Wheat-dogg's World

JISHOU, HUNAN — One of my favorite Internet hangouts is ScienceBlogs.com, which has a veritable pantheon of engaging and intelligent bloggers commenting on everything from creationist malarkey and real science to … shoes. One of the goddesses there is Dr. Isis (her mortal form is depicted below), who recently started a project to encourage more young women to enter the sciences.

Dr. Isis and I share the same concern. I spent more than two decades teaching physics to sometimes reluctant teenagers, and because our school basically required everyone to take physics to graduate, I managed to teach nearly everyone who passed through those hallowed halls.

Roughly half my students were girls. I don’t have any hard statistics, but I think about as many women as men among my students entered medical, scientific or technical fields. The numbers for both genders are comparatively small, given the arts-and-humanities bent of the school, but it’s the parity of the numbers that I am proud of.

For a student to love math and science is hard enough in the United States — such students are labeled nerds, geeks, and weirdos, because math and science are supposed to be (a) really hard and (b) really boring. To love something simultaneously hard and boring makes you a bit of a social outcast. [Cross-cultural aside: This kind of ostracism does not happen in China, or in Asia as a whole. Here, math and science students are virtually worshiped, which might help explain why Asian students kick American students' asses on international math and science exams.]

The bias against being a math and science whiz is especially hard on girls, who (still) are subtly or bluntly steered away from a natural love of math and science. Or, if they are particularly hell-bent on being scientists, the girls may be encouraged to enter the “soft” scientific fields of biology or environmental science.

I will offer two egregious examples of anti-girl scientist bias, to illustrate how hard it might be for a young girl to enter the sciences.

The Bridge Non-Builder: One year early in my career, I gave my Conceptual Physics students a year-end project to do. I offered several possible project ideas, including building a bridge from popsicle sticks (a competition coincidentally sponsored by the local engineering school). To my delight, one of the girls in the class said she would do it. She was not a gifted student, but she was bright and attentive in class, and I hoped the experience would give her more confidence in being a science student.

Her boyfriend told her building a bridge would be too hard. So she gave up the idea, and did a paper instead. I was a new teacher, and acquiesced. Even today I regret not sticking to my guns and requiring her to follow through on making that bridge.

The Broken-Hearted Math Lover: This girl was, frankly speaking, one of my worst students. Utterly charming and a great artist, but apparently incapable of any clear, logical deduction, she once told me that she actually loved math when she was in elementary school. Surprised by this revelation, I asked why she now hated math (as she so frequently stated in class).

In middle school, her (male) teacher asked her to solve a problem on the chalkboard. She made a mistake in the solution and got the answer wrong. Her teacher then publicly berated her, told her she was stupid, and made her sit down. End of story.

Dr. Isis is clearly a survivor of such passion-killing shenanigans. To quote her biographical squib, she has “some fancy-sounding degrees and is a physiologist at a major research university working on some terribly impressive stuff.”

Judging from her blog, she is also a concerned and serious educator who wants more women to become scientists. Her concern is further down the pipeline than mine was: the attrition that occurs between training and real jobs. So she started The Letters to Our Daughters Project. She wrote several women scientists and asked them to write letters to their “daughters” — women scientists-in-training — to share their experiences on the road to paying jobs in the sciences.

Two have shared their letters so far.

The first comes from Dr. Pascale Lane, a pediatrics scientist at the University of Nebraska. (Lane has her own blog here.) Her letter encourages women to embrace the word, bitch, if it denigrates their yen to succeed.

When my daughter was starting middle school, I explained the world to her in my own warped way. I give my students the same advice. If you have a voice that gets heard in the world, someone will call you a bitch. If you perform acts of kindness and charity, someone will say that the bitch is showing off! If you show more spine than a jelly fish, someone eventually will brand you a bitch. Accept it. If someone calls you a bitch, you are probably doing something right.

The second is from Dr. Barbara Goodman, a physiologist at the University of South Dakota. Hers is more autobiographical than Lane’s and describes the challenges she had as a young mother pursuing her graduate and post-doc degrees. She ends it with this summary:

Reflecting back on our moves and the evolution of my career, I can say that having a supportive spouse who was a willing co-parent and colleague has been the key to my success in my career. I only realized after about 6 months of marriage (now 37 years) that what I was and had always been was a FEMINIST. Fortunately for me as a smart girl, my family and my teachers never told me that I could not be who I wanted to be when I grew up.

And what of the mysterious and alluring Dr. Isis? In a true confessions post, she admits to have taken a non-traditional path to her final profession, which including dropping out of university to enter the workforce, only to return with a fire in her belly. And Isis is candid about her dual role as mommy and scientist and Major Research University (MRU):

Dr. Isis blogs often about managing a family while having a career. Frankly, I consider the dual spheres of my life to both be essential to my long-term happiness, but family is really the major source of joy in my life and the greatest part of the beginning and end of my day. I love to wear an apron, cook dinner, give baths, read stories, and rock the Isis kids to sleep. Except tonight I have something to confess…

I am a little tired of being with the immediate Isis family and am ready to go back to work.

I feel like a horrible mother, but I am ready to end my vacation and go back to work and reestablish the regular routine of my life. I appreciate the need to go away and spend time with my husband and wee ones.. I really do. We have been at Grandmom Isis’s house for the last four days and, I must be frank, four days of full-time, unabated mommyhood (especially to a two year old) is about my limit. I really need the duality of work and family in my life in order to function.

By the way, if you were wondering, Isis also blogs about … shoes.