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.”

Women science bloggers

I know things have been dusty around here lately... blame grad school :)

But I ran across this comprehensive blog post on the challenges faced by female science bloggers, and thought it was interesting with a lot of relevance to academia in general. The other thing I love about it is that it lets women bloggers speak for themselves, instead of making assumptions or generalizations. So check it out!

An excerpt:

Why isn’t there a girl version of Ed Yong or Carl Zimmer? Why is there no woman in the elite list of the most well known science bloggers? The excuse that there aren’t enough high-quality female science writers just doesn’t cut it anymore. They’re out there, and they have been for years. Incredible women like Sheril Kirshenbaum have been standing up and taking the full brunt of the internet’s misogyny with the utmost grace. [link added by me]

100 Best Spine Surgeons in America...What gives?!

This is cross-posted with my other blog.  Cheers!

The internal page for "my" college is boasting the inclusion of one of our faculty members on the recently released list of the "100 Best Spine Surgeons in America" by Becker's Orthopaedic and Spine Review. I was interested in which instiutions hosted the other 99 best spine surgeons, so I checked out the list myself. After getting about halfway down the page, scrolled back up, then began counting to confirm a feared conclusion: of the 100 "best" spine surgeons in this country, just 2 of them are female. I was dumbfounded--particularly as medical school classes are reporting higher and higher numbers of female entrants and applicants. And while I may have subconsciously expected a male-majority on the aforementioned list, the 98% figure was astonishing.

 

It's unclear where such a gender bias originates. I'd be willing to bet that of all the spine specialists in the united states, far more than 2% of them are women--which would rule out a representitive proportionality on the list. The site for the list reports:

"Physicians included in this list have been selected based on surveys, research and nominations. All physicians who are placed on the list undergo a substantial review with other peers and through our own research."

To me, this seems like odd selection criteria for surgeons. I suppose what really must be addressed first is the question: what makes a great spine surgeon? I would imagine it would depend on who you ask. Patients might value bedside manner and intrapersonal interactions. Other physicians and hospital administrators might value a colleague who is easy to work with and yields good patient outcomes, or a surgeon who takes on challenging cases. An insurance company might value surgeons with the most cost-effective outcomes, and those who report minimal "relapses." So the notion of an objective survey truely assessing the BEST spinal surgeons in the country is questionable, at best. Research and nominations also seem to depend on who is doing the nominating. It's also important to realize that the subtitle for Becker's Review is "Business and Legal Issues for Orthopaedic and Spine Practices."

Ultimately, I cannot answer whether the list is biased or not, only raise question with the striking minority of female surgeons.



Climate in Crisis

Here's a snippet of what I've been working on recently ("snippet" by grad student metrics). I presented a version of this at a History of Science conference last weekend (where I also included a section about the history of the Green Revolution), and got some positive feedback from professors and fellow graduate students.

"Look, my fear is that climate change is the crisis, the biggest crisis of all, and that if we aren’t careful, if we don’t come up with a positive vision of how climate change can make our economies and our world more just, more livable, cleaner, fairer, then this crisis will be exploited to militarize our societies, to create fortress continents. And we’re really facing a choice. And, you know, I think what we really need now is for the people fighting for economic justice and environmental justice to come together."

-Naomi Klein (author of Shock Doctrine) [1]

Two years ago I found myself wandering through rice paddies on the Southern coast of Bangladesh. One year earlier, this region had been devastated by a cyclone, and national and international aid organizations promptly swamped the region. I was there interning for a Bangladeshi non-governmental organization (or NGO), which was running an “agricultural rehabilitation program.” This program aimed to help farmers recover from the disaster and to avert a national food crisis. The NGO gave farmers free rice seed, fertilizer, machinery, and training in new intensive management practices. And they weren’t just giving out any rice seed- this was a new hybrid variety of rice that the NGO had commercialized and was selling in other regions of Bangladesh, but was new to this coastal region. This project was walking the line between disaster relief and exploitation of impoverished farmers, as once the crisis was averted, farmers would be locked into this new technology, paying higher prices for the new seeds and for more fertilizer.

A British journalist picked up the Bangladeshi story around the same time, writing that the NGO “is acting like a parallel state, but one that is accountable to no one.”[2] Similar criticisms are often made about agricultural research and exploitation of developing countries- for example, the Gates Foundation is currently calling for a Green Revolution in Africa, investing in controversial genetically modified crops. My experience in Bangladesh made me start to think about the role of organizations and governments in climate change adaptation.

Bangladesh is predicted to be hit very hard by climate change, due to its environmental vulnerability as a low-lying coastal country, as well as its social vulnerability of widespread poverty and an economic reliance on rice production. I started to wonder how the threat of future climate change will shape the agricultural research agendas in developing countries, and the relationships between power and technological development.

The concept of adaptation is defined by the IPCC as “adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects.”[3] In both climate change mitigation and adaptation, future-oriented conceptions of societal and technological solutions are used to justify present action. Climate adaptation is a deliberate restructuring of sociotechnical systems, supposedly to produce optimal social outcomes- such as alleviation of poverty, prevention of disease, preemption of cultural conflicts, and avoidance of food shortages. However, not only are there competing interests for this restructuring, as I saw with the Bangladeshi NGO, but also, people are faced with the risk and uncertainty of implementing these changes.

The construction of the climate crisis, and perceptions of risk and uncertainty are likely to drastically vary between scientists, policy-makers, and farmers. New agricultural technologies are implemented, or not, based on these perceptions. As the past Green Revolution has shown, it is not always the “best” technology that is adopted in agriculture, but rather the technologies that capture the imaginations of those in power, and that consequently shape the geopolitical landscape. In the face of climate change adaptation, the “best” technology becomes even more burdened by uncertainty, making agricultural development a channel for authority based on knowledge claims of the future.

Back to Bangladesh in the cyclone crisis aftermath, the NGO overlooked women’s significant role in agriculture. The NGO focused its resources and training on men. Although women do nearly all of the post-harvest processing and are often involved in other aspects of rice production, there was a lack of reflexivity in the NGO about its agriculture program, and especially in the disaster rehabilitation program. And this was from an NGO that pioneered women’s empowerment in rural Bangladesh for over 20 years. Even in central Bangladesh, the NGO was empowering women through microfinance and to sell hybrid seeds, breaking taboos on women’s participation in rice production and in public markets. What caused this drastic divergence of approaches to women's participation in agriculture?

If we fail to articulate a vision of the world in the face of a changing climate, then I fear that Naomi Klein's predictions will materialize (talk to me about the Green Revolution and the role of the feared "population bomb"). How will we imagine new sociotechnical systems in the face of this anticipated disaster? How will global environmental governance and conceptions of climate change adaptation be used to authorize profound interventions into peoples’ lives and livelihoods? What sorts of technological interventions will we accept? Or promote? How will we imagine new social arrangements in the face of climate-induced migration? How important is building socioecological adaptive capacity and resilience, vs. implementing technological fixes? Over the next few years I will be studying a tiny aspect of climate change adaptation and its relationship with agricultural research, but these broader questions are driving me.

[1] Goodman, 2011. http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2482/naomi_klein_why_climate_change/

[2] Kelly, 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/20/internationalaidanddevelopment.bangladesh

[3] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001. Third Assessment Report Glossary. P. 365.

Beauty and Brains

There is a really cool article on the New York Times about Natalie Portman's scientific success: finalist for the Intel Science Talent Search, straight-A student, Harvard degree in neuroscience (she studied the evolution of the brain). Now Ms. Portman boasts an Oscar for Best Actress as well--and I'll admit to being genuinely impressed. There's some mention of some other outrageously sucessful, gorgeous, and intelligent Hollywood women, too, who provide nice role models for young women who aspire to be actresses or scientists.

The articles ends with: "You can be a scientist, but if you want your name in lights, you’d better play one on TV." I hope that one day this changes, and little girls can look forward to the prestige of being a scientist in the same function that Hollywood actresses play today.

Women in Philosophy

This weekend our department welcomed our prospective graduate students, and I hosted one student myself. Last night and this morning we ended up talking a lot about feminism- not surprising, since the director of our program is a brilliant social engineer and probably matched us together because of our similar interests.

I've been thinking lately about how I represent myself as a woman and as a feminist, both personally and professionally. Since coming to grad school, I have been more hesitant to talk about feminism, other than about 5 people who I trust and respect. I don't want to reveal too much here, other than hoping to spur some public or private reflections about how gender dynamics are examined or unexamined in different institutional contexts.

Although I come from a field (biology) that is roughly equally male and female (although there are more male professors), I've been interacting with more philosophers, which is a very male dominated field, but the older generations tend to be pretty reflexive about this disparity (they recognize it, and likely even think of themselves as feminists- consider that many current philosophy professors were in grad school in the 70s).

But I feel that in everyday interactions, gender dynamics often go unnoticed- such as the gender composition of informal and formal groups, the subconscious judgments that get made about me because I am a single woman, and the role gender plays in professional/personal interactions (the line between the two is often blurry in grad school). On one hand, I dearly respect and cherish my professors and colleagues regardless of their gender; on the other hand, I wonder whether how we might be unconsciously perpetuating these disparities, and how actively we are working for equity [please note that by "we," I mean both men and women].

Thoughts from those in philosophy and others?

P.S. If you want to know what partly fueled our evening discussions, it was this and this.

Evelyn Fox Keller

This interview is worth a listen.

Evelyn Fox Keller was trained as a theoretical physicist, wrote her dissertation in molecular biology and made groundbreaking contributions to mathematical biology, and is now one of the preeminent scholars of "gender and science," History & Philosophy of Science, and Science & Technology Studies. Her writings on both gender and the history of molecular biology are also fantastic.


The rest of the interview series, "How to Think About Science," also looks very interesting! Many of those authors are in the field of science studies, like I am.