Balancing Act. From Mario’s Planet
It can be a balancing act to find female role models for girls in science without focusing too much on traditional female roles. If a teen girl wants to have both a family and a science career, do you talk about women who have done it? What bothers me about this ‘struggle’ is that we don’t ask the question when it is a young boy who wants a family and science career. My default position is to talk about the science in one arena and talk about personal lives in another. If I’m talking about a male scientist, I try to find out the personal details that are often included for women.
Once glaring example of talking too much about the personal lives of women scientists was done at the end of March 2013. The New York Times wrote an obituary for rocket scientist Yvonne Brill and led with her ‘mean beef stroganoff’. Her 2011 National Medal of Technology and Innovation wasn’t mentioned until the third paragraph! There was all kinds of outrage and examples are seen in this great Storify. The New York Times then changed their obituary and you can see the before and after. What added insult to injury was that earlier that month, I had read about the Finkbeiner test to measure gender bias in science and it has some great suggestions for writing about women. I then created an assignment for students to write about women in science and pass the Finkbeiner test.
The students were asked to write about a scientist whose work they admire and who happened to be a woman. However, they had to pass the Finkbeiner test so the story could not mention:
- she’s a woman
- her husband’s job
- her child care situation
- her nurturing nature
- how she was surprised by competitiveness
- how she’s a role model for other women
- how she’s “the first woman to…”
The students wrote about:
Please check them out and let them know if they slipped anywhere!
I decided to write about Mary Lyon, the person who discovered X inactivation, the area I studied for my PhD. I realized that I had always thought of her as a woman who did science – not as a scientist who happened to be female. However, I don’t know details of her personal life. I was pleasantly surprised that her Wikipedia page wasn’t that different than those for men. Unfortunately, that may be because she didn’t marry and have children. Her interview in PLOS Genetics does spend some time on what is what like to be a woman but it is a historical perspective and I can see the questions being asked of men. Most of the interview focuses on her work.
I will definitely continue this assignment in future years. I may even add the assignment to write a reverse-Finkbeiner on male scientists. What do you think?
Sarah Vollett says
My experience when working in biological research, and one of the reasons that I ultimately left, was how little room was given to ANY of the scientists to have families. Women were grudgingly granted six months of maternity leave, which they needed to continually justify, and that was the easiest example for me to point to to justify my decision to leave science. But I was also discouraged by the 12 hour days, 6 days a week, that seemed to be considered necessary to achieve success at the PhD or Post Doctoral level. I knew that these weren’t the hours I would ever want to work if I was going to raise the kind of family I hope to one day have; but I also knew they weren’t the hours I wanted a spouse working, either. I knew scientists who rarely saw their children, at least during the week, because of the hours they worked. This was by no means true of all the scientists I worked with, male or female, but there were certainly cases where one parent was in the lab constantly, while their spouse was charged with the vast majority of the child raising.
I know an assistant professor at one of the top research universities in Canada who asked to take paternity leave when his son was born. His department head told him that he would be given leave from his teaching requirements, but asked whether he (the prof) was still planning to come in to do a certain amount of research support. When the assistant professor answered in the affirmative, as his wife was also on leave, his department head told him that he was welcome to work reduced hours, but that he shouldn’t call it “parental leave” if he was still working. His explanation was because it put female professors taking maternity leave in an awkward position, by setting the precedent that they needed to spend a certain amount of time in the lab even if they were technically on leave. I’m not entirely sure what my feelings are about the situation (it still seems to treat male and female scientists differently), but I do at least appreciate that the department head recognized that this had caused problems in his department in the past.
We tend to judge female scientists by whether they can maintain their “feminine duties” (raising their kids, supporting their husband, cooking a delicious stroganoff, etc.), and yet we rarely judge male scientists by whether or not their career has also allowed them to support their family. If we are going to see changes in the scientific field that supports both male and female scientists in raising families, would it help if we highlighted family roles when profiling scientists of both sexes? I Would reverse-Finkbeiner profiles done for male scientists help build this awareness? I don’t have an answer, but I think the roles of family in the scientific field is a conversation we need to have.
Sarah Vollett says
PS I am very impressed by your students’ profiles of female scientists! They did a very good job of highlighting their accomplishments in clear terms, and I now know much more than I did before about several highly accomplished researchers.
genegeek says
Thanks for the comment! I know several male profs in Vancouver who did take parental leave with the support of their departments but that is in very recent years. When they mentioned it at conferences, men in other cities thought it was strange = probably depends a lot on the cultural norms and the individuals.
That’s an interesting comment re: parental leave and still working. I like the acknowledgement about pressures but it will also suggest that men aren’t taking any leave.
And didn’t the students do a great job?!?