I found a great post and discussion on crying in the scientific workplace at A Natural Scientist via another fine blog, Am I a woman scientist? Jenny F. Scientist describes the double bind of being socialized as a girl that it’s all right to cry, but that in the science lab, don’t even think about it.

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.

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Well, that was the way it sounded to me, anyway. This was right before I was to start as a physics graduate student at the University of Chicago. I had come back from my year in England in mid-August, and I was hanging out with my fiance and his posse over in the math department before courses got going. That was when someone mentioned a book titled Essential Elements of Algebraic Geometry. But the title I thought I heard sounds much more interesting, does it not?

Of course, even then I didn’t believe that I’d really heard right. Abstract mathematics and the world of the senses don’t intersect in the popular imagination—or even in my not-so-popular imagination. (It’s been almost twenty years since I read it, but the novel The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein does bring together math and sex quite well, as I recall. And then there is the nonfiction book Mathematics and Sex by Clio Creswell, but although it’s a little cheeky, the treatment is as matter-of-fact as the title. Those looking for, ahem, optimal oscillation frequencies here will be disappointed.)

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It’s been quite the week of gossip and spectacle for us living here in San Francisco. There’s been Gavin Newsom, Queen Mary 2, and Gavin Newsom again. Not much more to say about these than what’s already been said (my reactions were, “What the hell was he thinking?”, “Whoa, that’s a really HUGE ship!”, and “Ah, so that sort of explains why he wasn’t thinking. I hope he gets the help he needs.”

But astronaut Lisa Nowak just did Gavin Newsom a big favor by doing something even more bizarre and of even greater national—nay, international—newsworthiness. After all, Newsom may be the mayor of a major American city*, but being an American astronaut carries global cultural cachet. Astronauts are international cultural icons. We all read or saw The Right Stuff. American astronauts were first to land on the moon. Astronauts Sally Ride and Judith Resnik inspired me during my formative geek years as the first and second American women to go into space.

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And speaking of Liz Henry, she wrote a great piece about being a blogger for other, the magazine which Annalee and I publish. It’s a great exploration of blogging and geek culture, and how bloggers are making the world a better place. We just posted it online at othermag, and you can read it here.

My essay in She’s Such A Geek is about being a policy wonk, which is a huge part of my professional identity. I feel really strongly that wonks are a subset of geeks, and that it’s worth advancing the cause of wonk pride as well as female wonkdom. But it occurred to me the other day that I could also have written about being a speculative fiction author.

I’ve been writing speculative fiction for about 10 years, ever since I bought a copy of the Science Fiction Market Guide which claimed it’s possible to make a great living writing SF, fantasy or horrror. Especially short fiction!

I joined a writing group, the Revisionaries of Raleigh, which struggled with having a transgender person in its midst. No, not me. I hadn’t even started thinking about modding my gender yet. But that small group (usually half a dozen people) had a transwoman, an ex-marine like so many of us. Everyone else in the group seemed fairly straight and a bit bewildered by her, and I can’t imagine how they would have dealt with it if I’d tried to go all transtastic on them too.

All of which is to say, I started writing (mostly very bad) science fiction as a man. But I found speculative fiction a natural forum for exploring gender issues, as you can imagine. What if you had a species with only one biological sex, and they linked their wombs together to make one funcitonal womb and gestate their infant? What if you had six biological sexes, and they established a hierarchy with different tasks for each sex? Etc. etc. etc.

I sort of wandered away from writing speculative fiction in favor of “literary” fiction, but I’ve been coming back over the past few years. And I’ve decided to focus on speculative fiction more in the coming year or two. At the same time, I’ve been very self-consciously writing feminist science fiction. I’m interested in dealing with gender as a fungible “what if” sort of issue, but also as a locus of oppression and exploitation.

In theory, speculative fiction writers and readers should have the openest of minds. After all, they can conceive of dragon/unicorn hybrids, or planets where the “fifth force” (which affects dark matter) is stronger than gravity. So the idea that I’m a chick, that gender is customizeable, that things aren’t always simple or binary, should be no big whoop for the SF crowd, right?

Well, mostly. Most speculative fiction fans, like most geeks, have been accepting if occasionally clueless and obnoxious. What’s made me saddest is the lack of acceptance from some people in feminist SF forums, who dredged up old-school fears of “infiltrators” getting inside their tree fort. Bah! But for the most part, I’m just another life form.

The book reading at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco this past Thursday featured a lineup of contributors who wrote about the gaming and fantasy side of the geek realm, along with editors Annalee and Charlie. (It’s funny how the split happened that way—initially I had thought it would be cool to read at City Lights, what with its place in literary history, but it wound up that it made more sense for me to read at Modern Times on Feb. 1, which is more weighted towards the science geeks anyway.)

Even though I wasn’t reading, I decided to go anyway because I thought it would be cool to meet as many of the other contributors as possible and get them to sign my copy of the book—which is an appropriately geeky impulse, is it not? Besides, my husband was off on Easter Island and I had some serious procrastinating to do on some writing. So off to North Beach I went.

The cozy poetry room upstairs filled up with a crowd of nearly 100 people (I’m guessing) split pretty evenly between male and female. For some reason, my initial reaction was to be surprised by that—I guess I was expecting a more exclusively female turnout—but it just shows how I need to realize that there are more and more people who realize that feminism is not just a women’s issue but a human issue. So it was great to see the broad range of support.

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Here are all the things I meant to blog about in the past couple of weeks but didn’t have time to mention:

The makers of Joe Millionare are unveiling a new reality series, “When Women Rule The World.” There’s this island, see, and on it women are in charge. Unfortunately, it’s not Paradise Island and the women won’t be Amazons. Instead, they’ll be typical reality contestants. The men have to obey the women, and/or they’ll get eliminated. Will this lead to a Utopian society, the Fox network press release wonders? Because of course we all look to reality television for our world-shattering thought experiments.

Yet another study finds a correlation between gender stereotypes and math ability in women. This time, instead of having the women read essays before doing math problems, the researchers just surveyed their attitudes:

Researchers discovered that women who possessed strong implicit gender stereotypes, (for example, automatically associating “male” more than “female” with math ability and math professions) and were likely to identify themselves as feminine performed worse relative to their female counterparts who did not possess such stereotypes and who were less likely to identify with traditionally female characteristics. The same underperforming females were also the least inclined to pursue a math-based career.

To be fair, though, they didn’t seem to establish which was cause and which was effect.

Two new books look at lives of women who made major contributions to physics:

During the past 40 years, study after study has addressed why more women do not become scientists. The question is most apt for physics… The flip side of the question is: Why and how did those few prominent female physicists succeed? Historian Judith P. Zinsser’s La Dame d’Esprit and the profiles of women physicists in Out of the Shadows unveil the scintillating lives of women who overcame discrimination and made major contributions that went largely unacknowledged.

Marquise du Chatelet was Voltaire’s lover and shielded him from critics, but she also helped to synthesize prevailing notions of the physical world in her time. And her book Institutions of Physics helped to propagate the scientfic method. Meanwhile, Mary L. Cartwright, a pure mathematician, helped to found chaos theory.

Although the salary gap between men and women remains weighted in men’s favor in most instances, women are actually making more money than men in some IT related jobs, PC Magazine reports. Female help desk professionals and tech writers make more than men in the same jobs. But also female CEOs and other execs in the IT industry make 1.4 percent more than male ones. Overall, women in IT make 9.7 percent less than men, an improvement over the 10.9 percent gap a year ago.

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.

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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.

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OK, this is just weird. A ridiculously common parasite can change people’s behavior, making us dumber and more sexy, says infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter with the Sydney University of Technology. The toxoplasma gondii parasite can only sexually reproduce in cats, but it can live in other creatures, including rats and humans. The parasite changes rats’ behaviors, making them less fearful of cats. This makes the rodents easier prey for the cats, and makes it possible for the parasite to sexually reproduce inside its new feline hosts.

But toxoplasmosis may have much the same impact on humans, Boulter says. Weirdly, she says the effects depend on the host’s gender. “In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women like sex kittens.” Or, more precisely:

Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.

On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.

There’s evidence that this parasite has a role in schizphenia, according to the source of all lies. Humans get it from eating undercooked meat that has the eggs, or by accidentally ingesting cat shit.

The really scary statistic is that 33.1 percent of Americans have antibodies for toxoplasmosis — and the parasite never really goes away, even with antibiotics. So up to a third of the U.S. population could be dumber and sexier thanks to a catshit-traveling parasite. France has an estimated rate of infection of between 45 and 88 percent (steak tartare?) and Brazil’s infection rate is estimated at 66.9 percent. By contrast, only 4.3 percent of South Koreans have the parasite.

But press reports about the wacky behavior of people with the parasite may be overstated, an Oxford biologist told the UK Guardian in 2003:

“We don’t want people to go into a panic and think they’re going to behave really strangely, because the problem is once we’ve got it we’ve got it for life,” says Joanne Webster, a biologist at the University of Oxford who studies the parasite. “And in the vast majority, 99% of people or above, the results will be very subtle.” For those that are interested, a simple blood test for antibodies raised against the parasite can tell you whether you’re infected or not.