the trouble with narrative is that the writer has to select the details that support the major arc of the story and leave out the extraneous bits. I didn’t tell you in the essay that my particular research group was exceptionally gender-balanced. There were actually three women in my research group, out of six or seven grad students total. The undergraduates who came in to do thesis projects also had a fairly even gender ratio.

50:50 gender ratio in physics! That’s pretty darn utopian, isn’t it? I suppose so, except for the fact that whatever the gender ratio, people are still people, with their ambitions, jealousies, and all the rest. Back before I had to put this notion to the actual test of experiment, I’d once thought that when I met another woman in science that we’d have this automatic bond. But that was naive, because for one, I was very competitive, and I’d kind of gotten used to monopolizing the female geek crown through my high school years. My ego didn’t actually want to be friends with anyone who could threaten that. And for two, sharing a gender and a general area of interest does not actually an instant bond make. As if all male scientists get along just great! (I remember an admin at the Princeton engineering school tell me about how she had to keep track of which faculty members—all male, since there were only a couple of women faculty in the late ’80s—she had to keep apart because they just didn’t get along when she had to draw up seating charts for special luncheons.)

As I said, people are people, and the three women in my research group had three completely different personalities. I like to think that I was the “normal” one, but I have to admit that I was neurotic and a bit of a snob, too, fancying myself some kind of sophisticate (isn’t a sophisticated nerd an oxymoron anyway?) since I’d gone to fancy schools and lived abroad—part of the annoying upper-middle-class entitlement thing that I’m much more aware of now than I was then. I’m sure I came across as insufferable to the other woman who was very quiet and had grown up in less cosmopolitan and financially humbler circumstances. Our interests were different, and though we worked civilly in the lab, we weren’t drawn to seek each other out beyond that. And even if our personalities had been more similar, I think that the fact that we were competing for the scarce resource of our advisor’s time and interest would have precluded a friendship anyway.

The third woman couldn’t have been more different. She had a big personality, vivacious and a ton of fun, someone I could talk about shopping and girl stuff with as well as science. Actually, I would say she had a HUGE personality, which cut both ways—it seemed like every conversation wound up being about her. Her extreme social ease made me kind of wary, reminding me of queen bees from junior high school who had ostracized me. And I was also envious, because I’d thought the tack to take as a woman in the field was to blend in as much as possible—dowdy boxy turtlenecks were my stock-in-trade through graduate school, though I did wear some decidedly feminine floral outfits from time to time.

But Big Personality played the game differently, and it wasn’t by working harder at science than I was doing. (And no, it wasn’t because she knew more or was brilliant. Even my advisor once admitted to me that he gave her extra help because she didn’t know much when she joined the group.) Big Personality didn’t hide who she was at all, and in fact her networking netted her many tangible rewards that my strategy didn’t. I felt like Ferris Bueller’s younger sister, resentful that I had chosen the “nobler” path of tackling a more independently-initiated project didn’t get me publishable results as quickly as her less-independent project, didn’t get me an invitation to join a committee for consulting with industry, and didn’t get me a first paper in an extremely high-impact journal. No question, she was savvier about picking a project that was already in my advisor’s field of expertise and insinuating herself into the good graces of the professor involved in setting up the industrial consulting committee before I even knew that it existed.

And unlike the quiet woman and myself, this person was unmarried, which gave her further networking opportunities with men, whom she happened to like very, very much. I didn’t find it appropriate to flirt, being very much married, but she could—and did. She went way beyond flirting, too, with a few graduate students in and out of the department, at least one postdoc, and a professor (though of course I’m only going on gossip and self-reported data, not having been in the bedroom to bear witness myself). Actually, I still had enough of my repressed Catholic upbringing to be somewhat stunned when she bragged to me about sleeping with the professor—though when the Monica Lewinsky affair broke a year later, I was by then aware that there are people who do not consider it too much information to brag about their sexual conquests.

So I thought of Big Personality as the department slut, although that’s really kind of sexist, isn’t it? But hard as it may be to believe, male physics sluts exist, too, as I heard some fairly recent gossip about some Big Name who had been canoodling for several years with his female postdoc while both were married to other people, but after a couple of divorces they’re finally married to each other.

Anyway, Big Personality rocked my notions of how to play the graduate school game. Maybe nobody respected her much as a scientist, as we who delighted in gossiping about her reassured ourselves, but she certainly seemed to be showing up in the right places, on the consulting committee and in the high-impact journal. I resented it because there was no way I could compete at her level—unlike her, I didn’t have the presence or self-assurance that I’d be accepted without also having to be brilliant. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to be burdened by the awareness of her own weaknesses, if she had that awareness.

As I write this, I think, surely there were male counterparts to her who also seemed to be disproportionately rewarded for their modest achievements. But somehow Big Personality loomed larger in my consciousness, partly because I think I had a fear that she didn’t represent well for my gender. And if anyone was going to be Queen of the Geeks, it would be her, not me. She charms you from minute one; I’m more reserved, preferring to feel out a relationship as it goes along. But most of all, she had better political savvy and competed better in grad school than I did.

Were we sisters in science? Yes, I suppose so. But we weren’t friends, and I don’t know if we could have been.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Career advice, Sex & gender, True confessions. 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.