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?
Friday, December 30th 2011
A New Path by jurvetson on flickr
It’s the end of 2011, and I have a number of reasons to celebrate: a wonderful family, a wonderful job, a fun gig at SciAm, a roller derby season about to start back up again, and Science Online 2012 in a few short weeks. It’s the time of year to reflect on what we have done, and how to grow.
I have some fun ideas planned for this blog in the new year. You’ll see some pieces that are collaborations with academic and bloggy colleagues, others that give space to voices that need to be heard. I’ll also be writing soon about my upcoming Science Online 2012 panel with Scicurious, which, I promise, will be quite awesome.
And of course, it’s that time of year when we make a lot of lists. This list is, true to the blog, a Ladybusiness Anthropology edition, so one that focuses on scienceblogging on gender issues. As with many “best of” lists, it is somewhat arbitrary: this is one set of posts I’ve compiled that I think is exceptional, but I could have easily created several more. In fact, help me expand this list in the comments!
So, without further ado, here is my list of 10 great blog posts of 2011:
Is it cold in here? One of many moving posts to come out of Elevatorgate, and my very favorite. At Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette opens with one woman’s account of working at CERN where she endured footsie under the table at meetings and a regular, healthy dose of condescension. She demonstrates how the chilly climate in science isn’t just about work/life balance and spending more time with family, the excuse trotted out most frequently to explain why more women aren’t in science (and she does this with, you know, science). Then Ouellette uses this and the history of the term “chilly climate” to segue into a conversation about Elevatorgate, one of probably dozens, hundreds, thousands of experiences women have in male-dominated groups that remind them that they are women first, serious participants second. She dissects the way in which Rebecca Watson’s simple comment about her encounter with a man in an elevator polarized an entire community. And she offers a thoughtful and important manifesto to produce change in our environment.
Learning to Speak Like a Woman. This interview by Emily Anthes at Wonderland is a great example of what blogging has to offer traditional journalists. Anthes, a freelance science writer herself, interviews another journalist to get deeper into the story of speech therapy for transgender people. The whole interview is fantastic, but this is my favorite question and answer:
“EA: Could you see people who are not transitioning going through similar speech therapy? I’m imagining, say, a woman in the corporate world who thinks that perhaps making her speech less “feminine” will help her advance.
“EG: I know, in the context of the transgender world, some male-to-female transgender people have complained that in corporate settings, they tend to want their voices to go lower. They find themselves counteracting their therapy a little bit to keep their voices low and more gender neutral. A lot of people like the idea of having a more feminized voice, but then when it comes to the working world, they find that people don’t respond to them as well if their voice is too high.”
Are Women Really Less Funny Than Men? Elizabeth Preston at Inkfish deconstructs a recent paper on gender differences in humor. I love that Preston points out problems in this paper from several angles – the fact that the kind of humor they use is inherently male (New Yorker cartoons), and that their bracket methodology was potentially flawed. Preston’s blog is one more people should be reading.
Women Know Something You Don’t. In a truly beautiful post, Emily Willingham of The Biology Files writes about the history and importance of abortifacents in the context of recent attempts to define life as beginning at conception. A law that does this would criminalize not only miscarriage, but all forms of hormonal birth control and IUDs, since they can at times block implantation if fertilization somehow occurs. Willingham shares the relevance and importance of understanding family planning from a scientific and political perspective.
The Miracle of Birth is That Most of Us Figure Out How to Mother – More or Less. Ingrid Wickelgren at Streams of Consciousness writes a fantastic post that covers the neuroscience of motherhood. She describes research on working memory and executive function in mothers of six month olds, and shows how those mothers with higher scores seemed to be more attentive to their children. She says:
“Gonzalez and Fleming found that the mothers who did well on the executive function tests—those who have better working memories and are flexible thinkers—were also more sensitive to their babies’ needs than those who got lower cognitive scores.… Mothering tests your attention span, ability to plan, prioritize, organize and reason as much as does a day at the office. And if you are a good planner, you can cope better when interacting with your child.”
An adaptive fairytale with no happy ending. Jeremy Yoder of Denim and Tweed offers an intelligent rebuttal to a post by Bering on the evolution of homosexuality that goes back to the original Gallup citations. He demonstrates that the original data is unable to support the hypothesis that homophobia is adaptive, because it cannot address whether it is heritable or confers a fitness benefit. This is only one of many, many lovely posts by Yoder – in fact, also check out this post of his at the SciAm Guest Blog called The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, With a Key to Many Complicating Factors.
Getting “Mean Girled” in the Baboon world: the price of being sexy. Ashlee, also known as Serious Monkey Business of Serious Monkey Business blog, wrote a great post using Mean Girls as a way to frame a paper by Huchard and Cowlishaw (2011). Her post describes how baboon females receive more aggression from other females when they are in estrus, as opposed to non-estrus or when they are lactating. A fun, informative post.
Evidence on the Hebephilia question. I love this post by Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds because she compiles an impressive array of evidence to support her point about the nature of consent and power between children and adults. I’ve already linked to a number of other posts I like on the topic here, but this, more recent one lays out the evidence.
Maternal obesity from all sides. Science & Sensibility is one of my favorite blogs, and not only because its name is a spin on my favorite Jane Austen novel. This is the last in a series on maternal obesity that tries to understand situations and outcomes for women of size in a way that is respectful and thoughtful.
Menstrual Synchrony: Do Girls Who Go Together Flow Together? This is a post I missed the first time around; a reader brought it to my attention after I wrote on the same topic myself. This post, by Harriet Hall at Science Based Medicine, offers a thoughtful and critical perspective on the pervasive idea of menstrual synchrony. And no, it is not likely that it is real.
I also want to give a nod to the following mainstream media stories of 2011. I like when journalists cover sex and gender issues with sensitivity and thoroughness.
Led by the child who simply knew. A beautiful story in the Boston Globe about an amazing transgender girl and her amazing family. A multi-tissue story. May I raise my child to have the same grace and strength as these kids.
Contraceptive Comeback: The Maligned IUD Gets a Second Chance. At Wired, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel describes a study where, when women are properly educated about their contraception choices, overwhelmingly choose the IUD. The IUD is making a real comeback, is more effective and easier to use than hormonal contraception, and while it has its own set of side effects (discomfort with insertion, spotting for anywhere from a day to a few months after insertion) they are far lower than what some women experience on the pill. I have a post on IUDs at my old blog covering similar material.
Teens turn a blind eye to sex information on the web. This is from the Montreal Gazette, and actually, the title poorly describes the story. What this story does is report on a study that showed that teens are skeptical of sex information they get on the web, and, as it turns out, appreciative of what they get from their parents. Good thing for me to remember, as my three year old just my husband where babies come from this week.
Monday, December 26th 2011
Dear Kate,
I am an evolutionary psychologist, which, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing and society largely accepts the need for people like me. However, our evil, feminist, not-patriarchal-enough culture fundamentally doesn’t get me in particular, a special snowflake among evolutionary psycholgoists. You see, I am an Evidence Free Science Provocateur. I am quite sure all evolutionary psychologists are Evidence Free Science Provocateurs just like me, even though they are too chicken to speak the Evidence Free Truth. I have long suffered under this mantle, and derive some pride for my role in upsetting people with abject misogyny; I enjoy dabbling in the justifications of many oppressions and noxious human behaviors.
I’m also writing to you about a separate matter. You see, I’m not getting all the credit for my provocations! Where I write my blog, at, um, Schmientific Schamerican, I have complete editorial control, and have been here longer than the young upstarts at the new network. But people are mad at the manager of the blog network, who didn’t hire me, and the magazine. But my situation is entirely different than that other thing that happened in my publishing group! In the other case, someone submitted something provocative, where provocative = misogynist and not based in evidence (hooray! A kindred spirit!) and then an editor approved it (another one! I told you, we are everywhere). So someone other than the original author had to decide it was appropriate to publish. With my blog, it’s all me, baby.
So Kate, I’m writing for your advice on two matters: how can I devise an appropriate justification for my Evidence Free Science Provocations (people are already trying to copy me, I need an idea I can claim ASAP), and how can I make sure everyone understands that I OWN my hateful and problematic words?
Unberable
Dear Unberable,
I must first gently tell you that not all evolutionary psychologists are Evidence Free Science Provocateurs. But like you, I am sure there are many more of them than admit it, and there are very good evolutionary reasons to be an Evidence Free Science Provocateur, which I will now make up.
For instance, as evolutionary psychologists age their mate value diminishes significantly. In order to compensate for their increasing obsolescence, it becomes necessary to draw attention to themselves by upping the ante with ever-more evidence free theorizing. Further, the internet age makes the dominance rank of science bloggers in constant flux. Evolutionary psychologists who are also science bloggers, which it sounds like you are, need to beat their virtual chests like a silverback gorilla every now and again to fight off the younger males who want to oust them. Finally, Darwin’s finches that best survive periods of drought have an increased beak hardness and a taste for finches much younger than them (a little known fact I just made up, whee!). Like Darwin’s finches, evolutionary psychologist science bloggers respond to their environments adaptively, so it must be adaptive to be an Evidence Free Science Provocateur. Or something.
As for your second question, all I can tell you is that in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, or Back in the Day, it was adaptive to be entrenched in one’s own opinions and be unwilling to entertain the possibility that being provocative isn’t useful in the absence of evidence. I know this not because I can identify any traits that would support this being adaptive, or any heritability of this behavior, or any other suggestion of a mechanism, but because it is what I want to believe. In fact, I think I’ll give this hypothesis a name: the Honey Badger Don’t Care Hypothesis.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg]
Honey badger can get bitten by bees, and ingest the venom of a snake, and have its food stolen by scavengers. Honey Badger Don’t Care. In the absence of evidence, of editorial control, of any real constraints on your behavior, you will do whatever you want and you don’t care.
And that’s great, because evolution says so.
With warm, evidence free wishes for a happy and healthy new year,
Kate
