Monday, January 16th 2012
Scicurious and I are leading the “Sex, gender and controversy: writing to educate, writing to titillate” session on Thursday (at 2:45pm, room 1cd) at Science Online 2012. Despite the fact that the discussion at #scio12 will only be an hour long, we managed to fill a two hour Skype conversation with our thoughts and ideas about the panel earlier this month. I want to share some of our thoughts on the broader perspective we are taking on our session. Sci has shared her origin story over at her digs, which will give you a sense of our introductory remarks and why we care about this topic.
Agency and Institution in Three Acts. Act I: Within yourself
This is not a session on the science of sex, on being sexy while doing science, or on being sciency while having sex. Sci and I aren’t particularly excited by the idea of talking about any of those things, at least in a #scio12 session. What we want to talk about is the tension writing about this topic creates between the two major systems of our lives: our agency as individuals, and the institutions we operate around and within. Writing within this tension is where real risk-taking, exciting writing happens, and we want to help our fellow discussants figure out what this means for their own blogging.
For me, it’s the juxtaposition of my inherent agency as a tenure-track professor with academic freedom who can do whatever she wants for a research program* with institutional pressures of the various contexts in which I work: American culture, Polish culture (since I do my fieldwork in Poland), my university, my discipline. I have one of the most amazing, agency-filled jobs, where I get to decide where and when I work more than many other people I know. Yet I continually bump up against institutional oppressions, and observe the same in many of my peers.
As someone who is gendered female, people have long assumed that my academic interests must naturally tend toward ladybusiness: is that lifelong pressure why I study women’s reproductive ecology, or is it that I just don’t find the dudes that interesting since they aren’t the ones who make the babies? I imagine it’s a hefty portion of both. As a woman, I choose to study women and I understand the drives and assumptions that underlie this, that I didn’t make this choice in a vacuum but in the context of my personal agency and the world I’ve grown up in. I know I may be taken less seriously to do research on something gendered female, and that I may be taken more seriously as a female academic if I did research on something more obviously gendered male. But I also know the safety of women, and the risks where they are fewer of them.
This is a conversation I’ve had among other academics countless times: that this push by others towards particular topics, their own natural tendencies which may agree or disagree with that push, and their desires to subvert assumptions all influenced their topic of study. I know women who don’t study anything to do with women to be taken more seriously, and I know women who study women because it’s the only thing anyone would believe they wanted to study so, of their several projects, it’s all they could get funding for. Queer folk are often assumed to have interests only in queer topics. Several grad student friends of mine over the years have been directly told by their advisors that they should study their own ethnicity. Our agency as scientists is continually subverted by broader assumptions that who we are as people dictate our scientific interests.
Act II: Within your science
This, I think, is why I find the idea of bias in women’s health so interesting. Agency and institutional pressures are constantly at war within me, and so I seek out this tension in my own discipline. On the one hand, you have the scientific method, a nearly perfect form of agency that allows one to ask and test questions about the world in which we live. On the other hand, you have the oppressions and biases that permeate those who conduct science. Sometimes the outcome is pretty bad.
Writing about this tension is risky, but it also has the potential for an enormous payoff in terms of the quality of the final product. What were some of the most popular blog posts after #scio11? The ones that came out of the women in scienceblogging panel. These posts exposed many to the roiling mix of fear and courage many women and people from other underrepresented groups feel in the pit of our bellies every single day. Other posts that I’ve seen really hit a nerve involve tensions between different hypotheses, different interpretations of evidence, or the testing of a long-held assumption.
We are drawn to tension, to controversy, to provocation. Some want to engage, some to pitch a fit, and some to eat popcorn and watch. And a lot more people come when the science we write about is about the intersection or opposition of agency and institution because of that natural tension. The more people who come, the more people with a little more science in their day.
Act III: Within your writing
Here is a final way to think about these two concepts. As science bloggers, we have ultimate agency: even when we write for a network we usually have full editorial control. We can be whoever we want online, write about whatever we want.
But here is a place where institution – as culture, biology, our training or our relationships – can bring a healthy kind of unease to our writing. The kinds of people we choose to be are, as a whole, decent people. And decent people can be provocative, but they don’t lie on purpose. Decent people may spin wild theories, but not without qualifiers and evidence. Decent people find the controversy, but the controversy doesn’t define them.
And that is the core of the conversation Sci and I had the other day: with great power comes great responsibility. I credit Sci the most for first pointing out, understanding and personifying this last point. If we are the ones who have decided to communicate science, to break it down for our audience, to share it, or to push its boundaries, we need to be responsible. Our posts may be passed around on Facebook or Twitter, show up on Boing Boing or Reddit, and as a result be the only post someone reads on a given topic. Do we fan the flames of someone’s prejudice? Indulge our worst ideas? Write purely for pageviews?
So on Thursday, this is what we will talk about in our session: finding the tension in ourselves, our science and our writing. Delighting in the controversy, thrilling from the risk, but never forgetting our responsibility to the readers on the other side of our screen.
*This is of course within the confines of what it takes to get tenure and given the horrible funding situation which makes it hard to get any science done in the first place. Of course my job isn’t perfect. But that’s a topic for another post.
Note: I want to thank Alice Pawley and Scicurious for the ways in which conversations with them helped coalesce a lot of things I was thinking about around this topic.
Wednesday, January 11th 2012
This is a repost of a piece I wrote after the women in scienceblogging panel at Science Online 2011. Seeing as we’re heading into #scio12 season and there will be another women in scienceblogging session (this time in the brilliant and capable hands of Janet Stemwedel and Christie Wilcox), AND a writing for women’s magazines session, I thought it was time to bring this one back.
A few years ago, I was standing outside the building where I taught, unlocking my bike. It was one of the first days of the semester, and I had just finished teaching. I was wearing one of my teaching uniforms: wideleg trouser jeans, a black boatneck sweater, and beautiful forest green heels. Except in really bad weather, I wear heels when I teach because it helps me feel older, like I have some authority. Being sometimes several decades younger than my colleagues, but usually less than a decade older than my students, meant my gender and age made me a sort of sexualized second class citizen.
An older faculty member approached me to unlock his own bike. He complained about where some students had locked their bikes because they obstructed the bike lane. He mentioned that he had told the police but that they never did anything about it. I nodded sympathetically.
“Of course,” he then said, “if I had been dressed like you, maybe they would have listened!”
And just like that, I was no longer a colleague. I was a woman.
* * *
Dr. Clelia Mosher, by valleyviolet on flickr. Click through to read her story to figure out why I chose her as the featured image for this post.
The perils women sciencebloggers face are not that different than those we face in the real world… though the exposure of the internet can occasionally make it less safe. And the risks that women avoid out in the world, are not unlike those we avoid in the blogosphere. That was one of many important conclusions made in the panel Sheril Kirshenbaum, Anne Jefferson, Joanne Manaster and I ran for the Sunday midday panel entitled “Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name.” I believe Sheril was the one who first suggested the topic.
This panel ended up being a great experience, for several reasons. First, leading up to the session, I had the opportunity to meet with other women at the conference and discuss the topic. I found myself in large, women-only groups on a number of occasions (though I just realized, this happens to me a lot at academic conferences too: I think I avoid schmoozing with men more than I realize, a point I will return to later). Each time, I brought up the panel to hear what they had to say, and they made beautiful points, expressed legitimate frustrations, shared both good stories and horrible ones, and in general kicked ass. There were some seriously smart and savvy women at Science Online 2011.
“Even when we want something, we feel the need to hide it”
Because I’m not sure whether these women want to be identified by the points they made or stories they shared, I’m not naming names here. But after each impromptu mini-panel, I took copious notes. Here is what the women I spoke to had to say:
- There is serious friend bias in who gets promoted in the science blogosphere, and it ends up that men promote other men quite a lot (in order to avoid potential defensiveness, I will say that we did also discuss several notable exceptions). We need to share the empirical evidence about the fact that people like to read people who are a lot like them, as a kind of sensitivity training for men, to help them train their brains to appreciate many different voices.
- We are all very, very tired of making a point on a blog, on twitter, or in a meeting, being ignored, having a man make the same point, then having that man get all the credit. Very tired.
- We still can’t be ambitious without being considered a bitch. People will always fall back on that term if they think you are too aggressive, but the same behavior is not criticized in men. One woman brought up an article she read by a journalist who said, of all the famous women she had ever interviewed (including leading political figures like Hillary Clinton), only Catherine Zeta Jones had ever admitted to being ambitious: the others had denied it. Even when we want something, we often feel we need to hide it.
- Women already have to be two and a half times better than a man to get the same job in science (referring here to the Wenneras and Wold article), women who blog using their real names have to be even better than that if she doesn’t want her blog counted against her when going up for promotion.
- Both the attacks and appreciations are different for women bloggers. We get unwanted attentions and compliments on our appearance, surprise that we are an authority on certain topics or have an interest in male-dominated topics, or are bullied in a way that feels gendered when a man decides we are wrong on the internet.
- The risk-aversion women bloggers display only hurts us. If we continue to be risk-averse women will never occupy positions where they can influence the community of bloggers — we need to take on editorships, we need to manage networks, run carnivals, so that we can then involve and promote more women. The blogosphere, like academia, is not a pure meritocracy.
- There are differences in the pros and cons of blogging depending on whether you are pseud or use your real name, and different ways you find support in the community.
- If we think we have it bad, look at other underrepresented groups: the situation is in some ways even worse. We need to avoid the Oppression Olympics and think about how to pull everyone up the ladder with us.
And remember… this is what was covered before we even started the panel!
“I want to puke on their shoes”
The panel itself was great, because the four of us panelists had different backgrounds and stories to share. Anne and I are both academics who spent some time in the science blogosphere with pseudonyms before engaging with our real names. However Anne is in a more male-dominated discipline and co-blogs with a man; mine is a bit more equal, but also I study women’s reproductive physiology, which leads to more reflective, sometimes more personal writing. Joanne makes science videos for a broader audience and has a great mind for visuals, humor, and for a really engaging style. Sheril has co-blogged with a man as well, in a high profile website, and has published two books (I must admit, I am frantically trying to finish two books right now so that I can finally start her book The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us!). But again, while I think all my co-panelists had some very important things to say, and some great stories (and awful stalker stories), the audience is what made the panel. Here are a few things they had to say (I wasn’t able to take notes as readily during the panel, but I will link to the video of the panel when it’s up):
- We need to be clear about how bad it really is to write under your own name — some women have had no problems at all where others have been driven out. Depending on the topic you write about and the kind of audience you write for, you will have different experiences, and many women will have only good experiences. We shouldn’t be too negative.
- Some people think writing for a female audience is lame. Apparently there is a listserv of science writers, and about once a year a conversation starts up about whether science writers should write for women’s magazines — apparently many people come down on the side of not thinking science writers should write for them. (My take? Any time anyone says there is anything wrong with writing for women, it is sexist.)
- One fantastic young woman talked about how she avoids discussing her blog with her peers for fear of becoming the “soft skills chick.” Doing anything other than the hottest science seems to delegitimize women very quickly; however in some cases men get rewarded for doing the same thing (examples that come to my mind are picking up extra teaching and service, or having offspring, the latter being empirically supported).
- Robin Lloyd already mentioned this in her article, but Ed Yong attended our panel (one of, I think, only three men). He mentioned that he gets DMed on Twitter regularly by men who want him to Tweet or promote their posts. He said he had never been DMed for promotional reasons by a woman. I was completely flabbergasted by this comment (and I don’t think I was the only one), because it had never occurred to me that I could even do that sort of a thing.
- The brilliant Zuska made several great comments (as Sheril pointed out, she really should have been on the panel!). One that really struck me is that we need to interrogate assumptions about women and provide empirical evidence against them. The reason this came up was that we were discussing where attacks can come from, and how sometimes the attacks come from women as well as men. I believe someone made the comment that women can be worse, and alluded to the idea that women make bad bosses for women. Zuska pointed out that when you look at the evidence male bosses are still worse to women than women are to women. And of course, towards the end of the panel Zuska also used what is likely her most famous and beloved line, “I want to puke on their shoes.”
Building an old girls’ club
At the end of the day, being female is a risk factor for unwanted attention if you choose to put yourself out there in any aspect of your life, from your job to your blog. But a risk factor is not the same thing as a foregone conclusion. We can choose not to engage and participate, not to take on positions of power (like, say researchblogging editorships) or attention (blogging on a network). But we’re holding ourselves, and women younger than us, back. We aren’t directing or shaping the debate. We aren’t holding people accountable when they ignore or forget issues relevant to women and other underrepresented groups.
Women need to connect with each other in private spaces, like email and private forums, and we need to continue to write “life of science” posts that mentor other women. Anne and I have been writing each other every week for a few years now, sharing the work we need to get done, the work we are going to let go and not feel guilty about, the happy and sad happening in our lives. Those emails help me structure my week and make action plans for my big academic projects. What’s more, Anne and I probably know more about each other than many people who see each other every day. And that relationship has given me the confidence to write this blog, to engage with sciencebloggers, to be a mommy and a scientist and a professor.
Be bold. Be ambitious. Be a little bit of a bitch. Plan your life in such a way that it gets bigger, not smaller. I plan my life so that my daughter, now almost three, will feel as though anything is possible; I want to be her example that a woman can occupy space and be pleased with herself.
I hope more of you blog, I hope more of you who already blog promote your blog and get your name out there, I hope you email me or someone you feel you could connect to when you need a reminder that you’re not alone. Because, why be small when you can be big?
