The Bus

"The last student who went to graduate school after working with me was hit by a bus," my research advisor said to me as I began to figure out what I'd do after graduation with a Bachelor's degree and a desire to work in industry. He has an odd sense of humor, and I took the comment as a reminder to keep my eyes open and not get wrapped up in my head. This same advisor had encouraged me to apply to graduate programs, warning me that it would be hard later to "take the vow of poverty" after an industrial-sized paycheck if I decided to pursue a PhD after a few years on the job.

I didn't know the first thing about the graduate school application process and wasn't even sure where to apply. He encouraged me to set my sights high, nudged me toward higher profile programs and, in retrospect, he also guided me away from programs that I later learned had reputations for treating their students poorly. I was accepted at multiple schools thanks to his efforts, my letter writers, and the good advice I got about writing personal statements.

Skip ahead three years and his voice is in my ear, though it's only a memory speaking: "the last student … was hit by a bus." I cross the street like I'm five. Look left-look right-look left. All clear. I'm going to finish this thing and I will not become a pancake.

It's not until another year later, maybe two, that I hear something different as the memory speaks: "the last student stepped in front of a bus."

Oh.

Oh.

Oh no.

I don't know the story. I never knew the other student, but I can't unhear this version of the story now. And I understand it in a different way: Be careful, and Come back safe, okay?

During graduate school I learned about my anxiety, and I experienced the emotional quicksand that is depression. I felt sad for no apparent reason. Blue. Down. There were days I was unmotivated to leave home. Days when the failures of my research felt like failures of my self. And I realized one day that my predecessor had probably felt the same way.

I wish I could reach back through time and tell him that depression lies. But I can't. It doesn't work that way.

So I'll tell you: Depression lies. Don't carry that burden around alone. You are worthy of love and worthy of help.

And please, for the love of whatever you hold dear, be careful crossing the street. Come back safe, okay?

Some thoughts about crying

Reset your "days since a sexism-in-science incident" counters to zero. A Nobel laureate dug himself a pretty deep and boggy hole when, among other things, he explained why he thought men and women shouldn't be in labs together. Apparently, the womenz are just too irresistible and men "fall in love with them," but women also cry too much.

Much digital ink has already been spilled on the many things wrong with the speech, the speaker's behavior, the non-pology circus, and the pathetic and tone-deaf kinds of support he has received. I just want to focus on the part about crying.

I cry easily. When I'm excited, I tend to tear up. I cry during movies. I have cried in the lab, in my advisor's office, while presenting a group meeting, and, yes, at the end of my thesis defense. I don't recall anyone ever calling it unprofessional, but I do know that that message has been implied at times. Several people, at several points in my life, have told me to "get a thicker skin" so I wouldn't cry as often.

I have a few problems with that.

For one thing, not crying, for me, is like not sneezing. I can control it a little bit, but it's hard and sometimes painful, and I often end up with my eyes watering anyway.

For another, you get a thicker skin by developing callouses, and you get callouses from repeated, sustained exposure to something abrasive or otherwise painful. No thank you, I don't want to become calloused. I don't want to expose myself to painful and abrasive things any more than necessary.

I want to be a person who feels.

The Invisible Woman

I wrote this in October and somehow didn't manage to post it then.

I know a professor – a youngish white guy who looks older than he is – who wears a suit an tie to every class because, he says, he wants to command authority in the classroom. He doesn’t need to dress up for his students to think he’s the one in charge. All he has to do is feed their assumptions.

I work with another professor who told me during my interview that, as a middle-aged white guy, he knew he could be intimidating, and he’d rather that the subject be the scary part, not him as the instructor. He wears Hawaiian print shirts and makes goofy memes. He makes himself approachable.

And I? I am small and young and female. I want to wear skirts, but I’ve opted for khakis. They’re somehow safer. A friend of mine, who also teaches chemistry, recently told me she had finally “dared” to wear teal tights while teaching. We worry—and I think rightfully so—that if we present as too young and too feminine, that we won’t keep enough of our authority.

I like to be informal with my students. I want them to be comfortable asking questions without fear of looking stupid. But I insist on Dr. Haas. I need to be their professor more than their pal.

—

Since August, three women in gaming have left their homes and changed their speaking plans in response to rape and death threats. Ostensibly this is in a fight over ethics in video game journalism. It’s been reported as a “controversy,” as if there are two equally reasonable sides. But there aren’t two sides here. People are making threats of violence against women. That is wrong. Full. Stop.

In recent years, more and more women in tech & gaming have been targeted simply for being visible. For speaking up. For expressing opinions. For existing in a "male" space.

Science can be a pretty male space, too. Women in science – thankfully – aren't getting the kind of abuse women in gaming are, but that does not mean science is always a welcoming, egalitarian place.

The Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry were announced earlier this month and yet again a bunch of men won the prize, the recognition, the press, the attention, the praise, the legitimacy. There have been two female laureates in physics, and four in chemistry. And that’s not even a total of six women because Marie Curie won both a physics and a chemistry Nobel.

Five women. One hundred years of awards, up to three people each year, and only five women.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the blue LED is wonderful. I’m delighted that my own field, single-molecule microscopy, has been recognized. I think all the men involved are smart and talented and deserving of recognition. I just think we are way past due recognizing women for their works and listening to their voices.

We need to make women more visible. We need to change the norms so that is no longer remarkable to have female scientists or female gamers or female developers or female anything else. When few women stand out, they are seen as anomalies, rareities, and exceptions. Instead of individuals, they become symbols, whether the penultimate female scientist to gather the sisterhood behind or the feminist nail MRAs believe they must hammer down.

—

My heart is full. I am applying for jobs and I doubt myself so strongly sometimes. I worry that my voice will not be heard. That my science will not be recognized. That if I shout into the void, no one will hear, or worse, the darkness will come roaring back at me.

A week or so ago I spent multiple hours trying to write a short reply to a simple email. Sometimes I have opinions that I am afraid to express. I want things I am afraid to ask for. I am so fully aware that men who ask for more are seen more favorably than women who request less. I watch my words like I choose my clothes. Carefully. Weighing consequences. Debating if it’s even worth expressing my preferences, using my voice, making myself more visible.

I know the price of silence. I just worry at times that the price of speaking is greater.

In case you had forgotten

This is your weekly reminder that science isn't sexist.

In other news, we have always been at war with Eastasia and these are not the droids you are looking for.

Those who can, do. Those who can explain, teach.

My mother is an elementary school teacher. She chose that career path at approximately the age of 12 when writing an essay about what she wanted to be when she grew up. And she stuck to it. She's a Master Teacher, an expert in elementary education with extensive experience in remedial reading and math. She's taught nearly every level of elementary school, and since there aren't as many specialized courses in elementary school, she's taught nearly every subject, too.

My brother and I spent many, many Saturday and summer afternoons in my mom's classrooms, or playing in the empty hallways. She teaches in a different district than we went to school in, otherwise I'm sure we'd have spent even more afternoons and evenings at school. I have many memories of stocking bookshelves, cutting out cardstock shapes, keeping an eye on the laminating machine, sorting counters and tools and toys.

From the age of 12, if not before, I was asked "Are you going to be a teacher like your mom?" I got tired of that question very quickly. No, I was not going to be a teacher. Teaching is a lot of work! I didn't want to grade papers and prepare a classroom and write lesson plans. "You'd make a great teacher, just like your mom." Nope. Not doing it.

I went to college with the intent of becoming a science writer. I was a chemistry major on the B.A. track looking to take a lot of writing courses, and possibly double-major with journalism. My academic and research advisors convinced me that if I really wanted to talk about the science, I should learn more of it. So I switched to the B.S. track. And got into research. And fell in love with chemistry all over again.

Graduate school was not originally part of my plan. But after the B.S., it seemed like the logical next step. At that point I wanted a job in industry working on semiconducting materials. A PhD would help that, and I was told it would be much easier to take the "graduate school vow of poverty" before an industry job, rather than after. So I went to graduate school.

The questions about whether I was going to be a teacher then changed a bit. People still asked if I was going to teach, just like mom. But then I'd also get a few "Are you going to be a professor like your grandfather?" Nope. Not teaching. I'm going to be a scientist, not a teacher.

That lasted until about 10 seconds into my first teaching experience as a graduate TA. It turns out that I love teaching. That even when things are hard and crappy and it seems like I don't understand anything at all, I can walk into a classroom and feel alive.

There's a funny thing about being a scientist, though. Even though there's a lot of cultural pressure to be an academic, there's a heaping helping of disdain for anyone who actually wants to teach. You're "supposed" to put research first. Many, many times I would talk to other scientists about future plans and lie right through my teeth. Of course I wanted to go the research path! Of course I wanted a future full of grant-writing and a massive lab of grad students and post-doc!

All I really wanted was a classroom full of curious undergrads and the chance to give them research experience.

This summer, at the Gordon Conference, I was surrounded by R1-types. And I, newly hired for a teaching position, was actually honest about my career goals. I said I wanted to teach undergrads and have the opportunity—but not the requirement—to do research. Some people gave me the "that's nice" dismissal. I had admitted that research was not my #1 Thing. It was like admitting some kind of weakness. Like I am "not a serious scientist" because I care about instruction.

I once had lunch with a seminar speaker who refuses to admit more than one undergrad in her lab at a time, yet seeks out graduate students who, like herself, had undergraduate research experience. She wants to take all of the benefit and share none of the burden. I find that incredibly unfair. But then, I would like to run the sort of lab that feeds graduate programs with experienced undergraduates. I suppose what I want is that burden without the same benefit.

So I plan to teach. And do research. But in that order and not the other way around. That doesn't make me a second-rate scientist. It makes me an educator.

At an institution of higher education, don't you think you need a few educators?

The chemistry Nobel should go to a woman

It's Nobel Prize season, and everyone has their picks for which chemists might get a phone call from Sweden. All the names I've seen are of accomplished people who've done excellent, influential work. There's a problem with all these lists, though: I haven't seen a single woman on any of them. Not a damn one.¹ Also notable: a general lack of brown/black people of either gender. What gives? Chemistry is not solely the domain of white and Asian men.

Folks on Twittter have been passing around the Slate article about the 50-year drought of female laureates in physics, but I think it's worth noting that the story is hardly any better in chemistry. I counted four women among the chemistry Nobel laureates: Marie Curie (1911), Irene Joliot-Curie (1935), Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), and Ada Yonath (2009). Did I miss any? I really hope so. Four is a pitiful number.

Are women really not doing Nobel-worthy work? Or do we not recognize their work with the same prestige?

Do we only recognize the super-women? Those who aren't just better, but leagues better, like Curie and Goeppert-Mayer?

When we speak of scientists, do we remember to count the women? Or do they become faceless and forgotten? Do we even listen when they speak?

So, with a few more hours to go, can we think of a few women who should be on the Nobel shortlist?

Update: I missed C&EN's list, but it also doesn't have any women. Still bummed.

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1: Admittedly, I didn't check the much longer list of previous predictions from Everyday Science. I may have overlooked somebody.

More on career breaks

I have a few more things to say about how taking a break from science/academia could kill a woman's career.

First, the Executive Director of the Elsevier Foundation wrote a letter to the New York Times about retaining women in STEM (emphasis mine):

The work-life balance challenge faced by working women is particularly difficult for those in STEM professions (science, technology, engineering and math). Taking time off the research track can be a potentially career-ending decision for a woman, as she can lose valuable connections and funding.

Career brakes indeed. This letter prompted me to flip the issue and think about it from another side: what if men took more career breaks? The anecdata I have say that paternity leave (or, parental leave, in more generic terms) is becoming more common. Could we make it an expectation that parents will take breaks?

I have heard of a university (but now can't seem to find the article in which I read about it) that stops the tenure clock for new parents automatically. They have to ask for it not to stop, rather than the other way around. This is to encourage people to use the parental leave they have and make using it less stigmatized. It's a simple enough policy that might actually change academic culture. Parental leave is generally a few months, not multiple years, of course, but if we can change the attitudes about short breaks, I think it's possible to make longer breaks more acceptable, too.

Then there's this post at Chronicle Vitae about the proliferation of "quit lit," the genre of essays about leaving academia. I have read a number of quit lit pieces, but what strikes me about the topic this time around is that academia is a place people leave. Not take a break from, but leave for good. In that sense, it's not just women who might be unwelcome to return after time away, though men aren't likely to be accused of "leaning out" in the process.

I have to wonder how much of this attitude is related to the priesthood of science (and academia in general) and the ridiculous notion that "dedicated" scientists are single-minded in the pursuit of their work to the exclusion of other interests or obligations. I'm not sure and have no data to back it up, but I suspect they are linked.

Lastly, here are a few thoughts about working parents, moms in particular.

From an interview with Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo.:

I don't think women can have it all. I just don't think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all. My husband and I have been married for 34 years. And we have two daughters. And every day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions. And you have to co-opt a lot of people to help you. We co-opted our families to help us. We plan our lives meticulously so we can be decent parents. But if you ask our daughters, I'm not sure they will say that I've been a good mom. I'm not sure. And I try all kinds of coping mechanisms.

She says "you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother," but is her husband also presented with the same decisions about being a husband or a father? Maybe, but maybe not.

I also feel the need to invoke the Finkbeiner test on her interviewer, even though she's not a scientist.¹ Until men are asked in equal proportion about how they balance family with work, we have got to stop interrogating women about it.

Finally, go read this post by dinahere about being the daughter of a working mother.

For the first 12 years of my life I don’t remember my father being there for my birthdays or attending a school play. He was busy saving lives in the OR, earning his share of the money and my mother was there for all of those occasions. So, why didn’t his absence count while hers did? Why were her absences so glaring while her presence so fading?

You know why. Women will never be able to have it all because what we think ‘all’ refers to has been pre-determined by a society that will always be stacked against us.

We can't keep blaming women when they don't measure up to an unachievable standard. The culture has got to change.

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1: I'll just leave this right here, in case you haven't seen it yet.

Career brakes

From SciLogs:

When Adam Spencer asked if female scientists should consider taking an extended break of two or three years, the answer was a resounding “No.” “Science is really a fast-moving world,” [Suzanne] Cory said. “If you get out, even for three years, it becomes very difficult to get back in.

I have heard that position many times from both men and women, and I find it repugnant. It’s a “that’s the way it is” kind of attitude.

My grandmother was a music teacher before she was a mother. She’s told me if she could do it again, she would have become an accountant, but that’s not something girls did in those days. Girls could become teachers, nurses or secretaries. And then they could become mothers. Boys could become accountants or scientists or doctors or lawyers or whatever else they wanted. “That’s the way it is.”

Well that’s not the way it is now, and thank goodness. Thank goodness that somebody stepped up and said “This is what I want to do, and my gender doesn’t matter.” Thank goodness for the women who took the hard path – and the men who helped them – so that I could become a scientist. So that I could be treated as an equal.

Does my expertise have an expiration date? Does leaving the lab for more than a month make me forget how to be a scientist? Will my PhD turn into a pumpkin after midnight? No.

But “science is a fast-moving world” they insist. So what? We all had to learn how to get into that world once, so why can’t someone do it a second time? People also change fields and get into new topics they haven’t studied before. How is that any different from “getting into” the world of science after time away? No, the “fast-moving” argument strikes me as justification to leave things as they are and not bother to make it better.

It galls me to think that women are told that if they leaves, they will not be welcome back—that a career break soon becomes a career brake.

The panel in the article was discussing “possible solutions to fixing this leaky pipeline.” Their conclusion appears to be that women shouldn’t leave in the first place.¹ But why on earth don’t we do something to support the women who want to come back?

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1: Suzanne Cory:

“You are at a crucial age now. Don’t drop off.”

The panelists also said that women need more confidence. Tell me just how much confidence I’ll have after I’ve been told time and again that it’s damn hard to be a woman in science and you can’t leave because then you’ll have let down Womanhood and leaked out of the pipeline, and if you do go you won’t be welcome back because Reasons. And how far will that confidence get me when my words are ignored until spoken by a man? How confident do I need to be to get men to stop patting me on my head? How much confidence will I need to muster to get a seat at the table and be able to keep it?

I have sworn off Women in Science luncheons because I’m sick being told that the solution for the leaky pipeline is “Believe in yourself,” like if I just close my eyes and click my heels together, that will just fix everything.

Many kinds of good scientist

I saw this article by Adam Ruben make the rounds on Twitter a few days ago. Then I saw the article spreading on Facebook, with friends from grad school saying things like "So true!" and "That's totally me!" so I took a look.

He had me until the grants ("I dread writing grants…") but then I realized I wasn't even a third of the way through his list. It just went on and on, with an increasing tone of whininess. The post spirals out into a humble brag. By the time I got to the mice he's killed, I just grumbled, "Okay, dude, we get it. Poor you."

If you can sift through it, though, he makes some points about the culture of academic science that are worth expanding on.

I am not a priestess of Science

• I don’t sit at home reading journals on the weekend.
• I have skipped talks at scientific conferences for social purposes.
• Sometimes I see sunshine on the lawn outside the lab window and realize that I’d rather be outside in the sun.
• I have gone home at 5 p.m.

I love being a scientist, but I have a mighty big problem with the idea that as a scientist (or more broadly, as an academic) I'm supposed to "devote my life" to my work. That's not called Science, that's called Workaholism. If that’s what you enjoy, then by all means do it, but don’t expect me to have the same desires.

Here's my own confession: I worked roughly 8:30-5:30 five days a week through grad school. Sometimes I would keep working when I got home, but that didn't happen every week, much less every day. I came in to work or worked at home a few weekends, but I never made it a routine thing.

It's not that I wasn't dedicated to science or my research project. It's not that I didn't care, or that I was lazy. It's that I needed balance. For the most part, I leave work at work, and I am home at home. Balance for me means lunchtime chatter with friends, Friday date nights with my husband, and brunch with the in-laws. It means taking holidays and coming to work focused. We talk and talk about "work–life balance," but the cultural incentives are heavily on the side of more work and not at all balanced.

The summer after my freshman year, I spent about three months as an REU-type student at Duquesne University. It was awesome, and I learned so very much. An important part of what I learned, though, was that I needed to Stop. I lived in a dorm, worked in the lab, and knew almost no one besides the people I worked with. I ate breakfast in the dorm room, lunch in the lab break room, and dinner back in the dorm room. I had a crappy-to-okay Internet connection, I didn't know my way around Pittsburgh (and was honestly a little frightened of wandering the city alone), and I was too shy to get to know the other girls on my floor, so I stayed in and read research papers. I read a lot of articles that summer. I still have them all, in a cardboard box tucked at the back of a closet. I didn't understand half of what they said on the first read-through, so I read them over and over, looked up terms online, asked questions in the lab, and just tried to work it all out through context. At the end of the summer, I was praised for my efforts, but I was also teetering towards burn-out. I hadn’t spent enough time away from science.

I have been very careful since then to take breaks and disconnect from work. I have sought balance. And I have advised newer students to be mindful of their own balance. I love my science very much, but I refuse to pass on the idea that the only way to succeed in science is as part of a monastic order.

I am not a priestess of Science. I got a PhD all the same.

A PhD is not proof of knowing everything

• I remember about 1% of the organic chemistry I learned in college. Multivariable calculus? Even less.
• I have felt certain that the 22-year-old intern knows more about certain subjects than I do.
• I have pretended to know what I’m talking about.
• I find science difficult.
• I have worked as a teaching assistant for classes in which I did not understand the material.
• I have taught facts and techniques to students that I only myself learned the day before.
• I have feigned familiarity with scientific publications I haven’t read. ¹

A PhD is not proof of knowing anything. It's rewarded for "Persistence to a high Degree" as much as anything. It's not about facts you've memorized, or stuff you can recall on demand–no matter what certain committee members may say. It's about learning something new. And that new stuff wasn't in the classes you took. (As I've discussed with some friends and labmates before: course material covers stuff someone already knows; research is stuff we don't know yet.)

The work you do in a PhD is, as a rule, highly specialized and focused. I spent most of 5 years watching one protein in one pathway in one kind of bacteria. I am the world's expert on the motion of that protein. Yippee. I don't have equal expertise for other bacteria, or even other proteins in the same bacteria, much less other aspects of microbiology, microscopy and the rest. But I do have some expertise, and I have much more in these particular fields than a friend who has studied the thermodynamics of two dimensional structures, or another friend who has studied the surface chemistry of semiconductors. The three of us have each spent 5 years studying chemistry, and we have each earned a PhD for doing so, but we would not be able to pick up each other's projects on a whim. It would take more time and more learning. The need to learn something new doesn't make us bad scientists.

We have got to get over the idea that we must know everything, that everyone around us knows everything and expects the same of us. It's just not true, and it sets unrealistic expectations.

Academics posture too much

• I have asked questions at seminars not because I wanted to know the answers but because I wanted to demonstrate that I was paying attention.
• I have worried more about accolades than about content.

I don't understand why seminars start with the speaker's professional biography. It's not like it'll convince me to come see the talk: I'm already there, sitting in a seat. And if you were to tell me the speaker is from Nowhere State and has done absolutely nothing of note, I'm still not about to get up and leave. Will the talk be better because I now know that Dr. I-Never-Heard-Of worked with Dr. Famous? Fame, publication record and grant money are no guarantees for talk quality, yet those are the things chosen for introductions.²

With fame so highly valued, I suppose it's no surprise that people (in my experience, mostly men) feel the need to show off. Asking a question brings you to the attention of the seminar speaker and the audience. If you don't care about the answer, please don't ask the question; you're just wasting everyone else's time with your ego-stroking. Let someone else ask the question they care about. This counts double for "questions" that don't ask anything. Those are called statements. Keep them to yourself during the open Q&A.

Most scientists don't communicate well

• I can’t read most scientific papers unless I devote my full attention, usually with a browser window open to look up terms on Wikipedia.
• When a visiting scientist gives a colloquium, more often than not I don’t understand what he or she is saying. This even happens sometimes with research I really should be familiar with.
• When I ask scientists to tell me about their research, I nod and tell them it’s interesting even if I don’t understand it at all.
• I have used big science words to sound important to colleagues.

I like words. I like big, fancy words and unusual words and old words hardly anyone uses, but if you study too long for words of four syllables,³ I lose patience. Tell me how you rowed the boat gently down the stream, but not how you 'propelled the craft placidly through the liquid solution.’⁴ I'll know you're smart by the clarity of your point, not the frills in your sentences or the jargon you use. You don't have to emulate Newton and hide your knowledge in nonsense sentences.

Scientists are people

• Sometimes science feels like it’s made of the same politics, pettiness, and ridiculousness that underlie any other job.

Sorry to break it to you, fella, but science is like any other job. There are politics and pettiness, rudeness and ridiculousness. There are easily bruised egos. There are liars and cheats. There are people doing this job, flaws, fears and all. We scientists aren't a special case.

This is what a scientist looks like

As a counter to Ruben's concept of a scientist, here is my own list:

• Science is my job, not my life.
• I do not know everything.
• I do not need to know everything.
• I do not learn by pretending to know.
• My knowledge is not spoiled by sharing it with others.
• I am not perfect.
• I am a scientist anyway.

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1: Another article I read this week was on feigning cultural literacy. It's worth a read. There's a lot of overlap here.

2: Possibly the worst scientific talk I have ever sat through was given by a Nobel laureate; it was absolutely dreadful.

3: “…he does not write with ease. He studies too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?” – Mr. Bingley, Pride & Prejudice

4: In case you're not familiar with the “sophisticated version" of "Row Your Boat"

Propel, propel, propel your craft
Placidly down the liquid solution.
Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,
Existence is but an illusion.