I've been having a hard time with this month's Scientiae Carnival. I have been thinking about stories I've been told, the story I will some day tell, and there's something unsatisfying about it.
I think the reason is that, though I doubt this was the intent, that when I think of stories I think of a single protagonist -- for the purposes of Scientiae, perhaps a heroine. I think of one woman battling the odds and being defeated or, if she's lucky, making it in academia. And this is how we women scientists tend to slog through our lives. Sure, we find friends at conferences, we build relationships in our departments, maybe sometimes some of us even band together over tea from time to time. But these largely solitary journeys are doing nothing to improve the situation of women in science.
Growing up I was a big reader of sci fi and fantasy (ok, I still am). I was particularly drawn to stories with strong female characters, but I would happily read anything and, in my head, modify it so that the lead was a woman. To help me sleep at night, I would often retell these stories in my head, where the woman saved the man, or the man never existed at all, or the woman's magical or supernatural powers were stronger. I must have desperately wanted someone to tell these stories, but I was still getting the story wrong. I still thought the key was just that the woman had to be better, stronger, more persistent or more clever.
The key is that the woman cannot be alone.
Here is the beginning of the story I want to tell about my life. Kate felt like a big mistake in college, and few around her did anything to counteract this notion. She had imagined big things for herself, but feelings got in the way of being the kind of brave heroine she had imagined for herself as she drifted off to sleep each night in high school. The sport she played required near anorexia, so she quit. Some of the people around her were not good for her, so she found new ones. She met a studious, sweet young man who was saturated with quiet academic confidence. Because she liked him, she sought to emulate him.
Through this, Kate found she did have a lot more power than she thought, and she wasn't a mistake. So she went to graduate school.
Graduate school was oppressive, hurtful, and designed to create feelings of uncertainty and powerlessness. Qualifying exams are designed to make you feel like you'll never know enough. Committee meetings are designed to remind you of how junior and inept you are. And worst of all, graduate school is designed to teach you that you aren't powerful, and that you should teach that to the next generation of scholars as well.
Then Kate got involved in the union and discovered that it was possible to survive graduate school without picking up the behavior patterns that would lead to her perpetrating that oppression on others. She got arrested -- twice. She went on strike -- twice. She lost some academic relationships because of her union activity, having to take a semester longer than she wanted to finish because... well, you'll have to read those chapters yourself (i.e., the archives).
Kate did finish, and she got a non-tenure track job. She even got a tenure-track job next. She learned you can stand up for what you believe in and be successful, and that skulking about and being quiet about oppression didn't help a single one of her cohort in grad school. But here's where Kate needs to learn a major life lesson to make the next phase of her story worthwhile: she needs to pull people around her again, like she did in graduate school. She needs to build relationships, and build leaders, and work with other like-minded men and women to build a movement.
Because the problems in academia aren't going to solve themselves. Because women, people of color, people with disabilities, and other constituencies that are underrepresented in science will continue to be so. Because the degree of powerlessness and learned helplessness I see in the eyes of my colleagues distresses me. The story we need to tell over the next few decades is one of solidarity, because there is no rational conflict of interest between any human beings.
Here are some of the important plotlines of this story:
- We need to build explicit, formal mentoring networks.
- We need to form diversity committees in our departments and national organizations and societies. We need to work on making these committees actually stand for something.
- We need to learn about the kinds of issues that hold back underrepresented groups from achieving in our labs and classrooms, and implement appropriate changes.
- We need to be honest about what it takes to be successful, and we can't try and do it alone. We need to find resources and allies to make it so that we thrive as humans, not so that we make it by the skin of our teeth.
- And when it's time to fight, WE FIGHT. We don't say, that's for someone else to do, or I have a child, or maybe I don't care that much, or I'm safe so it's not important. We fight.
What are the other plotlines that need to be developed? How will your story unfold?
technorati tag: scientiae-carnival
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