Women and Science

The two identities that I intended to look at the intersection of were those of scientist and woman. This has been a hot topic at our university, and I have been a member of a group that specifically looks to support women with the intersectional identities of woman and “marine scientist.” With my interviewees, we did not discuss too directly what it means to be a scientist, but focused more on how being a woman affects the experience of being a scientist. All three of them shared stories of sexual harassment or assault in their work. While I have had my own #metoo experiences, I have been lucky enough to not have had such experiences directly associated with my research or scholarship. The experiences these women shared revealed how implicit assumptions about what it means to be a scientist is seen as not aligning with being a woman. They shared that having a goal of being a professor was treated as “cute,” and that their research interests were not supported because, “women are seen as the qualitative and men are the quantitative, they are the hard thinkers. The hard sciences are male.” These women felt their gender was seen as limiting their ability to succeed in their field in the way in which they wanted. This perception of women as more focused on the holistic analysis and men being more skilled at numerical analysis directly affected one women’s research. She shared that a professor wasn’t supportive of her interest in doing a heavily quantitative project, yet,

“The next year, he got a white man, and accepted him [to do the project]. I got really annoyed because I was like, wait, he’s a social scientist too! But yet, you give him that opportunity to work with you on these projects. Sometimes being a woman, especially being a woman of color, people just assume there are certain things you’ll be better at than others, and because in the sciences we value quantitative and hard sciences more than the other sciences, then women’s value is lesser in the sciences because we’re always grouped into the qualitative group.”

This revealed the internalized sexism that affected all three of these women's original interactions with the identity of "scientist." They had to separate from their identity of being a woman, or overcome the limitations of that identity as it was perceived by themselves and in their fields, in order to achieve their goals. Rather than pursuing science as a woman, they had to demonstrate how they could pursue scientific careers or methods even though they were women. Along with the aforementioned implicit assumptions about women’s abilities, the other two women expressed some concrete reasons why femininity may be seen as so incompatible with science. They explained how even without intentionally being feminine, being female in fields not intentionally designed to include women explicitly limits the research opportunities women can safely pursue. They explained how it’s frustrating to feel limited in what and where they are able to research because of their gender.

“Often you’re in a remote area, and you’re trapped in certain circumstances, and you’re pressured to ‘just get your data’ and deal with the situation, even if it’s not a good situation, and I’ve been in situations like that… and I didn’t want it to be like, ‘oh, it’s because I’m a female. If I was a guy this wouldn’t be a problem.’ I always had that, in the field, there were things that were happening because I was a woman, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to make an issue of this. Because, this wouldn’t be happening if I was a guy. So it’s like my fault, kind of’… gosh… and just, people I wanted to work with, who I thought their interest in me was because I’m a scientist, but it turned out to be something else. Which would become apparent after interacting with them for a while, and you’re like, ‘well, I guess I don’t want to do that project.’”

Rather than making choices that would protect her safety that was particularly endangered as a woman in the field, this woman felt she needed to suppress this sense that her gender made an impact on her field experience to demonstrate she could conduct rigorous field work. Another woman shared how, in recognizing how her gender would affect both her access to a community and her safety, she changed her research community and topic:

“I just figured that working with women…was going to give me more access to the community… it didn’t feel safe to go to the middle of nowhere with a bunch of [men of a different race than me]. I think being a woman affects the kind of fieldwork that women can do. Men are also affected by the types of communities they have access to. But for them it’s like, ‘Well I didn’t have access to them because they didn’t open up to me,’ versus as a woman I couldn’t do that work because my body wasn’t safe there. Which is an important reason as to why women and men face different obstacles”

A key sentiment that arose here was the tendency to internalize that they were responsible for the marginalization they experienced, and questioning whether being a woman is what limited your access to an opportunity:

“I felt like I wasn’t able to pursue the project that I wanted to pursue. And I don’t know if it’s because I was a woman, I think that it’s maybe because I didn’t have really high GRE scores in the math so he thought I wasn’t going to do well, even though I had done [that method] in my master’s. Or maybe he thought it was too difficult of a task for someone like me. I think a lot of times with some of this stuff it’s hard to say, ‘It was because I am a woman this happened.’ A lot of times you don’t know if it was because you are a woman, which makes you feel like you’re crazy, because sometimes it is because you’re a woman. But when you say it or you think of it like that, it sounds like, ‘you’re making that up’”