Insights about Cumulative Small Slights
Nancy Hopkins must be one of the most important leaders of women in science in the recent past; she and her committee at MIT investigated every detail of how women and men were supported as faculty members there from 1995-1997 and wrote a report, covered in this MIT faculty newsletter and here, detailing what was inequitable and how it could be remedied. Differences in laboratory size and support turned out to me much more common than anyone had suspected. That report has served as a model at many universities. Robin Heyden's blog covered Nancy Hopkins recently and I highly recommend reading it. The bottom line Robin Heyden suggests is that slights to women in science today are multiple and small today, not major slaps in the face. This rain of tiny oversights and implied exclusions can put invisible pressure on women scientists and scientists-in-training.
I remember things that happened to me that were surely too small or too unsubstantiated to be actionable but that contributed to my feeling bad about my prospects as a woman scientist. When I was in graduate school, the written qualifying examinations were hard and there was a rumor that the faculty members were out to fail a particular woman. One person did fail, but it was a different woman. Some of us women thought that since the examinations were graded without names, they had made a mistake and misidentified that examination. Rumor, innuendo, nothing reportable. But one woman was lost from our class because she never recovered her confidence, and the other woman, who had been the subject of the rumors, finished her degree but walked around with her head down a lot. This incident is far from the obvious slapdown that happened to me at Caltech back in 1963, when I met with a professor about graduate study and told me, "We don't really admit women here." But it's still a painful experience that increases the anxiety of women.
Have you experienced small incidents that might add up to a negative message? How have you handled them?
Grow a beard! That really speaks to mental images of scientists, doesn't it. I have always been interested in the Draw a Scientist studies showing how many people, including kids, draw a male in lab coat with glasses and, yes, a beard!
Sounds kind of silly, but I think that controls who gets invited, who gets hired, who gets awards way too often.
I was once told that I had to grow a beard to be a true physiologist. I laughed. That got less funny as time went by.
These cumulative slights are bad enough on their own, but worse, they are a symptom of a condition that seems to be simply accepted in the sciences. The inequities and stereotyping in biological sciences are obvious and I shudder at the thought of how much worse it must be in engineering or math. I whole heartedly agree that mentoring is the key - the key to giving women at all levels some confidence and assurance that what they are experiencing is real and not just happening to them and the key to empowering women to stand up for themselves and to teach other women to stand up for themselves. For a few years, I organized a series of talks sponsored by ADVANCE, highlighting things that have or have not changes for women in science, salary inequities, balancing work and home life, jobs beyond academics, etc. They were always well-received and from feedback, eye-openers to the newer women in science. Short of mentoring, panel sessions like these could also be a way to educate women on what they are up against and ways to handle the inequities and promote change.
I'd agree with that. I think that being small, we tend to think we are imagining it all unless someone else steps forward to tell us we are not! This is why mentoring is so important. When I started the mentoring program at Caltech for female grad students paired with postdoc mentors, many of the mentors did not want to talk about inequities, but you can't help but do so when your student tells you that everyone else went to a conference except her and the one other female student in the lab even though they had a poster ready to go. There just wasn't enough money, and the priority was too low. Or their advisors had encouraged them to start thinking about industry from their 4th year on even though they had stated they wanted academe all the way. Perhaps it was a good recommendation based on some insight of the advisor's? Or maybe it was that they had just gotten married and he felt they were not going to commit to the life of a science nun anymore. Regardless, it's the perception of those slights that matters just as much as the slight. Having another person you respect counter them gives back the self-confidence to move forward without that burden of self-doubt holding you back!
Female Science Professor calls these micro-inequities; see here: http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2009/09/start-seeing-micro-inequities.html
Maybe she's wrong in saying it's pretty much all small things now. I think big things still go wrong for women who are trying to go into these fields, especially engineering.
