STEM girl

[liv]

Lots of fun posts celebrating Ada Lovelace day (yesterday, but I was busy writing a grant and planning a communal Passover celebration). I particularly enjoyed helenic's piece on confidence and how it affects women who write about tech in public.

Also rmc28 asked for women in science and technology to represent, so I thought I might have a go. Among other things it will serve as an introduction to my professional side for all the new people who just subscribed.

My official title is Lecturer in Bioscience, at a small but research-driven English university. What I actually do is spend half my time teaching life sciences to the undergraduate medical students, and half my time setting up a cancer research group. Well, eventually it will be set up and then I'll be spending half my time doing actual research.

In more detail, my subject is cancer cell biology. I'm interested in how cells make the "decision" to grow and divide or remain static or die, how cancer can result when those decision processes go wrong, and how to use that information to develop better cancer drugs. I spend some of my time developing systems for trying out thousands of compounds on cancer cells to pick the ones that are best at making the cancer cells die but doing minimal harm to normal cells. And some of my time trying to figure out exactly what's going on when cells start growing, and how their natural defence mechanisms work to prevent inappropriate growth and cancer. (One of those natural defence mechanisms is a protein called p53, which is pictured in my icon.)

What I love about my work is the balance between teaching and research. The teaching gives me human contact and immediate gratification. I've always loved teaching, and it's fantastic to be working with these bright, motivated students who find my subject nearly as fascinating as I do. Having that in my life makes it much more possible for me to do the research part, which I love because it's endlessly interesting and an intense intellectual challenge; there's no ceiling on how well I can do it. But at the same time it can be quite isolating and sometimes frustrating, because it may take weeks, months or even years before I see whether my effort has yielded any useful progress.

I am a little uncomfortable with the concept of Ada Lovelace day, to be honest. I think it can make a difference to see visible women doing STEM subjects. It's just that when I was a kid I found it really frustrating that I was always expected to have female role models, I was pushed into fangirling Rosalind Franklin when I wanted to fangirl Francis Crick, assumed because of my gender to be more interested in Dorothy Hodgkin than Max Perutz and so on. In some ways the message I want to send out to girls and young women is that they can do anything they want and gender doesn't matter, not that we can manage to find one or two female names in the list of influential scientists in your field, so that makes it ok for girls to have science ambitions.

But then, I did have one very important female role model growing up: my grandmother, who qualified as a doctor around the start of WW2 and devoted her whole life (literally, she died in the middle of a consultation with a patient) to women's and children's health, especially in deprived parts of the country. She also worked closely with Isabella Forshall, a surgeon born in 1902 who pretty much invented paediatric surgery.

Comments

[yvi]

Oh, cancer cell biology! Interesting!

I agree on this strange pressure to point out the female role models. It always seemed like many of them were just tucked on the end of those lists to show that there are women.

(But isn't STEM Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and not Medicine?)

[liv]

Ooh, thanks for the correction (and I'm impressed that people are playing such close attention to my mouseover text!). You're quite right about STEM, I got confused because my department is called the Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine and it's so similar that they just overlapped in my brain.

[simont]

I checked the mouseover text precisely because I couldn't decide whether I thought it was more likely to be Maths or Medicine. I'm glad it had already been corrected by the time I did – that would have confused me even further :-)

[liv]

Lucky I have eagle-eyed pedants in my Circle, then!

[oursin]

There was a survey fairly recently (last year?) about famous women scientists, or at least female scientists who had some degree of name-recognition, and I found it extremely depressing that Marie Curie was stil way in the lead, and second on the list was Rosalind Franklin, who gets remembered probably for the wrong reasons. We are sadly not yet at a stage where it isn't valuable recuperative work to bring to people's attention the numerous women who were significantly involved in science and technology and made contributions in those fields.* And the reasons why they have been obscured from history, which about a lot of things like institutionalisation and professionalisation, and how those are gendered. And the assumption that the female half of a partnership was a meek helpmeet, enabling Man of Genius to do his genius-thing.

*Though yesterday was such a morass of exhausting mostly work-related hassle that the best I could do was for ALD was post a quick link on FaceBook to info about the geneticist Charlotte Auerbach, whom I have only recently discovered, last thing before I logged off for the day. Didn't get to do a more discursive DW post on anyone.

[nanaya]

So *that's* what your icon is! I always thought it was very pretty, but just clocked it as an abstract, plant-like pattern.

I really don't know a lot about life sciences, sadly. I did, somehow, manage to do biology A level, but only managed a C grade. I'm generally very interested but I don't really understand the basics, largely, I think, on account of dropping out of Chemistry at 14 because the maths was too hard.

I have often wondered if my response to maths was subtly informed by gendered expectations. My father is brilliant at numerical things, being an engineer, while my mother is quite discalculic. I was very good at basic maths as a small child but found it tedious. I got quite bad at it as I got older (at least in part due to avoiding lessons ftb I did not like them, and therefore never grasping the mechanics of fractions), and this was a real problem with my ability to do sciences, which was a shame as I loved Biology when I was younger. I've always got quite angsty when having to do numerical things (oh, Solicitors' Accounts! Oh, Company Law and Finances! Oh, Probate!) and I do wish I wasn't quite so stupid at them.

Gardening really makes me wish I understood more about organic chemistry, I have to say. It's such a technical subject!

[liv]

You mean my icon of p53, not oursin's icon of Hypatia? it's a ribbon model diagram of a quarter of the protein, but yes, I do find it quite pretty as well. If you look at the blue spirally bits on the right, they are for fitting between the strands of DNA.

Maths is very odd, because it's actually two almost distinct things: arithmetic and actual maths. Lots of people are put off arithmetic early in their career, I fear partly cos it's badly taught, and therefore they never get on to the actual maths part which is a lot less about manipulating numbers. It could also be that you've inherited a touch of dyscalculia from your mother, though.

It's just awful when you've had bad teaching as a kid and it leads you to panic whenever you see anything with numbers in it. (My grandmother, not the one who was a doctor, but the one who left school at 12, had that problem and the thing that fixed it for her was finding that she's a complete genius at sudoku. That got her over her fear of numbers, and it turns out she can actually do arithmetic quite well, in spite of her really low level of education. Even though sudoku isn't actually maths, it's manipulating numbers without getting frustrated cos you can't do it.)

I do wonder about this kind of response, though. I'm not at all criticizing you, but I think it is very much part of those gender expectations, that any time I mention anything sciencey or technical, a high proportion of women come back with a detailed justification of why they're no good at science. For one thing it doesn't matter, different people have different talents. But I worry that it's reflecting some social pressures, that women almost have to pre-empt any potential accusation that they can't do sciencey stuff cos they're girls.

[nanaya]

Oh, I agree entirely, and it *is* a problem. In an ideal world, different aptitudes would all be valued at a comparable level, but this isn't the case. I get similarly discontented when I hear people say things like "law is so hard!". It's not, it's just got a huge volume of necessary background stuff and, as you observe, it's in how you're taught.

I don't feel terribly defensive about being bad at science. I'm pretty convinced that I'm bad at science because I'm bad at maths - I was good at science until I hit the numbers problem. I used to think I was just 'naturally' bad at maths because I took after my mother, but I'm much more suspicious of the gendered implications these days (to give my dad his due, he tried to convince me to like maths, but he's not the world's most patients or interesting teacher...). alextiefling's degree is in Maths, and he would totally agree with you about the poor teaching problem, it's one of his recurring rants. I'd like to be better at sciences because I get frustrated when I hit a brick wall of understanding on a subject I find very interesting, but I suspect I'm a bit far along in my life to go back and try to relearn it all now - unless I suddenly inherit lots of money and never need to work again!

And yes, your icon not the Hypatia one, though that is also lovely.

[liv]

This is a really interesting point, thanks for commenting. The trouble is that I'm hardly on the level of Rosalind Franklin, I'm just a tiny little cog in a very big machine, so I don't know how much I can be a role model to the next generation of women.

Your comment about professionalisation sounds a really interesting thing to explore. I'm a big fan of linley's book on women in STEM, though it's necessarily US focused.

(As an aside I hate the term helpmeet, as it's a horrible translation of one of the most egalitarian bits of language in the Bible. It's not about being meek and enabling, it's about helping by being equal. But anyway, that's not the word's fault, it's just my pet peeve.)

[oursin]

I've discussed some of the issues about women, science, the image of the scientist, etc in my essay in the Narrative Power collection just out from Aqueduct Press. On professionalisation, there does seem a tendency for the fluidity that characterises the early formative stages of some field to become hardened into trad gender attitudes when it starts going mainstream, generating secure and well-paid jobs, and gaining public recognition and prestige. And of course for a v long time women were not in a position to get past the gatekeepers.

I'm fascinated to hear about Isabella Forshall - I did a tiny bit of historical research once on women in paediatric gastroenterology about the same period, and one very much got the sense that they were getting the unglamorous and even despised jobs - e.g. in large children's hospitals in slum districts - that men weren't so much interested in and thought of as career deadends, and then turned these around completely so they became internationally renowned centre of pioneering good practice.

[amethystfirefly]

Your job sounds so neat. I wanted to go into research before I got sick, and I love hearing about other people's science-related jobs.

[liv]

I love my job! I should probably talk about it more, in the name of generally improving the level of science knowledge in the world.

[amethystfirefly]

I agree completely. :D

[rmc28]

Thanks for your response and your gently-expressed discomfort with singling out women. (I've read some rather more aggressively-phrased dislike of ALD today, so your gentleness is much appreciated.)

I never heard of Rosalind Franklin until I'd been in Cambridge for over a year. My parents were and are proud to call themselves feminists, but were clearly not very good at their history of science.

I have felt/been made to feel very unusual "for a girl" in my interests and career choices for most of my life. I can totally agree that people can go too far the other way and I can sympathise with your frustration, even while I envy you for not being thought weird just for liking science to start with.

In my year out job I was at first the only woman, then later on a second woman was recruited. The design engineering team went from 15 to 45 over the same period. In my summer jobs, I think I was the only woman in small, otherwise male, teams. Throughout my degree (physical natsci, then compsci) I was in a very obvious minority in lectures and practicals, though my college meant I was supervised with other women and reminded they exist. In my first graduate job I was the first, and I gather so far the only, female developer in the company, though there were women in QA and customer support.

My current workplace is actually pretty good for gender balance, but even so all the top technical people are male. I've got a regular meeting where there's me, the female project manager, and 6-8 male techies and managers, most of whom are senior to me.

I love Ada Lovelace Day for being reminded that there are actually heaps of women doing stuff like me, and often rather more hardcore than me. I wouldn't want it to be All Ada All The Time but once a year is nice.

[liv]

Thanks very much for this comment. I have to admit it still surprises me when my friends, with similar backgrounds to me, point out that they were discouraged from going into STEM subjects because of being female. I thought that stuff was long dead in our sort of circles. So it's useful to me to have the reminder that not everybody was as lucky as I was, and that makes it worthwhile for me to point out, hello, I'm a girl scientist, even though I feel a bit silly saying it because I don't think the girl part matters very much.

My female role models: my grandmother as mentioned, my mother who was a biologist before she was a lawyer, my undergraduate tutor (Oxford equivalent of DoS), the head of my college who was the first female head of an Oxford college, my undergrad subject, biochemistry, being the only subject in Oxford with an exactly 50/50 gender ratio, my co-supervisor for my PhD (admittedly my overall boss was male, but I could hardly get the impression that women couldn't do science from his heavily female-dominated research group including several very senior women), the head of the life sciences department for my post-doc (again my boss was male there, but with a female majority research group and a wife who outranked him), the head of the research institute who appointed me at my current job, the new head of the medical school who arrived just after I joined...

I do think that life sciences is an easier situation for women than compsci. Partly because there's a sort of intellectual machismo in the geek world which isn't just about the male/female ratio. But I am glad to know that my post seemed like a useful reminder that you're not alone. (I'm not very hardcore at all though, you could well argue that I'm doing a typically female thing by going down the teaching route instead of pure research, and accepting a more senior position in a smaller institution rather than being intensely ambitious.)

Typically female

[rmc28]

I sometimes worry that I am also being "typically female" by moving into planning, organising and management rather than actually fixing stuff, using my stereotypically female communication skills.

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

Having single-sex schooling meant that of course girls could do maths and science, and the top sets were full of girls. For you and I perhaps we had the encouragement (or rather absence of discourangement) outside of school, but i think for some girls it is probably important to be encouraged at school, for there to be a 'normality' about doing and wanting to do well at maths and science and tech.

[scatteredshells]

I was linked to a different entry of yours via a friend, and my Dreamwidth Journal is mostly for my art, but I just had to comment to this entry because of certain themes that have been majoring in my life this past year, these past few years. :)

Though I am not anymore, I was one of those women in a science and technology related field. I wasn't going 'deep,' though I did toy with possibly going into computer engineering for a while, I was taking an intense two-year post-secondary program to do something rather specific (broadcast electronics.) But in the two times I attempted the program I was either the only or one of two or three women in it. And the specific field is very male-dominated.

I mean, it's not only a lot to do with electronics and digital science, it's an end career as some sort of technician (as opposed to an engineer, etc.)

I grew up very interested in and surrounded by electronics, computers, and technology in general thanks to my father. I'm terrible at arithmetic (numbers do not stick in my head) but great at mathematics so long as I keep track. Algebra in Jr. High got me hooked, up until that point I was all about English and Social Studies and Art and Music.

The road wasn't all bad, but wasn't all great. I had some wonderful support, and some wonderful role-models (many of them men.) I am fortunate that when I look back on my life I can see that I had many strong women role models of various types, but also had no real problems identifying with men as role models either (and indeed, found it easier to socialize with boys for most of my childhood.)

Some women friends of mine though received some terrible treatment and attitudes throughout their schooling with regard to their math and/or science abilities which I find very sad. Encouragement is necessary. And I while I do wish there were more examples of women in science and technology fields for us to point to, and it can be worthwhile to look at the ones who are there, I also agree with how uncomfortable I get when I feel as if I'm being told to like something "because it's meant to appeal to women." It's like pink laptops being sold with the attitude of "finally, there is a laptop women will actually like/use!" except more subtle.

In more rambles, I eventually had to drop out of my college schooling twice in a row despite an ability to ace almost any test they gave me. I did not know it at the time, not for years later, but now I finally understand it was connected to my undiagnosed ADHD (and related problems.) I find myself more drawn to artistic careers rather than anything science or math related, though I hope to keep electronics and computers and technology in general as a very active hobby (keep building my own computers, fun little electronic projects, etc.) It's been difficult though, I find I am filled with a lot of guilt over leaving such a field behind. It's like I have this image of myself (perhaps others around me have it as well, but I am not sure) as one way and it's been difficult to integrate with the other -- I've always had art as my hobby in the past. (I realize that "fine art" has long been an institution of men, with a few wonderful exceptions, but I'm not even interested in "fine art." I'm interested in textiles, which in my mind is definitely fine art. But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. :) And there seems to be a competing attitude that I grew up surrounded by, of art and even fine art as being something "girly.")