Dr. Shellie

Lab Lemming explains the barriers to women entering the pseudosciences.

When I was in college, several of my good friends were leaders in the campus feminist group. While they held support sessions for rape victims and developed protocols for police officers responding to domestic violence calls, I mostly stuck to my problem sets and figured the 70’s had taken care of most of the problem.

This summer, I had the chance to catch up with one of my friends again. She was headed for a new position as assistant professor in a biology field at a major research university. We started talking about our experiences in grad school and postdoc. Strangely, I was now the one thinking (and writing– on this blog) about gender issues, specifically in academia. I got the sense that many of the themes that occupy my attention were a good deal more muted in her field and department, where the gender ratio was much closer to 50-50. 

Unfortunately, one month later, she sent me an email saying that the all-male organizers of a recent conference did their networking at a strip club every night after the sessions!

Having seen Grizzly Man, I knew it was perfectly possible to be eaten by bears, particularly at the end of the season when the salmon run was dwindling. And having read a news report or two about fathers who killed themselves and their entire families in plane crashes on the way home from summer vacation, I have some fear of small planes. Small planes, however, are the way to get around in Alaska, almost as much as a taxis in New York City. So I overcame my twin fears of small planes and bears and headed off to Pack Creek bear-viewing area on Admiralty Island. (On a floatplane, no less!)

As our plane landed on the water and coasted in to the beach, two rangers came up to meet us in a small, motorized boat. After paying $20 each for our bear permits, they explained the rules. Supposedly, these were habituated grizzly bears– used to the presence of humans. As long as we acted in the way that the bears expected humans to act, they would probably just ignore us. Visitors should store their food and scented items in the bear-proof storage boxes, eat lunch between two particular rock piles on the beach, and cross between beach and creek along the high-tide line. Off we went, toward the bears. I took comfort in the fact that the ranger carried a rifle. "Oh, don’t worry," he said. "The Forest Service requires us to carry these. But we haven’t ever had an adverse human-bear encounter here."

We crossed the beach, and there were the bears. Right where the creek ran into the ocean, they were standing in the water, catching salmon, and tearing them apart. The ranger set up a viewing scope from a nearby hill, and we watched in amazement. Just as predicted, the bears paid us no attention. Because the Pack Creek area has been closed to hunting since the mid-1930’s, the bears haven’t learned to fear humans– and the humans have no need to fear the bears.

New to the blogroll: Field Notes of an Evolutionary Psychologist. If you get a chance, take a look at Holly’s recent post on questions about publishing and see if you can think of any tips. I’m just headed there myself…

Meanwhile, while I was happily cavorting in Alaska, SciMom missed most of her vacation. Send some good thoughts her way!

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled vacation-recap programming for an ode to growing older– or more accurately, more senior. Here are a few of the professional perks that post-PhD life has brought:

• More conferences. I have been going to about three conferences a year, and am happy to find that I am starting to know quite a few people in my field. This makes the conferences a lot more interesting, since you learn a lot in one-on-one discussions.
• More articles to review. This is pretty fun, as you get to read the latest work related to your own, and influence whether it is published and in what form. And it feels good to use all that highly-specialized knowledge.
• More people listening to me. Sometimes even faculty members ask me questions and listen to the answers.
• More access to higher-level discussions about science. Yesterday I joined my advisor for a meeting with a prominent researcher in our field, one of our competitors, who was visiting for a conference. I listened with interest as they traded broad opinions about where the entire field was going. Learning to do this kind of thing is quite an art– after all, you want to argue that the field is going in the direction YOU are headed!
• More papers published. Good for self-confidence: at some point, after the Nth article, the impostor issues do tend to fade away.
• More money. Always good. No longer am I buying lime green jeans just because they are on the sale rack at the Gap. If you see me wearing lime green jeans, it’s because I actually wanted them.