Telling Women's Lives

Jess Jordan Reader Response 3/20

This series of articles presented a few ideas that struck me as thought provoking. First, I agree that women are not any meaner to other women, they are simpler expected to be nicer. This is entirely true and I had never considered it before reading these articles. Our society expects women to do a lot of things, but we also put this pressure on men as well. Women are also expected to help more and are therefore considered “selfish” when they do not have time to help, whereas men are considered “busy”. On the other hand, men are expected to be tough and care for their families, often times suppressing their emotions in unhealthy ways. These ideas all surround us growing up, completely altering our perceptions of the world during our most formative years. We grow up watching our mothers care for us and then believe they are more caring and more nurturing. After all, these women cared for us for nine months while we were in their wombs! This point speaks directly to the article, “Why are there so few women in science?” This question is something I have pondered myself as an aspiring physician. I have heard many of the biological arguments, such as “female brains are better with people and writing and male brains are better at mathematics and spatial arrangements”, and for a while fell prey to many of those ideas. I believed I was not good at math for many years following a rough pre-calculus class in high school until I realized with startling clarity recently that I actually truly enjoy doing math. My misconception of my “weakness” in math was simply generated by years of bias that had completely shaped the way I viewed the world. Another important concept brought forth by that article is the portrayal of women in science. This was an idea also touched upon by the article about Harvard Business School, but focused more on women in the business school classroom feeling tension between wanting to be liked as a potential mate but also respected as a classmate or business partner. What is a woman’s role in a predominantly male driven field? The first and foremost thing I have noticed women do is mask their femininity. Why do women need to wear ugly loose blouses at many scientific conferences while males can wear sleek suits that still give them some essence of sexiness? The idea of a “sexy scientist” is one played out in some comedic movies and pornographic film; but in any serious movies, scientific women are portrayed as women who wear their hair pulled back with glasses, very little make up and bland clothing. Even worse, they are often depicted as boring, rude, bossy or simply uninteresting. How can we act as though women who are changing the scientific world are uninteresting? In movie, they often pull down their hair at the end and reveal that they had been beautiful the entire time, if only we had all noticed. It’s incredibly frustrating that this is the message we portray through media and stereotypes because we then perpetuate this problem. I spent this past weekend in a neuroscience conference and found myself talking to a woman from Brazil about her work studying the neural correlates of emotion processing in autistic children. Instead of focusing on the incredible and groundbreaking work she was doing, I could only notice that she was wearing a more “revealing” outfit that I deemed to be inappropriate for the conference. Here I was, perpetuating the stereotypes and judging a brilliant woman instead of praising her on her incredible work and I was really ashamed when I realized I was thinking in that way. Sheryl Sandberg pointed out that women need to recognize we can help each other without hurting ourselves, and we need to stop being so hard on each other and instead collaborate to find this equality that will then benefit everyone.