Stress, guilt, and leadership

This morning I attended a Women’s Leadership Summit at ASU, hosted by the Faculty Women’s Association. There we about 50, maybe more, faculty, graduate students and staff from ASU there. There were two panel discussions: an “early” and “late” career panel and then group conversations in between.

The conference gave me a lot to think about, partly because I’m interested in becoming the best leader I can be, both within and outside of academia. I heard some frank insights that I don’t often get from mentors (although I do have a great advisor) about the trade-offs of work, leadership, and life. A lot of the messages resonated with my experiences in the environmental movement, as well as now in academia.

One of my “big picture” challenges is how to have a better perspective and embrace more visionary leadership, rather than my very managerial style. We talked about how we often associate charismatic leadership with male traits, and managerial leadership with more female traits, such as nurturing and collaboration. The truth is, all leaders need to embrace what we view as female leadership traits. But we, as women, also need to step out of our comfort zone, and as one of the panelists put it, to be comfortable with ambiguity and change, and to grow from the times that we feel uncomfortable. In the end, most people agreed that leadership and management are not clear-cut distinctions; vision needs to be balanced with accountability.

The points that I took more the heart right now were about the daily challenge of balancing life and work. First, the facilitator at our table, an organizational psychologist, told us about a book called Eat the Frog. It’s about doing your most unpleasant tasks first, because the easy tasks will always be easy. This hit home because lately I’ve been feeling so overwhelmed that I’ve been putting off higher priority tasks (like applying for AZ residency, or revising my prospectus) because I just don’t have the mental energy to deal with them.

What went along with this point is that no matter how much we schedule our time, there will always be crises at work or at home. We should recognize that these are part of our job, and that times of crisis and non-routine are actually where you can become a leader. Another panelist made a very passionate point that there is no such thing as “balance.” Instead there is just a constant struggle to get rid of the guilt (when we’re at home/with family, guilt about not working; when we’re working, guilt about not being home). Yep, hit home again, although generally I don’t struggle with this as much. I just struggle with thinking that I should be working all the time, and then getting burned out, and then not actually working enough. It’s a vicious cycle.

If you’re still reading this, I have been struggling a lot to keep everything together this semester. I finally applied for my last fellowship (for now), but I’m helping organize a conference and I took on a slightly more important role in a graduate student group. Plus teaching, taking a full course load, and having a boyfriend—although we balance our time together well and he is very supportive of me.

Today was as challenging as ever, even though I didn’t have class. I’ve been incredibly stressed out by small frustrations (i.e. problems with my homework, which after emailing my professor, even he told me not to stress out) as well as things I need to handle in a less stressful way (waiting for fellowships, waiting on emails so that I can send more emails). I have gained a lot of skills for dealing with stress and anxiety in my undergraduate experience, but this is a different monster. This is constant, creeping guilt and stress that doesn’t go away after you send a few emails, talk it over, and have a beer. I’m really hoping that once I get a few projects done, things will get a bit better. But I also realize that this is how academia operates, and I need to be able to deal with this if I want to be successful. Step one, eat the frog (I actually ordered the book).

[I figured a photo of Liz Lemon would be appropriate here. Twice this week I've heard someone quote Jack's line from last week on Kenneth's job prospects: "He's a white male with hair, Lemon. The sky's the limit."]

Lady scientist Halloween costumes

In the spirit of the season, here are some awesome how-to's on dressing like a totally bad-ass lady scientist. And purposefully, these are not "sexy scientist" costumes....

Ada Lovelace

Her story (via Take Back Halloween):

Ada Byron Lovelace (1815-1852) was one of the most remarkable visionaries in the history of science. Her friend Charles Babbage invented the Analytical Engine to crunch numbers; it was Ada who realized that it could do much more. She saw that a mechanical device—a computer, if you will—could solve all kinds of analytical problems, as long as they could be treated algorithmically. She was a hundred years ahead of her time. Nowadays she’s recognized as “the world’s first computer programmer,” though we think that actually understates the novelty and breadth of her vision. It makes her sound a little like an early employee at IBM.

Lisa Meitner

Her story (via Take Back Halloween):

You would think that the person who discovered nuclear fission would be one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. You would think she’d be a household name. But unless you’re a geek or a history buff, it’s possible that you’ve never even heard of Lise Meitner (1878-1968). 

Meitner was born in Austria at a time when it was against the law for girls to attend school past the age of 13. Yet she overcame a lifetime of legal and social barriers to become one of the top nuclear physicists in the world. In the 1930s she set up a team in Berlin to explore transuranium elements, recruiting Otto Hahn to do the chemistry experiments. Anti-Semitism intervened in the form of the Nazis, and Meitner, born a Jew, was forced to flee Germany in 1938. From her exile in Sweden she continued to direct the experiments in Berlin, communicating with Hahn by letter and even meeting with him secretly in Copenhagen. The result was one of the great breakthroughs in the history of physics. On Christmas Day 1938, in a huge rush of insight while mulling over the data from Berlin, Meitner suddenly Saw It All: that the atom could be split, that the resulting energy was described by Einstein’s E = mc², that nuclear theory itself had to be fundamentally revised. 

Hahn published the fission results without listing Meitner as co-author, a move that was perhaps understandable given the Nazi situation. But what happened next was not: in 1944 Otto Hahn alone was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering nuclear fission. Meitner got bupkis. The Nobel committee simply ignored her existence. And so it is that Lise Meitner is often called the greatest scientist to never win a Nobel prize.

Can feminists wear make-up? And other musings...

Scale of make-up intensity, representative of what was used in the study. Source.

A recent study about perceptions of women wearing make-up is making the rounds. I'm interested because I think about this- will my colleagues and students take me more or less seriously if I'm dressed up or wearing make-up?

I am somewhat pleased that they didn't just measure perceptions of attractiveness, but also included things like "competence" and "trustworthiness"- in other words- things that actually matter to women in the workplace. It's a weird sort of feminist slant, as highlighted in the NYTimes article about the study (see below). So how do you use this science to your advantage?

“There are times when you want to give a powerful ‘I’m in charge here’ kind of impression, and women shouldn’t be afraid to do that,” by, say, using a deeper lip color that could look shiny, increasing luminosity, said Sarah Vickery, another author of the study and a Procter & Gamble scientist. “Other times you want to give off a more balanced, more collaborative appeal.” (NYTimes)

The article also brings up the idea of make-up as an "extended phenotype." This implies that wearing make-up is a sociobiological trait meant to improve the appearance genetic fitness. For example,

Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said the conclusion that makeup makes women look more likable — or more socially cooperative — made sense to him because “we conflate looks and a willingness to take care of yourself with a willingness to take care of people.” (NYTimes)

But hello, beauty is a social construct! Especially when it comes to trends like make-up. Like many sociobiology studies, this one seems to be conflating essentialized gender roles and socialization of our culture to certain beauty standards.

Now watch this.


Miss Representation 8 min. Trailer 8/23/11 from Miss Representation on Vimeo.

The kid at 5:05 is my favorite! He has already broken free of the "man box."

Gendered sweat

Tonight I was briefly annoyed by a women's deodorant commercial. The company in the ad asked women to wear bells on their wrist for an entire day to show how much they move (wow, great set up, I'm hooked!), then went into some fancy science about motion activated deodorant. It was a weird commercial, but I wrote it off as one of the many ads aiming *so* high to capture the sophisticated women's intellect. Here is the British version of the commercial:



A few minutes later, I saw a commercial for men's deodorant that framed sweating in a completely different way: it featured "great men of history," working up a sweat doing important manly things like inventing cool things and ruling a country. I couldn't find the exact commercial, but watch the one below and you get the idea. The contrast between these two commercials is what made me start to think...



Obviously, marketers have long employed gendered advertising, especially for personal care products. First, it seems like products are either labeled "normal"/"regular" and "women's" separately, thus establishing masculinity as the norm, and femininity as the deviation. Second, general products are becoming less and less unisex (coming soon: toothpaste for women?).

So I know it's pretty bad that these commercials reinforce gender roles in such an obvious way and setting up women for low expectations (woo, riding public transportation, biking, tennis, and... what's that?... shaking out a rug? yay!), but I also know there's not much I can do about it. And hey, at least we've stopped believing that period sweat is toxic, right? Right... thus, I present you with some of my favorite internet things poking fun and gendered beauty products.

The timeless Sarah Haskins on the technoscience-beauty-industrial-complex:



Sociological Images and Stephen Colbert on, "Is your armpit unattractive?"

And finally, based on the Hyperbole and a Half comic, "Shower products for men":

Women scientists and Home economics

This article, coincidentally by a professor of history at Michigan State University, calls for a revival of Home Economics as a response to widespread obesity. The first half of the article is about the foundations of Home Economics, which was a legitimate science, albiet one run almost entirely by women. The unequivocal founder of Home Economics was Ellen Swallow Richards, who began her graduate career as a chemist, coined the english version of "ecology" (based on Haekel's Oekologie), taught at MIT, and was critical to the formation of no less than half a dozen applied science fields, such as sanitary science, nutrition science, domestic science, and human ecology.

Not coincidentally, I wrote a paper on Ellen Swallow Richards last fall and, dear reader, I'm happy to provide it to you. I was really interested in her theories human-environmental interactions, so I mostly focused on that. But some of my main points will interest environmental, women's studies, and history of science scholars:

• Ernst Haeckel introduced oekology (ecology) in 1866, defining it as:

“knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment… the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence” (Foster, 2000:195)

• Richards envisions ecology as the science of the total environment, introducing it to America in 1892
• Swallow situated women as guardians of the home environment, emphasizing safety, efficiency, education and relief from drudgery
• As the "organismal" definition of ecology prevailed in the male-dominated sciences, Richards’ tried to re-brand her vision of ecology as domestic science, home economics, human ecology, and "euthenics"- as opposed to eugenics- as "the science of the controllable environment"

Some scholars recognize Ellen Swallow Richards as a proto-feminist, or even ecofeminist. Sandra Harding writes, "Might our understanding of nature and social life be different if the people who discovered the laws of nature were the same ones who cleaned up after them?” (Harding, 2001:27) Unfortunately, I believe that many of Swallow's theories on the environment disappeared after her death. Although she was a prominent chemist at the time, even appearing in books such as American Men of Science, she was marginalized because of her gender and her progressive views on human-environment interactions. Her version of Home Ecology was watered-down significantly over the next century. Nonetheless, I applaud the call for a reinvigoration of Home Economics- perhaps one that recognizes the role of men and women in the household.

It's worth reconsidering your viewpoint when...

... you are in a privileged position in the science community, and refuse to take a woman seriously and instead completely belittle her experience with unwanted sexual attention (and her extremely rational response, I might add).

Needless to say I'm interested in the recent hubub in the "skeptic" (atheist) community, in which a female blogger received widespread criticism (including from Richard Dawkins) for calling attention to the sexual harassment she experienced at a recent conference. The skeptic community (which is overwhelmingly male, I believe) seems to be reeling with questions like "then when is it appropriate to hit on women?" Many of these questions and conflicts seem to apply to the academic community at large.

I was discussing this with a friend, and I sometimes feel that academia, among other things (conferences, the work structure in general) are institutions that were set up in the absence of women's participation in them. Thus sometimes it feels like a constant struggle to "break in" to these institutions and the "boys clubs" that often inhabit them. So don't make it more difficult for us. Use a little more thought before you act, and reconsider that your viewpoint is the only one that's important.

It's not fair to just ignore sexuality; it's a part of human nature that I believe if we address more openly and set new norms for male/female relationships in our post-public/private-sphere society, it will lead to empowerment of all genders.

The final thing worth reconsidering is what you might think of "sexual harassment" as: Just because something's not physical doesn't make it not painfully uncomfortable, intimidating, and contributes to the overall context of fear that women often live their everyday lives in.

Scientists at the top

Actually, an interview with women scientists at the top of their field. See article here.

An excerpt:

DR. HIRSCH: I think the judgment about whether someone should be a scientist or not is a very serious one, because the life of a scientist, whether you are a woman or you are a man, is very difficult. It is a nonstandard life. It is a life with constraints and obligations that don’t come with other types of professions. If my daughter has to ask “Should I be a scientist?” the answer is no. But if my daughter says to me, “I was born to be a scientist. I can’t be anything else. This is my life,” then you say, “You go, girl.”