Queered Science Interview: Dr. Donna Riley and Engineering Social Justice

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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Dr. Donna Riley is a founding faculty member and associate professor at the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College, the first engineering program at a US women’s college. In 2005, she received an award from the National Science Foundation for her work on implementing and assessing critical and feminist pedagogies in engineering classrooms. She holds a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. In 2008 she published Engineering and Social Justice (Morgan and Claypool, 2008), and in 2010 was awarded the NOGLSTP Educator of the Year award for her work on combining social justice work and science pedagogy. She is out both personally and professionally as bisexual, and speaks as articulately about biphobia to the queer community as she does about homophobia to the heteronormative world.

Her work on feminist and critical pedagogy is what originally piqued my interest; we’ve talked before in this column about the tendency of STEM fields to exclude discussion of social justice issues, but Dr. Riley mixes together Paulo Freire, thermodynamics and bell hooks into one happy stew of learning of all kinds.

This year she is not teaching at Smith; instead, she’s actually in Washington serving a one-year stint as Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in the division of Engineering Education and Centers. Even so, she was excited to participate in this series and answered a number of questions for me. They’re so complete, as is, that I’ve left most of them intact for your reading and devouring pleasure. Enjoy!

You got an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, and a graduate degree in engineering and public policy. How did it feel to be a woman and a member of the queer community in those settings?

I could write a separate volume about my experiences of sexism at Princeton and CMU, and they are many and horrific. So I will just leave that alone and focus here on anti-queer stuff….

In the early ’90s at Princeton, there were only a handful of students who were out as LGB people, and there was one staff member we knew who was just coming out on campus as transgender. Lots of us were scientists and engineers, actually, though I didn’t put my professional identity together with my sexual orientation very consciously. I mostly just wanted to find other queer people. Within the sciences and engineering among our peers and faculty, we were mostly just met with silence. We knew to compartmentalize, and we knew when and where it was safe to be out – and that was definitely not in the engineering building.

Were there any instances in which you felt discrimination, overt or otherwise?

The most overt anti-gay acts in the engineering classroom that I experienced happened on Gay Jeans Day. Our campus had one of these days where to raise awareness about what it is like to be LGB (we hadn’t added the T yet), we asked people who supported LGB people to wear jeans. We advertised this in every mailbox, every signpost, everywhere so no one was clueless about what day it was. And people who normally wore jeans would wear suits, or khakis, a nice dress, anything to show they weren’t gay and didn’t approve. Some of the fundamentalist Christians would make t-shirts that said “love the sinner hate the sin” and wear those with either jeans or slacks, depending on how they interpreted things. I remember sitting in my ChemE classroom waiting for the professor to walk in, most of my classmates in khakis, some with micro-aggressions scribbled on their shirts, adrenaline shooting through my veins, as each year there was typically a conversation where the men would express something homophobic like “No way! Wouldn’t be caught dead wearing jeans,” or whatever. And our professor would stroll in, not wearing jeans either, possibly actually oblivious, or possibly comfortably homophobic. There was utter silence from them on any and all social issues. In science and engineering culture this is called “being objective.” But this was a day that you couldn’t be neutral, and every one of the faculty picked the anti-gay side.

Outside of the classroom I experienced two major incidents of homophobic harassment. The first was at a party my first year, where a guy pressed me up against a wall and ordered me to “suck his dick to prove to him I wasn’t a dyke.” His language. I got away from him and got myself home. It didn’t help that I was not yet entirely out to myself at that point. My senior year, the night Bill Clinton was elected, I was walking with two gay friends back to our dorms, jubilant, when a group of ROTC guys came up and yelled “NO MORE GAY RIGHTS” at us. It was a little weird, kind of a non sequitur, though it was clear they were drunk and pissed that Clinton had been elected. As we were looking at each other apprehensively, trying to figure out what we would do if they attacked us, they thankfully moved on, and we let out a collective sigh of relief and went home. We wrote a letter in the school newspaper documenting and protesting the way we were treated.

Within the LGBT community I have experienced biphobia in every campus community I have been a part of. In undergrad I was publicly called a “player to be named later” by a lesbian and in grad school publicly called a “poseur” by a gay man. Later at Smith a lesbian professor referred pejoratively to a colleague in Mathematics as a “bisexual atheist” when the conversation was about the professor’s objections to having a Dean of Religious Life at Smith. I still don’t know what her bisexuality had to do with anything, except to communicate its unacceptability.

Many scientists describe the difficulty of deciding to come out, knowing the heteronormative culture of the scientific community. What helped you make the decision to come out, and what kind of responses did you get from colleagues?

In college and grad school I was very out on campus as an activist, so my peers knew because it was widely public, but it rarely came up in classes for any kind of reaction from them. In grad school my dissertation advisers and other faculty with whom I had a closer relationship knew my partner was a woman and I am fairly certain we attended departmental events together. My advisers each recognized my partner in the same way they would recognize a student’s significant opposite sex relationship and that really helped me feel welcome.

I came out in my academic writing explicitly in 2003 because I knew that situating myself relative to relations of power in engineering, in academia, and in society as a whole was essential to the project of introducing critical pedagogies in my engineering classes. I was already out to a lot of students. Others assumed I was queer because of my use of gender neutral pronouns, and some picked up on a rainbow ribbon I posted in my office.

I choose again and again to come out and be out. For me it is a matter of both personal integrity and political commitment. I have to be who I am, and I have to work so others can be who they are. This is risky, and it comes at a cost, but I believe the costs of being closeted are much greater, both personally and politically.

You describe your work as liberative pedagogy. What does this mean in practical terms, in the classroom and in interactions with students?

I actually treat this as an open question in my classrooms – I present some ideas from the family of critical or liberative pedagogies – feminist, anti-racist, queer, post-colonial/decolonizing, and others – and ask what it would mean for students to find a classroom liberating – from what? To what? Students are active participants in their own education; I am trying to do away with what Freire called the “banking system” of education, still so common in the sciences and engineering, where professors are assumed to hold the knowledge, make “deposits” in students’ minds, then ask them to regurgitate knowledge on tests. I am instead trying to have students bring what they already know from the authority of their experience, share knowledge among the class, and translate theory into action for change in some way. Together we question the silences in our field around race, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and other forms of identity, and ask what we are learning about diversity when it cannot be discussed in professional science and engineering settings.

You’re a founding faculty member at the engineering school at Smith, the first women’s college to have an engineering degree. What was that process like?

It has been a huge thrill and the fulfillment of a life’s dream to get to teach engineering at Smith. I wanted to leverage the liberal arts context in my own work, and it was probably the only place in the country I could have gotten away with testing out critical pedagogies in engineering classrooms, and integrating ideas from gender studies, sociology, and ethics in my engineering work.

At the same time, the persistent and pernicious trans-phobia of Smith as an institution has been a huge disappointment to me. Smith that simultaneously is not welcoming to trans* people really pours bleach on the rainbow of having an engineering program at a women’s college. We have had trans* and genderqueer students in engineering, but the rhetoric around being a women’s engineering program against the backdrop of Smith’s very public transphobia becomes very retrograde, and misses a tremendous opportunity to move the conversation forward.

While overt sexism and homophobia are less common than historically, they still play out in ways that are subtle and, therefore, insidious and hard to combat. How do you see this happening in the sciences, and how do you deal with it?

One of the biggest sources of sexism and homophobia is lodged in the epistemology of science. How we think, and what we think, matter in determining what we know and don’t know, and affects our workplace interactions in very negative ways. We think that we eliminate bias by keeping our “personal lives” – some aspects of ourselves – out of the lab, classroom, or office. But actually this is how we allow implicit bias to seep in and saturate everything we do, because that which is male, straight, white, able-bodied, monied, is not left behind in the practice of science and engineering – it is just so normative that lots of us don’t notice.

I have learned that talking about these issues and building solidarity with like-minded others is the only way we can ever address them. Ultimately scientists and engineers have to be able to think outside the epistemological boxes we’ve been trained into to understand diversity and social justice. Cultural change takes a lot of hard work, it takes talking to people and organizing — skills typically not in our wheelhouses as scientists and engineers.

What do you envision for the future? If you could see your work come to fruition, what would that mean to you?

I dream of various incarnations of science shops or community-based research that are really rooted in community more than university; I dream of an engineering firm founded on a cooperative model that does projects in the public interest and in the interest of social justice; I want to develop more around the notion of feminist engineering ethics, to see what new models of social justice work in engineering might emerge. I want engineers and scientists to get directly involved en masse in the conversation about national priorities and be part of a shift away from militarism and policies that line corporate pockets to a more just, peaceful and sustainable future in the US and the world.

What would you say to young, queer-identified women just beginning a career in the sciences?

You’re not alone. See what community you find in NOGLSTP and oSTEM, and take part in MentorNet. Look for LGBT groups within your professional societies and join up early (engineering doesn’t have these yet – we need people to found them!). Be active in non-science LGBT groups too. Ask what you can do to contribute to the work.

And follow your passion. It is impossible to predict how careers turn out – you cannot plan a career trajectory in much detail at all, but if you do what you are passionate about you will develop the building blocks you need later to discover or put together the next thing – and you will create the sense that it has all led up to this…

Queered Science: Gender Bias OPEN THREAD

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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feature image from genengnews.com

After the last Queered Science post, about Dr. Ben Barres and how his transgender status gave him new insights into gender bias inherent in the sciences, we had a number of comments about gender bias, how to recognize it, and how to deal with it. Gender bias, especially in professional settings, is rarely an overt statement or action that you can name, report, write down, yell about or feel angry about. No, it’s much more subtle. Instead of leaving you righteously angry and ready to take down the whole department if need be in the face of your brave and downright meritorious cause, brushes with gender bias will often leave you with nothing but a rank pool of suspicion and self-doubt lurking in the pit of your stomach. Ew.

So how do you handle this? How do you work for equality in your workplace (or school or neighborhood or life) while still surviving and trying to be seen as a successful human in your field of choice at the same time? This is what one gender bias expert, a law professor at UC Berkeley, suggests: smile a lot, make yourself less threatening, and soften your message so it’s easier for other people to accept.

^{Mary Ann Mason: “smile a lot. Smiling, just evolutionarily, means we’re friends. We’re not going to do you harm.” (via genderbiasbingo.com)}

Or how about this one, from Joan Williams, law professor at UC Hastings.

^{Joan Williams: “you need softeners…to send femme-y signals, signals that you aren’t deficiently feminine…” (via genderbiasbingo.com)}

This sounds like just trying to fit even further into the gender role stereotypes that are so constricting and problematic in the first place. Soften my message? Smile more – but definitely don’t flirt, that’s a line we have to walk, too? Ok so maybe people will like me as a person, because I’m being non-threatening and friendly, but those tactics don’t effect any real change. And, more than that, I’m leaving the exact same walls and barriers still standing in the way of everyone else who comes behind me.

Now, Williams does preface her statement with the fact that you really want to change the workplace expectations first and foremost. And I like her last phrase: “It’s better to be a bitch than a doormat.” But it’s frustrating that we even need to prove that we are ‘sufficiently feminine’ (and what does that even mean anyway?) to get further ahead. The idea that being stereotypically femme-y is a prerequisite to getting any good feminist work done is short-sighted, counter-effective, and just plain backwards. Like our awesome reader Becky said, this kind of advice is like handing us the psychological equivalent of an apron and frying pan.

But in thinking about other potential strategies, here is the problem I keep coming up with: fixing gender bias is not our responsibility. The burden should be on those who are biased, and if a coworker really thinks I’m less deserving /intelligent /reliable /creative /whateverthehellelse just because I’m a woman then there’s not a lot I can do anyway.

At the same time, if we don’t do it, who will, right? And if we want to succeed in a male-dominated profession, we are going to come up against this sooner or later.

So I’m asking you, dear readers — magical alchemists who take the cruddy drudgery of working in the world of misogyny and other assorted problems and turn it into nuggets of social-justice learning-moment gold — what do you do? What strategies do you or people you know (or could you, or could others) employ to combat gender bias or any other kind of latent discrimination? Let’s talk about it.

And here’s a little gold nugget of a video, just to end on a happy note.

^{Shauna Marshall, Academic Dean at UC Hastings: “It’s ok not to be liked. It’s better to be respected. So go with that.” (via genderbiasbingo.com)} 

Queered Science: Eradicating Misogyny in the Scientific Community

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer scientists and tell you all about them, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Currently one of the most high-profile queer scientists right now is Dr. Ben Barres, who is a professor of neurobiology, developmental biology, and neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He’s important to us because he’s been vocal in the fight against misogyny in the sciences. He’s also openly transgender, and has extensively discussed his identity and his experiences with the press and the general public.

Dr. Barres was always interested in science since childhood; he remembers playing with chemistry sets, magnifying glasses — all the nerdy things he could get his hands on. He also struggled with gender since he was young: “I was kind of ostracized growing up. I was never in the “in” group. I was always sort of socially rejected. Because I was different. I really was sort of like that boy in a dress, or something.”

He originally went to MIT interested in electrical engineering, but decided to focus on neurology after a particularly inspiring class on the brain in his sophomore year. “I was very intense about my studies. I knew a lot about science, but I didn’t know a lot about other stuff. I was a typical science geek, and I really had no other interests… I was very driven. I worked seven days a week, fifteen-hour days…”

Barres has also described that he felt more comfortable in professional settings than personal ones, because at work he didn’t have to wrestle with the questions of gender identity that haunted him in his personal life. In many ways this echoes what we already know, and what Dr. Erin Cech’s work highlights: that queer students often feel a strong separation between personal and public life, and are constantly juggling a kind of “mental calculus” over where exactly that boundary lies.

“I really felt by that point that life had been so hard on me- I never feel like I really do a good job explaining what it was like, but I didn’t sleep lots of nights, I was suicidal, life was so uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really enjoyed my life, but somehow it’s like it was split into two parts. The person part, which has been very uncomfortable, and the professional part that’s been a pleasure, and I’ve really enjoyed. But the personal part was just so uncomfortable that sometimes you think, ‘I’ve had enough.’ It’s that distressing.”

At 40, already well established in the science community as a woman, Barres decided to transition. “I did not understand why I was different and I was too ashamed to ever once discuss my feelings with anyone. At the age of 40 years old, I learned about transsexualism, and decided to change my sex. Even though I worried that it would seriously harm my scientific career, I found that the opportunity to become a man was irresistible.”

He says he was in denial about the presence of gender discrimination in the sciences until his transition, at which point he saw first-hand the differences in how people treated him. He tells a now-famous anecdote: after giving a talk shortly after his transition to living as a man, he overheard a colleague say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.” This inferior “sister” was none other than Barres pre-transition, and the work being presented was the exact same work. This was an inarguable example of gendered stereotypes of scientific competency at work.

Since then, he has dedicated a significant portion of his work to eradicating misogyny in the sciences. “As is true for many successful scientists, I had never thought much about gender discrimination. It did not occur to me that it was a serious problem. After all if I could attain tenure and full professorship as a woman, why couldn’t every other woman? It didn’t occur to me to think that I just might have been lucky or that I might have been successful by being several times more productive than comparable men in my career cohort.”

In 2005, the president of Harvard, Larry Summers, gave a talk at Harvard in which he suggested that women are innately worse at science than men. Summers based much of his argument on The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker, in which Pinker states, among other things, that men are inherently “risk-taking achievers who can willingly endure discomfort in pursuit of success” and that “women are more likely to choose administrative support jobs that offer low pay in air-conditioned offices.”

The puzzling non sequitur of air-conditioned offices aside, (what does that have to do with anything?), obviously we disagree, and so did Dr. Barres. He wrote a pointed counterargument called “Does Gender Matter?” published in 2006 in Nature. And just like that, Barres was famous. “This is a street fight,” he says. He pointed out that much of Pinker’s work (and many similar theories as well) is based on evolutionary psychology, a field that has for the most part been strongly trounced. Barres argues that there is no evidence, only speculations on top of speculations, that women are innately bad at science thinking. However, there is strong evidence that prejudice, latent or obvious, against minority groups significantly decreases their success.

Just as Dr. Erin Cech mentioned last time, stereotype threat plays a huge part in minorities’ success: Barres defines stereotype threat as “the fear that one’s behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies… This fear causes an impairment of performance.” So, in practical terms, it’s been proven that women perform far worse on a science test if they are reminded beforehand that women are bad at science.

What’s more, the scientific community should have a huge incentive to minimize exclusion of minorities in the sciences, for its own good; white men account for eight percent of the population, but constitute far higher percentages in the sciences. And the probability of getting the best and brightest minds from that eight percent is incredibly low. The longer we go with such a limited slice of our population, the longer we are only shooting ourselves in the collective foot.

After his commentary was published in Nature, other colleagues at Harvard used slurs about his transgender status to denigrate his work. Barres reports that Harry Mansfield called him a “political fruitcake,” and Steven Pinker said that Barres had “reduced science to Oprah.” Both of these men are also professors at Harvard. Regardless of the fact that these insults are glaringly unprofessional and inappropriate to any work setting, their spluttering inability to come up with coherent objections to his work shows that they have no real support for what they’re saying. Keep in mind that Mansfield, a philosophy professor, has also stated in the past (in his 2006 book Manliness): “Is it possible to teach a women manliness and thus to become more assertive? Or is that like teaching a cat to bark?”

Obviously these guys need to revise their gender beliefs a little, and it’s disturbing that they are professors of psychology and philosophy at Harvard. They occupy positions of moral and intellectual authority, and it seems frankly irresponsible that the leaders of schools like Harvard continue to allow this kind of ignorant rhetoric from teachers and mentors. Oh, but I forgot – the president of Harvard is the one whose sexist comments started this controversy in the first place. That was dumb – but I am a woman, after all.

In general, their way of thinking is on the way out – thankfully. The vast majority of emails that Barres receives on this topic are overwhelmingly positive. Look at this one, for instance:

Things like stereotype threat and internalized prejudice don’t just apply to women, they also apply to any other minority status – like queer or trans* identities.

Barres spends a lot of time speaking openly and publicly about his transgender identity, in the hopes of supporting other LGBTQ scientists.

“I have become aware that there are many students and academics who are gay who are still closeted, even in the Bay Area, for fear of harmful repercussions to their lives and careers. I always advise them to be open about who they are, including on job interviews, and I have yet to see one not get their first choice job. Your difference is your greatest advantage. Don’t let others take your happiness away.”

He is an inspiring example of using positions of power to effect social change. While he says his colleagues at Stanford (in an open-minded and liberal part of the world, it should be noted) have been overwhelmingly supportive — not everyone is. “I am tired of powerful people using their position to demean me just because I am different from them…I will certainly not sit around silently and endure them.”

Download slides from his basic talk.

OPEN THREAD: Coming Out In The Sciences, Let’s Discuss!

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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We’ve been talking recently about how it feels to be queer in the sciences, and in particular, a queer woman in the sciences.

And you guys had awesome comments of your own, so now we have a whole space to talk about just these things! We’re going to have a few different open threads, each on a different sub-issue of being queer in the sciences. I’m excited because I always have so much to say on this topic, but not a whole lot of people to say them to. From your comments, it looks like you all have things to say too! Like many of you mentioned, I often feel like I have to keep my science self and my queer self separate, but this is the perfect space to merge them.

First, one of the most basic questions: Are you out to your co-workers/ peers/ advisors/ bosses/ important people?

Like I’ve already mentioned, I wanted to come out for a while, but it never quite felt like the right time. I mean, when is the right time? We all know how uncomfortable it is when everyone else can effortlessly talk about their wives/kids, or at least have their presence assumed, and we have to sit quiet like the weird kid with no friends in the corner. But how do you casually interject a comment about your sexuality at the work party?

For me, it was a slow and gradual process, one co-worker at a time, either in the lab or in the field, and each conversation had my heart beating so hard it practically fractured my sternum, a huge rush of adrenaline and weak knees for an hour or so afterward. I didn’t come right out and say it, but a quick correction of their pronouns was usually enough to catalyze a discussion.

Then again, like I mentioned, I work in an accepting part of the world. Not everyone even feels safe about being out – the potential awkwardness involved isn’t even part of the equation. Many of the comments so far have mentioned feeling legitimately worried about losing jobs, opportunities for promotion, grants, or future projects.

So. Are you out professionally? If so, how did you do it? We all know that coming out isn’t a one-time ordeal, but kind of a constant coming out or being out – every new person you meet, you have to re-introduce your queerness into the discussion. What is your favorite coming-out story? How were the reactions?

If you’re not out, why not? What are your thoughts on the topic?

Queered Science: Why Social Justice and STEM Fields Should Hang Out More Often

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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The first profile on my list is Dr. Erin Cech, an assistant professor and researcher in sociology at Rice University. She is my new hero and could definitely be yours too, if —like me —your hero list involves academics and novel protagonists. Cech focuses on inequality in the sciences, and specifically the subtle ways in which women, Native Americans, and LGBT people are excluded through seemingly innocuous cultural processes. You should know her because she was the lead author on a ground-breaking study in 2011 on the experiences of LGB students in engineering departments. I interviewed her last week and frantically wrote down everything she said in order to share it with you; it’s very impressive. She just off-handedly spouted the quotes I have typed below, the kind of sentences that I take hours to formulate and perfect. Oh well, I guess that’s her job.

She has two bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and sociology, but had a lot of questions about the hegemonic culture that dominates science professions. She decided to go to graduate school in sociology in order to push the cultures of engineering and science towards more diversity and inclusivity from the outside.

“Sciences are perceived as an objective, neutral place. Who you are, and what you identify with, aren’t supposed to matter in whether people think you can do science — and yet it absolutely does. There is a consistent underrepresentation of minorities of every type, and it’s often difficult to understand why from the outset. I’m interested in how inequality is a really subtle process, and how we can reproduce inequalities without noticing that’s what’s going on.”

One of the most important parts of her research is what she calls the “self-expressive edge of sex segregation,” and you should know this, because she is talking about you and to you.

“The way we construct this idea of having a career or a major or a path and how it’s a way of expressing oneself, is such a dominant cultural narrative. It’s a very common frame through which people choose a major, that what you pick is somehow expressing who you are. And in this way it might mask subtle gendered processes: people’s interests come to be gendered, and that then becomes who they think they are. It feels legitimate and organic to them, and in many ways it is. But when people make decisions as a result of these expressive choices, the societal gendering of those choices comes into play. These choices are part personal choice, but a focus on choice alone hides, or cloaks, the very important presence of this lifelong gendering process under the guise of self-expression.”

In retrospect, I experienced this very thing in middle and high school. As a youngster, I was a super girly girl. My best friend and I dressed up as Anne of Green Gables and went wandering the countryside; my grandmother helped me sew water-nymph and fairy costumes that I wore to school on a regular basis  in middle school. Yes, I know. And at some point, I think in eighth grade, I decided I was bad at math and didn’t like science. I wanted to be a writer, and writing and science didn’t overlap. QED, I couldn’t do science. For the rest of my public education, with that mentality, I put little to no effort into those classes and took my resulting mediocre grades as proof that I simply wasn’t cut out for it.

It was only in college, with a very different mindset, that I turned this totally around. Through a series of unrelated events, I realized I loved glaciers and wanted to study the physics of their behavior, and this – obviously – required math. So I started slowly but worked hard, remediated some of the bad habits and misinformation I’d learned in high school, and — guess what? Now I fucking love science, and I get paid to do it. It just took a slight tilt in my personal identity, and the realization that I could be creative, artistic, frilly and girly — and science smart.

Dr. Cech explains this exact phenomenon, in sociology language:

“Interest itself, the way we learn what we should focus on, comes from experiences since birth that are often gendered. Subtle signs in teaching, parenting, media, or interactions with our peers all lead to cues about what women are supposed to like, and men are supposed to like. So even legitimate self-expression – interests, desires, etc. – can be informed by social processes.”

This leads nicely into a discussion of her 2011 study, “Navigating the Heteronormativity of Engineering: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Students,” co-authored by Tom Waidzunas (Temple University) and published in Engineering Studies. As a brief summary, she found that within the dominantly heteronormative culture of engineering, there are many prejudices against LGB students that may hurt their success in the field. No surprise there. But the interesting part is that, in contrast with other minority identities, like race, queer people often have a certain amount of control over their visibility.

“Queer students are often out to some friends but not others, so there’s this dynamic of information control, which brings with it concerns about compartmentalizing. They have their personal life versus school life, and they have to manage how to keep them separate. These boundaries, and the mental calculus involved, aren’t required in the same way with other dimensions of inequality.”

This is probably something that many of us have experienced, at one point or another, either personally or by proxy. Whether for a week or for 10 years, there is a span of time in the coming out process where we have to juggle who knows and who doesn’t know; how much to share at any given time; who is within the trusted, sacred circle and who is not. And we all know that this is not comfortable. But the difference here is that it’s the academic institution and all the latent anti-gay prejudices that ferment in its silence that creates the need for this juggling.

For instance, Jessie is a 20-year-old mechanical engineer who writes a blog called Musings of a Lesbian Engineer, to let off some of the steam of being closeted at school. (She let me use her real name, but on her blog she goes by Jane Doe.) I found her blog during my research and asked her for her personal insights, and much of what she said supported Cech’s conclusions. “As for who I am currently out to, I can count it on my hand…Namely my ex, and 5 of my closest friends from home. I base this on how much I trust a person, I also tend to avoid coming out if I worry about a backlash or negative reaction. I am not out to anyone in the engineering department at my school, my roommate may have guessed by now that I am gay, but I am not certain.”

So students generally employ a combination of three strategies: passing (literally pretending to be straight and keeping their work and social lives completely distinct), covering (not necessarily pretending to be straight, but downplaying signifiers of gayness and gay culture around straight peers), and overachieving (making themselves indispensable to others, almost to make up for being gay). As you could probably predict, the results of Cech and Waidzunas’ study indicated that the constant navigating of these options adds a significant strain on these students’ energy and abilities, and often leads to a feeling of isolation within a hostile environment. Gay students might not even know about one another. Jessie agrees, “I’ve actually done the math and considering engineering is 85% men and 15% women, then there are 8.5 gay men and 1.5 lesbian women in 100 engineers. If they are anything like me I wouldn’t have a clue as to who was gay or straight.”

Interestingly, the coming out (or being out) experiences for these 8.5 gay men might differ significantly from those of the 1.5 lesbian women. Cech found that lesbians were often more likely to be accepted because the masculinity associated with the stereotypical projection of lesbians fits better with the image of typical engineers.

“This study seemed to suggest that gay men in particular felt their competence and qualification questioned, and had to push extra hard to seem qualified. In contrast, lesbian women were often given more credit than straight women; masculinity and comfort with machinery that are part of the stereotypical production of lesbians may give them some kind of credibility. Of course, lesbian women still very much have to deal with the gender dimension of inequality in engineering, but as compared to straight women, lesbians’ competence seemed more accepted. And the whole reason this dichotomy exists is because of the devaluing of the feminine in engineering.”

Maybe most important, though, is the “technical/social dualism,” that keeps us from discussing these inequalities and prejudices. We’ve discussed this idea before, that in the sciences, technical activities are the only ones valued. There is no space for subjects that could be classified as social: like talking about gay rights, or women’s rights, or social justice and inequalities. Of course, this is a false differentiation, because there is really no way to entirely separate the two, and anyone who’s worked on a team project knows that even in engineering, social dynamics are just as important as technical abilities. The devaluing of “social” topics really just serves to silence important conversations about inequalities.

This is a hard question, because you could also argue that it’s preferable to keep personal and professional lives separate. But, when it comes to the erasure and silencing of core pillars of our personal identities, the dualism must break. Jessie told me, “We don’t talk about the social problems of today, we never really talk politics. Some of my friends at school do seem to be accepting of gay[s] and lesbians. I just am horrible in social situations, and have no clue on the social protocol of coming out; there is no manual for it.” And this is a perfect example of why keeping silent on issues of LGBTQ acceptance is not enough. There is no social protocol, because coming out feels inappropriate in a science setting. We don’t create accepted social scaffolding around taboo interactions, and therefore we have no structure with which to discuss homosexuality. Jessie’s straight friends never needed to come out definitively, with or without a manual, and I’m pretty sure they do not spend time writing a blog to let off the steam of being straight in a heteronormative world either.

This is why, as Dr. Cech says:

“Perhaps the most important thing to hope for is the opening of dialogue on topics of inequality. I think it’s the most important cultural sticking point in the way of having systemic change that allows for inclusiveness. Conversations about equality and social justice are seen as tangential to the “real” work that is supposed to be done, like the equations on the board and the experiments in the lab. I’ve called it the idea of depoliticization: the idea that the removal of these social and political questions is good and even necessary for engineering, where in reality, decontextualizing everything could be quite damaging.”

“But if dialogue could be more open, more people can be on board to thinking about changes. There’s often talk about ‘we need this and that initiative, this and that change.’ But many people in science and engineering are not there yet. First we need to convince people that there’s a discussion worth having here. It deserves a place at the table just like equations on the board do.”

And therein lies one of the most important values of Cech’s research: it’s a first step towards breaking down this technical/social barrier. Her studies connect important facts about LGBT rights to the supposedly neutral and disconnected world of engineering and science, and provide a starting ground for discussion where there was none before. Because what these LGB students experience is not just restricted to engineering school. At some point in life, almost all of us will encounter (or already have encountered) a social situation in which queerness is not welcome, and we all have some experience with the ideas of passing, minimizing, or overachieving to compensate. It’s not just science where femininity is devalued, but in countless lurking cultural microcosms. And it is a constant truth that having to distance yourself from any important part of your identity leads to feelings of isolation and unhappiness. Within engineering fields and without, these things happen, and the only way to improve the situation is to talk about it.

“What I’d like to see is that the person who has been in a lab for 25 years can go and have a conversation in the hallways about LGBT equality issues with a colleague and no one thinks it’s strange,” Cech said. “We need to open a cultural space for that. Without that space, it’s just people like us pushing from the outside. Real change has to come from both, the outside and the inside.”

More Than Words: Adjective Invective

Welcome to the twentieth installment of More Than Words, where I take queer words of all sorts and smash them apart and see what makes them tick. Every week I’ll be dissecting a different word, trying to figure out where it came from, how it has evolved, where it might be going, and what it all means. It’s like reading the dictionary through a prism. Feel free to send word suggestions to cara@autostraddle.com.

Header by Rory Midhani

Last time on More than Words, we finished up a three-part series on gendered pronouns in English — where they came from, where they are now, and where they might be going. But what about the many, many aspects of language that are implicitly, rather than explicitly, gendered? Words or phrases so culturally tied to one side of the binary that we fill them in automatically, the way your brain grabs at a cliché simply because it’s at the front of the mental shelf? Why does that happen? How does it effect us? Should we try to change it? Can we, even if we try?

This question briefly made some corners of the news this week after author Jennifer Weiner took critic Alexander Nazarayan to task for describing her own criticism of the New York Times Book Review as, among other things, “strident.” “Can anyone remember the last time the word “strident” was applied to a man?” she tweeted.  Many of her followers chimed in with excellent snark, and more examples of words that are disproportionately used to describe women, usually in order to shame them into being quiet.

Weiner and Nazarayan had a phone conversation, and an essayistic back-and-forth hosted by The Atlantic (Weiner: “Make a point, and you’re ‘combative’ or ‘polarizing.’ Disagree with someone, and it’s not a ‘debate’ or a ‘discussion,’ but a ‘cat fight’ or a ‘feud.’; Nazarayan: “Had I been aware of that connotation while writing this post, I would have used another word”), and Nazarayan removed the word “strident” from his original essay (the tone of which is, hilariously, pretty strident). Slate’s Amanda Hess backed up Weiner’s hunch with hard data from the Google Books Ngram tool, which charts the usage frequency of words and phrases in published works over time:

“Over the past century, published books cataloged by Google refer to a ‘strident woman’ more frequently than they do a ‘strident man.’ That’s particularly significant given that books talk about men in general a lot more than they talk about women… In the 1930s, books referred to a ‘strident feminist’ more than it did a ‘strident critic.'”

How did this happen? Dictionary definitions of “strident” never mention gender at all. Etymologically, it’s probably just onomatopoeic, as it comes from the Latin “stridere,” which means “to make a harsh noise.” From there it jumped to French, and then English, where it still means essentially the same thing — although, especially in contrast with its more scientific cousin “stridulent,” it has taken on pejorative connotations. Mix all this up, spread it over years of cultural conditioning, and suddenly every woman in an argument is somehow making a horrible screeching sound, audible even over Twitter.

“Strident” is, of course, not the only example of this phenomenon. Plenty of words, for no clear linguistic reason, have become stuck on one side of the fence. I ran a few Ngrams myself and got some (sadly) unsurprising results: the corpus is teeming with shrill, nagging, and irrational women, but their male counterparts are nowhere to be found (not to mention the insane, more historically rooted sexism of language surrounding insanity —”hysterical” and “loony” are both literally named after female biology — which deserves its own column).

But come on, now, says the devil’s advocate on my shoulder. Does it really matter? Sure, humankind’s habit of referring to women as “strident” or “shrill” when they mean “not making sandwiches” reflects societal viewpoints that should be examined, set on fire, and fed to wolves. But does it actually reinforce those views? Yes, actually — because the human brain is instinctively addicted to categorization and will grab at any excuse to sort into boxes (readers of this site are likely all too familiar with the cultural and political consequences of this). Language is no exception — as anyone who has ever been on either side of a flubbed pronoun knows — and recent experiments back this up, both results-wise and in their very construction.

Research by cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky and linguist Dan Slobin both suggest that certain adjectives are so firmly associated with certain genders that they cling to them even when said genders are merely grammatical. In Boroditsky’s tests, German and Spanish speakers were asked “to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a ‘key’ — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like ‘hard,’ ‘heavy,’ ‘jagged,’ ‘metal,’ ‘serrated,’ and ‘useful,’ whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say ‘golden,’ ‘intricate,’ ‘little,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘shiny,’ and ‘tiny.'” Slobin did the same thing, but used newspaper articles instead of live subjects, finding that press coverage of a new bridge — the Millau Viaduct, which stretches from Paris to Montpellier — described it entirely differently depending on whether the reporter wrote in German (where the word for “bridge” is feminine) or French (where it’s masculine).

Fascinating, to be sure. But even more fascinating, to me, is what these studies themselves assume. When writing about this, people tend to focus on the fact that these inanimate nouns are being described “femininely” or “masculinely,” taking an attitude of: How crazy! How ridiculous, the human need to personify! No one — not even the scientists in charge of the experiments, who are literally doing them in order to see how language affects the brain — seems to think twice about the adjectives doing the describing, and our implicit gendered categorization of them based on superficial, outdated, and often problematic stereotypes. Our overwhelming tendency to refer to a bridge as “slender” when we think of it as grammatically female seems to me less interesting than our tendency to think of “slender,” itself an inherently neutral adjective, as feminine in the first place. I want to see some studies on that, pronto. Otherwise I fear we are doomed to a future of strident, hysterical bridges.

**special thanks to reader Amy Dentata, whose comment got me thinking about this!**

The Science and Technology Of Making (And Breaking) Things By Hand

feature image via Shutterstock

Welcome to the forty-forth installment of  Queer Your Tech with Fun, Autostraddle’s nerdy new tech column. Not everything we cover will be queer per se, but it will be about customizing this awesome technology you’ve got. Having it our way, expressing our appy selves just like we do with our identities. Here we can talk about anything from app recommendations to choosing a wireless printer to web sites you have to favorite to any other fun shit we can do with technology.

Header by Rory Midhani

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As y’all know, sometimes I like real things and not virtual things, or tech things. But the thing is, most of the time the line between real, touchable things and technology isn’t there. Technology helps artists and artisans, whether it’s in a new way to think about or talk about their work or in a new way to create something classic. Sometimes it helps humans deconstruct something, breaking it down to see its essential elements. As I trucked around the internet this week, it seemed especially evident – there were videos everywhere about science and tech aiding in creation and destruction of physical things. The theme struck a chord with me.

Making

Fikri sent me this amazing video that originally came off a Kickstarter, though the project is long-funded by now. Ardent Heavy Industries is providing a new take on cloud technology – one that takes it literally. An industrial arts collective, they’re used to installing large-scale art in various locations and festivals around the world. I love the way they talk about their art like a Silicon Valley startup with a sarcastic nod to both art and tech – “engineering solutions to problems… that don’t exist.”

Polybius is a song by Julian Corrie, video by James Houston, in which a SEGA Mega Drive, Commodore 64, floppy disk drives and hard drives all form the instruments. They’re controlled, live, via MIDI.

Like Adam Smith, one of the toy-makers in this video, I always thought a computer must make toys. But actually, artists sculpt action figures. And then a lot of tech goes into making plastic parts. By Mile Deep Films and Television.

Did you know there are basically two studios on planet earth that still make globes? Here’s a short film about Bellerby and Co., one of those two studios. Directed by Charles Arran Busk & Jamie McGregor Smith.

Dash is a DIY, arduino robot kit that’s not yet on the market. I find this little dude both fascinating and creepy. It’s built from cardboard and plastic, so it’s f*cking fast. And it looks a little like an insect. And I kinda want one.

Breaking

This video is old, sure, but I came across it again this week and who doesn’t like seeing plasma light up a microwave and burn through a plastic container? Veritasium, a YouTube channel dedicated to exploring science, often with slow motion footage, put a grape in the microwave to make plasma.

And here’s a video of students crushing a 55 gallon drum using water vapor and air pressure. I originally found this video on Sci-ence.

 

Queered Science: LGBTQ Scientists and the Legend of the Unicorn

Quick, tell me the name of a scientist! Probably a man, huh? Maybe you picked Einstein, or maybe Newton – but odds are, you picked a man. Ok, now give me a female scientist. A little harder, right? Marie Curie, or Jane Goodall if you’re really creative. But now tell me the name of a queer scientist. Nothing? Yeah, I thought so. But it’s not your fault – I couldn’t think of any either. And this got me to thinking: where are all the queer scientists?

I’m a scientist, and I am always on the lookout for other lesbians in my profession, just for a sense of community and company. But I never find any. Actually, I found one once, I think, but that was when I was closeted and awkward and I was always too scared to talk to her, so I just stalked her in the hallways instead. (I would not suggest you try this, by the way). It’s sad, but it’s true; there are hardly any out lesbians (or queer people of any shades, for that matter) in the sciences. We are nowhere to be found.

So I investigated a little, to learn why lesbian scientists often seem like unicorns: legendary, awe-inspiring, luminous figments of the imagination but notoriously hard to come across in person. Partially, it is because women in general — and queer women to an even greater extent — truly are entering science careers less than men. Our society genders children’s tastes before they can even speak, and girls often grow up with internalized beliefs about sex segregation. But, statistically speaking, even math or science-oriented girls are often turned away from the science professions before they graduate. It’s called the “leaky pipeline theory”: along the long pipeline of education and entry-level jobs, women “leak out” at every step, often from feelings of isolation and unhappiness or because of prevalent societal assumptions that “women can’t do science.”

This is magnified for women who also identify as queer. LGBTQ students encounter harassment at school much more often than straight-identifying children; this kind of harassment leads to worse performance in school, and lower high school and college graduation rates. There are also few role models for queer people in the sciences, and the culture can feel very chilly to anyone who is not a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered man. In this world, queer women hold a minimum of a double-minority status, and it’s no wonder we see relatively few queer women entering or acting in the sciences.

Within the workforce, queer scientists are often very quiet about their queerness, if they’re out at all. Many feel they have to stay in the closet to stay competitive in their careers. Today, thanks to organizations like NOGLSTP (the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals – quite a mouthful, I know!) and Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, it is much easier to be out at work. More than 95% of Fortune 500 companies now include sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies, and for scientists employed by the government, the Supreme Court’s decision on DOMA recently made it possible for federal benefits to be extended to same-sex partnerships as well.

But it hasn’t always been that way, and for many of the older generation, being out simply is not an option. Furthermore, much of the money in science is “soft money” – meaning that researchers have to renew their grants or apply for new ones every few years, from unknown third parties. You never know exactly who you’ll need money from, or who will be on your board of approval, and you never know who will be homophobic.

Also, there is a reluctance among scientists to talk about “social” or “political” issues; however much it might not be the case in real life, we like to see ourselves as the dispassionate investigators of objective truths. The sciences are meant to be neutral, and because of the rigor of the scientific process, they are thought to hold only essential facts. Sexuality is not considered among those essential facts, regardless of how essential it is to an identity, and therefore there’s no space to discuss it. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But in a heteronormative world, a non-political or “neutral” stance automatically becomes heterosexist itself. And within this setting coming out often feels inappropriate.

Of course, this is problematic. Straight scientists are also “out” in their own way, but never have to overtly discuss it. But regardless of how unfair this double standard might be, it is prevalent. I felt it strongly when I started at my first full-time job after graduating college as a field hydrologist for a major department within the federal government. Even though I’m fully out to family and friends in the rest of my life, I spent a lot of time being weird and closeted and awkward about my social life at work. In our field, there’s a lot of driving and hiking time, and therefore a lot of talking time; we get to know each other far better than many co-workers do. Where my co-workers (all men) could mention their girlfriends and fiancés offhandedly, I had to think and re-think about what I should say and how much I should allow. I was constantly working around the question of which was better, to be quiet and look like I was a weirdo with no social life and no romantic life, or open the can of worms that begins with “my girlfriend and I…”

In my personal situation, I actually work in a very LGBTQ-friendly area of the world, and I did come out to my co-workers, over a period of a few months. It was catalyzed one weekend on a rock climbing trip with a co-worker that I had assumed was platonic. I quickly learned otherwise when he touched my hair and said he was excited to be taking such a “beautiful, sexy lady” out. I stammered back in surprise and indignation that I wasn’t into men and if he wanted this to be a date, this would be a good time to turn the car around.

To his credit, he took this news remarkably well, and we finished the climb – albeit in relative silence. Over the rest of the season, I eventually came out (in various degrees of social agility) to every member of my team, but it was surprisingly hard. I spent a significant amount of thought and energy on the process, and as I said, I worked in an accepting place, with accepting co-workers. I also didn’t have a lot to lose (my job, maybe, but not a reputation or lab or work of my own). But for many queer scientists, this is not the case. And so queerness is often minimized, avoided, or hidden altogether.

Obviously, similar questions of visibility and individual expression come up in many other professions as well. But my point — and why I think this is important to be acknowledged — is  positions in the hard sciences are often signifiers of privilege and social status, much like being a lawyer, or a politician. Saying you’re a chemist, for instance, carries a certain gravitas; it’s as if you must not only be smart, but now, in this position of authority, you can tell other people things — and they will probably listen. The sciences are also seen as a particularly meritocratic institution, though that’s not always true. The belief is that if you’re there it’s because you deserve to be there. Conversely, if you’re not there, it’s because you don’t deserve to be there. Given the demographics of the sciences as a whole, this implies that only white, heterosexual cis-men deserve these positions of privilege and power.

What does the absence of queer people in such an authoritative job strata say about us? Young queer or questioning people see statistically fewer queer role models in positions of power than straight people. And it also raises questions of why there aren’t more queer people in the sciences. Is it because we’re not smart enough to get there? Is it because queer people are simply not cut out for the heavy intellectual lifting that the scientific method requires? Obviously not. But there’s some way in which all the stereotypes we ascribe to scientists – extremely intelligent, nerdy, rational, motivated, authoritative, intimidating – become disconnected from our socially constructed projections of homosexuality.

Never fear, queer scientists do exist. There’s Dr. Rochelle Diamond, the chair of NOGLSTP and a research biologist at Caltech. There’s Dr. Donna Riley, an openly bisexual researcher and professor of engineering at Smith; Dr. Ben Barres, an openly transgender professor of neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine; and Dr. Neena Schwarz, a retired neuroendocrinologist at Northwestern University and out lesbian. They exist, and they are awesome! And there are many more as well.

So, for your ogling and reading pleasure, for the next few weeks I will be profiling scientists whose work or personal stories you should be aware of. First up: Dr. Erin Cech and her pioneering study on lesbian, gay, and bisexual students’ experiences in engineering school. Stay tuned!

More reading:

“Shattering the Glass Closet” by Jenny Kurzweiler.

“Closeted Discoverers: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Scientists” by Jacqueline Ruttimann Oberst

NOGLSTP’s popular list of Queer Scientists of Historical Note

Badass Lady Astronaut Candidates: Meet NASA’s Class of 2013

Feature Image Via Nasa Flickr

On August 12, eight new astronaut candidates met for the first time in the Johnson Space Center in Houston to begin training. As NASA previously announced, the astronaut candidate class of 2013 is the first ever with an equal number of men and women. Selected from a pool of over 6,100 candidates — the second largest group in history — NASA picked some incredibly impressive individuals. In this totally biased writer’s opinion, the women especially are killing it.

This year, in addition to traditional selection criteria (a series of intense tests measuring their medical and psychological condition, language aptitude, and mechanical skills), candidates were asked to create limericks and compose tweets during their interviews with the selection board. This just underscores the point: In addition to being smarties with technical skills, astronauts must also serve as high profile public figures.

Within the next five years, NASA expects to see commercial shuttles bringing Americans to and from the international space station. By the end of the 2020s, NASA plans to pilot a human mission to an asteroid; the following decade, on to Mars. As the class of 2013 joins rank with those who routinely break scientific ground and propel the human race forward, millions around the world look to these men and women as inspiration, leaders and role models. This is why it’s such a big deal to (finally) see some gender equality.

Right now, the team is at the Johnson Space Center undergoing intensive physical training. During the first month, candidates are required to pass a swimming test in which they swim three lengths of a 25 meter pool without stopping, then swim three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes with no time limit. They must also tread water continuously for 10 minutes wearing a flight suit. After completing military water survival training, candidates will move on to their flying syllabus.

All four women this year enjoy SCUBA diving, giving them a leg up on the first month, during which candidates must obtain SCUBA qualification to prepare for spacewalk training. Not including the class of 2013 candidates, 12 of NASA’s 49 active astronauts are women; of the inactive (former and deceased) astronauts, women make up only 31 out of 274.

Without further ado, meet the latest crop of badass lady astronaut candidates!

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An avid rock climber and ice climber, Christina Hammock is a native of Jacksonville, North Carolina. Before becoming an astronaut candidate, the 34-year-old worked in applied physics, cryogenics and X-ray detection. As part of her research, Hammock did two winter seasons in Greenland and one season in Antarctica. Most recently, she has served as station chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate and Atmosphere Observatory at Cape Matatula in American Samoa.

In space, Hammock says she will miss her umu, a traditional Samoan method of preparing roasted food. However, she looks forward to flight lessons in NASA’s fleet of supersonic T-38 jets reserved to train astronauts.

Hammock holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, a second bachelor’s degree in physics, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University.

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Nicole Aunapu Mann is from Penngrove, California. Prior to joining the team at NASA, Mann was a major the Marine Corps, an operations officer and integrated product team lead at Patuxent River. The 35-year-old has over 1400 hours of flight time and most recently served as an F-18 test pilot. Mann has flown in combat missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. Assuming she successfully completes her training, she will be the first female fighter pilot to become an astronaut in nearly two decades.

Mann has played soccer from an early age, and was team captain of the naval academy soccer team. When she isn’t kicking ass on the field or in the sky, she likes to participate in triathlons and backcountry camping. Mann’s husband, Travis, is deployed in the Middle East with the Navy until fall 2014; that means it’s just going to be Mann and her 17-month-old son, Jack, for the first year in Houston.

Mann holds a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the US Naval academy and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford.

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^{ANN MCCLAIN TELLS HOW SHE DELIVERED THE BIG NEWS TO HER MOTHER.}

Before her selection as astronaut candidate, Anne McClain was finishing up her last several weeks at naval test pilot school, an intense program she describes as “Crossfit for the brain.” A major in the army, the 34-year-old from Spokane, Washington, was a rotary wing pilot and command squadron intelligence officer. McClain spent 15 months in Iraq starting in 2006 as an OH-58 Delta Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot. She has over 1600 hours of flight time.

An avid rugby player, McClain has also found professional success in the full-contact sport. Since 2002, she has played at highly competitive levels in England (Women’s Premiership), and in the US (Women’s Eagles). Interrupted only by her deployment to Iraq, after 10 years of playing, McClain moved into a coaching role last year. She credits rugby as one of the big reasons she was selected as an astronaut candidate, preparing her both in fitness and her ability to work with a team.

McClain holds a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from West Point, a masters in public health from the University of Bath, and a master’s degree in international security from the University of Bristol.

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Dr. Jessica Meir, 35, grew up in Caribou, Maine, the northeastern most city in the United States. As a biologist, her work has taken her to extreme places: Antartica, for one, where she did research on penguins at Penguin Ranch. She described her experience ice diving:

“You dive through ice holes that you drill in the sea ice – the sea ice can be three, six, nine, sometimes 17 feet thick. And you go down through this hole, you’re wearing a dry suit and all this gear, which keeps you warmer than you’d expect. At first there is slush everywhere in the hole and you can’t see anything and you think, ‘Oh my God, what am I getting myself into?’ But then you get down below the ice and you can see hundreds of feet, and the light is coming in through the holes in the ice that you came through, and you have this ‘Highway to Heaven’-type lighting effect. And it’s incredibly striking. On the surface, the Antarctic is devoid of color. You have this white and austere landscape. And then suddenly when you get underwater there is all this life.”

Immediately before becoming an astronaut candidate, Meir served as assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Her specialty was studying animals in extreme low oxygen environments. Previously, she worked doing principal investigation project management at the University of British Colombia where she studied bar headed geese. For fun, Meir enjoys flying; she began taking flying lessons during her undergraduate years at Brown, and now has a private pilot’s license.

Meir holds a bachelor’s in biology from Brown University and a master’s degree in space studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. Her Ph.D. in marine biology is from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

When You Wish Upon a Star: Throw Yourself a Perseids Party

Welcome to the fortieth installment of  Queer Your Tech with Fun, Autostraddle’s nerdy new tech column. Not everything we cover will be queer per se, but it will be about customizing this awesome technology you’ve got. Having it our way, expressing our appy selves just like we do with our identities. Here we can talk about anything from app recommendations to choosing a wireless printer to web sites you have to favorite to any other fun shit we can do with technology.

Header by Rory Midhani

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In your childhood, did your mom wake up you at weird hours on school nights to watch meteor showers because they were more important than 2nd grade? Or was that just my mom? Either way, we’re all now Adults and we can get up (or stay up) to watch the meteor shower of our own volition, and with our girlfriends/best friends/dogs. The Perseids 2013 meteor shower will be visible in the northern hemisphere (approximately 50 meteors per hour) and the southern hemisphere (about 1/3 of that) this weekend and early next week, with a peak sometime between August 12 and August 14th (some are even saying two peaks within that time frame). The Perseids can claim the moniker of “Old Faithful of Meteor Showers” because we can see them every August.

What Is a Meteor Shower?

Dust. Rocks. I know, when I put it that way, it doesn’t sound as pretty as it looks. Sorry! But hey, they’re pretty anyways. And throwing a rock and making a wish doesn’t have the same romantic mystique as catching a glimpse of a shooting star to jumpstart your deepest desires.

 

Where Does This Particular Meteor Shower Come From?

If you didn’t watch that entire video up there (and I highly recommend it, they’re nerd-funny at Universe Today), the Perseids come from the debris left behind by the Swift-Tuttle comet (which earth won’t see again until the year 2126). We come into its orbital path, and the Perseids are debris left over. So what I’m saying is that earth runs smack into some space waste and we get meteors!  In terms of practicality – as in, where in the sky are these meteors coming from? – they’re called the Perseids because if you trace their tails back, they all are radiating out from the constellation Perseus.

Still can’t find Perseus? Don’t worry, you can use this app to help in the moment. But also never fear – you’ll be able to see meteors all over the sky, because generally there’s just that damn many of them.

How Can I See This With My Eyeballs?

You don’t need any special equipment to watch this meteor shower, and because it’s warm you won’t even need a coat/mittens/blanket (can you tell I really did spend my ENTIRE childhood outside staring at the sky?). But you will need nice, dark sky far away from large light sources. If you live in a major US city with a lot of light pollution, check this article because there may still be a place you can go to see the meteors. Try to get a viewing spot with a clear, unobstructed view of the sky –  there’s nothing worse than a poorly placed tree. I recommend grabbing a reclining camping chair/deck chair or a blanket, because you’ll be looking at the sky for quite some time and it’s, literally, a pain in the neck to do it standing up. Make sure you wait at least 20 minutes to see your first meteor – it takes our eyes that long to adjust.

If you bring binoculars, you might be able to catch a glimpse of a meteor’s smokey tail.

If you’re planning to photograph the Perseids, don’t just bring your DSLR: make sure you bring a tripod and a cable release, as well an extra batterie(s) – the long exposures necessary to capture meteors really eat up battery power. If you do manage some good shots, you should email them to me because I would genuinely love to see them.

I want to reiterate that predicting the activity of a meteor shower is a bit like predicting the outcome of a well-written novel: there’s generally a lot of twists, turns and surprises. So check every night – the later and darker it gets, the better shot you’ll have at seeing meteors. Consensus says that for the Perseids, early morning is best (think 4 am). I myself will be watching well into the wee hours, and then I’ll probably nap and get up again around 4 or 4:30 am.

What Beer Will You Be Drinking With The Experience?

I’ll be watching this meteor shower with one of my best friends (I’ve known her since elementary school!) and we will be drinking River Horse Tripel Horse. How about you?

Team Pick: Scientists May Have Cure for Cat Allergies, Everyone Rejoices

Mey’s Team Pick:

Feature Image via corporation-cats.tumblr.com

It’s a tale as old as time, you meet a lady and everything clicks. She laughs at all your jokes, you can’t take your eyes off her bow tie. But when you take her back to your place, things start going downhill fast. First her eyes start watering, then she breaks out in hives, and finally she’s lying on the floor in the fetal position hacking up a lung. You’ve got a pet cat and she’s allergic. Well, thanks to a team of researchers at Cambridge University, you may never need to worry about this happening again.

The team of scientists, led by Dr. Clare Bryant, have isolated the protein in cat dander that combines with histamines in the human body to cause allergic reactions. According to Dr. Bryant:

“When cats lick themselves they spread saliva, hormones and skin cells on to their coat. When the hair falls out, it is proteins in this dandruff stuck on their fur that people are allergic to. How cat dander causes such a severe allergic reaction in some people has long been a mystery. This is the first time we have discovered the process that leads to the allergic reaction. It opens up a whole new type of drug to treat it.”

They believe that within five years a pill or inhaler could be on the market that would allow people to play with, pet and snuggle cats without any kind of bad reaction. While current drugs help relieve the symptoms of allergic reactions, this new information could lead to a drug that would block the effects of the dander itself. So, if that cutie you’ve got your eye on has a cat that’s been getting in the way of things, science may be the wingwoman you’ve been waiting for.

Oh, and by the way, there is good news for dog lovers- research suggests that a similar treatment could help with dog allergies as well.

Girls In Tech Become Women In Tech: The Girl Scouts Get a Video Game Patch

Have I mentioned I was a girl scout for the better part of my childhood and adolescence? I was starting my silver award as a Cadette by the time I finally quit – and I didn’t even quit because I wanted to. I was just spread too thin, my troop disbanded, I had to join another and something had to give. The Girl Scouts of America taught me how to pee in the woods, balance my checkbook, work with other humans and, yes, write a story – all skills I find very useful to this day. The Girl Scouts of Colorado recently issued a statement of inclusion for a 7-year-old trans * girl scout, sparking a right-wing conservative cookie boycott and Boy Scouts of America to endorse a Christian scouting group that emphasized women spending time with family. Girl Scouts have been boycotted before, by the way, for racial integration and the inclusion of comprehensive sex education in their discussions. And now Girl Scouts of America has given me one more thing to be proud of.

LA’s getting a Video Game Design Patch, y’all! The Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles are working together with Women In Games International to create a patch for local scouts (patches are earned locally, badges are national). This patch is reportedly more technical than the equivalent Boy Scout merit badge, which allows for the creation of board and dice games as well as video games. Scouts will be able to earn the badge by designing an actual video game because girls are badass. They’ll be using Gamestar Mechanic, which (in the ultimate of meta) makes a game out of learning to design and create games. You don’t have to be a Girl Scout to use the site, either; they offer several different price points, including free, advanced and professional coursework options.

Girl Scouts as an institution is actually really excellent across the board about including STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in their Journeys and Pathways curricula – they have specific badge experiences reflective of women in STEM fields and they acknowledge that boys take the lead in school with regards to STEM and that Girl Scouts is a safe place to explore STEM and leadership together. They sell an academic report on girls’ aspirations to STEM fields in their Girl Scout shop and partner up with other organizations to bring troops programs in robotics, engineering and even NASA trainings. All of these options are national, so even though this patch will only be available to scouts whose troops belong to the Greater Los Angeles Council, GSUSA is still showing the STEM love to its tiny, radical charges on a broader scale.

This is really important. By the time we’re asking the question “Why aren’t there more women in Science, Tech, Engineering and Math fields?” (answer: misogyny) at a professional level, it’s already too late. After all, how many high school seniors do you know who wake up one morning and decide to, out of the blue, major in computer science without having fostered an interest and skill in it throughout their childhood and adolescent life? Yes, we as adults can learn to code and be really good at it. But technology is like a language – your fluency increases the younger you start. And your desire to do anything is born out of the activities you participate in as a child. So three cheers for Girl Scouts teaching our future to be better than our past.

Women In Tech Throwback: Grandma Got STEM

Welcome to the twenty-second installment of Queer Your Tech with Fun, Autostraddle’s nerdy new tech column. Not everything we cover will be queer per se, but it will be about customizing this awesome technology you’ve got. Having it our way, expressing our appy selves just like we do with our identities. Here we can talk about anything from app recommendations to choosing a wireless printer to web sites you have to favorite to any other fun shit we can do with technology.

Header by Rory Midhani

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Have I told you guys I worked as a computer teacher for two years? But not like for elementary schoolers. Like for adults. And so many people would ask me to explain things to them “like I’d explain them to my grandmother.” Even the grandmothers I had as students. Everyone had this notion that grandmas were bad at technology because they were a certain age or gender – females over the age of… like, 40. Which isn’t old, so I never understood it. Women would bad mouth themselves, say they’re too old for this, they’re no good at this.  But I don’t think it’s about being old – I think it’s a combination. About age, about gender, about the act of motherhood. Something about all of that makes us – dumb? Inept? Bad at technology? The worst thing is that we, as women, do this to ourselves. To our sisters. If I had a penny for every time I heard one of my students say “I bet your grandmother is better at this than I am” or “I’m about as good at technology as my grandmother” or “explain this like you would explain it to granny” we’d all be living on our super queer commune right now, funded by all those pennies. I got sick of it pretty quickly. If my student wasn’t learning, regardless of age, I had to question what I was doing as a teacher. I did not have to question their age, gender or any other factor about them. I’ve seen it – anyone can learn to use a computer.

Grandma Got STEM is a website that explores that idea and shatters it. From their mission statement: “I would like to counter the implication that grannies (gender + maternity + age) might not easily pick up on technical/theoretical ideas. As a start, I’m planning public awareness / art projects using grandmothers’ pictures+names+connections to STEM.”

And you can submit a picture and a story if you or anyone you know is a badass grandma that worked or works in a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM!), just email ggstem@hmc.edu with their picture, name and story.

You guys – this is so important. Women in STEM fields are rare enough. Misogyny in the sciences is real. But women in STEM fields 20, 30, 40 years ago? That’s amazing! That’s a jewel that should be celebrated. My grandmother was a chemist in a pharmaceutical production plant in an age where women didn’t really work. And yes, she looked at my iPad with a bemused scorn in her later years, but still. Grandma got STEM! And everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, can be a tech wizard with enough focus and determination. A computer is really a series of yeses and nos, ones and twos. If you can get yes, no, one, two, then you’re golden. Or should I say, Golden Girl.

New Gallup Poll Answers the Question “How Gay Is Your State?”

In June 2012, Gallup, one of the world’s largest and most reputable polling companies, added the question “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?” to their Gallup Daily tracking poll. When they released the first batch of data in October 2012, it was already noteworthy for being the largest to date. Now, four months later, it’s nearly twice as big, having garnered over 200,000 responses from all across the country. The estimated proportion of LGBT citizens nationwide has stayed about the same — it’s now at 3.5%, up from 3.4% — but there is now enough data to come up with state-by-state percentages, too, as there were over 1,000 respondents in all but eight states. This is very exciting for everyone who likes numbers and trends, as well as those of us who like to stand in our local coffee shops and try to figure out the exact Queer Quotient.

You can go here to find a state-by-state table and a fun mouseover map, but here are some vitals:

• Washington, D.C. has the highest reported proportion of LGBT people, a cool 10%.  This is nearly twice as high as the runner-up, Hawaii, which reports 5.1%.
• The following eight: Vermont, Oregon, Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Nevada, and California.
• North Dakota is at the bottom of the chart, clocking in with 1.7%.
• If you take out D.C., the spread of percentages, from Hawaii at #2 to North Dakota at #50, is a mere 3.4%. As the analysis points out, this very small variation “may run counter to some stereotypes that portray the LGBT community as heavily grouped in certain states of the union,” such as urban areas.
• The highest red state on the list is South Dakota, at #8 (4.4%).  The lowest blue state is Pennsylvania, at #43 (2.7%).

Gallup has begun to crunch its new numbers with older ones, beginning by comparing LGBT presence to political ideology. Results are unsurprising: their 10 Most LGBT States list and their 10 Most Liberal States list have seven members in common; 10 Least LGBT States and Top 10 Conservative States have six. South Dakota is the only state that houses over 4% LGBT people and lacks anti-discrimination and partnership laws. They’re also trying to figure out why there’s any variation at all — do LGBT people move to more supportive areas, or are LGBT people in less supportive areas less likely to tell the truth to a telephone pollster? David Mariner, who runs the Center for the LGBT Community in D.C., thinks it’s the former, calling the study “a good indicator of where people feel comfortable living and where people want to live.” Dave Lanpher of Fargo, North Dakota’s Human Relations Commission, thinks it’s the latter, and suspects an undercount. The study’s founders, who are probably less biased, also lean towards the second explanation, as their report has also found that most LGBT people are also young, nonwhite, and female, three “groups with economic disadvantages that could limit their abilities to move.”

As we’ve discussed before, counting gays is problematic sociologically and philosophically. And even if, as study author Gary J. Gates argues, it’s still worth it, it’s pretty difficult logistically, too. We are a community that, generally speaking, does not enjoy neat little boxes of the confining or pencil-checking variety (of course, some of us do enjoy them, which makes us even more unboxable overall). Asking people whether they consider themselves L, G, B or T might leave out those who identify better with other letters. It also leaves out everyone who is uncomfortable sharing information about their sexuality. So a study like this is less a rack of hard data and more a representation of people who, in Gallup’s words, “publicly identify themselves as part of the LGBT community when asked in a survey context.”

Still, it’s better than nothing. Immediate effects will include new potential pickup lines (“hey California girl, are you in the 4.0%? ‘Cause you’re lookin’ 100% good”), some nifty infographics, more fuel for the coast-vs-coast rivalry, and a zillion think pieces about why D.C. is so disproportionately gay (I blame the Washington Monument). Long-term, hopefully studies like this will lead to increased knowledge, more visibility, and challenges to old associations between “gay” and “urban” and “Northeast” and “West Coast.” Maybe they’ll finally even ask about us on the U.S. Census! Then we could REALLY start crunching some numbers and taking some names.

Gallup Reports on Minuscule LGBT Population, Actually Gets Some Stuff Right

You gays! There’s a new study out about how many of us there are out there and this time they’re saying Club LGBT is even smaller than we thought. In what is the largest study to date of LGBT demographics in the U.S. — over 120,000 individuals were surveyed — Gallup reports that 3.4 percent of American adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Their results are similar to last year’s William’s Institute study that reported that 3.5 percent of the population is LGBT.

But before we get to the cold hard facts, let’s take a second to talk about their methodology. When it comes to statistics, looking at the research they performed tells us almost as much as the data. In this case, Gallup added a new question to their Gallup Daily tracking interviews starting in June. Along with questions about health, politics and other demographic information, respondents were asked, “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?” Of course, limiting the question to those four identities and grouping them together puts constraints on the study. Our genderqueer and pansexual brethren are just as queer as we are, but many of them are excluded from the data because they don’t “personally identify” as L, G, B or T.

Whether or not they’re aware that their wording excludes a significant segment of the rainbow, Gallup seems to recognize its limitations and is upfront about what their data does and does not tell us. They explain that they “chose the broad measure of personal identification as LGBT because this grouping of four statuses is commonly used in current American discourse, and as a result has important cultural and political significance.” They also realize that asking about self-identification during a phone interview won’t result in a figure that reflects the true number of queer people in the country:

Measuring sexual orientation and gender identity can be challenging since these concepts involve complex social and cultural patterns. As a group still subject to social stigma, many of those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender may not be forthcoming about this identity when asked about it in a survey. Therefore, it’s likely that some Americans in what is commonly referred to as “the closet” would not be included in the estimates derived from the Gallup interviews. Thus, the 3.4% estimate can best be represented as adult Americans who publicly identify themselves as part of the LGBT community when asked in a survey context.“

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the key findings

+People of color are more likely to identify as LGBT than white respondents. 4.6% of Black interviewees, 4.3% of Asians, 4% of Hispanics and 3.2% of white identify as LGBT.

+Younger people are more likely to identify as LGBT. 6.4% of 18-29-year-olds, 3.2% of 30-49-years-olds, 2.6% of 50-64-year-olds and 1.9% of 65+-year-olds answered the interview question in the affirmative.

+Slightly more women identify as LGBT. Looking at the 18-29 age group, the gap greatly widens. LGBT people account for 8.3% of young women and only 4.6% of young men.

+LGBT people tends to have lower levels of education and income. The education cohort who identified most frequently as LGBT were those who’ve had some college. At 4%, they’re followed by individuals with a high school education or less, college graduates and people with a postgraduate education. LGBT people also accounted for the highest percentage of the population in the lowest earning brackets. They compose 5.1% of respondents who make less than $24,000 annually.

+Individuals in domestic partnerships and single people who have never married are more likely to be LGBT. 12.8% of domestic partners and 7% of singles are LGBT while only 1.3% of married people are.

+LGBT women are just as likely as non-LGBT women to be raising children. 32% of all women have a child under 18 living at their home. 31% of non-LGBT men are raising children while only 16% of LGBT men are.

Do you know what I see here? Intersectionality! Microsoft Word might not know it’s a word, but we sure as hell do and we’re here to talk about it. When it comes to data like this, there’s still a lot that’s left to interpretation. For example, reading that many LGBT people are less educated and earn less money appears to be a dismal (although understandable, considering the history of discrimination) stat. But what if, instead of telling a story about LGBT people, it’s simply illustrating facts about what it’s like to be young in the U.S.? In an excellent breakdown of the education/income question, Jezebel shows how a lurking variable like age can totally change the way we see the situation. 24-year-olds (6.4% of whom are LGBT) are significantly less likely to earn $80,000 than 53-year-olds (LGBT rate: 2.6%). If we could control for age, we would have a better idea of what’s going on, causality-wise.

Similarly, relationship and parent status might benefit from a little three-way table action. One interpretation of the data that shows that roughly half as man LGBT men as non-LGBT men and all women are raising kids is to assume that women are naturally nurturers and that, without the companionship of women, men are unwilling or unable to care for children. It wouldn’t be the first time gay men would be stereotyped as shallow, apathetic party boys. Controlling for relationship status might reveal more about the structures of these families and allow us to consider alternatives that take custody laws (perhaps a gay woman is raising children from her former marriage to a man) or the difficulties of adoption (the high cost and various anti-gay state laws make it difficult for gay men to have children) into account.

One of the most inscrutable findings of the study revolves around race. Despite a lack of visibility of LGBT people of color in the media and, as Gallup themselves point out, enduring “stereotypes that portray the LGBT community as predominantly white, highly educated, and very wealthy,” 33 percent of respondents who identified as LGBT were people of color. While it’s difficult to find research that sheds much light on this outcome, this kind of information could help encourage further research on an often-overlooked segment of the community. It also helps fight back against damaging beliefs about people of color and their acceptance of queerness. The more we know about our mutual struggles and joys and our unique conflicts, the harder it becomes to tear each other down.

A larger study on LGBT identities takes us one step closer to what I hope to see happen some day soon: a queer question on the Census. It’s not just about recognizing our existence, it’s about knowing how to improve society. Each study written and every interview performed allows us, our neighbors and our government to know more about the queer experience. Even with its flaws, Gallup’s poll — and their promise to include the question on all future surveys — is a valuable tool for finding solutions to demonstrably real problems.

Science Says It’s Time for Real Talk About Lesbians and Pap Smears

There was once a doctor who told my ex-girlfriend that she didn’t have to go to a gynecologist because she was gay. In the car, she turned to me and said “imagine if my mom weren’t a nurse and I didn’t know that I should?” Truth be told, a lot of us don’t know that we should. And a lot of us don’t, for a ton of reasons. Science says we don’t.

A new study by the University of Maryland School of Medicine shows that about four out of ten lesbians are not regularly screened for cervical cancer. This percentage of lesbians not being screened as recommended is higher than it is for women overall. We as a queer community are no stranger to being marginalized in the health care system (or any system, for that matter.) So this may not surprise us. The study states that cervical cancer is highly treatable when detected early, and that women who are engaging in same-sex sexual activity can also get HPV (this is already known because science, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t actually think about it!) The study’s author, Dr. J. Kathleen Tracy, says the study highlights an often over-looked cancer disparity, the details of which will be presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research.

Dr. Tracy and her team executed a standardized internet survey, sent to 3,000 women who self-identified as lesbians and 1,006 responded to the survey. Of these, 38% said they were not being screened for cervical cancer, while 62% said they were routinely screened.

The study states that the two most common barriers to testing for the 38 percent of lesbians who are not regularly screened were no physician recommendation (17.5 percent reported this) and not having a physician (17.3 percent.) In Dr. Tracy’s statements, she says that the overarching theme is a lack of communication between healthcare providers and their patients:

“We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of open communication between patient and provider,” Dr. Tracy says. “Our research showed that women who were open with their primary care doctors and gynecologists about their sexual orientation were nearly 2½ to three times more likely to have routine screening than those who did not disclose it. They also were more likely to be screened if their doctors recommended it and they believed that having routine Pap tests was beneficial.”

Basically the result of the study: it’s time for some real talk about Pap smears. And as much as I love talking with you about vaginas on the internet, this real talk should be with your doctor. If you don’t have a doctor like many lesbians in the study, you should get one. I live in a very happy, very privileged bubble where I have health insurance. But there are places where one can seek vagina treatment and consultation sans health care plan. While most of its media attention revolves around reproduction (preventing it or facilitating it), Planned Parenthood screens for all manner of STIs. There are also many other clinics that provide free or inexpensive screenings, and their reservation system is just a Google away.

If you’re putting off seeing a doctor, you may want to examine why. We’ve all had terrible doctor experiences, yes, and having a bad experience can put you off. But I’ll tell you what my father told me my senior year of high school the day after I wrecked my car. He opened his driver’s side door and said, “If you don’t drive today you never will again. So drive.” Don’t let one or even a hundred bad experiences stop you from being your own health care advocate. Are you scared about the costs in money and time? We’ve already talked about Planned Parenthood, which provides complimentary health care, but also consider this: preventative care costs far less in time and money than care will/does when an illness becomes an acute problem. Getting a pap smear can save you time and money in the long run.

Perhaps you see a doctor, but they may not have told you to get a pap smear. If you’re one of the women who hasn’t been told by a doctor to go get a Pap, we have to examine why. Do you turn red-faced and embarrassed every time your doctor mentions sex and say you are sexually inactive because you aren’t sleeping with men? Let’s all help society ovary-up about talking sex. Be open with your healthcare provider. Communication is a two-way street. It’s a normal thing to talk about, especially with your healthcare provider. And sex between two people with vaginas has risks associated with it, risks you should get tested for. Are you like my ex-girlfriend, whose doctor told her she didn’t need to because she’s gay? Demand better doctors, demand better training. This is hard, because doctors have authority and sometimes it’s scary to stand up for ourselves around authority figures. You know what my ex ultimately did about this doctor? Nothing. We don’t all have to be crusaders all the time But she didn’t go see her again. Instead she found another doctor, one who spoke about her body in gender neutral terms, one who took her seriously and didn’t tell her her asthma was in her head. And most importantly, one who understood that if you have a cervix, regardless of sexual orientation or gender presentation, you need a pap smear.

Studies like Dr. Tracy’s are important because it’s impossible to take responsibility for our healthcare if we are uneducated. How can we demand the healthcare we require when we don’t know what it is that we require? There are so many barriers to being educated and properly treated by doctors, some we have control over and some we don’t. Like when us women who are not straight report no sexual activity because we are assumed straight, because we were taught that sex is between a man and a woman, because we face ridicule or judgement from our doctors if we come out. When we are scared because we are uncomfortable in our bodies, because we don’t like to think about our vaginas if they don’t fit our outside gender presentation. Or perhaps this doesn’t apply to us because this study is about lesbians and we don’t identify as lesbians, we don’t even identify as female. When society tells us that if we have STIs, we are whores. Or we suspect something is wrong, but hope that if we ignore it, it will go away. There are just so many reasons that we have not to get tested for the HPV that can cause cervical cancer. But as the results of studies like these are discussed within our queer spaces, as queer communities we can support each other in the face of an imperfect health care system. This study and others like it can provide a platform, a jumping off point for our community discussing how we’re going to solve our own problems with vaginas, cervixes and their health. Because even with all these reasons not to get a pap smear, none of them outweigh the reason you should book your appointment for a pap smear right now.

It could save your life.

 

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Here are some resources Autostraddle has published in the past regarding sexual health, pap smears and going to a gyno while queer. We thought you’d find them helpful.

Lesbian Safe Sex 101: The Doctor is In (Also, the Cartoonist)

Health Care: Hard for LGBT People, Hardest for LGBT Old People

The PP & Me: Why We All Need Planned Parenthood

Why Are Gay Ladies So Afraid of the Gynecologist?

Harvard’s Science and Cooking Lecture Series Brings All The Girls To The Yard

Laura’s Team Pick:

If you find yourself with a free Monday night this fall and just happen to be in Boston, you’re in luck; after a few insanely successful years of offering an undergraduate course called “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is bringing all the class has to offer to the public during their three month long lecture series.

Howard McGee, a New York Times writer and the author of one of my favorite books (and the textbook for the course), opened the series on September 4th with a talk on the components and history of food. Last week, two Catalan brothers discussed how heat affects cooking and kicked off their session with a practical experiment involving the efficacy of whiskey rocks. Ladies and gentlequeers, this is Seduction 101: Nerdery and The Fastest Way To a Woman’s Heart.

But wait, here’s the best part: you can watch the lectures even if you’re nowhere near Havad Yad on YouTube or on iTunes.

What If? Takes Thought Experiments To The Next Level

What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question?

What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?

What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?

Randall Munroe, the mind behind xkcd, has some suggestions. In typical I-don’t-know-how-or-why-your-brain-went-there,-but-I-like-that-it-did xkcd fashion, Munroe comes up with some bizarre but fascinating answers to things you might have wondered at one point or another in the project What If?.

One of my favorite tangents comes from the answer to the question “What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?”

After dismissing the possibility of fitting a mole of moles on earth, Munroe suggests turning a mole of moles into a planet of its own and takes us through the hypothetical future of planet mole.

The outer surface of the planet radiates heat into space and freezes. Because the moles form a literal fur coat, when frozen it insulates the interior of the planet and slows the loss of heat to space. However, the flow of heat in the liquid interior is dominated by convection. Plumes of hot meat and bubbles of trapped gases like methane—along with the air from the lungs of the deceased moles—periodically rise through the mole crust and erupt volcanically from the surface, a geyser of death blasting mole bodies free of the planet.

I mean seriously. WTF. But also LOL. And wow.

Dr. Ben Barres Knows That Misogyny in the Sciences Is Real

Feature image via Harkey Science

When I was living in France back in 2009, I taught English at a university that catered only to computer science students. Ninety percent of my students were male. I had only three female students during my four months as an English tutor. My male students referred to their female colleagues as either chaste workaholics or whores who would sleep with anyone to avoid doing work to get to the top. This was not my experience with the female students. When one of my students told me that homosexuality was a sin against God and that women belonged in the kitchen, I had had enough. I made them sit in a circle on the floor and we had a discussion about feminism. None of my female students were present at the time. When I asked them why there weren’t more women at the school, none of them pointed to the way they treat women in the classroom. None of them even considered that their assertion that they’d love to see more women at the university because they’d love to date them even remotely a detractor for women choosing what to study and where to study it. They all told me that women just are not innately interested in science, and in fact they weren’t innately good at it.

Dr. Ben Barres studies and teaches neurobiology at Stanford, with a focus on neuron-glial interactions in the development of the central nervous system. He graduated from MIT back when he was presenting as Barbara Barres, a period of his life he has no problem with speaking about publicly because he believes it gives him an interesting insight into the increasingly covered dearth of women in science. The Wall Street Journal very recently published an article about Dr. Barres’s take on the subject. It’s worth noting that the Wall Street Journal coverage has some semi-problematic language, headline included. However, some of the language comes from the way Dr. Barres himself speaks about and frames his own transition. You do you, Dr. Barres! The truly important thing is that the article is rife with anecdotes of the differences between Barres’s treatment from others when presenting as female versus when presenting as male. For instance:

Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 10 years ago, describing to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other top institutions his discoveries about nerve cells called glia. As the applause died down, a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, “Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s.”

Dr. Barres does not have a sister. In fact, the scientist was remembering Dr. Barres in previous years. Same research. Same person. But he was taken more seriously while presenting as male. This is an experience many of us feel personally every day, regardless of which field we work in.

The interesting thing about Dr. Barres is that, unlike me, he’s not working off of personal anecdotes alone. He’s a scientist and he knows about brains. He looks at the data to refute the claims by Larry Summers, a former Harvard president, that women have a lack of “intrinsic aptitude” for math and science, and that’s why there aren’t so many women at the top level. Barres asserts that there are no differences in cognitive ability between the sexes, but rather the treatment of women accounts for the gender gap in scientific field and that the under-representation of women in the professoriate is entirely based on social factors.

This is not news for us. It’s clearly not news for Barres. He lectured on the subject in 2008, and you can see the entire two hour lecture and even have the slides all for yourself, which I highly recommend. He’s also backed up by other sources, which say that when women are reminded before an exam that they are supposed to be worse at science by being asked to indicate their gender, they do worse on that exam.

So what should we do about it? “Ask to see the data,” says Ben Barres in his lecture. Assumptions about women, even the ones we’ve all grown up hearing, are rarely backed by the data that is cited in these so called studies. And he tells all of us women in academia to ask for what we need and take it upon ourselves to tackle stereotypes and prejudices where we see them. This is certainly something we can extrapolate and take to heart in our every day lives, scientists or not.

Sally Ride Is Dead

The book was called To Space And Back. It was big, with glossy photographs taken by real astronauts in outer space, and diagrams that showed what the inside of a space shuttle looked like. Where did I get it? Maybe it was a present, or something I picked out at a museum gift shop. We went to a lot of museums in the 80’s.

The book was by Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel into outer space. I loved the hell out of that book because it was a story about a woman doing a thing people said women couldn’t do, and I wanted to be a woman like that some day. A woman like Sally Ride, like Amelia Earhart, like Joan of Arc. I’d never been good at science, or even all that interested in it, but because of Sally Ride I became interested in outer space and started begging my parents to send me to Space Camp (they never did). I had this idea, because I was a child and a therefore fundamentally ridiculous human being, that if I was an astronaut, I would get to fly rocket ships with Sally Ride herself. Have I mentioned that I became obsessed with Sally Ride? I was obsessed with Sally Ride. Sometimes her hair looked like my Mom’s hair, which made her easier to draw. I drew a lot of pictures of Sally Ride.

As a little tomboy in the 1980’s, when I thought about what I wanted to do with my life I never imagined I’d be doing something that involved a lot of other women (unless I succeeded in inventing my Women’s Professional Baseball League). There weren’t a lot of models for that kind of life. Instead I imagined a life like Sally Ride’s — being the only woman in every photograph, on every team, in every meeting. I was already used to that kind of thing because I was always doing activities that somehow landed me as the only girl in so many little rooms. Sally Ride was my hero, of sorts, and I was confident that she’d like me a lot when we met, which, of course, never happened. I mean, I’m genuinely terrible at science.

Today, following a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, Sally Ride died at the age of 61.

“What’s it like to be in space?” “Is it scary?” “Is it cold?” “Do you have trouble sleeping?” These are questions that everyone asks astronauts who have been in space. The experience is hard to describe. The words and pictures in this book will help you imagine what it’s like to blast off in a rocket and float effortlessly in midair while circling hundreds of miles above the earth.”

– From the introduction to “To Space and Back,” by Sally Ride with journalist Susan Okie.

Sally Ride was pretty special from the get-go — bright, curious, ambitious. Born in Encino, California, in 1951, as a teenager she earned a scholarship to the prestigious Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles and then went on to get a B.A. (English & Physics), master’s degree (physics) and Ph.D. (physics) from Stanford University. As a young woman she was also a prolific tennis player who idolized Billie Jean King. She actually met her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy, playing tennis when both girls were 12.

In 1978 she joined NASA, one of six women and 35 people total chosen from the over 8,000 applicants who responded to a newspaper ad seeking new people for the space program. She completed four years of Astronaut training before June 18th, 1983, when aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, she became the first American woman in space. She flew again on The Challenger in 1984.

In 1986, teacher Christa McAuliffe, meant to be the first female teacher in space, was one of seven crew members who died when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight. The space program was put on a 32-month hiatus and Sally Ride was chosen to head the operations subcommittee of the presidential commission investigating the accident. Neil Armstrong was Vice Chairman of the commission, called the Rogers Commission after its Chairman William P.Rogers. After the investigation, Ride moved to NASA headquarters in D.C. to lead their first strategic planning effort and found their Office of Exploration.

She retired from NASA in 1987 and quickly began making her mark on land; working at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control, teaching physics at UC-San Diego and serving as director of the California Space Institute.

In 2001, she founded Sally Ride Science, a company that aims to “make a difference in girls’ lives, and in society’s perceptions of their roles in technical fields,” creating innovative science education programs and products “that educate, entertain, engage and inspire.” The Sally Ride Science Camp offers “hands-on” science camps for middle-school-aged girls at Universities in California and Massachusetts. In 2009 she partnered with ExxonMobil to create the Sally Ride Science Academy and became the Education and Public Outreach lead for NASA’s GRAIL MoonKam, which enables kids all over the country to solicit and study photographs taken from satellites orbiting the Moon.

Ride has been inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame, the California Hall of Fame, The National Women’s Hall of Fame and The National Aviation Hall of Fame. Earlier this year she was awarded the 2012 National Space Grant Distinguished Service Award.

Ride devoted much of her adult life to being an advocate for women in science, speaking about how to nurture girls’ interest in science and scientific careers and developing programs to foster these tiny trailblazers into becoming strong ambitious women like Sally Ride. Can you even imagine how many girls she’s inspired, now? What a life.

Although Sally Ride married another astronaut, Steven Hawley, in 1982, they divorced in 1987. She spent the last 27 years in a relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy. Tam is the Chief Operating Officer and vice president of Sally Ride Science.

In a 2006 interview for the Academy of Achievement, Sally Ride was asked what it was like to be up there in space, or what she saw when she had time just to look. This was her answer:

The view of earth is absolutely spectacular. And the feeling of looking back and seeing your planet as a planet is just an amazing feeling. It’s a totally different perspective, and it makes you appreciate, actually, how fragile our existence is. You can look at earth’s horizon and see this really, really thin royal blue line right along the horizon, and at first you don’t really quite internalize what that is, and then you realize that it’s earth’s atmosphere, and that that’s all there is of it, and it’s about as thick as the fuzz on a tennis ball, and it’s everything that separates us from the vacuum of space.