Dr. Shellie

I went to an all-girls high school. At the time, my high school didn’t have all of the upper-level AP* math and science classes that our "brother school" (the boys high school in the area) did. I had a neighbor who was one year ahead of me at the boys high school and was always bragging about his AP Physics and BC Calculus classes, not to mention his older brother who was doing a PhD in Physics at MIT, and I remember feeling quite intimidated. Meanwhile, I cobbled together a curriculum with my high school’s math teacher, who tried to teach me AP Calculus one-on-one despite not having seen the material since she was in college 20 years earlier.

My point here is not that I was math-deprived. My point is that I was intimidated by "science boys" from very early on. When I went to college, people warned me not to go to MIT, because the boys from Bronx Science would be way ahead of me. While I didn’t go to MIT (ugly campus, strong fraternity system– neither seemed appealing), the science boys came back to haunt me. When I went to Undergrad U, there were in fact a couple of guys from a similar science magnet school, who had apparently taken graduate-level math while still in high school. And I assumed that all the guys in my science classes were probably like my neighbor, and had taken "real" AP Calc and Physics. Though I ended up with really good grades at the end of my first semester, I assumed it was because I made up for my stupidity and lack of training my frequenting the TA’s office hours.

Meanwhile, other wackily advanced science boys presented themselves. For example, there was a Russian guy who was about 3 years ahead of everyone else in courses. And then there were all these annoying guys who had somehow finished the problem set 2 days earlier than anyone else and got to lord it over everyone else by carefully doling out hints to the answers. There were also some nice guys, who I did problem sets with — they weren’t jerks, though they were usually kind of nerdy.

Meanwhile, where were the girls?** Well, actually, there weren’t any. Oh sure, there were a few other girls in my classes (maybe 3 or 4 in a class of 50). But one was an econ major and doing math on the side, and the other was somehow not keeping up with everyone else and anyhow was a year younger and never washed her hair, and then another had chronic problems with not getting her work done, and the other one had some sort of weird health problem that made her skin grey (yeah, what was that?), and then there was my friend the superstar who was a year older than me and so good at doing her problem sets that she could go hang out in cool coffee shops the night before they were due, but anyway she went to high school in the former-Communist bloc so that was somehow a different story (hi r&o, if you’re reading!). Basically, all the other (small number of) women in my classes seemed so anomalous that it didn’t really feel like there were other women doing science.

For most smart American students, going to college is the time when you find out that you are not the smartest person in the world– that there are lots of people out there who are smarter than you. Suddenly you become a small fish in a big pond, and all that. But for smart American girls in math and science? Those "people" who are smarter than you are most likely boys (do the numbers!). And so the (quite reasonable) message that you aren’t the smartest person in the world can easily get confused with another message: boys are smarter than you. And somehow (at least for me) all those boys in the class getting worse grades than me didn’t seem to register. Whenever I had the fear that I wasn’t good enough or smart enough to do science, it was the boys I was worried about.

Which makes me wonder… I know that some men have this fear as well: that maybe they are not good enough or smart enough to do science. I wonder who are they worried about– is it those same mythical boys from Bronx Science? Or Russians? Or PhD’s from MIT?

I would love it if everyone could just get over it and do some science.  

*For any non-Americans readers: AP stands for "Advanced Placement." These are nominally courses that high school students can take to get college credit, but are in fact practically prerequisites for admission to top US universities.

**I’m using "boys" and "girls" in this story, not "men" and "women", ‘cause that’s what I thought of them as.

In college I had two majors.

For grad school I applied to departments in two different subject areas.

Now I am applying for jobs in two different subject areas… (or maybe three).

I think it’s a trend.

As a follow-up to the last post: I’ve just been reading Zuska & co-workers papers on the importance of web-page design for science and engineering departments. It was very relevant reading for the end of a week spent looking at departmental websites, trying to see how I could "fit in" (yes, in quotes!) to the department and whether I could come up with anything interesting, relevant, and unique to that school to write in my cover letter. So far I have noticed: several departments with totally random, out-of-context pictures of women and/or minorities, seemingly designed to assure the reader that they do exist, one department with totally random pictures of what I guess are inside jokes, and one department with a mission statement that sounds like a giant inferiority complex (though I’m sure they didn’t see it that way). If I get invited to visit, I’ll be curious to see if the department matches up with it’s web page.

With each cover letter I write, I picture myself in that particular university. I am getting disoriented.

Welcoming a new blogger, Am I a Woman Scientist? to the blogosphere… She writes:

Finally, my blog title: 99.9% of the time I totally forget that I am a “woman” scientist… I go about my daily life in blissful ignorance of my gender, doing all sorts of research and teaching related duties totally unaware of my condition. Then some man will helpfully point this condition out, and I will be left scratching my head, frantically trying to figure out what the hell my gender has to do with the subject at hand. As the saying goes, if you ever forget that you’re a woman, someone will always be around to remind you.