Women in Science
I still remember the day that I decided that I wasn’t going to become an astronaut. When I was sixteen, I hardly ever cried, and I never cried in public places. But on that day, tears were rushing down my face as I ran from school down 25th street home. It was cold outside, but I couldn’t feel it. I remember trampling through a pile of fallen leaves as a dashed across the park, and I remember thinking how lucky those trees were that they got to shed so much weight each year and then begin again every spring.
By the result of either my audacious imagination or the graces of my teachers tending to like me, when I started high school I had not yet abandoned the idea that I would make it to outer space. It still seemed, in my growing teenage brain, that anything was possible. But the sad truth is that as we get older, that eternal field of possibilities we once lived in as children begins to look more like a square patch of lawn surrounded by an invisible fence.
My field of possibilities had been slowly demarcated, one fence post at a time, by many different hands over the years. On this particular day, my physics teacher said to me, “You must be stupid if you can’t understand this.”
I was trying to grasp something, and I can’t even remember what it was. But it doesn’t matter what I could not grasp out of his textbook, because I was impacted by an even deeper truth, one that had been cementing itself in my mind and one that stayed with me far longer than any equation on a whiteboard would have.
It was not that this one sentence from my physics teacher held enough power over me to determine my fate. While a teacher’s words are powerful, even if he said them with kinder than taken intentions, I was stronger than that. The fact was that his words came to me as a final blow, solidifying a wall I had slowly been building to the idea that I was the kind of person who could excel in the kind of science that reached for the stars.
This story begins when I was little. I had this book called Women in Science. It was like my bible, and because my parents were both generally skeptical of religion, they were perfectly happy that I treated it as such. Its pages were worn and its cover was in tatters. I could have recited any page of that book.
My mom didn’t really know anything about science and self-admittedly hated mathematics, many times explaining to me that you could get out of it by taking logic instead. But she encouraged me nonetheless. So, I spent hours reading all my books about the SETI project, quantum mechanics, The Life of Albert Einstein, and whatever science fiction I found at the library.
My older sister was far more into make-up and other normal “girly” things. She will also tell you that she was far more competent at socializing. She hated it when I put Star Trek on TV, but we worked out an agreement whereby she let me watch Star Trek and I kept my mouth shut while she was supposed to be grounded and watching me but was actually outside smoking cigarettes with her friends.
I wanted to be like the characters on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Indeed, looking back, they were probably some of the most reasonable adult influences in my life. Captain Piccard was my biggest role model, but I was also very much in love with Dr. Crusher. I imagined that one day, I would be a woman with her passionate intelligence, doing important things in the galaxy.
I was certain of the existence of aliens. And I was also occasionally afraid of very ridiculous things, like the notion that we could without any notice fall into a black hole. I wanted to understand all of these phenomena, and in my pursuit found myself doing what my sister would tell you were very nerdy things, like watching university cosmology courses broadcast on the public access TV channel.
In third grade, I had the first experience that made me think deeply about how boys and girls differ in the world. The teacher was playing her favorite game with us, where she would hold up different objects and have us answer questions about them. On this particular day, she presented us with a toy pyramid and told us to show her the number of sides we thought it had with our fingers. “Imagine that this pyramid is out in the desert in – where are the pyramids, everyone?”
“Egypt!” several of us shouted.
Two sides of her pyramid faced us, and one side faced the ground. I stared at the pyramid for a while before I came to the conclusion that it had four faces. My initial reaction was that there were five, because we could see two and I figured there were the same number of sides from the teacher’s perspective, plus the bottom. But when the teacher tilted the pyramid slightly, I noticed that the base was triangular. That changed everything. There had to be just one side facing the teacher. And when I examined the pyramid with this in mind, it seemed right. The angles that faced us would have been all wrong if this was a five sided pyramid.
I was quite confident in my answer, and so I held up four fingers.
Then I noticed everyone around me had five fingers up. Had I calculated wrong? I looked at the pyramid again, and again I concluded there had to be only four sides. A triangular base couldn’t support more. It only had three edges.
One of the boys sitting close to me looked over and said “You’re wrong, it has five sides.”
“No, there’s only four,” I said. I was going to explain why, but then the teacher silenced us. “Okay, class, how many sides do you think there are?”
Now really, the teacher had, either wittingly or not, chosen to give us a rather frustrating trick question with this particular shape. Considering that there are several adults who can’t comprehend how may sides a pyramid has, or that a pyramid can have more than one number of sides, throwing such a question at a group of nine year olds seems almost cruel.
But I knew that there were four sides. The teacher called on me specifically to answer the question, and I believe it was because she saw that I was holding up the correct number of fingers. “Nikki,” she said, “How many sides are there?”
And then I felt the weight of all the other eyes on me. I heard murmurs, mostly coming from boys but also from some girls. I knew what they were saying. She’s stupid, she can’t see there are five sides. An emotional battle raged in my nine year old brain for what felt like a very long moment until I finally answered. I had a choice to make: I could either say what I knew to be the right answer but risk looking very stupid for being the only person who thought so if I was wrong, or I could say the answer that everyone else thought was correct and be safe.
I wavered, and then I finally added an extra finger to my total. “I think there are five sides,” I lied. I immediately felt ashamed of myself for not saying what I really believed and instead buckling to peer pressure and the fear of looking stupid.
But I felt even dumber when the teacher said “There are four sides.”
I vowed from that day that I would speak my mind and say how many sides I believed there were to geometric objects, even against the odds that I might be wrong.
But it was after that day that I began to notice how much more often boys would shout and exclaim and believe that they were correct. And how differently they would be treated for it. Girls, even from a young age, are more likely to waver. Girls are more likely to feel intimidated by other voices telling them they are wrong.
Around the same time, I was also gaining the awareness that things like my family structure and financial status mattered. When I was little, none of that had really meant anything to me. I heard mom talk about being stressed about money, and I heard my sister complaining that she only ever got clothes from the thrift store (which I found interesting, because I only ever got clothes that used to be my sister’s). But from my early perspective, I had library books and a set of Legos and that seemed to be all I really needed. Of course, there were lots of things I wanted, and perhaps many other things that I did not want nor feel I needed but which would have boosted my social status. Yet in my early childhood, it had not yet occurred to me that growing up without those things could impede my chances of success later in life.
I was also never particularly troubled by the situation regarding my parents. I saw my dad on weekends and for longer vacations in the summer. When I moved in with him, I did the same with my mother. It worked out just fine. They couldn’t gang up on me. Plus, I never had to see them fight with each other, like several of my friends did.
In third grade, one kid said “So your parents are divorced?”
“No,” I said. “They were never married.”
This created stirs across the classroom. “That’s not possible,” the kid retorted. “Kids
are made when parents get married.”
I did not understand his faulty logic. I, of course, knew that kids were made when
parents had sex. And that many parents had sex before marriage, and many others were married but did not have sex.
My experience was also that kids could be made by mistake. See, I was raised knowing that I had been conceived quite accidentally. Specifically, at a Grateful Dead concert, in 1985 in Ventura, in the back of a 1956 Chevy pickup truck that had been converted into a caravan with some PVC tubing and some “groovy” purple sheets turned curtains. It was only as a teenager that I started to wonder whether my parents were actually on acid when they committed my conception. I’ve never asked, because really I don’t want to know.
One night, I saw a special on TV about kids raised by single parents and their diminished chances of going to college. It turned out, I learned, that I was also more likely to go to jail, to get cancer, and to be overweight. This troubled me terribly. My grandma had just died of cancer, and I had been there when one of my step-dads was arrested and went to jail – two things I also learned meant I was more likely to get cancer and go to jail. Neither of those things sounded like a good future for me. But I was also concerned because my parents and teachers had said things to me like “You’re so smart. I think you’re going to go to college one day.” Maybe they had been lying to me. Maybe they said that to all the kids. To me, college had been, like most of the grownup world, a sort of imaginary kingdom that existed somewhere else and maybe in the future. I knew that people went there and got smarter, and I was also vaguely aware that people drank beer there.
But, the concept of price had also been developing in my mind recently. Later that night, I approached my mom. “College is expensive isn’t it?” I asked.
She quite correctly said “Yes, but you are way too young to worry about that now. And there are scholarships. Just do your homework.”
Then she added that if I had to work at McDonald’s, I would, but that I wouldn’t work at McDonald’s forever. This idea terrified me, because I had a deep-seated fear of Ronald McDonald.
My mom didn’t have much practical assistance to give me, but she gave me the gift of the belief, which was perhaps somewhat audacious, that I was smart and that because I was smart, one day I would use my intelligence in a meaningful way in the world.
In seventh grade, when I moved in with my dad and transferred into a new school, I learned about something else that has the power to change your future: your school district. I had graduated from sixth grade with an A+ in pre-algebra. It was an advanced class for a sixth grader, but there was a handful of us who had placed into it after taking our entrance exams.
The first day at my new middle school, I saw that I had not been placed into algebra, as expected. I stormed into the school counselor’s office. “Why am I not in the math class I belong in?”
In retrospect, I must have been the only kid at that school who ever complained about being placed in too easy a math class. That middle school had a measurable drop-out rate - that is, kids who dropped out of middle school and didn’t go to high school. I was intimately introduced to several things that I had only been casually aware of previously: cigarettes, pot, skipping school.
My new environment presented me with a lot of new things to learn about, but math, it seemed, was not one of them. My counselor said “We don’t have a record that you belong in algebra.”
“You have my transcripts,” I argued. I knew they were sent from my other school. How did they even know I belonged in seventh grade without them?
And algebra comes after pre-algebra, that’s what the “pre” suffix means. I figured she would understand that, she was an adult.
“Seventh graders don’t take algebra,” she said.
“But I’m a seventh grader and I was going to be in algebra at my old school.”
The injustice infuriated me. Not only that they wouldn’t place me into algebra, but the
fact that I was being treated like I didn’t know anything because I was twelve years old. When you’re twelve years old, nothing is more frustrating than adults believing that you don’t know what you’re talking about just because of your age.
The math class they put me in was what I had been doing in fourth grade. The teacher got mad at me because I wasn’t doing my multiplication tables as she taught them, with some stupid drawings over a grid design that made me feel like I was illustrating a snake. I tried to explain that it’s even harder to re-learn something that you already know another way than it is to learn it in the first place, but this was to no avail.
I pleaded again with my counselor. She nearly shouted at me this time: “No seventh graders take algebra.” I supposed she thought I wanted to be considered special, while I only wanted to be considered normal for what I was.
My dad, who was still somewhat sober and making attempts at being parental laughed at my outrage. “You’re gonna be doing so much math in the next few years, why not just take the easy A? Your misses what’s-her name math teacher is going to have to give you an A as long as you get the answers right, even if you don’t follow her bullshit method.”
He gave me his look, the look that told me he believed what he was about to say was really important. Then, he took a long drag of a cigarette before he said “You’re smart. One thing about growing up is, you learn to work within the system. So do your bullshit snake drawing, get your A, and get out.”
Dad’s words helped calm me down. But a few months later, I had an even larger cause for outrage, which led me both to hate my school counselor and to decide that I was a feminist once and for all. I found out that there were in fact some seventh graders – a small group, all boys – who had been placed into algebra that year, and who were bussed to the high school the next year to for geometry class. When I saw them loading into their special school bus to go up to the high school, I was filled with a deeper resentment than I had ever felt. I should have been on that bus. Instead, I was drawing snakes with fractions on grid paper.
It sounds like such an insignificant matter. In the grand scheme of things, which year I took algebra could hardly have had a serious bearing on my future chances in any sort of mathematical field. But, see, it did, and in a large part because I began to internalize my wonder that some boys, but not myself, were placed into a class that I was told was not for me.
But there was an even bigger issue that was knocking down my confidence. Throughout my middle school career, my dad sadly progressed from a weekend drunk to a full time drunk, to a pothead, and then to a pothead who was also sometimes did other drugs. By the time I found his crack pipe and finally accepted that my dad is a crack-head, I was already traumatized by his behavior. My little sister, who had been around on Wednesdays and weekends, was moved to New York with her mom and her new step-dad. My dad reacted to this new reality by consuming even more vodka and smoking even more pot.
I started stealing pot from the pocket of the one formal suit in Dad’s closet where I knew he hid it. My best friend and I spent a whole summer getting high and playing video games. Nobody was there to stop me from numbing myself with drugs and Mario Cart, so I did. And then, I went back to school that fall and I found out that the pot had put a cloud over my head. Not only was I struggling with my home life, but I also found for the first time that it was hard for me to focus on my homework.
This brings me back to my AP physics teacher. I was trying to get through his class with a C and I didn’t like it. For hours, I would read and then re-read each chapter. After the third time reading, I tried as hard as I could to find an adult who understood what the fuck any of it meant.
As some point, the neighbor across the street told me that he thought he could help. He had a degree in electrical engineering. Upon opening my AP physics book, he scratched his head for a minute and then muttered “I’m so fucking glad I’m not in school anymore.”
He closed the book and then looked at me and said “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. You’re on your own.”
On my own was just how I felt. I was struggling with so many things – not only the laws of physics, but also, it seemed, the laws of psychology. My home life was nothing but chaos, and I felt that chaos consuming me.
Perhaps I would have had an easier time with my physics book had things at home made logical sense. Physics – Newtonian Physics at least – is the study of objects moving in rational and predictable ways. But when I went home, objects did not move in any rational, predictable order. Dishes, books and furniture were thrown, with no formula or equation that could reasonably be followed. The only constant variables in any of the equations were A for alcohol and c for crack.
I still had that book Women in Science. It was one of the rare items that I managed to carry forward from my childhood. I still occasionally looked at it. But through my teenage years, I grew ever more aware of what that book actually meant. Women in Science was the properly designed title of that book – one book – because in it, all of the names of women who were noted for what they had done in science would fit.
In my teenage years, I became aware of my disenfranchisement as well as my privilege. Re-reading Women in Science I took note that all of the women amongst those pages were white. Perhaps that was part of why as a white girl, I had for so long held onto the belief that I could become an astronaut. Female astronauts were more prominent than black astronauts, and as much as I saw girls being treated differently in the classroom, I also noticed teachers treating kids differently because of their skin color, or because they wore a head scarf, or because English wasn’t their first language. There were hierarchies in the classroom, some of which the students made, and others of which some staff subconsciously or otherwise enforced.
The women that I had studied in Women in Science were rarely actually covered in my high school science courses, and where they were I learned mainly only the details of their less than fair claims to scientific fame. Rosalind Franklin was in our text book only as an example of how women were “historically” given less credit for their work than their male colleagues. Her story is an interesting one to tell fifteen year olds in biology, but what’s more interesting is that still, I often hear science news that refers back to Watson and Crick, with Rosalind never re-written into the history as it is retold.
Most stories on women in science were told as just that, as stories about a women being in science, as if that fact were by its own accord worthy of announcing. It certainly is no longer to this day, and it is in fact a misnomer of the past, although there were historically less women in science, and those women who succeeded clearly had to be at a genius level and also at least a little bit bullheaded to reach any status among reasonably intelligent men.
I was perhaps misled by the books I read when I was a child. I was also perhaps misled by the world that existed for me to in the future in Star Trek, particularly Star Trek: Voyager, where the captain of the spaceship and the chief of engineering were both competent scientists and women. At sixteen, I was developing an understanding that Dana Scully was more likely to be Fox Mulder’s personal assistant, and that if the chief engineer of a spaceship were a female, she would be far more likely to be interpreted as harsh and aggressive for her direct management style – and not because she was half Klingon, but because she was a woman.
As I stood in front of my physics teacher, this all swirled through my head. The ultimate conclusion was that space was not for me. Maybe it was for other kids at my school. Boys - perhaps those boys who were bussed from the middle school to study geometry in eighth grade. And perhaps the girls in my classes who had perfect homes with parents who paid for tutoring, or whose dads had PhDs themselves. NASA wasn’t going to be the fate of a sixteen year old girl with a crack-addict dad.
I went home and cried for two hours, and then I transferred out of physics and into Western Ecology. I thought of Rachel Carson, a prominent name in my book Women in Science. Transferring out of physics wasn’t all sad, because I had come to believe that while the stars were exciting, there was much work to be done down here on earth. For all I know, had I been in a different position, maybe I would have chosen to leave physics anyways. It wasn’t the choice that hurt as much as the feeling that, at least on some level, it wasn’t my choice to make.
But anyways, I left physics behind and full-heartedly committed myself to both my study of and my political concern for the environment. This political concern would eventually take me far. But first, it would earn me a special title at my next place of employment.
#WomeninScience.