Tag Archives: women in science

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

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.

* * * * *

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.

Gender bias: ethical implications of an empirical finding.

Posted on by

By now, you may have seen the recently published study by Ross-Macusin et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”, or the nice discussion by Ilana Yurkiewicz of why these findings matter.

Briefly, the study involved having science faculty from research-focused universities rate materials from potential student candidates for a lab manager position. The researchers attached names to the application materials — some of them male names, some of them female names — at random, and examined how the ratings of the materials correlated with the names that were attached to them. What they found was that the same application materials got a higher ranking (i.e., a judgment that the applicant would be more qualified for the job) when the attached name was male than when it was female. Moreover, both male and female faculty ranked the same application more highly when attached to a male name.

It strikes me that there are some ethical implications that flow from this study to which scientists (among others) should attend:

  1. Confidence that your judgments are objective is not a guarantee that your judgments are objective, and your intent to be unbiased may not be enough. The results of this study show a pattern of difference in ratings for which the only plausible explanation is the presence of a male name or a female name for the applicant. The faculty members treated the task they were doing as an objective evaluation of candidates based on prior research experience, faculty recommendations, the applicant’s statement, GRE scores, and so forth — that they were sorting out the well-qualified from the less-well-qualified — but they didn’t do that sorting solely on the basis of the actual experience and qualifications described in the application materials. If they had, the rankings wouldn’t have displayed the gendered split they did. The faculty in the study undoubtedly did not mean to bring gender bias to the evaluative task, but the results show that they did, whether they intended to or not.
  2. If you want to build reliable knowledge about the world, it’s helpful to identify your biases so they don’t end up getting mistaken for objective findings. As I’ve mentioned before, objectivity is hard. One of the hardest things about being objective is that fact that so many of our biases are unconscious — we don’t realize that we have them. If you don’t realize that you have a bias, it’s much harder to keep that bias from creeping in to your knowledge-building, from the way you frame the question you’re exploring to how you interpret data and draw conclusions from them. The biases you know about are easier to keep on a short leash.
  3. If a methodologically sound study finds that science faculty have a particular kind of bias, and if you are science faculty, you probably should assume that you might also have that bias. If you happen to have good independent evidence that you do not display the particular bias in question, that’s great — one less unconscious bias that might be messing with your objectivity. However, in the absence of such good independent evidence, the safest assumption to make is that you’re vulnerable to the bias too — even if you don’t feel like you are.
  4. If you doubt the methodologically soundness of a study finding that science faculty have a particular kind of bias, it is your responsibility to identify the methodological flaws. Ideally, you’d also want to communicate with the authors of the study, and with other researchers in the field, about the flaws you’ve identified in the study methodology. This is how scientific communities work together to build a reliable body of knowledge we all can use. And, a responsible scientist doesn’t reject the conclusions of a study just because they don’t match one’s hunches about how things are. The evidence is how scientists know anything.
  5. If there’s reason to believe you have a particular kind of bias, there’s reason to examine what kinds of judgments of yours it might influence beyond the narrow scope of the experimental study. Could gender bias influence whose data in your lab you trust the most? Which researchers in your field you take most seriously? Which theories or discoveries are taken to be important, and which others are taken to be not-so-important? If so, you have to be honest with yourself and recognize the potential for this bias to interfere with your interaction with the phenomena, and with your interaction with other scientists to tackle scientific questions and build knowledge. If you’re committed to building reliable knowledge, you need to find ways to expose the operation of this bias, or to counteract its effects. (Also, to the extent that this bias might play a role in the distribution of rewards like jobs or grants in scientific careers, being honest with yourself probably means acknowledging that the scientific community does not operate as a perfect meritocracy.)

Each of these acknowledgments looks small on its own, but I will not pretend that that makes them easy. I trust that this won’t be a deal-breaker. Scientists do lots of hard things, and people committed to building reliable knowledge about the world should be ready to take on pieces of self-knowledge relevant to that knowledge-building. Even when they hurt.

I am science … or am I?

Posted on by

Kevin Zelnio kicked it off on Twitter with a hashtag, and then wrote a blog post that shared the details of his personal journey with science. Lots of folks have followed suit and shared their stories, too — so many that I can’t even begin to link them without leaving something wonderful out. (Search the blogs and Twitter for #iamscience and you’ll find them.)

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to tell my own “I am science” story, but it’s complicated. Thus, I’m preemptively declaring this my first pass, and reserving the right to come back at it from a different angle (or two, or three) later.

One of the things I mentioned in my story at the ScienceOnline 2012 banquet is that I have always loved science. As far back as I can remember, I have wanted to understand how the pieces of my world work. I have thrilled at utility (and fun) of the problem-solving strategies that are part of a scientific approach to the world. I have contemplated the different observational, experimental, and conceptual tools different scientific disciplines bring to the table (and the ways that directing these different toolboxes to the same phenomena can give us starkly different understandings of just what is going on).

I wanted to learn science. I wanted to do science. But I lived in a culture that took pains to make it clear that girls and women were not supposed to be into science, so I should just cut it out.

Luckily for my love of science, well-behaved was not really a tool in my personal toolbox, at least when it came to edicts that got in the way of goals that mattered to me.

I probably got by with the normal ration of sexist crap. For example, I had the junior high math teacher who was convinced (and did not hide this conviction from his students) that Girls Just Cannot Do Math. Finishing geometry in one quarter so I could get the hell out of his classroom (for the matrix algebra class at the high school) was not just liberatory, but it let me give him a metaphorical poke in the eye. It did not, however, change his conviction about girls and math. I had the guidance counselor who was concerned that I was overloading with “hard” (i.e., math and science) courses when maybe it would be better if I took some home ec., or even a study hall.


As I went to a women’s college, I actually skipped the bulk of the classroom sexism I heard about from peers at other universities. None of my chemistry or physics professors started with the assumption that it was weird to have women in the classroom or the lab, which was nice. I did find out later that at least one of the professors had made offhand comments that chemistry majors at my alma mater probably weren’t “up to” graduate programs like the one I went to. Unless this professor was thinking that the graduate school experience should be all margaritas and hot stone massages, I have no idea what this impression was based on; in my graduating class, I was a fair to middling chemistry major (as some of the comments in my lab notebooks attest) — not one of the stars by any stretch of the imagination — and I was sufficiently “up to” the graduate program that I earned my Ph.D. in just over four years.


Of course, I got to bask in the sexism provided by students of a nearby technical school, which my boyfriend at the time happened to attend. Said boyfriend had taken to posting photocopies of each of my grad school acceptance letters on his door, proclaiming to the world (or at least to the frat) what a glorious geek his girlfriend was. After acceptance number 5 (out of 5 applications, to top-10 schools) was posted, a frat-brother said, “Wow, she must have applied to a lot of schools.” When told that the number of acceptances equalled the number of applications, he replied, “Ohh — affirmative action.”


Because clearly, how else could a chick (from a women’s college, no less) get into top graduate programs in chemistry?


And you know, that view was shared by at least some of the men in the graduate program I attended. Because nearly a quarter of our incoming class was female, it was clear to them that affirmative action had been in high gear during the admissions process. (Meanwhile, I was looking at the numbers and thinking, “Where the hell are the rest of the women?”) Women who did very good research, who got publishable results (and publications), and who got their Ph.D.s in four or five years (rather than six or seven or eight) were frequently looked upon with suspicion. They must be getting extra breaks from the system. Or maybe it was that their research focus was not very … significant. (There were never any reasoned arguments to back up the claims that a particular research focus was trivial; it just must be, because … well, she’s doing it.)

Meanwhile, of course, female TAs (in classes like thermodynamics) were treated with contempt by undergraduates. In instances where problem sets and solution sets disagreed about an answer, the fact that the solution set was prepared by a female was treated as reason enough to question its correctness.

Because women don’t really understand physical chemistry as well as men do (even, apparently, men who have not yet taken physical chemistry).


The fact that all of this garbage was clearly recognizable as garbage at the time didn’t make dealing with it any less tiresome. Some days there was barely enough energy just to do my own homework, grade the stacks of problem sets, and try to get things in the lab to function as they should. Keeping myself from punching the noses of the people who treated me as an interloper in science because I was a woman took up energy I could have used for other things.


Sexist crap not withstanding, I made it through. I got my Ph.D. in physical chemistry.

And then, things took an unexpected turn.

I was trying to write an NSF proposal to get funding for a post-doc I had lined up. I was very interested in the research in the lab in which I was planning to work. Indeed, I had been pretty enthuisiastic about the whole thing while I put together an NIH proposal to fund postdoctoral research in that lab. I could definitely imagine three years worth of learning about systems and measurment techniques that were new to me, and I could see it building on (and drawing upon) the things I had learned in my doctoral program in interesting ways.


But the NSF proposal I was writing was such that I could not describe the research project I was planning to undertake as a post-doc. Rather, the task was to describe the first project I envisioned undertaking as a principal investigator. In other words, tell us what you’ll contribute when you are officially a grown up scientist.


Now, I could think of lots of projects I would be qualified to pursue. I could even work out interesting projects in my general area of expertise that would be fundable. But, I was having trouble putting my heart into any of them. Imagining myself setting up a lab of my own to pursue any of these lines of research made me … sad.


I tried to ignore the sad feeling. I tried to put it down to slothful avoidance of the thinking and writing involved in the NSF proposal. But then, every time I’d try to make myself think past the few years of the impending post-doc, I got the same sad, empty feeling.


I knew I was still fascinated by science and its workings, still moved by the elegant model or the clever experiment. But it was becoming clear to me that in my heart I didn’t want to do science for the rest of my life. Serious reflection got me to the reasons: Doing science (i.e., being able to get funding to do science) would require that I focus my attention on the minutiae of a particular system or a particular problem; this is the approach that seems most effective in yielding the data and insight that solves scientific problems. But, the questions that kept me up at night were much broader questions about how, more generally, experiments tell us anything about the deep structure of the universe, how different methodological assumptions make the same phenomena tractable in different ways, what balance of hard-headed skepticism and willingness to entertain speculative hypotheses scientists needed to get the job done …


These were questions, clearly, that I would get into trouble for making the focus of my research were I working in a chemistry department. They had the smell of philosophy all over them. So I had to choose between being kept up at night by questions I couldn’t pursue professionally and pursuing questions I was not so interested in for a living, or admitting that my interest in science was primarily driven by an interest in philosophical questions and get myself the necessary training as a philosopher to pursue them. In some ways living a lie would have been the path of least resistance, but given how little I enjoyed being with me as I contemplated a loveless marriage to a scientific career, I figured I’d probably me cutting myself off from fellowship with other humans as well. So, I made the entirely selfish decision to do what I thought would make me happy.

Here, believe me when I tell you that it felt like a selfish decision in the time — not like a luxurious self-indulgence, but out and out selfishness. I leaked out of the pipeline. I could have improved the gender balance in science by one, and I didn’t. Instead of helping the sisters, I pursued my own individual happiness.


This is the thing I hate most about pervasive sexism. It makes your personal choices important to others in a way that they wouldn’t be if you were just an ordinary human being. It’s hard not to feel that I have let down people I have never even met by leaving the sparse ranks of women scientists, or that I have handed myself over to the pundits: one more example of a woman who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hack it in science.


None of which is to say that my relationship with science is over.

My professional life as an academic philosopher is tied up with understanding how science, and the community that does science, works. If anything, I feel more connected to the intellectual enterprise as a whole, and its connection to other aspects of human flourishing, than I did when I was in the trenches working as a chemist. As an educator, I have an opportunity I might not have had if I were teaching primarily chemistry majors to help folks who fear science understand it better. As it happens, I also have the opportunity to teach lots of science majors (in my “Ethics in Science” course) how ethics matter to scientific knowledge-building, and to the project of sharing a world with non-scientists. Since I’m tickled to be paid to think about the questions that keep me up at night, I have enthusiasm and energy I might not be able to muster otherwise to call shenanigans on misrepresentations of the scientific enterprise, whether by policy makers or science teachers.

Science has my devotion as a philosopher; as a chemist, chances are I would have just been going through the motions.

I may have left the lab bench, but I haven’t left the conversation.

Occasionally, though, I have to grapple with the question of whether I’m in the conversation as an insider or an outsider. Do I really count in the tribe of science? If I don’t do science anymore, how can it make sense to claim that science is part of who I am?

I don’t know what I can say to that except that my love for science, my inclination towards scientific ways of navigating through my world, the formation of myself as a competent scientist as I was figuring out how to become an adult — these are things I cannot separate from my identity. These are features of myself I cannot turn off. If you deal with me, these are some of the facets you are likely to encounter.

Am I science? It sure feels that way to me.

My story from the ScienceOnline 2012 banquet.

Posted on by

This year at ScienceOnline, the conference banquet featured storytelling organized by The Monti, a North Carolina non-profit organization dedicated to building community by getting people to share their true stories with each other. Conference goers were asked to share stories on the theme of “connections”. The stories had to be true, and storytellers had to tell them without notes.

The seven stories told at the banquet provided a kaleidoscopic view of what “connections” might mean to a bunch of people involved in doing science, or teaching science, or communicating science, or trying to negotiate their own relationship with science in their personal and professional lives.

I feel honored that I got to tell my story as part of this event. My narrative was about connections between what things were like for me as a kid and how I’d like things to be different for my own kids, between online discussions and outcomes in the three-dimensional world, between my comfort zone and situations where I know I am out of my depth.

You can listen to the audio of me actually telling my story here. (It’s #3 in the list; I haven’t been able to figure out a way to grab just my story and embed it here, and you probably want to listen to the other stories, too, because they’re all really good.)

Here’s a photo of me telling the story (taken by official ScienceOnline 2012 photographer Maggie Pingolt.

Partway through the story, it will become relevant.

And, here’s a transcript-like text version of the story. I’ve taken out umm-like things.

So, like a lot of people in the room, I guess, I have always known that I loved science, but I grew up in a culture that told me that I shouldn’t, because I’m a girl.

And, between the TV, and the toy commercials, and my peers, and the teachers, the message was: “Look, science is not girls’ stuff. Science is not something girls are supposed to like. You are supposed to spend your time figuring out how to be like girls are, which is pretty, and pink, and neat, and well-behaved.” I did not want to be any of those things. I did not know how to be any of those things. I did not see how being any of those things was going to get my hands on the science-y stuff I wanted to do. So what was the point?

So, as you can imagine, school was not a lot of fun, because on the one hand, I had my peers making life crap because I could not perform femininity. And, I had teachers making my life crap, saying: “Look, no, I don’t care that you can do the math and do the science. It’s impossible that you can do the math and do the science because you’re a girl. So, stop that!”

And, one gets through this. And, I kind of figured by the time I was a grown-up, and had kids that I was raising of my own, we were going to be past all of this in our culture — that we would have fixed this particular blind spot we have. But the first time we cracked open the educational toy catalog, when our kids were old enough for those: hit in the face with the heavily gendered science kits.

And they come in two flavors: they come in the science kits, and the science kits for girls. And the science kits for girls of course come in a pink box, and they are science that concerns what girls are supposed to want to do, which is make lip gloss, or make bubble bath, or maybe grow pretty crystals. And the pictures on the box have cartoon girls with eye shadow and off-the-shoulder blouses, as if to say: “Look, dear, there’s nothing about doing this activity that is going to get in the way of your really important task of figuring out how to be conforming to our gendered expectations of you.”

The boys’ kits, meanwhile, had cool stuff — I mean, you got to take things apart. You got to blow things up. You got to examine the world on a really small scale. This is stuff I wanted to do — and got to do, luckily, when I was a kid, but only because my mother was as much of a rebel against this as I was.

What the girls are offered is the pink microscopes that don’t magnify as well as the blue microscopes do. Instead of getting kits where you get to blow stuff up, you get to make bath bombs, and as it turns out, bath bombs do not actually explode. Which is kind of a rip off.

So, of course, when I started blogging, this was one of the things I blogged about — because a good rant is what keeps a blogger going in the morning. And this was like five years ago. So I got my rant on. And of course, this November, those of you who watch the Twitters knew that Ed Yong tweeted about the WILD! Science* website selling extremely gendered science kits.

So it’s still going on! And people were like, “Yeah, we should blog about this some more!”

I’ll be honest: I was tired. I did not feel like blogging about this again. I said, I have been banging my head against this particular wall with this culture, and, you know, maybe I’d like to bang my head against a different wall that might move a little. But, I took a breath. I said, OK, everyone’s doing it, so I’ll try to explain again what it is about these kits that I find problematic — that they’re not really trying to interest kids in science so much as saying the only hook we’ve got with girls is their femininity. And, they’re not actually cultivating an interest in science so much as reminding girls: even in science, you are expected to do this femininity thing or you will get crap.

So, I blogged about it, and then a really exciting thing happened in December. In December, Edmund Scientific announced on their blog that they had noticed these blog posts, and letters they had gotten, emails they had gotten from customers, and they understood the criticism, and they recognized that they were sending out a message that they did not want to send out as they were selling science kits. And they said, we’re going to stop. They said, we are going to no longer sell boys’ science kits and girls’ science kits; they’re now all science kits for whatever kind of kid wants to do it.

And I was really, really excited. You know, all of us sort of being cranky eventually, I guess … every now and then we get this incremental piece of change.

I was so excited that afternoon, and I had to tell my kids, because, you know, you’ve got to share your excitement and your tweeps get tired of it so your kids have to listen to the overflow.

I should tell you something about my kids, something I sort of keep on the down-low on blogs ’cause of creepy internet stalker types. My kids are daughters.

The oldest one’s in seventh grade, the youngest one’s in fifth grade. So, they’re twelve and ten. The older one … I think maybe there was a six month stretch in kindergarten where she experimented with officially sanctioned femininity as recognized by our culture and then decided it just was not worth the trouble, and hasn’t really bothered with it since.

The ten-year-old is a pretty pink princess.

Which makes our relationship with each other complicated, because as I told you before, I don’t really do femininity. She actually tried to help me with my outfit for tonight, but in the end she said, “Please don’t tell them I was involved in this.” We’re different, she and I.

But, she was the one, when I told her this news about this company selling science kits that decided to drop the heavy gendering, she was the one who got really excited and gave me a hug and gave me a high five.

Because both of my kids — the tomboy and the pretty princess — both of them love science. The ten-year-old who loves to dress up, who loves to wear pantyhose, for God’s sake, who asked for a lint-roller for Christmas — she loves to do science. She is also a fierce goalie for her soccer team, and she can tell fart jokes with the best of them, and this is because, unlike what the marketers would have you believe, a pretty pink princess has facets.

So, as we’re celebrating this, I’m sort of keeping up with the discussion in the blogosphere. And there’s some discussion going on saying, “Well, OK, heavily gendered science kits: probably problematic. But, maybe we’re doing some pink-bashing here. Maybe we’ve got to make the world safe for pink microscopes, too.”

There was sort of this “click!” in my head when I remembered — oh wait, it’s not just that we live in a culture that says “Girls can’t do science,” and we’ve got to deal with that; or that girls need to be feminine, and we’ve got to deal with that. We live in a culture where we have this idea that scientists need to be a certain way.

So we’ve gone from where I was when I was in school, having teachers tell me, “You can’t do science ’cause you’re a girl,” to now maybe the teachers are saying , “Well, you’re probably not going to be into science because you’re a girly girl.” You can do science, but you’ve got to be one of those girls who thinks the whole femininity thing is not something you want to spend any kind of time with.

And that’s a problem, too.

And I thought back to my misspent scientific youth in a physical chemistry lab, where absolutely the smartest, the best scientist in that lab aside from my PI was a fourth year graduate student who graduated after her fourth year with a ton of publications in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. But people outside of our lab thought she had all kinds of help, or that her work must not be too significant, and the main reason they seemed to think that is ’cause she did her hair, and she wore make up, and she did her nails, and she was kind of a grown up pretty princess. If they had bothered to talk to her about her science, if they had bothered to look inside her notebooks — which, I grant, were kept in loopy script, sometimes in pink ink — they would have seen that she was fiercely intelligent and frighteningly organized in her attack on the research questions that she pursued. She was an astonishingly good scientist, and she was made to feel like an outsider in our scientific community simply because she did femininity.

And we’ve got to cut this out. We have to cut this out.

We not only have to, as a culture, get over the idea that boys have to be a certain way and girls have to be a certain way, and that the certain way girls have to be is not compatible with doing science. We also have to get over the idea that to be a good scientist you have to be a certain kind of person, and that’s not the kind of person who’s going to get his or her nails done.

Because ultimately, the world I want to be in, the world I want for my daughters — for the tomboy and the pretty princess — is one where they can be authentically who they are, and they can love science, and they can pursue science, and it doesn’t matter what else they like.

Thank you.
_____
*At the banquet, I erroneously said “Mad Science.” Ah, the dangers of telling a story without notes!

If you want to go back and relive the discussion of gendered science kits as it was happening last November and December, here are some links:

Science kits … for girls.
Some reasons gendered science kits may be counterproductive.
Gendered science kits aren’t so great for boys either.
How do we make room for pink microscopes? (More thoughts on gendered science kits.)

The WILD! Science selection of science kits for girls.
The Edmund Scientific blog post that filled my heart with joy.

More on #Womanspace: common suggestions and patient responses.

Posted on by

A few things people have suggested in the discussion of “Womanspace” on multiple blogs and social networking platforms:

  1. That the story does not advance any gendered stereotypes (or, it it does, that these are not negative stereotypes, or that they reflect most poorly upon the hapless men in the story rather than upon the highly competent woman).
  2. That, if the story does rely on gendered stereotypes, these are surely not harmful to women because the author did not intend them to be harmful to women.
  3. That there is something untoward (or vicious, or slanderous) in pointing out that a story comes across to a number of readers (or just to oneself) as sexist — because, again, clearly that was not the intent of the author, and here you’ve gone and sullied his good name!
  4. That if one woman who reads a story does not find it sexist, no other women are within their rights to find it sexist. (A corollary to this is that those women who do find it sexist are actively looking for something to be angry about.)
  5. Peripherally, that a woman whose mode of dress is judged “provocative” will have her credibility to identify, or object to, gendered stereotypes questioned.
  6. That if there is any more pressing problem facing the planet or its denizens, someone will take you to task for “wasting time” pointing out gendered stereotypes and their potential negative effects
  7. That whether or not this particular attempt at humor in short fiction succeeded, the situation for women in scientific education, careers, and publishing is so much better than it used to be that there is no good reason for women to complain — verily, that they should show some appreciation for the golden age of gender equity in which we live.

It’s worth noting that many of these are familiar (so much so that there are bingo cards which collect them), and that many of us have tried patiently to respond to them many, many times (which may explain why we seem less-than-patient explaining the problem on the Nth time we hear these chestnuts, since N is by now a very large number). Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if the need to re-answer familiar objections over and over and over indicates a problem some have with listening to the answers.

But I’m sure that does not describe you, gentle reader. So, some responses:

  1. Here, let us turn to the source material:

    In any general shopping situation, men hunt: that is, they go into a complex environment with a few clear objectives, achieve those, and leave. Women, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish.

    And the interesting thing is — and this is what sparked the discovery — that any male would be very hard pressed to say where she got some of these things, even if he accompanied her.

    Is this not a generalization about gendered differences around shopping? Does it not play into stereotypes of women as shoppers — either always up for the next mall-crawl, or at least clearly in charge of spending the family’s money to procure necessary goods and services, including food, clothing, and cleaning supplies? Even if this is a stereotype that makes men, as a group, look less competent, that does not make it less of a stereotype. Sexist stereotypes hurt men, too.

  2. There is nothing magical about intent. If I accidentally step on your toe, it may hurt just as much as if I had intentionally stepped on it. Regardless of the intent of one’s actions, the effects of those actions may properly matter to the people affected by them. Pretending this is not so is magical thinking.
  3. Following upon #3, having the harmful effects of your actions pointed out to you and taking that as an attack on your character either reflects an inability to separate intent from effects, or an unwillingness to assume any responsibility for those effects (even if they were not intended), or an unwillingness to change in such a way as to avoid those effects in the future. The last of these options starts to look an awful lot like intent, or at least willful negligence — since if you’re listening, you have information that could help you avoid having the same harmful effects in the future.

    One might object that gendered stereotypes don’t actually have significant harmful effects — that at most they are annoying. Christie’s discussion of stereotype threat describes just one of the actual harms.

    If it makes you feel bad to have people point out the harmful effect of your action (even if that harmful effect is not intentional), think of how it must feel to actually experience the harmful effect that you feel bad having someone point out was caused by your action. If you feel bad being connected with sexist impacts, presumably it is because you recognize that sexist impacts are bad. Right?

    Here, the right thing to do is not to holler, “I didn’t mean it!” but rather to say, “I’m sorry I caused you harm; I’ll do my best to avoid doing it again.”

    For more assistance in distinguishing between the “what you did” and the “what you are”, see Jay Smooth.

  4. Women are not, as it turns out, a monolithic group. Among other things, this means some women will be more bothered by particular instances of sexism than others. This does not mean that the women who are bothered are wrong, or that they are not actually harmed. And, if you care about whether your piece of short fiction, or your workplace policy, or whatever, might have the specific effect of alienating women, you should probably take account of women who report actually being alienated rather than deciding that the existence of one woman who is not proves that no woman should be.

    Of course, if you don’t care whether your piece of short fiction, or your workplace policy, or whatever, might have the specific effect of alienating women, proceed accordingly.

  5. One sort of gendered stereotype that women have to deal with is the assumption that we choose our manner of dress to attract men — or, if we do not dress in a conventionally feminine manner, that we object to gendered stereotypes because we are unable to perform femininity (and thus cannot score the approval points available to those women who can). Let me suggest that the very fact that women’s appearance and “what it means” are taken to be relevant in evaluating substantive points those women may be trying to make is part of how women come to learn about sexism and its negative effects.
  6. “Surely being unfairly labeled a sexist is not nearly as bad a problem as children starving, so why are you wasting time complaining about this!” See how that works?

    More generally, caring about (and taking action to address) problem X does not necessitate not caring about (or not taking action to address) problem Y. People can tackle many problems simultaneously (and develop their own best strategies for successfully addressing all the injustices, even if they take them in a different order than you do).

  7. There is likely less overt sexism in scientific education, careers, and publishing than there one was. Research cited in a Nature news item suggests overt discrimination against women in scientific careers is “largely a thing of the past”. However, the same story notes that this research “contrasts with reports that suggest overt discrimination remains a significant problem”. And, the same study identified still-existing societal barriers to women’s success in science.

    Which is to say, things may be better for women in science than they once were, but women still have to grapple with gender-based impediments if they want to be scientists.

    If one thinks that success in science should not be subject to unfair impediments on the basis of gender, perhaps this means one has a responsibility not to introduce or reinforce such impediments, even unintentionally.

More generally, if you care about the situation for women in science, it may be useful to listen to women when they describe their experiences in science. These experiences may have given them some relevant insight.