An interesting little story from LiveScience caught my eye on Twitter this week, about what kinds of interventions actually succeed in keeping women in physics. As a woman formerly in physics, I’m always interested in hearing what people think convinces us to stay or go. This little piece, well-intended as it was, set off some burning hellfire rage.
In the study LiveScience is reporting on, a group at Clemson took a look at five different efforts (single-sex physics classes, female physics teachers, woman scientist guest speakers, discussions of woman scientists’ work, explicit discussions of underrepresentation) to see which worked best. Excerpted from LiveScience:
“There are lots of causes and hypothesized solutions for these causes that are prevalent in our mythology,” Hazari said. “Basically our mythology around what helps girls is not necessarily true, and we have to be a little bit smarter finding evidence. The one factor we did find was that explicitly discussing underrepresentation had a significant positive effect on females’ choice of a physical science career.”
Hazai said it wasn’t clear why that one strategy proved to be effective, but she guessed that it might be because such a conversation made the issue personal for girls.
“Showing them a picture of somebody doesn’t make them want to do it themselves,” Hazari said. “But this process of discussing underrepresentation may prompt female students to reassess their own biases, thereby influencing a change. It’s really about having more meaningful discussions with them about these issues.”
Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t seem to be anywhere online, and the LiveScience article is irritatingly vague as to what constitutes a “meaningful discussion about these issues” and how large the effect was. But that’s not why it makes me rage.
I deeply resent the idea of “making it personal” to keep women in physics (or science in general). When you make it personal, you’re assigning responsibility for solving a broad problem — one that’s not her fault — to an individual woman. This is not okay.
Why? To explain, I’m going to have to make it personal.
Almost exactly a year ago, I was finishing up and defending my master’s thesis, having chosen to leave my graduate physics program without a Ph.D. By then, I’d been living with my decision to leave for at least eight months, but it hadn’t gotten any easier than when I first realized that I needed to leave. And then I read this piece by Female Science Professor, which is really a very innocuous discussion of some reasons why women leave academia, but it set me off.
Here’s an excerpt from something I wrote at the time. Emphasis is added now, and it’s also edited for length, clarity, fury, and self-loathing. I was in a bad mental place right before my defense.
As a woman who is finishing/leaving/quitting with a master’s degree instead of a Ph.D., the whole viewpoint these discussions are framed from bothers me. Perhaps it’s just due to where I read these things — mostly on blogs published by Ph.D.-holding women with research careers — but the language choices and quiet bias always make me feel like a traitor to the cause.
Yes, I am leaving before I originally intended. Yes, I know it’s what’s best for me and will make me happiest, now and in the long run. Yes, I’m confident enough in my choices to recognize that these pieces aren’t about me personally and aren’t intended to make me feel like a traitor, and in fact, they’re often written to be as objective as possible and are quite careful about their language. The fact that lots of people want more women to stay in high-level research careers does not mean that I should stay if I don’t want to, and nobody is saying this. I know all of this. I know I know I know I KNOW …
From speaking with other women who’ve left (or thought about leaving) science, “feeling like a traitor to the cause” is not uncommon. Yes, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I don’t think this issue should be ignored. Having discussions about underrepresentation aimed at “making it personal” can only make these feelings worse. Continuing with the excerpts,
… But leaving isn’t easy. To come to this decision, I’ve had to fight the fact that I’d always seen myself as a professor or researcher. I’ve had to fight the camaraderie within my circle of friends and colleagues here (and graduate-student friends even at distant locations) and place myself outside of it. I’ve had to fight the PhD-or-die-trying mindset that helps push us all through graduate school. And, in the blogosphere, I’ve had to fight the perception that the only reasons women depart are because they got driven out, and that if we fixed some issues in the system, women wouldn’t choose to leave research. Maybe this is even true; who knows? My point is that it certainly doesn’t make it any easier for those of us who do choose to leave to feel good about that choice. It removes a lot of our own agency in the decision.
This is the crux of my burning hellfire rage. The discussion around all of this already removes a woman’s own power in her decision-making process, and now we want to make the underrepresentation problem personal?
How can women possibly succeed with a setup like that? A few years back, the message I would take from this is, “Hey ladies, underrepresentation is your own problem to fix, and if you weren’t so underrepresented in physics (science) things would be better and you’d never want to leave!” With this message, a woman who wants out is stuck. It’s her fault the system is failing; it’s her fault future women won’t have it better.
This is simply not true, and it’s not okay to create a situation where someone can absorb that message.
The idea that coaxing someone into a field of academia (or anything) by making them feel like they have something to prove (basically just challenging them) is probably the worst idea for long term happiness and success that I can think of outside of blatantly forcing them to do it. There’s a pretty clear unequal treatment of women in STEM fields starting at the grade level and the idea that you can just suddenly basically challenge someone late in life to prove that women have a place in science seems like a lazy way to bandaid a much deeper wound. Not only does it result in the misery of people who are dragged into a hostile environment that they may or may not have really wanted in the first place, but it ignores the fact that women are not really positively encouraged to do STEM fields their entire lives for a large chunk of the populace. I was encouraged to do science from a very young age and I have a deep rooted drive to do it in spite of the bullshit. With the even more BS that women have to put up with at the college/graduate level in addition to the general lack of encouragement and attention they get at the grade level, it’s unfortunate but not surprising that women are underrepresented and have much lower retention rates. I certainly wouldn’t stick around either.
Meh. <3
It sounds like there are two issues here.
1) There is a systemic problem. The culture of academia is not always welcoming and many people say “oh, well it HAS to be that way.” It seems that women are made to feel particularly unwelcome because of a culture of sexism. They are made to be even MORE on the defensive, particularly if they want to have a life.
2) People want to keep women in academia. Changing the culture is extremely hard. Therefore research is done on which quick fixes have the most success. Sounds like “make women feel guilty for wanting to leave” is a successful tool. Short-term gains are used everywhere and then backed by data because the hard truth is that systemic change isn’t easy. It will require department by department changes. In all honesty, something major needs to happen that changes the debate and how we look at these issues. #OccupySTEM discussions at conferences might be a place to start. These conversations should be led by previously underrepresented groups, which leads me to another point:
This all reminds me of an earlier conversation the author of this blog post and I had about women and underrepresented groups going into fields that are more welcoming. In some cases those fields are women’s studies, African American studies, social work. In these fields, feminst and imperialist critiques are often central to the field of study. The end effect seems to be to isolate people that might otherwise be dissidents (especially women and people of color) in a relatively small/safe sector of academia.
In truth, this is true of all fields; we build thousands of little walls around where “our job” lies and the things that *really* need to be done, but no one is doing (how many times does a scientist say “I’m not qualified to answer or address that”). Peter Sellars* says there are no “jobs worth doing that pay money” and important pursuits need their own ecology built. It sounds like an opportunity to me for some sort of non-profit organization or social media project that builds dialogue and analyzes the systemic issues (perhaps like an outside auditor for the public good?) that face a field/department. At this time, this sort of thing seems impossible, but it sure won’t happen until someone tries.
*A guest lecturer for Michael Pollan’s edible education course: http://bit.ly/HXppR7 I don’t know much about him and this lecture is too long, but the citation is between minutes 15&20.