I'm Sorry I'll be MissingScienceOnline09

I'm sorry to say that I'll be unable to attend ScienceOnline09 due to a family emergency. I was looking forward to both my session and meeting all the science bloggers I only know by name/pseudonym.

I'm sure Stephanie will do an excellent job moderating the science in SF session discussion. I'm hoping to at least watch the sessions remotely.

You can get info about live coverage here.

Hina Chaudhry: Interesting Science from a Lab-Worn Doctor-Lady

Over on my Biology in Science Fiction blog I recently posted about an article by Tom Junod in men's magazine Esquire profiling UW scientist Mark Roth. The article was bad, in part because it painted a picture of Roth as an genius maverick who couldn't get a grants because his ideas were too brilliant, unlike the plodding never-had-a-fresh-idea scientists actually funded by the NIH. But it wasn't just that. It was the writing, which read like a transcribed conversation with a valley dude who was completely unfamiliar with science and the way it's practiced.

Now Carl Zimmer points out another article in the latest Esquire - this one by Lisa Taddeo - that's equally bad. There's the flip conversational tone and use of odd analogies*, and, as a bonus, "who'd believe this normal-looking woman is a scientist."

But now look here, a woman. She is a pretty lady of Pakistani heritage who highlights her soccer-mom layers, which you don't expect from a lab-worn doctor-lady. And she's got ideas. Wild ones. Hina Chaudhry believes she can do what the body can't: fix the dead parts.

Highlighted layers and ideas? Amazing! And is the "soccer-mom" description a dig at her style?

It's a shame the writing is so bad, since Chaudhry's research sounds quite interesting. She's been studying the role of the cell-cycle regulating protein cyclin A2 in heart development.

From the Esquire article:

Chaudhry says it was women's intuition. The holy-shit solution. It came to her during a seminar at UPenn when she was twenty-nine. They were discussing fruit-fly genes. How the head segment knows it's going to form a head and how the tail segment knows it's going to be a tail. "I just had this sudden realization that heart cells don't divide after birth in any mammal. They divide in the embryo, but they stop after birth," she says. "So I thought, That's it! We have to go back and study the basics of why and when heart cells stop dividing." If they could do that -- figure out what causes heart-cell division to turn off -- then perhaps they could find a way to turn it back on.

She's devised a method of introducing an expressed version of cyclin A2 into adult heart cells, which appears to allow the heart to recover from a heart attack. It's been successfully tested in rats and ultimately she hopes that the method can be used in humans.

Her idea was laughed at, at first. In part because she was young and a woman, she says. But now the medical world is sitting up, taking notes.

Chaudhry was recruited to Mount Sinai's Cardiovascular Institute by the director of Mount Sinai Heart, Dr. Valentin Fuster, and the medical center's Cardiovascular Research Center director, Dr. Roger Hajjar. She calls them the two greatest visionaries in the cardiac world. Along with their chosen one, this bright many-schooled angel, they are going to make Mount Sinai the leading thinker in the heart world. "We've had no therapies to reverse heart failure, to make a diseased heart normal again," says Hajjar. "This therapy may finally do that."

An angel and "chosen one" - that's a lot to live up to. Heart attacks are a top killer here in the United States, so anything that improves the survival rate would be a significant achievement. I suspect, though, that Chaudhry's methodology is further from being a clinical reality than the article might lead you to believe.

---

* From the description of what happens during a heart attack.

"Suddenly, soldier, this part of your heart is dead, only it's still in your body, attached to the good section -- the 90210 ventricle -- and the good part is smirking, it's saying, "Come on, rebuild yourself, man!"

Science articles rarely juxtapose a reference to a teen drama and a quote from an anthropomorphized internal organ in the same sentence (not to mention the gratuitous "soldier" reference), so this is very special.

Tags: Hina Chaudhry, women in science

Women in Science Link Roundup: January 12 Edition

Between the holidays, getting ready for ScienceOnline09, and reading Anathem (which will probably result in a post) I've really gotten behind in posting here. I've also been spending a lot of time reading other people's posts. I don't know if it's because people had a bit of vacation, or have been thinking about the past year, or just chance, but there seem to have been a lot of interesting discussions over the past few weeks.

I've included brief excerpts below to give you the sense of posts, but I really recommend following the links to read both the posts and the comments.

Blue Lab Coats: Is it unfair to have women's faculty groups?

Many of us women don’t have a female science next door neighbor, or even another female TT department-mate, who might understand our unique issues and teach us how to function effectively in a male-dominated environment. If we did, having a group where we could get the support and mentoring we need from people with like experiences to help us climb the academic ladder successfully, wouldn’t be such a pressing issue.

A Blog Around the Clock: The Shock Value of Science Blogs

Academic science is a very hierarchical structure in which one climbs up the ladder by following some very exact steps. Yes, you can come into it from the outside, class-wise, but you have to start from the bottom and follow those steps "to the T" if you are to succeed. But those formal steps were designed by Victorian gentlemen scientists, thus following those steps turns one into a present-time Victorian gentleman scientist. But not everyone can or wants to do this, yet some people who refuse are just as good as scientists as the folks inside the club. If you refuse to dance the kabuki, you will be forever kept outside the Gate. The importance of mastery of kabuki in one's rise through the hierarchy also means that some people get to the top due to their skills at glad-handling the superiors and putting down the competitors with formalized language, not the quality of their research or creativity of their thought.

And there's a lot more food for thought on his post.

Not Exactly Rocket Science: Why are there so few female chess grandmasters?
You should read the whole post, but here's Ed's conclusion:

So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It's that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table. In science and engineering, where men dominate the top ranks but also have an advantage in numbers, it's likely that the same explanation applies, rather than the innate differences cited by Summers and Irwing.

Dr. Isis: "On Motherhood and Maintaining Your Identity..."

I felt like I was living a double life and constantly denying one half of my identity -- turning parts of myself on and off and disguising the others so that people only saw what I allowed them to see -- was emotionally draining and it left me feeling isolated in every sphere I interacted in. It left me feeling guilty when I let one part of my life creep into the other and it left me feeling depressed that I could not recognize my full identity for fear of being shunned in either sphere. I realized that I would not be able continue to function this way and be successful in either sphere. And with that, I opened the dam between the two spheres and have allowed them to blend together.

Greg Laden: The natural basis for gender inequality
This is a thought-provoking look at naturalism, primate behavior, and how it might relate to gender inequality in humans. The comments get a bit heated - or at least one dude does.

Courtney at Feministing points to a piece about Caroline Kennedy and the definition of "experience" in the New York Times.

She goes on to talk about how work "experience" used to be defined, visually speaking, as a ladder. Just keep on climbing and hope for the rewards on your way up. But a new paradigm is taking over, one that looks less like a ladder and more like a "lattice"--a shape that allows for stepping off and stepping back on, caretaking for children and aging parents, working non-traditional hours, taking detours into various fields, developing various skills etc. In this paradigm, success would be less defined by one's years of experience or status within a particular linear framework, but the quality of one's work, the breadth of one's experience, one's capacity for reinvention and adaptation.

Lee Kottner @ Cocktail Party Physics: by invitation only
This is quite a rant that compares the sexism in Christianity with the sexism in science, then takes on Dawkins' selection of writers for the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. I can't do it justice by taking a snippet, so just go read her post.

DN Lee @ Urban Science Adventures: Increasing Diversity in the Sciences With Mentorship and Conference Attendance

Scientific meetings offer tremendous learning and networking opportunities for students. This is especially true for students who are members of traditionally under-represented groups. Though you may be one of a few brown or young or feminine faces at the conference, many societies are working hard to get you at that meeting and to keep you coming back.

Female Science Professor: Just Call Me F
As a PhD and/or an academic, how do you like to be addressed?
Dr. Isis (who has been blogging up a storm the past few weeks) also weighs in: That's "Dr. Little Missy to You!

Young Female Scientist: science vs. street smarts in academia

Supposedly, your level of street smarts has more to do with your upbringing than almost any other single factor. People who know how to come in and play the system usually learned those skills early on, from their parents. Or maybe if they did certain activities after school.

This is a critical skill, but you don't learn these things in class.

However, here's where things get really interesting for women in particular.From what I can tell, street knowledge is really hard for women to get.

Christina Pikas posted the slides from her presentation at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience. She looked at how science blogs were interconnected, and was able to identify subgroups in different scientific specialities and was even able to pick out a troll. She also found a high level of connectedness between women's science blogs:

What was interesting - and most definitely worthy of further investigation - is this cluster of blogs written mostly by women, discussing the scientific life, etc. The degree distribution was much closer to uniform within the cluster, and there were many comment links between all of the nodes. This, to me, indicates other uses for the blogs and perhaps a real community (or Blanchard's virtual settlement).

Juniper Shoemaker lays bare her long journey from English to genetics: part 1, part 2, part 3. English majors can indeed make great scientists.

Astarte's Circus: At Ease With Her Age
Most of Octogalore's post isn't about women in science directly, but discusses women and aging and appearance. And this part is directly relevant:

My aunt, who got into Harvard Med, wanted to be a doctor. My father, who also did, wanted to be a teacher. She was told “don’t BE a doctor. Marry a doctor.” He was told that literature was effete and that he would not continue to get love and admiration if he didn’t pursue the medical route. When he fainted at a gory video and had to be taken from the room, of course, it was clear things were a bit off.

He is now still teaching at 73, and still making much less than a first-year lawyer, but loves what he does. My aunt never did enjoy humanities and ultimately stopped working. When her kids left the home, she found herself at loose ends, with the fields she was most interested in having high entrance costs for a middle-aged woman who’d been out of the work force for twenty years.

GirlPostDoc wrote about "Marginalization and the fight for even less funding"

So should you be "extra careful of to avoid being marginalized?" No. Because that will happen anyway. If being the department's "Black or Brown Female Scientist" means that you have the chance to be present and give others a chance to see themselves where you are - I say go for it. Be that "Scientist." Be strong, take lots of deep breaths, and always be humble. And know that you are not alone.

There were also posts about stereotypical feminine gender roles and being a scientist or engineer by Green Gabro, Dr. Isis, Leslie Madsen Brooks, Sheril Kirshenbaum ....

Last, but not least, is this old post of Zuska's: "Explaining (Away) Women Geeks". Of particular note is this comment by Mark Chu-Carroll about affirmative action. (Thanks to commenter SKM in this discussion of affirmative action and gender at Shakesville)

Tags: women in science, stereotypes, gender gap

Take the Pledge: Write about a woman in technology on Ada Lovelace Day

Journalist, tech writer and blogging consultant Suw Charman-Anderson has started a new project to draw attention to women who excel in technology. She's asking bloggers to take the Ada Lovelace Day pledge:

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

As I write this post, 524 people have joined up, including me.

On the official Ada Lovelace Day blog Suw explains what inspired the project:

I’ve mainly stayed away from the discussion of gender issues in technology. I didn’t think that I had any real expertise to share. But over the last six months, after many conversations, it has become clear that many of my female friends in tech really do feel disempowered. They feel invisible, lacking in confidence, and unsure how to compete for attention with the men around them.

Then I see the stupid puerile misogynistic manner with which some of the more powerful voices in the tech community - some of them repeat offenders - treat women, and it makes me very cross indeed. The objectification of women is bad enough when it’s done by the media, but when it’s done by a conference organiser or tech commentator or famous tech publication, what message does it send? Nothing but “You will never be taken seriously, but we might take notice of you if you’re hot.”

On March 24th (hopefully) the 1000+ posts will end up highlighting the great contributions that women have made to technology, beyond providing eye candy for their male colleagues. Learn more at FindingAda.com and take the pledge.

(Of the posts Suw links to, I'd recommend starting at BitchBuzz Tech's "Two Big Reasons Why it's So Hard to Be a Woman in Tech")

You can see the latest pledge total on the image above.

Tags: Ada Lovelace Day, women in technology

February Scientiae Carnival Call For Posts: Hope and Change

Pat at Fairer Science will be hosting the February Scientiae carnival. This month's theme:

What do you think a better, more equitable society should look like? What are your dreams for your life? For the lives of others? How close are you to living the life of your dreams? What would make you able to live that life?

It's 2009 – a year of hope and change and the next Scientiae Carnival is about hope and change—the hopes we have and the changes we would like. I've been reading ScienceWoman, Dr. Isis and even the 1841 Lowell Offering and their ideas have really gotten me thinking. Our dreams as to what society can and should be may not happen; but if we don't dream it, it surely won't happen. My hope is that the Carnival will get us all into the discussion, help us learn from each other and move us forward. Please tell us your dreams.

Submit your entries by January 30th as explained here.

And a big thank-you to Pat for introducing me to the Lowell Offering, a journal of poetry and fiction by the girls and women working in the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1840s. And in particular, the piece titled "A New Society", which lists some hopes for the future that we are still working towards today.

Tags: scientiae carnival

New Year Blues

Well, the New Year is nearly a week old and it seems like a century! I've been struck by the sense of anticlimax that comes with the New Year. It leaves me feeling bored in spite of all the work to do, overwhelmed by the incredible distance between effort and reward. That distance may be as much as the ten minutes between putting on the kettle and drinking the cup of coffee, an unspeakably long time.

It hasn't been helped by the antics in Israel. I seem to find myself stuck on Al Jazeera watching rockets and explosions against the night sky, hypnotized by the pointlessness of it all.

The fact that we have all been hit by a persistent cold doesn't improve my frame of mind. The ache in my head and pain in my face cast a negative filter on everything. The weather is cold and damp, which makes me alternately homesick or SAD. And the bare house, stripped of it's cheerful tree, is just the icing on the cake.

Rereading the above makes me seem like a miserable old grouch. Perhaps I am...

New Year Blues

Well, the New Year is nearly a week old and it seems like a century! I've been struck by the sense of anticlimax that comes with the New Year. It leaves me feeling bored in spite of all the work to do, overwhelmed by the incredible distance between effort and reward. That distance may be as much as the ten minutes between putting on the kettle and drinking the cup of coffee, an unspeakably long time.

It hasn't been helped by the antics in Israel. I seem to find myself stuck on Al Jazeera watching rockets and explosions against the night sky, hypnotized by the pointlessness of it all.

The fact that we have all been hit by a persistent cold doesn't improve my frame of mind. The ache in my head and pain in my face cast a negative filter on everything. The weather is cold and damp, which makes me alternately homesick or SAD. And the bare house, stripped of it's cheerful tree, is just the icing on the cake.

Rereading the above makes me seem like a miserable old grouch. Perhaps I am...

Social Beavers and Normal Women

I hope that I am winning a way which others will keep open. Perhaps the fact that I am not a radical, and that I do not scorn womanly duties, but deem it a privilege to clean up and supervise the room and sew things, etc., is winning me stronger allies than anything else… I am useful in a general way, and they can’t say study spoils me for anything else.

~ Ellen Swallow Richards in a letter to a friend in 1872. She was the first woman admitted to MIT, where she earned a BS in chemistry in 1873.

I was browsing through the videos in MIT's TechTV collection and stumbled on "The Social Beaver". It was filmed in the early or mid-1960s, and depicts "typical" student life at MIT. It spends a few minutes focusing on the few women who were enrolled there.

In the embedded the video below, the segment about "girls" starts at about 6:15.


Looking back 45 or so years, the whole campus appears terribly old-fashioned. The filmmakers seemed to want to emphasize how "normal" the girls are. We see them relaxing in the girls-only dormitory ("no men allowed") in what the narrator calls "typically feminine fashion": knitting, chatting about boys and dates, and singing around a piano. Of course they study too, but "the studious beaver is also the social beaver"¹, and one young woman turns out to be doodling an evening gown instead of boning up on multivariable calculus.

What is particularly striking to me is where the young women aren't. The film shows all the different extracurricular activities open to students - the newspaper, the yearbook, band, radio station, rocket design club, a variety of intramural sports, student government and more - and all you see are male faces. It wasn't just because women "chose" to not participate: of all the sports in MIT's extensive intramural program, only sailing and fencing were open to women. While women were at the Institute it seems that they weren't really part of the Institute.

Of course part of the reason we see so few female faces was that women only made up about 5% of the student body in the 1960s. They wouldn't be particularly visible even if they did participate in campus activities. But they also had to contend with the attitude that all they really were interested in was boys and babies. Take, for example the 1964 symposium on Women in Science and Engineering hosted by MIT. One of the invited speakers was well-known psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim² who stated:

As much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.

That's a helluva broad brush to paint half the human population with. Any woman who was focused on her research and career, happy to be single or childless, or uninterested in dating men would be considered unwomanly, at least by Bettelheim's standards. I doubt he was alone in that attitude, considering that even today many people still assume "normal" women are primarily interested in marriage and children. It's the usual no-win situation: traditionally feminine are assumed to not be focused on their careers, and women who focused on their careers were aren't "normal" women.

Interestingly, the percentage of women in the MIT student body began to shoot upward beginning in the early 1970s. This was correlated with two significant changes: the opening of co-ed dorms, so that the open slots in the women's dormitory didn't limit women's enrollment, and a switch to gender-blind admissions. Currently women make up more than 40% of the MIT undergraduate population and 30% of the graduate school population. And they definitely participate in intramural sports.

1. Yes, you have a dirty mind. However it may be noted that the sports teams at MIT are currently called the Engineers, rather than the Beavers.

2. Bettleheim is best known for popularizing the "refrigerator mother" explanation for autism. The idea is pretty much how it sounds: "emotionally frigid" women cause their children to become autistic. This has been discredited here in the US, but apparently is still a popular notion elsewhere.

Tags: MIT, women in science, women in engineering

January Scientiae Carnival: Doors Open, Doors Close

AcmeGirl has posted the first Scientiae Carnival of the year at Thesis - With Children. This month's theme was "the doors YOU have opened and closed this year." AcmeGirl has collected some great posts, so head over and check them out.

The February Scientiae Carnival will be hosted by Pat at FairerScience.

Tags: scientiae carnival, women in science