AsianScientist (Jan. 26, 2018) – Earlier this week, I was at a panel discussion on media portrayals of women in science, an event organized in conjunction with the Women in Engineering, Science & Technology Symposium happening this Saturday. One of the questions we were asked was if we had ever played the ‘woman card.’
At first, I was simply quite stunned by the question. I’m not sure if it indicates that I’m not a particularly reflective person, but it has just never even occured to me to use my gender as leverage for personal or professional gain. In fact, being a woman has often left me on the back foot; interrupted, overlooked or simply ignored. I simply couldn’t fathom any benefit to playing the proverbial woman card.
While at a conference in South Korea, I approached a male professor to find out more about his work, as you do when you are a science journalist at a science journalism conference. He did not acknowledge my existence, refusing to look up from his cellphone screen. I’m quite sure I was audible and visible, even in the crowd of the room, because I could see his male graduate student next to him squirming in discomfort at the awkwardness of the situation. I’m willing to wager that this would not have happened if I were a man.
[Coincidentally, this was the very same conference where Nobel Laureate Sir Tim Hunt made his now infamous comments about his “trouble with girls” in science. Sexist attitudes don’t discriminate between cultures.]
Benefit of the doubt
Behind the concept of playing the woman card lies the assumption that there is a benefit to doing so. Putting aside my own experiences to the contrary, I tried to think about what those benefits could possibly be. Better treatment by male professors as an undergrad or grad student? An easier path to publication? Better career advancement prospects?
I can concede that there may be anecdotal evidence of male professors favoring women, but as a woman myself, that is certainly a ‘benefit’ I would actively avoid. In that unequal dynamic between a professor and a student, what does the male professor expect in return for his favor? More often than not, it is usually much more than what that favor is worth. Worse still, many women face all the downsides of sexual harassment with no benefit to themselves at all.
Even those women who manage to successfully navigate graduate school and join the race for tenure find that their gender continues to dog them. When researchers studied the impact of having children on the careers of male and female academics, they found that having a child is actually an advantage—if you are a man. If you are a woman, however, having a child is a ‘career killer,’ getting in the way of reaching the upper echelons of leadership. Unsurprisingly, university presidents are predominantly male (75 percent in the US). Even if a woman does become president of a university, she is paid lower, about 80 cents to the dollar.
And as for publications, let’s not kid ourselves. Remember #addmaleauthorgate?
So is there a benefit to playing the woman card? I remain unconvinced.
See me as a scientist
The other panelists also shared that they too have never played the woman card in their careers, and have sometimes even tried to actively downplay their gender. I understand that impulse, and indeed look forward to the day when female scientists can simply be called scientists. After all, have you ever heard anyone say ‘male scientist’?
At the end of the day, the quest for gender equality is really about putting the science first, not about pushing men down in favor of women. Sadly, it is not often perceived that way. There was only one man in the room during our panel on media perceptions of women in science, no other man felt it was a topic important enough to give up a few hours of his time to discuss.
A career in science is an arduous and difficult one, and many of us enter it out of sheer passion. It is my hope that more men can find it in themselves to recognize women as their colleagues in the endeavor to advance human knowledge, rather than competitors trying to erode an unspoken advantage.
This article is from a monthly column called From The Editor’s Desk(top). Click here to see the other articles in this series.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine.
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