Tag Archives: diversity in science

Professional communities, barriers to inclusion, and the value of a posse.

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Last week, I wrote a post about an incident connected to a professional conference. A male conference-goer wrote a column attempting to offer praise for a panel featuring four female conference-goers but managed to package this praise in a way that reinforced sexist assumptions about the value women colleagues add to a professional community.

The women panelists communicated directly with the male commentator about his problematic framing. The male commentator seemed receptive to this feedback. I blogged about it as an example of why it’s important to respond to disrespect within professional communities, even if it’s not intended as disrespect, and despite the natural inclination to let it go. And my post was praised for offering a discussion of the issue that was calm, sensitive, and measured.

But honestly? I’m unconvinced that my calm, sensitive, measured discussion will do one whit of good to reduce the incidence of such casual sexism in the future, in the community of science journalist or in any other professional community. Perhaps there were some readers who, owing to the gentle tone, were willing to examine the impact of describing colleagues who are women primarily in terms of their looks, but if a less gentle tone would have put them off from considering the potential for harm to members of their professional communities, it’s hard to believe these readers would devote much energy to combatting these harms — whether or not they were being asked nicely to do so.

Sometimes someone has to really get your attention — in a way that shakes you up and makes you deeply uncomfortable — in order for you to pay attention going forward. Maybe feeling bad about the harm to someone else is a necessary first step to developing empathy.

And certainly, laying out the problem while protecting you from what it feels like to be one of the people struggling under the effects of that problem takes some effort. If going to all that trouble doesn’t actually leave enough of an impression to keep the problem from happening some more, what’s the point?

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What does it take to create a diverse professional community? It requires more than an absence of explicit rules or standing practices that bar certain kinds of people from membership, more even that admitting lots of different kinds of people into the “pipeline” for that profession. If you’re in the community by virtue of your educational or employment status but you’re not actually part of the discussions that define your professional community, it may help the appearance of diversity, but not the reality of it.

The chilly climate women have been talking about in a variety of male-dominated professional communities is a real thing.

Being a real member of a professional community includes being able to participate fully in venues for getting your work and insights into the community’s discussions. These venues include journals and professional meetings, as well as panels or study sections that evaluate grant proposals. Early in one’s membership in a professional community, venues like graduate seminars and department symposia are also really important.

One problem here is that usually individuals without meaningful access to participation are also without the power in the community required to effectively address particular barriers to their access. Such individuals can point out the barriers, but they are less likely to be listened to than someone else in the community without those barriers.

Everyday sexism is just one such barrier.

This barrier can take a number of particular forms.

For the students on their way into a professional community, it’s a barrier to find out that senior members of the community who you expected would help train you and eventually take you seriously as a colleague are more inclined to sexualize you or full-on sexually harass you. It’s a barrier when you see people in your community minimize that behavior, whether offhandedly or with rather more deliberation.

It’s a barrier when members of your community focus on your looks rather than your intellectual contributions, or act like it’s cute or somehow surprising that someone like you could actually make an intellectual contribution. It’s a further barrier when other members of your community advise you to ignore tangible disrespect because surely it wasn’t intentional — especially when those other members of the community make no visible effort to help address the disrespect.

It’s a barrier when students don’t see people like themselves represented among the recognized knowledge-builders in the professional community as they are being taught the core knowledge expected of members of that community. It’s also a barrier when the more senior members of the professional community are subject to implicit biases in their expert evaluations of who’s cut out to be a full contributing member of the community.

Plenty of well-meaning folks in professional communities that have a hard time fully integrating women (among others) may be puzzled as to why this is so. If they don’t personally experience the barriers, they may not even realize that they’re there. Listening to lived experiences of their female colleagues might reveal some of the barriers — but listening also assumes that the community really takes its female members seriously as part of the community, when this is precisely the problem with which the women in the community are struggling.

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Professional meetings can be challenging terrain for women in predominantly male professional communities. Such meetings are essential venues in which to present one’s work and get career credit for doing so. They are also crucially important for networking and building relationships with people who might become collaborators, who will be called on to evaluate one’s work, and who are the peers with whom one hopes to be engaged in productive discussions over the course of one’s career.

There is also a strong social component to these meetings, an imperative to have fun with one’s people — which is to say, in this context, the people with whom one shares a professional community. Part of this, I think, is related to how strongly people identify with their professional community: the connection is not just about what people in that community do but about who they are. They have taken on the values and goals of the professional community as their own. It’s not just a job, it’s a social identity.

For some people, the social component of professional meetings has a decidedly carnal flavor. Unfortunately, rejecting a pass from someone in your professional community, especially someone with more power in that community than you, can screw with your professional relationships within the community — even assuming that the person who made the pass accepts your “no” and moves on. In other cases, folks within the professional community may be perfectly aware of power gradients and willing to use them to get what they want, applying persistent unwanted attention that can essentially deprive the target of full participation in the conference. Given the importance professional conferences have, this is a significant professional harm.

Lest you imagine that this is a merely hypothetical worry, I assure you that it is not. If you ask around you may discover that some of the members of your professional community choose which conference sessions to attend in order to avoid their harassers. That is surely a constraint on how much one can get out of a professional meeting.

Recently a number of conferences and conventions have adopted policies against harassment, policies that are getting some use. Many of these are fan-oriented conventions or tech conferences, rather than the kind of research oriented, academically inclined professional meetings most of us university types attend. I know of at least one scientific professional society (the American Astronomical Society) that has adopted a harassment policy for its meetings and that seems generally to be moving in a good direction from the point of view of building an inclusive community. However, when I checked the websites of three professional societies to which I belong (American Chemical Society, American Philosophical Association, and Philosophy of Science Association), I could find no sign of anti-harassment policies for their conferences. This is disappointing, but not surprising to me.

The absence of anti-harassment policies doesn’t mean that there’s no harassment happening at the meetings of these professional societies, either.

And even if a professional community has anti-harassment policies in place for its meetings, this doesn’t remove the costs — especially on a relatively junior member of the community — associated with asking that the policies be enforced. Will a professional society be willing to caution a member of the program committee for the conference? To eject the most favored grad student of a luminary in the field — or, for that matter, a luminary — who violates the policy? Shining light on over-the-line behavior at conferences is a species of whistleblowing, and is likely to be received about as warmly as other forms.

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Despite the challenges, I don’t think the prospects for building diverse and productive professional communities are dim. Progress is being made, even if most weeks the pace of progress is agonizingly slow.

But I think things could get better faster if people who take their professional communities for granted step up and become more active in maintaining them.

In much the same way that it is not science that is self-correcting but rather individual scientists who bother to engage critically with particular contributions to the ongoing scientific conversation and keep the community honest, a healthy professional community doesn’t take care of itself — at least, not without effort on the part of individual members of the community.

Professional communities require everyday maintenance. They require tending to keep their collective actions aligned with the values members of the community say they share.

People who work very hard to be part of a professional community despite systemic barriers are people committed enough to the values of the professional community to fight their way through a lot of crap. These are people who really care about the values you purport to care about as a member of the professional community, else why would they waste their time and effort fighting through the crap?

These are the kind of people you should want as colleagues, at least if you value what you say you value. Their contributions could be huge in accomplishing your community’s shared goals and ensuring your community a vibrant future.

Even more than policies that aim to address systemic barriers to their entry to the professional community, these people need a posse. They need others in the community who are unwilling to sacrifice their values — or the well-being of less powerful people who share those values — to take consistent stands against behaviors that create barriers and that undermine the shared work of the community.

These stands needn’t be huge heroic gestures. It could be as simple as reliably being that guy who asks for better gender balance in planning seminars, or who reacts to casual sexist banter with, “Dude, not cool!” It could take the form of asking about policies that might lessen barriers, and taking on some of the work involved in creating or implementing them.

It could be listening to your women colleagues when they describe what it has been like for them within your professional community and assuming the default position of believing them, rather than looking for possible ways they must have misunderstood their own experiences.

If you care about your professional community, in other words, the barriers to entry in the way of people who want badly to be part of that community because they believe fiercely in its values are your problem, too. Acting like it, and doing your part to address these barriers, is sharing the regular maintenance of the professional community you count on.

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While this post is focused on barriers to full participation in professional communities that flow from gender bias, there are plenty of other types of bias that throw up similar barriers, and that could benefit from similar types of response from members of the professional communities not directly targeted by these biases.

Addressing (unintended) disrespect in your professional community.

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I am a believer in the power of the professional conference. Getting people in the same room to share ideas, experiences, and challenges is one of the best ways to build a sense of community, to break down geographical and generational barriers, to energize people and remind them what they love about what they’re doing.

Sometimes, though, interactions flowing from a professional conference have a way of reinforcing barriers. Sometimes a member of the community makes an attempt to express appreciation of colleagues that actually has the effect of treating those colleagues like they’re not really part of the community after all.

Last week, the 8th World Conference of Science Journalists met in Helsinki, Finland. Upon his return from the conference, journalist Nicolás Luco posted a column reflecting on his experience there. (Here’s an English translation of the column by Wladimir Labeikovsky.) Luco’s piece suggests some of the excitement of finding connections with science journalists from other countries, as well as finding common ground with journalists entering the profession in a very different decade with a panoply of different technological tools:

If I hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have had that experience. I have submerged into an atmosphere where what I had seen as the future is already taken for granted. And yet, the fundamentals [e.g., that the story is what matters] remain.

It is, without a doubt, a description of a very positive personal experience.

However, Luco’s column is also a description of his experience of female colleagues at this conference framed primarily in terms of their physical attributes: shining blonde hair, limpid blue eyes, translucent complexions, apparent youth. His description of the panel of journalists using the tools of new media to practice the fundamentals of good journalism describes them as

four Americans: Rose, Lena, Kathleen and Erin (blonde), none older than 25

All of the other conference-goers who are identified by name are identified with surnames as well as given names. We do learn of the two women identified by their full names in the column that they are not blonde. It is left to the reader to imagine the hair color of Philip J. Hilts, the only male attendee mentioned by name.

I understand that Nicolás Luco was aiming to give a vivid visual description to draw his readers into his experience of being in Helsinki for this conference, and that this description was meant to convey a positive, optimistic mood about the future of science journalism.

But I also understand that these stylistic choices carry baggage that make it harder for Rose Eveleth, and Lena Groeger, and Kathleen Raven, and Erin Podolak, the journalists on the panel, to be taken seriously within this international community of science journalists.

Their surnames matter. In a field where they want their work to be recognized, disconnecting their bylines from the valuable insights they shared as part of a conference panel is not helpful.

Moreover, I am told that the journalistic convention is to identify adults by full name, and to identify people by first name alone only when those people are children.

Eveleth, Groeger, Raven, and Podolak are not children. They may seem relatively young to a journalist who came into the profession in the age of linotype (indeed, to the extent that he underestimated their ages, which range from 25 to 30), but they are professionals. Their ages should not be a barrier to treating them as if they are full members of the professional community of science journalists, but focusing unduly on their ages could well present such a barrier.

And, needless to say, their hair color should have no relevance at all in assessing whether they are skilled journalists with valuable insights to share.

As it happens, only days before the 8th World Conference of Science Journalists, Podolak wrote a blog post describing why she needs feminism. In that post, she wrote:

I’m a feminist for myself because yes, I want a fair shake, I want to be recognized for the value of my work and not whether or not my hair looks shiny that day. But, adding my voice to the other feminist voices out there is about more than just me. I’ve got it pretty good. I’m not trying to argue that I don’t. But I can support the women out there who are dealing with overt sexism, who are being attacked. I can try to be an ally. That to me is the real value of feminism, of standing together.

It is profoundly disheartening to take yourself to be accepted by your professional community, valued for the skills and ideas you bring to the table, only to discover that this is not how your presumptive colleagues actually see you. You would think that other journalists should be the ones most likely to appreciate the value of using new technologies to tell compelling stories. What a disappointment to find that their focus gets stuck on the surface. Who can tell whether the work has value if the hair of the journalist is shiny?

You will likely not be surprised that Eveleth, Groeger, Raven, and Podolak were frustrated at Nicolás Luco’s description of their panel, despite understanding that Luco was trying to be flattering. In an email to Luco the four sent in response to the column, they wrote:

Leading your story with a note about your attraction to blondes and then noting Erin’s hair color, is both inappropriate and, frankly, sexist. We were not there for anyone to ogle, and our physical appearance is completely irrelevant to the point of our panel. It is important for you to understand why were are upset about your tone in this piece. Women are constantly appraised for their looks, rather than their thoughts and skills, and in writing your story the way you did you are contributing to that sexism.

And, in a postscript to that email, Kathleen Raven noted:

I was under the impression that you wrote your article using hair color as a narrative tool to tie together your meetings with journalists. I appreciate this creativity, but I am worried that American women can perceive — as we have — the article as not fully respecting us as journalists in our own right.

What Eveleth, Groeger, Raven, and Podolak are up against is a larger society that values women more for their aesthetic appeal than their professional skills. That their own professional community repeats this pattern — presenting them as first young and pretty and only secondarily as good journalists — is a source of frustration. As Eveleth wrote to me:

Last I checked, being pretty has nothing to do with your skills at any kind of journalism. Having long blonde hair is not going to get Erin the story. Erin is going to get the story because she’s good at her job, because she’s got experience and passion, because she’s talented and tough and hard working. The same goes for Kathleen and Lena. 

The idea that it is not just okay, but actually complimentary to focus on a young woman’s (or really any aged woman’s) looks as leading part of her professional identity is wrong. The idea that it’s flattering to call out Erin’s hair and age before her skills is wrong. The idea that a woman’s professional skill set is made better if she is blonde and pretty is wrong. And the idea that someone who writes something like this should just be able to pass it off as “tongue in cheek” or “a cultural difference” is also wrong.

I should pause here to take note of another dimension of professional communities in this story. There is a strong pressure to get along with one’s professional colleagues, to get along rather than raising a fuss. Arguably this pressure is stronger on newer members of a professional community, and on members of that community with characteristics (e.g., of gender, race, disability, etc.) that are not well represented in the more established members of that professional community.

Practically, this pressure manifests itself as an inclination to let things go, to refrain from pointing out the little instances which devalue one’s professional identity or status as a valued member of the community. Most of the time it seems easier to sigh and say to oneself, “Well, he meant well,” or, “What can you expect from someone of that generation/cultural background?” than to point out the ways that the comments hurt. It feels like a tradeoff where you should swallow some individual hurt for the good of the community.

But accepting this tradeoff is accepting that your full membership in the community (and that of others like you) is less important. To the extent that you believe that you make a real contribution to the community, swallowing your individual hurt is dancing on the edge of accepting what is arguably a harm to the professional community as a whole by letting the hurtful behaviors pass unexamined.

Eveleth, Groeger, Raven, and Podolak had more respect than that for their professional community, and for Nicolás Luco as a professional colleague. They did not just sigh and roll their eyes. Rather, they emailed Luco to explain what the problem was.

In his reply to them (which I quote with his permission), Luco makes it clear that he did not intend to do harm to anyone, especially not to Eveleth, Groeger, Raven, and Podolak, with his column. Still, he also makes it clear that he may not fully grasp just what the problem is:

I write as a known voice who can write tongue in cheek and get away with it because I am willing to laugh at myself. 

I strive to make what I write entertaining. And maybe sneak in the more serious arguments.

Sorry about my misjudgment on your ages.  But the point is: you are generations apart.

I did not include your last names because they would interrupt the flow of reading and clog the line with surnames, an obstacle.

Finally, it is so much in U.S. culture to discard the looks vis a vis the brains when the looks, as President Clinton knows so well, can be a good hook into the brains.  And since this is a personal column, in the first person singular, I can tell how I personally react at good looks.  For example, Ms. Anne Glover, was extraordinarily beautiful and charming besides being bright and political, which helps, in front of the probable mean thoughts of envious uglier looking colleagues.

Thank you, I still prize the panel as the best and most important in the Conference.

Is there a way Nicolás Luco could have described his personal experience of the conference, and of this panel within the conference that he found particular valuable, in a way that was entertaining, even tongue-in-cheek, while avoiding the pitfalls of describing his female colleagues in terms that undercut their status in the professional community? I think so.

He might, for example, have talked about his own expectations that journalists who are generations apart would agree upon what makes good journalism good journalism. The way that these expectations were thwarted would surely be a good opportunity to laugh at oneself.

He might even have written about his own surprise that a young women he finds attractive contributed a valuable insight — using this as an opportunity to examine this expectation and whether it’s one he ought to be carrying around with him in his professional interactions. There’s even a line in his column that seems like it might provide a hook for this bit of self-examination:

Erin, the youngest and a cancer specialist, insists that decorations don’t matter: good journalism is good journalism, period. Makes me happy.

(Bold emphasis added.)

Extending the lesson about the content of the story mattering more than the packaging to a further lesson about the professional capabilities of the storyteller mattering more than one’s reaction to her superficial appearance — that could drive home some of the value of a conference like this.

Nicolás Luco wrote the column he wrote. Eveleth, Groeger, Raven, and Podolak took him seriously as a professional colleague who is presumptively concerned to strengthen their shared community. They asked him to consider the effect of his description on members of the professional community who stand where they do, to take responsibility as a writer for even the effects of his words that he had not intended or foreseen.

Engaging with colleagues when they hurt us without meaning to is not easy work, but it’s absolutely essential to the health of a professional community. I am hopeful that this engagement will continue productively.

The ethics of naming and shaming.

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Lately I’ve been pondering the practice of responding to bad behavior by calling public attention to it.

The most recent impetus for my thinking about it was this tech blogger’s response to behavior that felt unwelcoming at a conference (behavior that seems, in fact, to have run afoul of that conference’s official written policies)*, but there are plenty of other examples one might find of “naming and shaming”: the discussion (on blogs and in other media outlets) of University of Chicago neuroscientist Dario Maestripieri’s comments about female attendees of the Society for Neuroscience meeting, the Office of Research Integrity’s posting of findings of scientific misconduct investigations, the occasional instructor who promises to publicly shame students who cheat in his class, and actually follows through on the promise.

There are many forms “naming-and-shaming” might take, and many types of behavior one might identify as problematic enough that they ought to be pointed out and attended to. But there seems to be a general worry that naming-and-shaming is an unethical tactic. Here, I want to explore that worry.

Presumably, the point of responding to bad behavior is because it’s bad — causing harm to individuals or a community (or both), undermining progress on a project or goal, and so forth. Responding to bad behavior can be useful if it stops bad behavior in progress and/or keeps similarly bad behavior from happening in the future. A response can also be useful in calling attention to the harm the behavior does (i.e., in making clear what’s bad about the behavior). And, depending on the response, it can affirm the commitment of individuals or communities that the behavior in question actual is bad, and that the individuals or communities see themselves as having a real stake in reducing it.

Rules, professional codes, conference harassment policies — these are some ways to specify at the outset what behaviors are not acceptable in the context of the meeting, game, work environment, or disciplinary pursuit. There are plenty of contexts, too, where there is no written-and-posted official enumeration of every type of unacceptable behavior. Sometimes communities make judgments on the fly about particular kinds of behavior. Sometimes, members of communities are not in agreement about these judgments, which might result in a thoughtful conversation within the community to try to come to some agreement, or the emergence of a rift that leads people to realize that the community was not as united as they once thought, or ruling on the “actual” badness or acceptability of the behavior by those within the community who can marshal the power to make such a ruling.

Sharing a world with people who are not you is complicated, after all.

Still, I hope we can agree that there are some behaviors that count as bad behaviors. Assuming we had an unambiguous example of someone engaging in such a behavior, should we respond? How should we respond? Do we have a duty to respond?

I frequently hear people declare that one should respond to bad behavior, but that one should do so privately. The idea here seems to be that letting the bad actor know that the behavior in question was bad, and should be stopped, is enough to ensure that it will be stopped — and that the bad behavior must be a reflection of a gap in the bad actor’s understanding.

If knowing that a behavior is bad (or against the rules) were enough to ensure that those with the relevant knowledge never engage in the behavior, though, it becomes difficult to explain the highly educated researchers who get caught fabricating or falsifying data or images, the legions of undergraduates who commit plagiarism despite detailed instructions on proper citation methods, the politicians who lie. If knowledge that a certain kind of behavior is unacceptable is not sufficient to prevent that behavior, responding effectively to bad behavior must involve more than telling the perpetrator of that behavior, “What you’re doing is bad. Stop it.”

This is where penalties may be helpful in responding to bad behavior — get benched for the rest of the game, or fail the class, or get ejected from the conference, or become ineligible for funding for this many years. A penalty can convey that bad behavior is harmful enough to the endeavor or the community that its perpetrator needs a “time-out”.

Sometimes the application of penalties needs to be private (e.g., when a law like the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act makes applying the penalty publicly illegal). But there are dangers in only dealing with bad behavior privately.

When fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are “dealt with” privately, it can make it hard for a scientific community to identify papers in the scientific literature that they shouldn’t trust or researchers who might be prone to slipping back into fabricating, falsifying, or plagiarizing if they think no one is watching. (It is worth noting that large ethical lapses are frequently part of an escalating pattern that started with smaller ethical infractions.)

Worse, if bad behavior is dealt with privately, out of view of members of the community who witnessed the bad behavior in question, those members may lose faith in the community’s commitment to calling it out. Keeping penalties (if any) under wraps can convey the message that the bad behavior is actually tolerated, that official policies against it are empty words.

And sometimes, there are instances where the people within an organization or community with the power to impose penalties on bad actors seem disinclined to actually address bad behavior, using the cover of privacy as a way to opt out of penalizing the bad actors or of addressing the bad behavior in any serious way.

What’s a member of the community to do in such circumstances? Given that the bad behavior is bad because it has harmful effects on the community and its members, should those aware of the bad behavior call the community’s attention to it, in the hopes that the community can respond to it (or that the community’s scrutiny will encourage the bad actor to cease the bad behavior)?

Arguably, a community that is harmed by bad behavior has an interest in knowing when that behavior is happening, and who the bad actors are. As well, the community has an interest in stopping the bad behavior, in mitigating the harms it has already caused, and in discouraging further such behavior. Naming-and-shaming bad actors may be an effective way to secure these interests.

I don’t think this means naming-and-shaming is the only possible way to secure these interests, nor that it is always the best way to do so. Sometimes, however, it’s the tool that’s available that seems likely to do the most good.

There’s not a simple algorithm or litmus test that will tell you when shaming bad actors is the best course of action, but there are questions that are worth asking when assessing the options:

  • What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior, which is observable to at least some members of the community, goes unchallenged?
  • What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior, which is observable to at least some members of the community, gets challenged privately? (In particular, what are the potential consequences to the person engaging in the bad behavior? To the person challenging the behavior? To others who have had occasion to observe the behavior, or who might be affected by similar behavior in the future?)
  • What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior, which is observable to at least some members of the community, gets challenged publicly? (In particular, what are the potential consequences to the person engaging in the bad behavior? To the person challenging the behavior? To others who have had occasion to observe the behavior, or who might be affected by similar behavior in the future?)

Challenging bad behavior is not without costs. Depending on your status within the community, challenging a bad actor may harm you more than the bad actor. However, not challenging bad behavior has costs, too. If the community and its members aren’t prepared to deal with bad behavior when it happens, the community has to bear those costs.
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* Let me be clear that this post is focused on the broader question of publicly calling out bad behavior rather than on the specific details of Adria Richards’ response to the people behind her at the tech conference, whether she ought to have found their jokes unwelcoming, whether she ought to have responded to them the way she did, or what have you. Since this post is not about whether Adria Richards did everything right (or everything wrong) in that particular instance, I’m going to be quite ruthless in pruning comments that are focused on her particular circumstances or decisions. Indeed, commenters who make any attempt to use the comments here to issue threats of violence against Richards (of the sort she is receiving via social media as I compose this post), or against anyone else, will have their information (including IP address) forwarded to law enforcement.

If you’re looking for my take on the details of the Adria Richards case, I’ll have a post up on my other blog within the next 24 hours.

Thoughts on the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre.

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On December 6, 1989, in Montreal, fourteen women were murdered for being women in what their murderer perceived to be a space that rightly belonged to men:

Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

They were murdered because their killer was disgruntled that he been denied admission to the École Polytechnique, the site of the massacre, and because he blamed women occupying positions that were traditionally occupied by men for this disappointment, among others. When their killer entered the engineering classroom where the killing began, he first told the men to leave the room, because his goal was to kill the women. In their killer’s pocket, discovered after his death, was a list of more women he had planned to kill, if only he had the time.

Most of the people who believe women do not belong in science and engineering classrooms, or in science or engineering jobs, or in other domains that used to be exclusively male, will never pick up a gun to enforce their will.

But, there are plenty who will send women the clear message that they are not welcome as equal participants in these domains.

There are plenty who will assume — and proclaim loudly — that women have unfairly gained access (due to affirmative action or quotas or political correctness), that they cannot possibly perform at the same level as men (despite evidence that the women they scorn are doing just that), that they have taken the place of some anonymous deserving man who really needed that job or that spot in the class.

There are plenty who will remind women, with words and deeds, that they will always be seen primarily in terms of their sexual desirability (or lack thereof) by the men who are their classmates and teachers, their colleagues and bosses. Women in these male precincts who have the temerity to object to leering and ass-grabbing and unwelcome sexual advances can expect to be told that they are sucking all the joy out of the professional or educational environment, and that this is how it has always been (and if you wanted to be part of this world, you should take it as it is rather than ruining it), and that they should just toughen up.

There is no amount of toughening up that would have saved these fourteen women from the bullets that were fired at them for the crime of being female in a male domain.

And, when men speak passionately against women leaving their proper place to invade male dominated fields — when they go beyond placing the burden of proof on women to show they should be allowed to participate (rather than giving them the same opportunity as men to prove themselves) and argue that women’s full-scale participation will ruin science and engineering for everyone who matters — we cannot tell, just by looking, which of them may someday feel entitled to act on their convictions with weapons more deadly than words.

The danger of pointing out bad behavior: retribution (and the community’s role in preventing it).

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There has been a lot of discussion of Dario Maestripieri’s disappointment at the unattractiveness of his female colleagues in the neuroscience community. Indeed, it’s notable how much of this discussion has been in public channels, not just private emails or conversations conducted with sound waves which then dissipate into the aether. No doubt, this is related to Maestripieri’s decision to share his hot-or-not assessment of the women in his profession in a semi-public space where it could achieve more permanence — and amplification — than it would have as an utterance at the hotel bar.

His behavior became something that any member of his scientific community with an internet connection (and a whole lot of people outside his scientific community) could inspect. The impacts of an actual, rather than hypothetical, piece of behavior, could be brought into the conversation about the climate of professional and learning communities, especially for the members of these communities who are women.

It’s worth pointing out that there is nothing especially surprising about such sexist behavior* within these communities. The people in the communities who have been paying attention have seen them before (and besides have good empirical grounds for expecting that gender biases may be a problem). But many sexist behaviors go unreported and unremarked, sometimes because of the very real fear of retribution.

What kind of retribution could there be for pointing out a piece of behavior that has sexist effects, or arguing that it is an inappropriate way for a member of the professional community to behave?

Let’s say you are an early career scientist, applying for a faculty post. As it happens, Dario Maestripieri‘s department, the University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human Development, currently has an open search for a tenure-track assistant professor. There is a non-zero chance that Dario Maestripieri is a faculty member on that search committee, or that he has the ear of a colleague that is.

It is not a tremendous stretch to hypothesize that Dario Maestripieri may not be thrilled at the public criticism he’s gotten in response to his Facebook post (including some quite close to home). Possibly he’s looking through the throngs of his Facebook friends and trying to guess which of them is the one who took the screenshot of his ill advised post and shared it more widely. Or looking through his Facebook friends’ Facebook friends. Or considering which early career neuroscientists might be in-real-life friends or associates with his Facebook friends or their Facebook friends.

Now suppose you’re applying for that faculty position in his department and you happen to be one of his Facebook friends,** or one of their Facebook friends, or one of the in-real-life friends of either of those.

Of course, shooting down an applicant for a faculty position for the explicit reason that you think he or she may have cast unwanted attention on your behavior towards your professional community would be a problem. But there are probably enough applicants for the position, enough variation in the details of their CVs, and enough subjective judgment on the part of the members of the search committee in evaluating all those materials that it would be possible to cut all applicants who are Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook friends (or their Facebook friends, or in-real-life friends of either of those) from consideration while providing some other plausible reason for their elimination. Indeed, the circle could be broadened to eliminate candidates with letters of recommendation from Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook friends (or their Facebook friends, or in-real-life friends of either of those), candidates who have coauthored papers with Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook friends (or their Facebook friends, or in-real-life friends of either of those), etc.)

And, since candidates who don’t get the job generally aren’t told why they were found wanting — only that some other candidate was judged to be better — these other plausible reasons for shooting down a candidate would only even matter in the discussions of the search committee.

In other words, real retaliation (rejection from consideration for a faculty job) could fall on people who are merely suspected of sharing information that led to Dario Maestripieri becoming the focus of a public discussion of sexist behavior — not just on the people who have publicly spoken about his behavior. And, the retaliation would be practically impossible to prove.

If you don’t think this kind of possibility has a chilling effect on the willingness of members of a professional community to speak up when they see a relatively powerful colleague behave in they think is harmful, you just don’t understand power dynamics.

And even if Dario Maestripieri has no part at all in his department’s ongoing faculty search, there are other interactions within his professional community in which his suspicions about who might have exposed his behavior could come into play. Senior scientists are routinely asked to referee papers submitted to scientific journals and to serve on panels and study sections that rank applications for grants. In some of these circumstances, the identities of the scientists one is judging (e.g., for grants) are known to the scientists making the evaluations. In others, they are masked, but the scientists making the evaluations have hunches about whose work they are evaluating. If those hunches are mingled with hunches about who could have shared evidence of behavior that is now making the evaluator’s life difficult, it’s hard to imagine the grant applicant or the manuscript author getting a completely fair shake.

Let’s pause here to note that the attitude Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook posting reveals, that it’s appropriate to evaluate women in the field on their physical beauty rather than their scientific achievements, could itself be a source of bias as he does things that are part of a normal professional life, like serving on search committees, reviewing journal submissions and grant applications, evaluating students, and so forth. A bias like this could manifest itself in a preference for hiring job candidates one finds aesthetically pleasing. (Sure, academic job application packets usually don’t include a headshot, but even senior scientists have probably heard of Google Image search.) Or it could manifest itself in a preference against hiring more women (since too high a concentration of female colleagues might be perceived as increasing the likelihood that one would be taken to task for freely expressing one’s aesthetic preferences about women in the field). Again, it would be extraordinarily hard to prove the operation of such a bias in any particular case — but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that it is having an effect in activities where members of the professional community are supposed to be as objective as possible.

Objectivity, as we’ve noted before, is hard.

We should remember, though, that faculty searches are conducted by committees, rather than by a single individual with the power to make all the decisions. And, the University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human Development (as well as the University of Chicago more generally) may recognize that it is likely to be getting more public scrutiny as a result of the public scrutiny Dario Maestripieri has been getting.

Among other things, this means that the department and the university have a real interest in conducting a squeaky-clean search that avoids even the appearance of retaliation. In any search, members of the search committee have a responsibility to identify, disclose, and manage their own biases. In this search, discharging that responsibility is even more vital. In any search, members of the hiring department have a responsibility to discuss their shared needs and interests, and how these should inform the selection of the new faculty member. In this search, that discussion of needs and interests must include a discussion of the climate within the department and the larger scientific community — what it is now, and what members of the department think it should be.

In any search, members of the hiring department have an interest in sharing their opinions on who the best candidate might be, and to having a dialogue around the disagreements. In this search, if it turns out one of the disagreements about a candidate comes down to “I suspect he may have been involved in exposing my Facebook post and making me feel bad,” well, arguably there’s a responsibility to have a discussion about that.

Ask academics what it’s like to hire a colleague and it’s not uncommon to hear them describe the experience as akin to entering a marriage. You’re looking for someone with whom you might spend the next 30 years, someone who will grow with you, who will become an integral part of your department and its culture, even to the point of helping that departmental culture grow and change. This is a good reason not to choose the new hire based on the most superficial assessment of what each candidate might bring to the relationship — and to recognize that helping one faculty member avoid discomfort might not be the most important thing.

Indeed, Dario Maestripieri’s colleagues may have all kinds of reasons to engage him in uncomfortable discussions about his behavior that have nothing to do with conducting a squeaky-clean faculty search. Their reputations are intertwined, and leaving things alone rather than challenging Dario Maestripieri’s behavior may impact their own ability to attract graduate students or maintain the respect of undergraduates. These are things that matter to academic scientists — which means that Dario Maestripieri’s colleagues have an interest in pushing back for their own good and the good of the community.

The pushback, if it happens, is likely to be just as invisible publicly as any retaliation against job candidates for possibly sharing the screenshot of Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook posting. If positive effects are visible, it might make it seem less dangerous for members of the professional community to speak up about bad behavior when they see it. But if the outward appearance is that nothing has changed for Dario Maestripieri and his department, expect that there will be plenty of bad behavior that is not discussed in public because the career costs of doing so are just too high.

______
* This is not at all an issue about whether Dario Maestripieri is a sexist. This is an issue about the effects of the behavior, which have a disproportionate negative impact on women in the community. I do not know, or care, what is in the heart of the person who displays these behaviors, and it is not at all relevant to a discussion of how the behaviors affect the community.

** Given the number of his Facebook friends and their range of ages, career stages, etc., this doesn’t strike me as improbable. (At last check, I have 11 Facebook friends in common with Dario Maestripieri.)

Reading the writing on the (Facebook) wall: a community responds to Dario Maestripieri.

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Imagine an academic scientist goes to a big professional meeting in his field. For whatever reason, he then decides to share the following “impression” of that meeting with his Facebook friends:

My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually high concentration of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain? No offense to anyone..

Maybe this is a lapse in judgment, but it’s no big thing, right?

I would venture, from the selection of links collected below discussing Dario Maestripieri and his recent social media foible, this is very much A Thing. Read on to get a sense of how the discussion is unfolding within the scientific community and the higher education community:

Drugmonkey, SfN 2012: Professors behaving badly:

There is a very simple response here. Don’t do this. It’s sexist, juvenile, offensive and stupid. For a senior scientist it is yet another contribution to the othering of women in science. In his lab, in his subfield, in his University and in his academic societies. We should not tolerate this crap.

Professor Maestripieri needs to apologize for this in a very public way and take responsibility for his actions. You know, not with a nonpology of “I’m sorry you were offended” but with an “I shouldn’t have done that” type of response.

Me, at Adventures in Ethics and Science, The point of calling out bad behavior:

It’s almost like people have something invested in denying the existence of gender bias among scientists, the phenomenon of a chilly climate in scientific professions, or even the possibility that Dario Maestripieri’s Facebook post was maybe not the first observable piece of sexism a working scientist put out there for the world to see.

The thing is, that denial is also the denial of the actual lived experience of a hell of a lot of women in science

Isis the Scientist, at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, What We Learn When Professorly d00ds Take to Facebook:

Dr. Maestripieri’s comments will certainly come as no great shock to the women who read them.  That’s because those of us who have been around the conference scene for a while know that this is pretty par for the course.  There’s not just sekrit, hidden sexism in academia.  A lot of it is pretty overt.  And many of us know about the pockets of perv-fest that can occur at scientific meetings.  We know which events to generally avoid.  Many of us know who to not have cocktails with or be alone with, who the ass grabbers are, and we share our lists with other female colleagues.  We know to look out for the more junior women scientists who travel with us.  I am in no way shocked that Dr. Maestripieri would be so brazen as to post his thoughts on Facebook because I know that there are some who wouldn’t hesistate to say the same sorts of things aloud. …

The real question is whether the ability to evaluate Dr. Maestripieri’s asshattery in all of its screenshot-captured glory will actually actually change hearts and minds.

Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel, University of Chicago Professor Very Disappointed that Female Neuroscientists Aren’t Sexier:

Professor Maestripieri is a multiple-award winning academic working at the University of Chicago, which basically means he is Nerd Royalty. And, judging by his impressive resume, which includes a Ph.D in Psychobiology, the 2000 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, and several committees at the U of C, he’s well aware of how hard someone in his position has had to work in order to rise to the top of an extremely competitive and demanding field. So it’s confusing to me that he would fail to grasp the fact that women in his field had to perform similar work and exhibit similar levels of dedication that he did.

Women: also people! Just like men, but with different genitals!

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, Why casual sexism in science matters:

I’ve got a daughter who, at four and a half, wants to be a scientist. Every time she says this, it makes me swell up with so much pride, I almost bust. If she grows up to be a scientist, I want her to be judged on the reproducibility of her results, the elegance of her experimental design, and the insight in her hypotheses, not on her ability to live up to someone’s douchey standard of “super model” looks.

(Also, do check out the conversation in the comments; it’s very smart and very funny.)

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Education, (Mis)Judging Female Scientists:

Pity the attendees at last week’s annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience who thought they needed to focus on their papers and the research breakthroughs being discussed. It turns out they were also being judged — at least by one prominent scientist — on their looks. At least the female attendees were. …

Maestripieri did not respond to e-mail messages or phone calls over the past two days. A spokesman for the University of Chicago said that he had decided not to comment.

Pat Campbell at Fairer Science, No offense to anyone:

I’m glad the story hit Inside Higher Ed; I find it really telling that only women are quoted … Inside Higher Ed makes this a woman’s problem not a science problem and that is a much more important issue than Dario Maestripieri’s stupid comments.

Beryl Benderly at the Science Careers Blog, A Facebook Furor:

There’s another unpleasant implication embedded in Maestripieri’s post. He apparently assumed that some of his Facebook readers would find his observations interesting or amusing. This indicates that, in at least some circles, women scientists are still not evaluated on their work but rather on qualities irrelevant to their science. …

[T]he point of the story is not one faculty member’s egregious slip.  It is the apparently more widespread attitudes that this slip reveals

Dana Smith at Brain Study, More sexism in science:

However, others still think his behavior was acceptable, writing it off as a joke and telling people to not take it so seriously. This is particularly problematic given the underlying gender bias we know to still exist in science. If we accept overt and covert discrimination against women in science we all lose out, not just women who are dissuaded from the field because of it, but also everyone who might have benefited from their future work.

Minerva Cheevy at Research Centered (Chronicle of Higher Education Blog Network), Where’s the use of looking nice?:

There’s just no winning for women in academia – if you’re unattractive, then you’re a bad female. But if you’re attractive, you’re a bad academic.

The Maroon Editorial Board at The Chicago Maroon, Changing the conversation:

[T]his incident offers the University community an opportunity to reexamine our culture of “self-deprecation”—especially in relation to the physical attractiveness of students—and how that culture can condone assumptions which are just as baseless and offensive. …

Associating the depth of intellectual interests with a perceived lack of physical beauty fosters a culture of permissiveness towards derogatory comments. Negative remarks about peers’ appearances make blanket statements about their social lives and demeanors more acceptable. Though recently the popular sentiment among students is that the U of C gets more attractive the further away it gets from its last Uncommon App class, such comments stem from the same type of confused associations—that “normal” is “attractive” and that “weird” is not. It’s about time that we distance ourselves from these kinds of normative assumptions. While not as outrageous as Maestripieri’s comments, the belief that intelligence should be related to any other trait—be it attractiveness, normalcy, or social skills—is just as unproductive and illogical.

It’s quite possible that I’ve missed other good discussions of this situation and its broader implications. If so, please feel free to share links to them in the comments.

Ada Lovelace Day book review: Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science.

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Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Last year, I shared my reflections on Ada herself. This year, I’d like to celebrate the day by pointing you to a book about another pioneering woman of science, Maria Mitchell.

Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics
by Renée Bergland
Boston: Beacon Press
2008

What is it like to be a woman scientist? In a society where being a woman is somehow a distinct experience from being an ordinary human being, the answer to this question can be complicated. And, in a time and place where being a scientist, being a professional — indeed, even being American — was still something that was very much under construction, the complexities of the answer can add up to a biography of that time, that place, that swirl of intellectual and cultural ferment, as well as of that woman scientist.

The astronomer Maria Mitchell was not only a pioneering woman scientist in the early history of the United States, but she was one of the nation’s first professional scientists. Renée Bergland’s biography of Mitchell illuminates a confluence of circumstances that made it possible for Mitchell to make her scientific contributions — to be a scientist at all. At the same time, it tracks a retrograde cultural swing of which Mitchell herself was aware: a loss, during Mitchell’s lifetime, of educational and career opportunities for women in the sciences.

Maria Mitchell was the daughter of two people who were passionate about learning, and about each other. Her mother, Lydia Coleman Mitchell, worked at both of Nantucket’s lending libraries in order to avail herself of their collections. Her father, William Mitchell, turned down a spot as a student at Harvard — which Lydia, as a woman, was barred from attending — to stay on Nantucket and make a life with Lydia. Maria was born in 1818, the third child of ten (nine of whom survived to adulthood) in a family that nurtured its daughters as well as its sons and where a near constant scarcity of resources prompted both hard work and ingenuity.

William Mitchell was one of the Nantucket men who didn’t go to sea on a whaling ship, working instead on the island in a variety of capacities, including astronomer. His astronomical knowledge was welcomed by the community in public lectures (since youth who planned to go to sea would benefit from an understanding of astronomy if they wanted to be able to navigate by the stars), and he used his expertise to calibrate the chronometers ship captains used to track their longitude while at sea.

Since he was not off at sea, William was there with Lydia overseeing the education of the Mitchell children, much of it taking place in the Mitchell home. Nantucket did not establish a public school until 1827; when it did, its first principal was William Mitchell. Maria attended the public school for the few years her father was principal, then followed him to the private school he founded on the island. William’s astronomical work, conducted at home, was part of Maria’s education, and by the time she was 11 years old, she was acting as his assistant in the work. As it was not long before Maria’s mathematical abilities and training (most of it self-taught) soon exceeded her father’s, this was a beneficial relationship on both sides.

Maria herself did some teaching of the island’s children. Later she ran the Nantucket Atheneum, a cross between a community library and a center of culture. All the while, she continued to assist her father with astronomical observations and provided the computational power that drove their collaboration. She made nightly use of the rooftop observatory at the Pacific Bank (where the Mitchell family lived when William took a post there), and one evening in 1847, Maria’s sweeps of the heavens with her telescope revealed a streak in the sky that she recognized as a new comet.

The announcement of the comet beyond the Mitchell family gives us a glimpse into just what was at stake in such a discovery. Maria herself was inclined towards modesty, some might argue pathologically so. William, however, insisted that the news must be shared, and contacted the astronomers at Harvard he knew owing to his own work. As Bergland describes it:

When Mitchell discovered the comet and her father reported it to the Bonds at Harvard [William Bonds was the director of the Harvard Observatory, his son George his assistant], the college president at the time, Edward Everett, saw an opening: Mitchell was a remarkably appealing woman whose talent and modesty were equally indisputable. She could never be accused of being a status seeker. But if Everett could convince the Danish government [which was offering a medal to the discoverer of a new comet] that reporting her discovery to the Harvard Observatory was the equivalent of reporting the discovery to the British Royal Observatory or the Danish Royal Observatory, the Harvard Observatory would gain the status of an international astronomical authority.

Maria was something of a pawn here. She was proud of her discovery, but her intense shyness made her reluctant to publicize it. Yet that shyness was exactly what made her so useful to President Everett. Her friend George Bond had also discovered comets, but he’d been unsuccessful at arguing on his own behalf against the authorities of Europe. Since Bond was directly affiliated with the Harvard College Observatory, Harvard’s hands were tied; Everett had never even tried to defend Bond’s claims. But by framing Mitchell as something of a damsel in distress, Everett could bring his diplomatic skills to bear to establish the precedent that Harvard’s observatory was as reliable as the British Royal Observatory at Greenwich. (p. 67)

There was more than just a (potential) scientific priority battle here (as other astronomers had observed this comet within a few days of Maria Mitchell’s observation of it), there was a battle for institutional credibility for Harvard and for international credibility for the United States as a nation that could produce both important science and serious scientists. Thus, “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” took on a larger significance. While Harvard at the time would have had no use for a woman student, nor for a woman professor, they found it useful to recognize Maria Mitchell as a legitimate astronomer, since doing so advanced their broader interests.

Maria Mitchell’s claim to priority for the comet (one that turned out to have an unusual orbit that was tricky to calculate) was recognized. Besides the Danish medal, this recognition got her a job. In 1849, she was hired by the United States Nautical Almanac as the “computer of Venus”, making her one of the country’s very first professional astronomers.

Her fame as an astronomer also opened doors for her (including doors to observatories) as she left Nantucket in 1857 to tour Europe. The trip was one she hoped would give her a good sense of where scientific research was headed. As it turned out, it also gave her a sense of herself as an American, a scientist, and a woman moving in a very male milieu. Maria Mitchell was horrified to encounter neglected telescopes and rules that banned women from even setting foot within certain university facilities. She rubbed shoulders with famous scientists, including one Charles Babbage and Mary Somerville, the woman William Whewell invented the word “scientist” to describe:

When Whewell groped for words and finally coined “scientist” to describe her, the issue was not primarily gender, but rather the newness of Somerville’s endeavor — her attempt to connect all the physical sciences to one another. …

Another, even more important reason that Whewell … felt the need for a new term was that a new professional identity was developing. Those who studied the material world were beginning to distinguish themselves from philosophers, whose provinces were more metaphysical than physical. But the first steps of this separation had been quite insulated from each other: chemists, mathematicians, astronomers, and the soon-to-be-named physicists did not necessarily see themselves as sharing an identity or as working at a common endeavor. Somerville’s treatise On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences was instrumental in showing the various investigators that their work was connected — they were all practitioners of science.

Although the development of the word “scientist” related more to the philosophical point (argued by Somerville) that the sciences could be unified than it did to gender, “scientist” did gradually replace the older formulation, “man of science.” Gender also entered in, Whewell thought, because as a woman, Somerville was better equipped to see connection than a man. … Whewell argued that Somerville’s womanly perspective enhanced rather than obscured her vision. (pp. 146-147)

In Somerville, Mitchell found a woman who was a fellow pioneer on something of a new frontier in terms of how doing science was perceived. Though the time Mitchell spent with Somerville was brief, the relationship involved real mentoring:

Somerville talked to her about substantive scientific questions as none of the British scientists had done; Mitchell first learned about the works of the physicist James Prescott Joule in Florence [where she met Somerville], despite having spent months in scientific circles in England, where Joule lived and worked. Somerville took Mitchell seriously as an intellect, and wanted to share her wide-ranging knowledge and encourage Mitchell in her own endeavors. She made her affection for Mitchell clear, and she offered the support and encouragement the younger scientist needed. Best of all, Mitchell liked her. She was charming and kind, someone for Mitchell to emulate in every way. (p. 151)

Somerville was not just a role model for Mitchell. The reciprocal nature of their relationship made her a true mentor for Mitchell, someone whose faith in Mitchell’s capabilities helped Mitchell herself to understand what she might accomplish. This relationship launched Mitchell towards greater engagement with the public when she returned to the U.S.

Maria Mitchell broke more ground when she was hired by the newly formed Vassar College (a women’s college) as a professor of astronomy. While she was first interviewed for the position in 1862, the trustees were locked in debate over whether a woman could properly be a professor at the college, and Mitchell was not actually appointed until 1865. Her appointment included an observatory where Mitchell conducted research, taught, and lived. At Vassar, she broke with the authoritarian, lecture-style instruction common in other departments. Instead, she engaged her students in hands-on, active learning, challenged them to challenge her, and involved them in astronomical research. And, when it became clear that there was not enough time in a day to fully meet the competing demands of teaching and research (plus other professional duties and her duties to her family), Mitchell recorded a resolution in her notebook:

RESOLVED: In case of my outliving father and being in good health, to give my efforts to the intellectual culture of women, without regard to salary. (p. 203)

Such a commitment was vital to Maria Mitchell, especially as, during her time at Vassar, she was aware of a societal shift that was narrowing opportunities for women to participate in the sciences or in intellectual pursuits, in the realms of both education and professions. Pioneer though she was, she saw her female students being offered less by the world than she was, and it made her sad and angry.

Renée Bergland’s biography of Maria Mitchell lays out the complexities at work in Mitchell’s family environment, in the culturally rich yet geographically isolated Nantucket island, in the young United States, and in the broader international community of scientific thinkers and researchers. The factors that play a role in a person’s educational and intellectual trajectory are fascinating to me, in part because so many of them seem like they’re just a matter of chance. How important was it to Maria Mitchell’s success that she grew up in Nantucket, when she did, with the parents that she had? If she had grown up in Ohio or Europe, if she had been born a few decades earlier or later, if her parents had been less enthusiastic about education, is there any way she would have become an astronomer? How much of the early recognition of Mitchell’s work was connected to the struggle of the U.S. as a relatively new country to establish itself in the international community of science? (Does it even make sense to think of an international community of science in the mid-nineteenth century? Was it less about having American scientists accepted into such a community and more about national bragging rights? What might be the current state of the U.S. scientifically if other opportunities to establish national prowess had been pursued instead?)

Especially gripping are the questions about the proper role of females in scientific pursuits, and how what was “proper” seemed contingent upon external factors, including the availability (or not) of men for scientific labors during the American Civil War. I was surprised, reading this book, to discover that science and mathematics were considered more appropriate pursuits for girls (while philosophy and classical languages were better suited to boys) when Maria Mitchell was young. (How, in light of this history, do so many people get away with insinuating that females lack the intrinsic aptitude for science and math?) The stereotype in Mitchell’s youth that sciences were appropriate pursuits for girls seems to have been based on a certain kind of essentialism about what girls are like, as well as what I would identify as a misunderstanding about how the sciences operate and what kind of picture of the world they can be counted on to deliver. Mitchell, as much as anyone, seemed to be pushing her astronomical researches in a direction very different from the “safe” science people expected — yet in her writings, she also makes claims about women that could be read as essentialist, too. It’s hard to know whether these were these rhetorical moves, or whether Mitchell really bought into there being deep, fundamental differences between the sexes. This makes her story more complicated — and more compelling — than a straightforward narrative of a heroic scientist and professor battling injustice.

Indeed, there are moments here where I wanted to grab Maria Mitchell by the shoulders and shake her, as when she negotiated a lower salary for herself at Vassar than she was offered, even though she foresaw that it would lead to unfairly low salaries of the women faculty who followed her. Was her rejection of the higher salary just a matter of being honest to a fault about her limited teaching experience and her wavering self-confidence? Was she instead worried that accepting the higher salary might give the trustees an excuse not to take on the college’s first woman professor? Was opening the doors to other women in the professorate a more pressing duty than ensuring they would get the same respect — or at least, the same pay — as their male counterparts?

Given the seriousness with which Mitchell approached the task of increasing educational and professional opportunities for women, I can’t help but wondering how many of her choices were driven by a sense of duty. On balance, did Mitchell live the life she wanted to live, or the life she thought she ought to live to make things better? (Would she have drawn such a distinction herself?)

Some of these questions are connected to the various other strands of this rich biography. For example, Bergland does quite a lot to explore Maria Mitchell’s Quaker background, her own inclination to part company with the Society of Friends on certain matters of religious belief, the influence of her cultural Quakerism on and off Nantucket island, even how her plain Quaker dress made her an exotic and an object of curiosity during her travels through Europe at a time when the U.S. was arguably a developing country.

Bergland’s book is a captivating read that will be of interest to anyone curious about the development of educational institutions and professional communities, about the ways political and societal forces pull at the life of the mind, or about the ways people come to steer their interactions in many different circles to achieve what they think must be achieved.

An earlier version of this review was first published here.

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Want to help kids in a high poverty high school get outside and really experience astronomy? Please consider supporting “Keep Looking Up”, a DonorsChoose project aimed at purchasing a telescope for a brand new astronomy class in Chouteau, OK. Even a few dollars can make a difference.

Everyday mentors: a tribute to Dr. James E. Lu Valle.

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People talk a lot about the importance of mentors, and scientific trainees are regularly encouraged to find strong mentors to help them find their way as they work to become grown-up scientists. Sometimes, though, mentoring doesn’t happen in explicit coaching sessions but in casual conversations. And sometimes, when you’re not looking for them, mentors find you.

Back in the spring and autumn of 1992, I was a chemistry graduate student starting to believe that I might actually get enough of my experiments to work to get my Ph.D. As such, I did what senior graduate students in my department were supposed to do: I began preparing myself to interview with employers who came to my campus (an assortment of industry companies and national labs), and I made regular visits to my department’s large job announcement binder (familiarly referred to as “The Book of Job”).

What optimism successes in the lab giveth, the daunting terrain laid out in “The Book of Job” taketh away.

It wasn’t just the announcements of postdoctoral positions (positions, I had been told, which provided the standard path by which to develop research experience in an area distinct from the one that was the focus of the doctoral research) that listed as prerequisites three or more years of research experience in that very area. The very exercise of trying to imagine myself meeting the needs of an academic department looking for a certain kind of researcher was … really hard. It sounded like they were all looking for researchers significantly more powerful than I felt myself to be at that point, and I wasn’t sure if it was realistic to expect that I could develop those powers.

I was having a crisis of faith, but I was trying to keep it under wraps because I was pretty sure that having that crisis was a sign that my skills and potential as a chemist were lacking.

It was during my regularly scheduled freak-out over the binder in the department lobby that I really got to know Dr. Lu Valle. While I was in the department, his official position was as a “visiting scholar”, but since he had been the director of undergraduate labs in the department for years before he retired, he wasn’t really visiting, he was at home. And Dr. Lu Valle took it upon himself to make me feel at home, too — not just in the department, but in chemistry.

It started with light conversation. Dr. Lu Valle would ask what new listings had turned up in the binder since the last time he had seen me. Then he’d ask about what kind of listings I was hoping would turn up there. Soon, we were talking about what kind of things I hoped for in a chemical career, and about what scared me in my imagination of a chemical career.

That he bothered to draw me out and let me talk about my fears made those fears a lot more manageable.

But Dr. Lu Valle went even further than just getting me to voice my fears. He reassured me that it was normal for good chemists to have these fears, and that everyone had to get across the chasm between knowing you could be a good student and believing you could be a successful grown-up scientist. And he took it as an absolute given that I could get across this chasm.

Now, I should note for the record that my advisor did much to encourage me (along with pressing me to think harder, to make sure my data was as good as it could be, to anticipate flaws in my interpretations, and so forth). But the advisor-advisee relationship can be fraught. When you’ve been busting your hump in the lab, showing weakness of any sort in your interactions with your PI can feel, viscerally, like a bad idea. I think that for a good stretch of time in my graduate lab, I put a spin on many of my interactions with my PI that was significantly more optimistic than I felt inside. (Then, I worked like mad so that my optimistic projections of what I would be able to accomplish had a reasonable chance of coming true.)

Being able to voice some of my worries to a senior chemist who didn’t need me to make headway on one of his research projects — and for whom reassuring me wasn’t part of the official job description — really helped. Dr. Lu Valle didn’t need to mentor me. He didn’t need to interact with me at all. But he did.

Somewhere in the course of our discussions, as we were talking about the frustrations of getting experiments to work, Dr. Lu Valle mentioned that his advisor had made him completely disassemble, then completely reassemble, complex apparatus — not just to get an experiment under control, but to persuade him that taking the whole thing apart and putting it all back together (even repeatedly) was within his powers.

That was the conversation in which that I learned that Dr. Lu Valle’s advisor had been Linus Pauling.

Now, maybe it amped up the pep-talks a little that a senior scientist who seemed to have complete faith that I was going to do fine had been trained by a guy who won two Nobel Prizes. But mostly, I think it reassured me that Dr. Lu Valle remembered what it was like to be a graduate student and to have to get over the chasm of not knowing if you can do it to believing that you can.

After the season of job interviews passed, I drifted away from “The Book of Job” and back to my lab to get some more experiments done and to get writing. Then, in January of 1993, while he was on vacation in New Zealand, Dr. Lu Valle died.

It was at his memorial service (which happened to be on my twenty-fifth birthday) that I learned the remarkable details of Dr. Lu Valle’s life that didn’t come up in our conversations in the department lobby. A press release from the Stanford University News Office describes some of the high points:

James E. Lu Valle, a visiting scholar at Stanford and retired director of undergraduate laboratories in the Chemistry Department, died Jan. 30 in Te Anau, New Zealand, while on vacation. He was 80.

During a long and varied career, Lu Valle’s research covered electron diffraction, photochemistry, magnetic susceptibility, reaction kinetics and mechanisms, photographic theory, magnetic resonance, solid-state physics, neurochemistry and the chemistry of memory and learning.

Lu Valle was well known in track circles as the 400- meter bronze medal winner of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. …

Lu Valle ran in the Olympics the same year he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California-Los Angeles. He then returned for his master’s degree in chemistry and physics, during which time he helped found the graduate student association and served as its first president. In 1983, UCLA named its new Graduate Student Union in his honor.

Lu Valle’s career in chemistry started at age 8, when he found a chemistry set under the Christmas tree. He tried every experiment possible, and eventually filled the house with smoke. At his mother’s insistence, the rest of his childhood experiments took place on the porch.

In 1940, Lu Valle earned a doctorate in chemistry and math under the tutelage of Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology. He then taught at Fisk University in Tennessee, after which he spent 10 years at Eastman Kodak working on color photography.

He was the first African American to be employed in the Eastman Kodak laboratories. While there, Lu Valle went on loan to the National Defense Research Committee to conduct research at the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology on devices for monitoring carbon dioxide in planes.

He later served as director of research at Fairchild Camera and Instrument and became director of physical and chemical research at Smith-Corona Merchant Labs in Palo Alto in 1969.

During that time, he made extensive use of the Chemistry Department library, in the process getting to know faculty members. When SCM closed its Palo Alto operations, the Chemistry Department asked him to head the freshman labs.

“He was eminently qualified, a first-class chemist,” Professor Douglas Skoog recounted in 1984, “and we were glad to have him. In fact, he was overqualified for the job.”

As head of the labs for seven years, his task was to assign teaching assistants and make sure that the right equipment was always ready.

In practice, he became a friend and counselor to the chemistry majors and pre-med students passing through the department. In an average year, 900 students would start freshman chemistry.

Lu Valle is survived by his wife of 47 years, Jean Lu Valle, of Palo Alto, and three children. Son John Vernon Lu Valle is an engineer with Allied Signal under contract to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and Michael James Lu Valle is associated with Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Daughter Phyllis Ann Lu Valle- Burke is a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School. A sister, Mayme McWhorter of Los Angeles, also survives.

Dr. LuValle never talked to me about what it was like to be an African American athlete competing in Hitler’s Olympics. He didn’t share with me his experience of being the first African American scientist working at Eastman Kodak labs. We didn’t discuss the details of the research that he did across so many different scientific areas.

If I had known these facets of his past while he was alive, I would have liked to ask him about them.

But Dr. Lu Valle was, I think, more concerned with what I needed as someone trying to imagine myself taking on the role of a grown-up chemist. His success as the director of undergraduate labs had a lot to do with his ability and willingness to tune into what students needed, and then to provide it. With all of those accomplishments under his belt — accomplishments which potentially might have made a student like me think, “Well of course an exceptional person with so much talent and drive succeeded at science, but I’m not that exceptional!” — he wasn’t afraid to dig back to his experience of what it was like to be a graduate student, to remember the uncertainty, frustration, and fear that are a part of that experience, and to say, “I got through it, and I have every reason to believe that you will, too.”

I don’t know whether personal experience is what developed Dr. Lu Valle’s awareness of how important this kind of mentoring can be, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. As an African American graduate student at Caltech in the 1930s, I’m sure he had lots of people expecting him to fail. Having people in his life who expected that of course he would succeed — whether his parents, his advisor, or someone else with standing as a grown-up scientist — may have helped him propel himself through the inescapable moments of self-doubt to the distinguished trajectory his professional life took.

It may not be accidental, though, that in a very white, very male chemistry department, Dr. Lu Valle was the one who put himself in my path when I was doubting myself most and reassured me that I would do just fine. Maybe he knew what it was like to have someone provide that kind of support when you need it.

I count myself as lucky that, in his retirement, Dr. Lu Valle still felt that the chemistry department was a home to him. Because of him, that department and the larger community of chemists felt like more of a home to me.