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A review by bluepigeon
The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club by Eileen Pollack
3.0
I think much of what could be better about The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is Still a Boy's Club have been told by other reviewers, so I'll cut to the chase. The expectation is that the author, in some way or shape, will answer the question of why there is still a lack of female scientists. Reading the detailed account of Eileen Pollack of (mostly) her singular experience, which is then somehow generalized and perhaps holds true for some women, I concluded that the answer is: women have low self-esteem and lack self-confidence. I conclude this, and I am alienated from these women. I do not know who they are. OK, maybe I know some, but really, most of my science colleagues did not "panic" at the sight of a difficult problem in the lab or in the classroom, did not have crushes on every other male counterpart, and did not "feel like failures" every time something they tried failed. Who are these women who feel uncomfortable with boys or men in the classroom? Coming from a developing country where the power struggle between the sexes (only two sexes recognized, I'm afraid) is much more apparent, I thought it was strange that all these bright-eyed, privileged girls in my science classes were too timid, too much in need of constant assurance. The boys were not much better. Socially awkward, desperate to drink and lose inhibitions, mostly quiet or annoying in the classroom. I spent many a modern algebra class in my freshman year yawning, and finally having to decide which one of us (we were two foreign girls in a class full of American men) would finally raise our hand and answer the damn question so the awkward silence would end and the professor would continue the lecture (he had a habit of just waiting and waiting and waiting...) Perhaps we were immune, because we had not gone through the "trauma" of junior high in the USA?
Does that sound like I just unloaded a bunch of my personal experience in a book review. Well, I did. One can only expect that for a book that is marketed as a study, yet is mostly a memoir? So long story short, America (and perhaps the rest of the world) needs to raise their girls with more oomph. Girls who don't care so much about what everyone else thinks, girls who are immune to peer pressure, girls who don't just go cry in a corner when someone calls them names or tells them they are stupid, girls who are not emotionally so desperate to have a crush left and right... I am not saying there is anything wrong with crying, or having crushes, or getting upset at people calling you names, etc. I am just saying that boys endure these things to. To ignore this fact would be sexist. Everyone copes differently. But coping must be done. So what if girls cry when angered or frustrated and boys become violent when their ego is challenged (regardless whether the reason is nature or nurture for this difference)? Ah, the problem is that we, as a society, interpret crying as weakness and breaking things and screaming as strength. Well, that does come from somewhere: the former hurts only you, so is harmless to others, and the latter can hurt others, so is harmful, therefore dangerous. And danger equals strength and power.
Now, why are there more men than women in the sciences. First of all, in biology, there are more women than men! That is, up until professorship... Then there is a big drop off, and you get closer to the other sciences. I can tell you that most Americans who are not that good at math but like science choose biology. That's my impression from years of being in academia, specifically in the life sciences. This is bound to change and is already changing with the advent of genomics and systems biology (and whatever the new buzz word is today...) Second of all, there are VERY good reasons why fewer women are in the sciences, and I doubt that this will change much: the academic career has gotten to be this ridiculous creature! Basically feminism and post-feminism managed to get women in the door just at the time the academic career in the sciences became almost impossible to sustain for most humans. Which leads to the third point: women are the ones who have to give birth. Unfortunately, we are NOT all created equally. Men cannot have babies (yet), women can... I imagine there are many careers out there that are exceptionally grueling for people with young children, and discriminate against humans who have the potential to bear children (i.e., women) like being a police detective or certain types of surgeons or heavy duty manual labor (I don't see a lot of books about the obvious lack of women in construction. Any recommendations?) This seems to be getting better overall in the west. But in general, it would be very naive to assume that men and women are equal. We are not. Not biologically, and not in terms of nurture. So nature and nurture contribute to make us different. I would doubt that any smart person will argue that there is a clear duality here; it is more like a bimodal distribution where the two peaks kind of merge into one another... lots of women who can do math and lots of men who can multitask. Lots of men who would love to stay at home and look after babies and lots of women who prefer to commute two hours each day to some job...
But the burning question in my mind is: who is crazy enough to have an academic career in the sciences anymore? Back in the day (yes, the 1970s!) my PhD boss (the lab head, or P.I. [principal investigator]) would take off for a few months in the summer to go "study wine yeast" in Europe. Yeah, nice life. Even when I was doing my PhD in the early 2000s, one professor had a girlfriend in Germany and was there half the year, leaving the lab to one of the senior post-docs to run. Gone are those days! The newly minted professors in competitive institutions work as hard, if not harder, than they did in their post-docs, and guess what, they worked their asses off in their post-docs. Now, nobody can get grants, not the newbies, not the well-established people who fetch millions (for research, not for personal spending...) to migrate from one institution to another (if they can manage it, and cope with losing a good year during re-location). So you work 80 hours a week, you get paid nothing like a junior partner in investment banking, and this after putting off your "adulthood" during the PhD and post-doc (because, let's face it, you could not earn enough money to buy a house, have children, or even have time to date and find a partner...) The women I see still getting professorships in the life sciences are those who have very supportive husbands and partners who don't mind the 80-hour-a-week schedule their wives/partners keep, or they are single without worry of having a life. Because there is no work-life balance. It's work, and more work.
The thing is, this lack of self-esteem and confidence, these years of training to try to appease men in high places, actually produces very strange results for female faculty in the sciences. Even the most "normal" and "non-crazy" female P.I. I have known had one major fault, which I saw in ALL female P.I.s I have ever worked with: she loved her boys! Meaning, the men working under them could do no wrong, had great ideas, and were, in general, held to lower standards, while the women, though usually harder working with great ideas and skills, could never quite be as good as the boys. (I noticed that I call the men "boys," perhaps my feeble attempt to ridicule them, but what for, as they have done nothing wrong but be biological males...) I personally observed this in several top labs in some of the most prestigious institutions in the US (but I wasn't a victim of it, not directly.)
So, my two cents to all those women out there: don't do it! Not because men/others think you can't, but because I've been there and done that and it's not worth it! (I am half joking, of course, one should do it, if one wants, but seriously, think long and hard about it before you commit your youth to it!)
Is science a boy's club? Yes, indeed it is. Is it special in this regard. No, absolutely not. It is just like everything else in the world. In fact, I would argue that, because it involves highly educated people and institutions dedicated to education, it is much more self-aware of these imbalances than, say, investment banking or the construction industry.
Now how do we raise self-confident, self-assured, headstrong, curious girls (and boys!)? That's the real question.
And who are all these boys and men, but not sons of mothers who raised them to be who they are? Someone once said, and I can't remember who or where it was, something like: the biggest power women have in the world is that they raise the boys who become men. This is a a realistic statement, and underlines the fact that children are raised mostly by their mothers in the world. So mothers need to raise their boys to respect women and reassure all those girls who need reassurance and encouragement in the sciences... But perhaps, lacking self-esteem and confidence, a person cannot raise a boy to see girls as his equals? All children see who does all the house work and who comes home, brings the money, sits at the table expecting dinner (OK, big generalization, but not by numbers; most of the world still operates like this, but it is not necessarily the home life of academics here in the USA.)
Pollack's memoir is valuable for just that: it is the account of a female scientist's education experience starting in the 70s. I am sure many can relate to her experiences at different levels and there is a lot of personal lessons to be learned in these pages. Diversity is very important for science, because even the questions one sets out to answer, even the assumptions made and hypotheses tested are influenced by personal experiences and the unique knowledge pool of the scientists working in a project. And for that, we must wonder what more could we achieve if we had more diversity in the sciences: more women, more racial and ethnic diversity, more LGBTQA presence, more creative types, more generalists...
I am glad I read this book. Do read it with different expectations than those set out in the marketing material.
Thanks to LibraryThing and the publisher for a free copy of the book in exchange of my honest review.
Does that sound like I just unloaded a bunch of my personal experience in a book review. Well, I did. One can only expect that for a book that is marketed as a study, yet is mostly a memoir? So long story short, America (and perhaps the rest of the world) needs to raise their girls with more oomph. Girls who don't care so much about what everyone else thinks, girls who are immune to peer pressure, girls who don't just go cry in a corner when someone calls them names or tells them they are stupid, girls who are not emotionally so desperate to have a crush left and right... I am not saying there is anything wrong with crying, or having crushes, or getting upset at people calling you names, etc. I am just saying that boys endure these things to. To ignore this fact would be sexist. Everyone copes differently. But coping must be done. So what if girls cry when angered or frustrated and boys become violent when their ego is challenged (regardless whether the reason is nature or nurture for this difference)? Ah, the problem is that we, as a society, interpret crying as weakness and breaking things and screaming as strength. Well, that does come from somewhere: the former hurts only you, so is harmless to others, and the latter can hurt others, so is harmful, therefore dangerous. And danger equals strength and power.
Now, why are there more men than women in the sciences. First of all, in biology, there are more women than men! That is, up until professorship... Then there is a big drop off, and you get closer to the other sciences. I can tell you that most Americans who are not that good at math but like science choose biology. That's my impression from years of being in academia, specifically in the life sciences. This is bound to change and is already changing with the advent of genomics and systems biology (and whatever the new buzz word is today...) Second of all, there are VERY good reasons why fewer women are in the sciences, and I doubt that this will change much: the academic career has gotten to be this ridiculous creature! Basically feminism and post-feminism managed to get women in the door just at the time the academic career in the sciences became almost impossible to sustain for most humans. Which leads to the third point: women are the ones who have to give birth. Unfortunately, we are NOT all created equally. Men cannot have babies (yet), women can... I imagine there are many careers out there that are exceptionally grueling for people with young children, and discriminate against humans who have the potential to bear children (i.e., women) like being a police detective or certain types of surgeons or heavy duty manual labor (I don't see a lot of books about the obvious lack of women in construction. Any recommendations?) This seems to be getting better overall in the west. But in general, it would be very naive to assume that men and women are equal. We are not. Not biologically, and not in terms of nurture. So nature and nurture contribute to make us different. I would doubt that any smart person will argue that there is a clear duality here; it is more like a bimodal distribution where the two peaks kind of merge into one another... lots of women who can do math and lots of men who can multitask. Lots of men who would love to stay at home and look after babies and lots of women who prefer to commute two hours each day to some job...
But the burning question in my mind is: who is crazy enough to have an academic career in the sciences anymore? Back in the day (yes, the 1970s!) my PhD boss (the lab head, or P.I. [principal investigator]) would take off for a few months in the summer to go "study wine yeast" in Europe. Yeah, nice life. Even when I was doing my PhD in the early 2000s, one professor had a girlfriend in Germany and was there half the year, leaving the lab to one of the senior post-docs to run. Gone are those days! The newly minted professors in competitive institutions work as hard, if not harder, than they did in their post-docs, and guess what, they worked their asses off in their post-docs. Now, nobody can get grants, not the newbies, not the well-established people who fetch millions (for research, not for personal spending...) to migrate from one institution to another (if they can manage it, and cope with losing a good year during re-location). So you work 80 hours a week, you get paid nothing like a junior partner in investment banking, and this after putting off your "adulthood" during the PhD and post-doc (because, let's face it, you could not earn enough money to buy a house, have children, or even have time to date and find a partner...) The women I see still getting professorships in the life sciences are those who have very supportive husbands and partners who don't mind the 80-hour-a-week schedule their wives/partners keep, or they are single without worry of having a life. Because there is no work-life balance. It's work, and more work.
The thing is, this lack of self-esteem and confidence, these years of training to try to appease men in high places, actually produces very strange results for female faculty in the sciences. Even the most "normal" and "non-crazy" female P.I. I have known had one major fault, which I saw in ALL female P.I.s I have ever worked with: she loved her boys! Meaning, the men working under them could do no wrong, had great ideas, and were, in general, held to lower standards, while the women, though usually harder working with great ideas and skills, could never quite be as good as the boys. (I noticed that I call the men "boys," perhaps my feeble attempt to ridicule them, but what for, as they have done nothing wrong but be biological males...) I personally observed this in several top labs in some of the most prestigious institutions in the US (but I wasn't a victim of it, not directly.)
So, my two cents to all those women out there: don't do it! Not because men/others think you can't, but because I've been there and done that and it's not worth it! (I am half joking, of course, one should do it, if one wants, but seriously, think long and hard about it before you commit your youth to it!)
Is science a boy's club? Yes, indeed it is. Is it special in this regard. No, absolutely not. It is just like everything else in the world. In fact, I would argue that, because it involves highly educated people and institutions dedicated to education, it is much more self-aware of these imbalances than, say, investment banking or the construction industry.
Now how do we raise self-confident, self-assured, headstrong, curious girls (and boys!)? That's the real question.
And who are all these boys and men, but not sons of mothers who raised them to be who they are? Someone once said, and I can't remember who or where it was, something like: the biggest power women have in the world is that they raise the boys who become men. This is a a realistic statement, and underlines the fact that children are raised mostly by their mothers in the world. So mothers need to raise their boys to respect women and reassure all those girls who need reassurance and encouragement in the sciences... But perhaps, lacking self-esteem and confidence, a person cannot raise a boy to see girls as his equals? All children see who does all the house work and who comes home, brings the money, sits at the table expecting dinner (OK, big generalization, but not by numbers; most of the world still operates like this, but it is not necessarily the home life of academics here in the USA.)
Pollack's memoir is valuable for just that: it is the account of a female scientist's education experience starting in the 70s. I am sure many can relate to her experiences at different levels and there is a lot of personal lessons to be learned in these pages. Diversity is very important for science, because even the questions one sets out to answer, even the assumptions made and hypotheses tested are influenced by personal experiences and the unique knowledge pool of the scientists working in a project. And for that, we must wonder what more could we achieve if we had more diversity in the sciences: more women, more racial and ethnic diversity, more LGBTQA presence, more creative types, more generalists...
I am glad I read this book. Do read it with different expectations than those set out in the marketing material.
Thanks to LibraryThing and the publisher for a free copy of the book in exchange of my honest review.