It’s really encouraging to see the number of bloggers out there writing about their experiences as women in these male-dominated fields (there’s way more blogs that I can add to our sidebar here; I’ve just been casual about it so far). I seriously wonder if there aren’t the seeds of a movement here, now that women who haven’t had anyone to talk to honestly can open up anonymously and tell it like it really is for them among people who don’t understand what it’s like to be marked by your gender. (Of course, I can’t say what it’s like to be marked by race, really, though I have lived in Japan. Being a white American in Japan is surely a different experience from being black or Asian or Hispanic in America, though.)

All’s I can say is that it’s great that women are starting to compare notes and share stories, and maybe we can use solidarity to help change the dominant culture of STEM fields. When I was in a top-ranked graduate school in physics, I believed I was as qualified to be there as everyone else in my class, even though there was always this vague sense of maybe I had gotten that extra break because I was female (my mother had suggested this to me more than once during my college and graduate school career). This crescendoed in a raging sense of inadequacy, that maybe I really didn’t belong there, when my first project went south, even though a large part of that debacle wasn’t my fault. If there had been an active AWIS chapter on campus, maybe I would have been able to find a mentor who could have told me how to avoid death march projects and other advisorial shortcomings—but there wasn’t, and I didn’t have that mentoring, and I took the failure really, really hard.

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).

But the problem is, the qualities of open-mindedness and questioning of assumptions in the laboratory can coexist with a huge blind spot: the belief that physics is a meritocracy. (You may substitute any science, or really just about any endeavor really, for “physics” here.) Astronomer Rob Knop posted about this myth on his blog Galactic Interactions after getting copies of these marked-up pages which are from the letters section of the December 2006 issue of the physics trade magazine Physics Today.

The letters were in response to an article published earlier in the year about that topic that always is guaranteed a heated debate, why are there so few women in physics. I don’t know what the article said—I haven’t been a member of the American Physical Society in a decade—but reading the letters is free, and the images of the marked-up pages are even better (though the handwriting is a little hard to read). I transcribe below some excerpts interleaved with the corresponding handwritten comments by graduate student Rebecca Stanek:

After observing that the number of female full professorships in physics had doubled from 3% to 5% in four years (“5%! Slow down!” went the handwritten comment), the letter writers Jerry Smith and Wei Smith went on to say:

The second question we have is this: Must technical communities be cross-sectional representations of their greater societies? Gates suggests that they should be. Unfortunately, the question immediately leaves the realm of facts and statistics and lands squarely in a domain where physicists have little experience or qualification—the emotional and political arena of social engineering. Will the social engineering of physics stop once that “parity” is achieved? Probably not. Will the next step be to lower physics graduation requirements simply to attract students from other career fields in the hope of meeting some artificial parity requirement? [emphasis added] That outcome is not as far-fetched as some may think.

Handwritten comment: “Women who drop out tend to have above-average grades and/or qualifications”

How are women faring in other career fields? It is well observed that female engineering students tend to favor such specialties as biomedical or materials engineering over the traditional mechanical, civil, and electrical domains. This phenomenon is dominated by sociological and psychological factors. The nerdy reputation that attaches to traditional engineering does not help cultivate the social connections and relationships that our society stresses for young women. [emphasis added] Alternatively, the newer engineering fields, particularly biomedical, can be viewed as exciting, and as more people-oriented and compassionate—qualities that our society emphasizes in young women.

Handwritten comments: “1) Removing the “macho nerd” reputation helps men AND women. 2) Maybe society shouldn’t stress that women be little social butterflies. 3) Maybe someone should tell Drs. Smith that physics is no longer about one dude working alone in a lab.”

Is the lack of male nurses viewed as a crisis in medicine? Considering that females currently dominate the nursing and medical aid communities, and the doctor community approaches parity, is society concerned at the prospect of a female-dominated medical community? Of course not. [emphasis added] So why should we be concerned that males may be more socially inclined to physics?

Handwritten comment: “No, because it helps them justify low pay to teachers and nurses.”

To achieve social similitude, the physics community must either change society or abandon the meritocracy that yielded the great founders of our field. Let’s allow students to choose their own careers in line with their interests and dreams. We risk losing professional integrity if we cast aside the meritocracy of physics for cross-sectional similitude with society merely for the sake of political correctness. And rather than acting as sociologists, we should remain focused on our expertise and true to our goal: good physics that is good for society. Once society has fixed its problems, the optimal solution will percolate throughout the physics community so long as we maintain our unbiased meritocracy. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “Ha ha ha!”

And then there’s this letter from a Robert Adair, who writes the following:

Certainly men and women are different. Our forebears who dealt with cows and bulls, roosters and hens, and rams and ewes never questioned such differences. Although gender differences in the intrinsic intellectual abilities important in physics are surely small, if not nonexistent, men and women differ in certain personality traits such as aggression (murderous or otherwise), which unfortunately has some effect on status, even in physics. More important is that in judging their best roles in society, women tend to make different choices from men. The influx of women into medicine and biology rather than physics and engineering likely follows from such differences in interests rather than gender biases. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “SOCIALIZATION”

It is important to reduce illegitimate gender biases in all elements of society. I suggest, though, that the most important bias is found in the structures of the paths to leadership roles. These paths mesh poorly with women’s biological rhythms. When I review the wedding announcements in the New York Times, I find that attractive and accomplished brides are marrying at an average age of about 30—halfway between menarche and menopause. Thus, among advanced societies, women are properly playing a larger role in leadership, but the birth rate lags behind replacement levels. We are becoming extinct. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “‘Don’t read, just breed!’”

There’s more good stuff if you’re interested, just click on this link and scroll down to find the photographic images of the printed letters—er, “Men defending the status quo”—pages.

I don’t know how representative these attitudes are of the field as a whole. I believe my graduate school advisor was a good guy and supportive of women in physics, but at the same time there was a gulf between the way he’d been socialized and the way I’d been socialized that led to explicit misunderstandings on several occasions.* But I heard about how another professor (about the same age as my advisor) would comment to his female chemistry grad student that she should become a medical doctor instead—not exactly encouragement.** And I would hear the occasional comment, fortunately not from anyone I worked with or chose to hang out with, but enough to make you aware that sexist attitudes still very much exist. And it makes you wonder about how much you’re not picking up on, too.

The thing is, you just don’t know what other people are really thinking, until some of them write letters like the above. You think everyone’s cool, everyone’s enlightened, because of how freethinking scientists can be in other respects, but then you run the experiment and get data showing that no, there still are people who really don’t think women are up to snuff in physics. That moves to make the field more hospitable for women—or really, hospitable for people—will dilute the quality of research being done. (And it’s easy to start asking yourself why you should care about impressing these people or why you would want to be in a field where you see that you’re not going to be given the benefit of the doubt if you’re not already head and shoulders above the competition.***)

The pity is that these people, who are so astute in other ways, can’t even see their blind spot about this. Everything else in the universe is up for questioning and being probed, but perish the thought of criticizing the culture of the field, which is clearly already perfect as it is.

—-

*—For example, I don’t think he fully got it when the first project I was on ran into serious managerial and technical problems and I took it really hard. (In retrospect, it was the wrong project for me, or really for just about any beginning graduate student who wasn’t already a master tinkerer. I did make mistakes, no question. But it really hurt that all of my eggs had been in that one basket, while he had other projects that were getting results.)

**—I do wonder if this guy might have had some issues with women at the time, though, since his ex-wife had run off to marry a rival of his working in the same field, and he was engaged in litigation over custody of their daughter. I am sure there are two sides to this story, neither of which I know.

***—I was certainly not a standout—with the way graduate school had gone, I would have had to perform a miracle during my postdoc(s) to have had a crack at an academic position. And I didn’t have the fire in the belly for that any more.

On the 15th I will drop off at your office the Java 2 Training Course. I will not be using it after all, but thank you very much, just the same.

After receiving the results of an aptitude test last week I realized CS would not be the best field for me to enter. A key aptitude among engineers is being able to visualize 3-D structures. I scored on the low end of average with this aptitude.

After getting over my surprise, I replied:

I can’t visualize 3-D structures either. Please do not make important career decisions based on a single aptitude test that is likely to be faulty. For example, there could be gender bias. Women are reportedly less able to visualize 3-D structures then men are, but some of us flatlanders are excellent computer scientists.

You shouldn’t abandon CS unless you are not interested in it or you fail in learning it. Please do not leave the field because of some possibly sexist superstitions about what abilities are needed.

I am reminded of Michael Bérubé’s satire on former Harvard president Larry Summer’s statements about women in science:

According to [Harvard geneticist Charles] Kinbote, the presidency of Harvard University requires a unique array of talents and dispositions which, statistically, only a small handful of women possess…..Men are … more adept than women at mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes on aptitude tests, Kinbote added. “You’d be surprised how often a university president needs to do this, and at Harvard the pressure is especially intense.” Kinbote estimated that the president of Harvard spends roughly one-quarter of the working day mentally rotating complex, hypothetical three-dimensional shapes.

Much is being made of Harvard’s recent decision to appoint a woman to its presidency. While some people are speculating that she was hired because of her sex, it is more likely that she is the first Harvard president not appointed on the basis of their sex.

On a similar theme, see Women, men, and IQ tests, posted at my Beyond Satire blog.

This experimental condensed matter physicist blogger is telling it like it really is:

This is also why I am so disgusted with certain attitudes in hiring new faculty or new staff members (if we are talking about the parallel universe of national labs). The attitude is basically – we created a situation when there are hundreds of candidates desperately applying for every position available, and because we can afford to be so selective, we can scoop the best of the best of the best, invite them for a song-and-dance presentation (”Impress me!” approach), and treat the rest of applicants who didn’t make the shortlist cut as garbage not worthy [of] our attention. The arbitrary nature of [the] selection process never ceases to amaze me, even though it’s remarkable how programs that are not even nationally ranked can attract people with stellar research records (as far as I am concerned) in hope that they may get desperate enough to accept a position that utilizes those skills in a very marginal fashion, if at all. It’s as if classically trained opera singers were hired to sing catchy commercial tunes at a supermarket to attract more customers for minimum wage pay.

Therefore, I find it somewhat disingenuous when people start talking about how to encourage certain underrepresented groups [to] enter graduate schools in sciences. We should encourage interest in science, but should we encourage more bright and talented people to follow the career path that has 95% chance of leading nowhere (after 6-7 years of living on Raman noodles through grad school and relocating a few times for a couple of 3 year postdoc stints that quickly become the norm)? I am not so sure…

Neither am I. Plus female job candidates have to deal with the swirl of biases out there that stay alive amid entrenched faculty (just check out FemaleScienceProfessor’s blog if you want a taste).

Not that crying is something that anyone plans on doing. And actually, with the exception of Rosie Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” on Free to Be… You and Me, I got the message growing up that crying is most definitely a huge no-no. And I knew that because I cried easily. I was the kid of whom teachers would say, “She’s very sensitive.” I didn’t really understand the phrase at the time, but I figured it wasn’t good, because I was the weirdo and the kids who called me “crybaby” were the norm.

And it is those kids who grow up to define the unofficial rules of the workplace, too. The book The Highly Sensitive Person points out that though having highly attuned senses is actually a good thing, it’s not a trait that our culture by and large recognizes or rewards. And it can be a pretty cruel and insensitive world out there, especially when you’ve been told that you are free to be you and can grow up to do anything you want, but when you are grown up you discover that actually it’s not as simple as all that.

As Jenny F. Scientist writes:

My mentor is a woman in her forties who has left academia; I am in love with her, she is wonderful, and I wish I’d met her years ago. Be advised, o women scientists: go ye forth and find women mentors, for verily, thy quality of life shall improve.

It was such a pleasure to connect with someone who has experience!! and useful advice!!! So we were talking about the need to be tough and on guard all the time, and I said, ‘It’s just been really hard…’ and burst dramatically into tears.

Of course she was wonderful about it.

But here’s the thing: I could not under any circumstances cry in front of my advisor, or any of the male professors; they would never take me seriously again. This is true of some of the female professors, but on the whole, I would expect it to be less career-destroying.

Nobody wants to cry in the workplace; we all know the rules. But regardless of popular notions of science being this entirely rational and emotionless endeavor, that simply isn’t true. In graduate school you have young high-achievers thrown into a situation where success is far from guaranteed—major research discoveries are so celebrated because they are so rare. The rules for success that worked for problem sets don’t necessarily work in graduate school, where not every problem has a guaranteed solution. There are personalities to deal with, because many scientists avoided the normal types of socialization. In short, it can be very stressful. And at some point you’re sure to run into a situation that will make you want to cry.

I definitely tried not to cry in front of my advisor, but it did happen. And I think it was only fair that my advisor should see the impact that the debacle of my first project had on me (though now I think I see that failure as a blessing in disguise, precisely because it did ultimately lead to my leaving physics).

And then there was the time when I cried in front of my advisor’s postdoctoral advisor, who was female, when I visited her lab. This was right after my project imploded, and I’d also just won a fellowship, and the cognitive dissonance of being congratulated just as I felt like this huge failure was too much. But I didn’t expect any sympathy from her, because she was of course close to my advisor, and how could I complain to her about her star postdoc? Cry and you cry alone, indeed.

Techbridge is an innovative program to inspire girls in technology, science and engineering. The program is hosted after school at elementary, middle, and high schools in Oakland, San Lorenzo, and at the California School for the Blind in Fremont. In these after-school programs, girls work on a variety of projects such as making solar LEGO cars, soldering, digital photography, and building robots. The girls also participate in field trips and meet with role models.

Under the supervision of the Program Director, the Techbridge Program Manager is responsible for supporting and supervising staff, coordinating and implementing our after-school programs, developing and piloting curricula, and leading professional development workshops for teachers, role models, and professional audiences. We are looking for an experienced and dynamic individual who has the ability to supervise a team of instructors, work with the Techbridge project director, and oversee the development of training and resources to teachers, professionals and partners.

According to the Techbridge Web site, girls had lots of ideas for things they’d like to do, including “addressing problems at school and in the neighborhood, working with tools, building robots, taking field trips, and meeting role models.”

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.

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.)

The word is now out about a unique graduate program designed to bring women into computer science, thanks to an article by Charlie Anders in this week’s San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Mills College Interdisciplinary Computer Science program, which I direct, is aimed at women and men who have a bachelor’s degree in a field other than computer science who want to get into CS or interdisciplinary work. Some of the graduates mentioned in the article are:

• Sheri Wetherby, a former casino worker who became a Microsoft programmer
• Erica Rios, a former labor activist who now works as an Internet project manager at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
• Lisa Cowan, who has a BA in anthropology and is now pursuing a CS PhD at UC San Diego
• Constance Connor, a CS instructor at City College of San Francisco

The above photo, not from the article, is of former ICS students Susan Housand and Kiem Sie with a robot they built. Kiem went on to build several more.

On a personal note, I moonlight part-time at Google, which was deservedly named America’s best workplace, and many of my Google co-workers wonder why I don’t leave Mills and work at Google full-time. Charlie’s article does a great job of showing what excites me about teaching.

The book’s editors seem to have gone out of their way to give space to biological explanations of women’s under-representation in the sciences. In this interview, they worry that the anti-Larry backlash dampened the spirit of free inquiry: “Defenders of Summers’s remarks were vilified and dismissed. This does not serve the purpose of science — it led to muzzling of the scholarly debate, with one side effectively silenced by the other.”

But it sounds, from the interview, as though they had a balance of arguments for, as well as against, the idea that women are naturally less clever with numbers:

Our biggest surprise was not found in any one essay but in the class of essays about biological differences between men and women. We had anticipated greater agreement among these essayists, but what we found was quite divergent, with some arguing strongly in favor of sex differences in brain organization, hormones, etc., as causative factors in women’s underrepresentation among those who score the highest on standardized mathematics tests, and others arguing against such views.

So that’s something. And they also note the well-known fact that the “science gender gap” is really a white American thing, not a global thing.

They also discuss social factors behind the disparity, including the well-known “leaky pipeline,” where women give up at every stage of the academic process. They also talk about the challenge of balancing a career and family. This gives rise to the following comment from a guy reading the post:

Most of the references to “women” in the article (and perhaps the book it describes) are about women who desire male sexual partners, i.e. heterosexuals. From childhood to adulthood this orientation may well be a liability for women with interests and aptitudes in science…

Studies of lesbian women faculty in the sciences are sorely needed, as is research on adolescent lesbian attitudes towards the sciences. … The question that needs to be asked is this: How much is this problem is caused by female biology and how much is a result of the culture of heterosexuality?

Darn good point, actually… although the lesbian scientists I know are as stressed out by the whole balancing-careeer-and-family thing as everyone else.