I identify as an ardent feminist. However, I move between the worlds of STEM (I have a B.S., M.S, and PHD in biological engineering), academia (I am a postdoc), and creative writing (I have numerous short fiction and poetry publications). My creative writing background meant that I took a lot of feminist literature classes and workshops over the years, and have read numerous scholarly feminist texts unrelated to science but to other aspects of life. I loved writers like Virginia Woolf and Alison Bechdel and Gloria Anzaldúa. Even before that, I had committed to feminism in middle school (back in the conservative ‘00s Bush years) when I read that a few members of the Women’s Liberation Movement burned their bras—from that point I was all in. But what really inspired me to examine feminism in science was taking a class with the renowned Dr. Margaret Rossiter during my undergraduate study. Sure I had known that women have historically been excluded and under-credited in scientific fields, and that sexism and bias still persisted (I was often one of the only women in some of the engineering sections I took—I was also the only female engineering or science major in my literature classes and Dr Rossiter’s class). Dr. Rossiter’s class gave me the real framework to understand the social and institutional barriers that worked (and still work) to exclude women in STEM. I will get way into more this in other posts, but suffice to say, I have relentlessly critiqued my own and others’ experiences in navigating STEM academic spaces. And I highly recommend reading the “Women Scientists in America” trilogy by Dr. Rossiter for those who want a deep understanding of sexism in STEM academic spaces.
Anyway, during my decade as an engineering student I participated in a lot of superficial efforts to engage women in STEM fields. This included Society of Women Engineering events, participating in outreach events for middle school and high school girls, judging science fairs, ect. Even as a K-12 student myself, I engaged with these events. For some reason, they worked for me, converted me to majoring in engineering. However, they did very, very little to give me the tools to navigate or even critique these spaces. Women dropped like flies from my own engineering program. Few went in academia. Those that did, left academia for non-research related industry work or they shifted to teaching, despite being accomplished scholars, which is a classic historical pattern for female PHDs, by the way. Many had mental health problems (many of the men also demonstrated troubling addictive behaviors), many were unhappy, many were very stressed. Clearly, something is not working in these fields, even in our more enlightened 21st century era.
I started this Substack because I really noticed a lack of deep, critical feminist perspective written by female scientists. I tried publishing academic articles in this vein, but they have been consistently rejected because I lacked some of the sociological scholarly framework needed for those journals (hopefully they will be published one day though—I keep revising and working on them!). I considered writing an academic book and even queried a few small academic publishers, and while they were interested in the idea, I think I seemed like a risky prospect not having humanities training, despite my extensive publication history in literary journals and creative writing. So, I decided to write a Substack after having followed several feminist-oriented Substacks. This space can hopefully accommodate a personal and scholarly approach towards this subject area. I really hope to enlighten other scientists about these critical topics which may seem daunting to understand, but may help provide some perspective to help navigate these spaces.
To be clear, I love my job, love the day-to-day work. I love having a Ph.D. and found it to be the most immensely rewarding experience of my life. I count myself extremely lucky to do a job that challenges and excites me. I love mentoring students and teaching. However, I believe that my inherent love of the field and ‘learning’ in general is the only thing that kept me persisting in the field. I was also lucky not to have experienced addiction or chronic health issues or require a visa. I was immensely privileged as an American white woman, whose family’s support, meant I was not overly-burdened with student loan debt or had to experience the poverty that many students face which makes the experiences 10x harder. But I didn’t receive ‘real’ support in navigating the intricacies of my degree programs (‘tough it out’ is the mentality), academically struggled and was seriously in danger of failing some classes despite working 12 hours a day and having no personal life, and floundered in some aspects of the field, especially the job market, networking, and receiving appropriate credit for my contributions to the field. I recently experienced an incident where I did not receive the authorship credit I advocated for, despite proving my contributions and crafting a carefully developed comprise that was shot down in an instant (by a woman). I have also repeatedly been denied departmental ‘awards’ for service and research one of which went to a white man, who had graduated a semester early, and had treated me with rudeness. I was recently shut down from discussing the implications of the CDC no longer working with the WHO, because it was not relevant to ‘our paper’ which is literally discussing CDC guidelines. These experiences and others shattered the ‘meritocracy myth’ for me. STEM can do better. It MUST do better. There are amazing people, research projects, and outstanding creativity that gets smothered by politics, profit, or spite. I also heartily believe in the mission of the land-grant research university, and have personally witnessed all the good it’s done, and am continually disheartened by funding cuts, political attacks, and their own corporate mentality that works to undermine their mission, education for all.