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.

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.

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.

Yesterday one of the machine technicians was training me on a piece of equipment. He explained that we were required to buy various supplies of our own, and then commented that as a "lady," it might be hard for me to carry my supplies in a toolbox, thought that was recommended, because it looked kind of nerdy and might mess up my hair.

Which was sort of funny, on a number of levels, one of which was that carrying a toolbox in no way messes up your hair, and another of which is that whenever anyone used the term "lady," it is usually a bad sign. And thirdly, (ironically enough) the possibility of my hair getting messed up was (uncharacteristically) on my mind yesterday, because I just got a trendy new haircut and my hair now flops uncontrollably over one eye.

Anyway, I thought this remark deserved some sort of response, and the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment was, "Oh, I used to be a big nerd when I was doing my PhD, but now those days are over." This had sort of the desired effect, as he fell all over himself apologizing that he didn’t KNOW I had a PHD in Subject X from School Y and why didn’t I SAY that before as he would have gone much faster during the training and not thought he had to explain what a damped sine wave was. The other guy doing the training also turned out to be a postdoc and got a similar apology. You never know when that PhD is going to help you, do you?

From this week’s Letters to the Editor in Science:

The data-driven conclusion is that women, even in higher-income brackets, tend to be married to men that make even more money on average than they do. This economic differential makes it unlikely that, when it comes time to raise children, the husband will be the one to stay home with the children. If we are really serious about recruiting women to academia, we must give female scientists honest advice. Perhaps rather than reflexively blaming every gender difference on "bias," we should be telling women to marry a man who makes less money than she does. It may be strong medicine, but recruiting the best talent demands that we examine all of the potential causes of gender imbalance.

–George Gordon Roberts, Department of Physiology, Wayne State University

(Bold emphasis mine.)

The author received his Ph.D. in 2005. I wonder if he followed his own advice? George, if you ever happen upon this page, we will be curious to hear whether you have found a suitable spouse that makes less money than you do.