Show notes: Join Kate as she talks to Dr. Annaliese Beery, professor and member of the Psychology, Biology, and Neuroscience programs at Smith College. I wanted to talk to Dr. Beery because of her work on sex, gender, and estrus cycles in animal research. People often avoid studying females because they believe we are all too variable because of the effects of the menstrual cycle on physiology and behavior. Dr. Beery tells us how that isn’t at all true! She also tells us about the research that shows that males are often the ones who are more variable.
It turns out that menstrual/estrus cycles don’t mean you are suddenly at the whim of your hormones any more than any other gender. So one of the main reasons for gender inequity in research – that when studying females you have to control for menstrual cycle phase, and that is just so hard – is rendered moot. I have been chewing on this interview for months, because it turns upside down so many ways that menstruators are taught to think about themselves. I loved this episode, and I hope you do too!
Guest Bio: Dr. Beery is a professor at Smith College, where she integrates ecological, evolutionary, and neuroscience perspectives in her work. One branch of her research is focused on the neurobiological mechanisms supporting life in social groups. She also studies sex bias in the use of female and male research subjects—both from literature based surveys of prior research, and through empirical studies of sources of variability in males and females. She is the recipient of grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and other organizations.
Dr. Annaliese Beery
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A number of folks have asked for the transcript for my oral remarks at yesterday’s hearing of the Congressional Subcommittee on Research & Technology (see the whole hearing here). So, here it is. While I made sure to get feedback from many people for my written testimony, I wrote the oral testimony without input, and I wrote it for you. If you’d like to read my longer, written testimony, full of citations as well as quotes from interview respondents, you can find it here.
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Thank you for the opportunity to share my research and expertise with you today, and thank you for taking on such an important topic. I want to start by sharing a bit about what sexual harassment is, how it manifests in the sciences, and what I hope you’ll help us do about it.
Sexual harassment comes in two main forms – come ons, which are unwanted sexual advances and sexual coercion, and put downs, also called gender harassment, non-sexual behaviors that are crude or hostile regarding gender. While the come ons are the types of behaviors you see in articles about Harvey Weinstein and in sexual harassment trainings, the majority of sexual harassment are in fact the put downs. These are the kinds of behaviors most women in the workplace have experienced at least once in their lifetimes, and many experience every day. The offensive remarks, subtle exclusions, requests to make coffee, yes, but also starting rumors, sabotaging a promotion, or ruining a career.
One of the more recent cases of sexual harassment in the sciences is by alleged perpetrator David Marchant, a Boston University geologist who conducted fieldwork in Antarctica. This case involved horrifying and physical gender harassment: blowing volcanic ash into the already snow blind eyes of a grad student, pushing her down a mountain multiple times, throwing rocks at her if she dared go to the bathroom.
There are a few conditions that make sexual harassment more common in the workplace. When workplaces are male dominated, not just in numbers but in culturally how they behave, sexual harassment happens more. When workplaces demonstrate that they’re tolerant of sexual harassment, by ignoring reporting, retaliating against reporters, or not sanctioning perpetrators, sexual harassment happens more. In 2016 the EEOC wrote a report that showed that only a quarter of sexual harassment is reported, and of those who report, three quarters of them faced retaliation. I study sexual harassment in the sciences because I am a scientist, I care about science, and I’m interested in the ways in which the manifestation of harassment varies by work context. But this is a problem not just of science, but of American workplaces.
In the sciences, sexual harassment looks like this: women having less access to their advisors, to the materials they need to conduct their research, and withstanding constant questioning of their intelligence and worth. I have stories of sabotaged lab equipment, of intentional safety violations, of rumormongering and yes sometimes of sexual assault and rape. What bothers me the most about how it usually looks in science is that we wrap sexual harassment up in this package that we claim is intellectual rigor, and meritocracy. It’s like we think that rudeness and cruelty are the same thing as being smart without noticing that we direct these cruelties more at women than men, more at women of color than white women, more of sexual minorities than straight folk.
We say that asking a nasty question at a colloquium is how we push people to be better scientists. We say when we see an all-male research team that it must just be that the best scientists for the job were all men. We say that the sole woman in a department is the affirmative action hire. We spend all this taxpayer money supporting recruitment of women to STEM fields, and supporting their educations, only to lose that money when they are forced out by damaging behaviors. We also lose their diversity of perspectives, and thus end up with a flatter, more boring, less complex and less innovative American science.
Too often I’ve heard that harassment and bad behavior are the price we must pay for star scientists. But are they really doing star science? When I’m writing my papers or analyzing my data on sexual harassment in the sciences, I’m thinking of the victims and the science we’ve lost. We lost their ideas, we lost their perspectives. We scientists do this work because we want to give the best of ourselves to the advancement of science. Women keep trying to give us their best, and we blow ash in their faces and push them down mountains.
The way we’ve tried to fix this problem isn’t working, we have decades of evidence to prove it. Let’s move away from a culture of compliance and towards a culture of change. Let’s convince universities to worry less about litigation and more about legacy. Do you want to be on the right side of history when it comes to how you center victims and how you improve the lives of women? Do you want to be the hub for exciting, groundbreaking science? Do you want to be the place everyone wants to work at, or the place all the women warn each other about?
I hope you will join me in encouraging universities and other science workplaces to take a values-into-action approach to eliminating sexual harassment. That means locational, contextual solutions that create respectful and equitable climates for everyone. That means focusing on the behaviors we want to see, not creating fear around the legally actionable ones. And that means creating confidential avenues for women to speak, and to be heard.
I just want to say one last thing, because this testimony is public record and it’s important that I say it. In a climate where perpetrators are being centered and where the conversation has been on reporting and speaking up, I want to say today to victims that I see you. I see you whether or not you report, whether or not you have been in one of my studies. I see you when you email me, tweet at me, when you stay silent. I see you and I think of you and I thank you for getting up every day, and I derive strength from you. I hope you know how much you mean to those of us who do this work.
Excerpt: Join Kate as she talks to grad student Holly Horan from her fieldwork in Puerto Rico on the effects of stress on pregnancy and preterm birth. Show notes can be found at kateclancy.com/period23. And don’t forget to use coupon code “periodpodcast” for 50% off your order at elleboxco.com!
Summary: I was lucky enough to meet Holly Horan a few years ago when I was out at Oregon State giving a talk. I then invited her advisor, Melissa Cheyney, and Holly, to be part of a symposium at last year’s American Association of Physical Anthropology. We got to talking after the symposium, and of course Holly quickly became another one of my podcast victims. I am excited to share our conversation with you all in today’s episode.
Holly Horan has a masters degree in medical anthropology and is a doctoral candidate in applied anthropology at Oregon State University. In her non-academic life, she is a birth and postpartum doula, this is a professional who provides non-clinical prenatal, labor, and postpartum support to pregnant individuals and their families. Holly is currently conducting her dissertation research in Puerto Rico, studying the relationship between perceived maternal stress and gestational age at delivery. She is involved in a variety of maternal and infant health research projects both in the states and in Puerto Rico, but is still very much in the “gestational phase” of her professional career. Most importantly, she is a mother to one of the best research assistants around, her two year old daughter, Naya Thoreau.
Holly’s work in Puerto Rico is motivated by the fact that Puerto Rico has a high rate of preterm births, as well as her lived experience as a member of a mixed race household, with a Puerto Rican mother who herself experienced several preterm births. Her work demonstrates the limits of understanding health disparities through simple genetic explanations – the idea that genetic differences explain variation in health – as well as access issues – the idea that health care access are the main reason for health disparities. Rather, psychosocial stress, the kind that comes from every day slights and discrimination, has been shown to play the biggest role in creating differences in the health between racial groups. So, is there “something in the water” that helps us understand variation in health? Yes, but it’s not as easy to measure as you might think.
Holly Horan, medical anthropologist.
Thanks to Ellebox for sponsoring season 2 of PERIOD. Use coupon code “periodpodcast” or this link to get 50% off your order.
Do you want to be a patron, or is there someone on your shopping list who would want to be? Check out my Patreon page for ways to support this podcast. Help me make beautiful things!
Want a better PERIOD?
Subscribe to PERIOD so you don’t miss an episode! Subscribing, especially on iTunes, helps us a ton with promoting the podcast and getting the word out to more people. So does leaving a review, so please do that too!
Call or write me! I am collecting two things right now: your period questions, and first period stories. Leave me a voicemail with either or both at 262-PERIOD-2 (262-737-4632). Don’t forget to tell me how to contact you if you don’t mind my following up.
