This article has to be the most depressing thing the New York Times has ever published.
I mean, first: wow, NYT, way to be completely brutal about how horrid my job prospects are and how I made terrible life choices. I’m going to go cry in a corner now. Yikes.
Secondly, though, I’m getting a little tired of the articles that attempt to justify women’s career choices based on things that sound suspiciously like BS pop evolutionary psychology. All the ladies major in biology instead of ‘harder’ sciences/engineering because they don’t like math and they want to help people! Because they are LADIES! It all makes so much sense! …if, of course, you buy into bogus socially-constructed notions of gender essentialism. Look, math anxiety is definitely a real thing, and it’s experienced more by girls and women–I’m not arguing that. Math anxiety is a problem. However, if women are trying to avoid college majors and future careers based on how much math they’d have to do, it stands to reason that maybe they would avoid things that require several semesters of calculus, just sayin’. Also, if we were so interested in helping society through our work, maybe we’d all be teaching in inner-city elementary schools or joining the Peace Corps or running nonprofits, not pipetting alone in our labs in the pursuit of knowledge that, objectively, probably won’t help the world any more than research done in any other science/engineering field.
Folks like the author of that article tend to think they can come up with a handwave-y hypothesis that fits comfortable notions about women’s place in society and then apply it to All Women, an approach that comes nowhere near to making sense. I think it’s probably just as valid for me to take my experience as A Lady in Science and apply it to All Women, so I’ll go ahead and talk about my path to the biological sciences. I didn’t go into biochemistry because I didn’t want to do math. I’m very open about the fact that I’m not crazy about math. However, this has much more to do with my preference for studying real, tangible things rather than the theoretical (and, let’s face it–when you get right down to it, numbers are a concept and math is a complete invention, albeit an incredibly useful and vital one). It has nothing to do with thinking I’m bad at math–in fact, I’m really good at it. I won awards in high school, and did very well in college with the four semesters of math I needed to take. Rather than pin this major life choice on some imagined fear of numbers, let’s tell it like it is: I went into biochemistry over physics because I thought physics was boring while biochemistry was fascinating. From my perspective, it seemed that many of the big questions in physics had been answered, and the things that were left were highly theoretical questions that were nearly impossible to test (without going through the hassle of getting time on a particle accelerator, at least). With biochemistry, on the other hand, I could stroll into my lab in the afternoon and spend 30 minutes running experiments, and I would come out with actual data that provided new insights into the function of an enzyme that had been studied since the 1850s but still wasn’t fully understood. How cool is that? It’s pretty cool. It was so cool that I stayed with it and eventually got a Ph.D. in it.
And let’s talk about this ‘helping society’ bit. I’m sure there are some people who go into the biomedical sciences because of a deep-seated, altruistic desire to cure cancer or AIDS or Alzheimer disease, etc., and that’s certainly admirable. However, for a lot of us, we research things that we think are interesting and then come up with potential health-related applications for them because we need to get NIH funding, and if we can’t get the funding, then we can’t do the interesting research in the first place. Also, traveling down the biomedical-sciences-are-here-to-serve-society road starts to sound a little too St. Kern-y for my tastes.
In sum, women don’t go into the biological sciences because of our biology. We do so because the inner workings of life are fascinating and still largely mysterious, despite decades of intense study.
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Um, I may have reposted your blog all over Facebook and Twitter. :)
Um, you might be awesome and I might be super grateful for that and for you saying crazy nice things about me. It was so great to see you a couple weeks ago!!
Dr. Bowers, you have presented an intriguing collection of thought-provoking insights, and have thereby facilitated my day’s nOtworking, so I thank you. When I first spied the title, subtitle, and image, I thought “OMG, some degenerate got hold of the beloved Erin’s Facebook profile photo and proceeded to trash her most cruelly”. Thanks be to the Spaghetti Monster that this is not the case. Contrary to the views presented in the evil article, the math in biology was one of the things that attracted me to it – beautiful geometry/symmetry, discreet math in complicated genetics calculations, calculus in things like [drug] vs. time, algebra+trig in optics of a microscope, and lovely recurring equations like the rectangular hyperbola and dC / dt = k [A]^x [B]^y that make you go aaaaaah :) And yeah, I’m comfortable with the fact that my career as a biologist, in addition to hours of PIPETTING, will mostly just earn me a salary, and not help society more than a speck. But that’s OK because my smiles and love and sharing “improves society” a lot, thank you very much.