Recently, the Johns Hopkins Postdoctoral Association in Baltimore, USA held a session on “How to have a productive meeting with your Mentor/Mentee” that featured postdoctoral researcher Jenifer Calvo (JC) and professor Rajini Rao (RR). Moderated by postdoctoral researcher Irina Duff, the Q & A session covered best practices and proposals for better mentoring of postdoctoral fellows. Their discussion follows, together with excerpts from Rao’s annual lecture on Mentoring from the Johns Hopkins Responsible Conduct of Research course.

What are the signs of a good mentor? How to recognize them before reaching out to them?

JC: For me, a good mentor is one who would not only guide my growth as a scientist but also help and support me in reaching my career goals. I don’t think this is something you can easily determine from their publications or website, so you really need to talk to them and to their lab members. You need to discuss their mentoring style and expectations and see if these match your needs and personality.
RR: A good mentor will listen, be attentive, give specific advice, criticize constructively, and provide encouragement. A good mentor must also be accessible and make time for their mentee. If they are always too busy to meet with you, then find someone else. Look for a mentor who models a shared life experience or specific career that matches your aspirations. Ultimately, a good mentor must care about the mentee. They must want to do this job!

“A mentor is someone whose hindsight can become your foresight”

What is the best way to find a potential mentor?

RR: This depends on career stage. Predoctoral students have structured access to mentors, through thesis committees, laboratory advisors and teachers. Early career faculty are often assigned mentoring committees and have department chairs who are invested in their success and will advise them on career development. Unfortunately, postdoctoral fellows fall in between and often lack access to mentors, especially outside their lab. We can change this.

How frequently do you meet? Do you meet regularly (for example, every week) or per the mentee’s request? How do you prepare for these meetings?

JC: I meet with my PI (Principal Investigator) every week, at a fixed day and time. The day before, I send them a weekly report, which includes a summary of the previous meeting, updates, other issues that needs to be discussed, and plans for the following week. This gives me a chance to organize my results and plan for the meeting, while it allows my PI to prepare by giving them time to look at my data and think about any issues. This is also a good way to make sure I am on track and goals are being met.
RR: I individualize the frequency of meetings depending on the mentee’s needs and career stage, so that there continues to be growth and development in our discussions. I prepare for the meeting by reviewing any notes from prior meetings and going over their research plans. If the mentee is not a trainee in my lab, I may ask for an updated CV to review their career trajectory.

Do you set a mentorship plan with goals and milestones to be accomplished every month/year and follow it, or is it more on a question/answer basis?

JC: When I started, my PI and I discussed not only my project goals but my professional goals as well. This allowed us to tailor my research projects so that I can attain skillsets beneficial for my next career step after this fellowship. Postdocs at my institution are also required each year to accomplish an Individual Development Plan (IDP) with their PIs, so this is a great opportunity to plan and think about goals and milestones.
RR: I strongly recommend separate plans for short, medium and long-term goals that can be tracked at different intervals. It’s important to develop your career in the direction of your long-term goals. For example, if you would like a job at a predominantly undergrad institution get a teaching certificate and real world experience teaching at a local college. Find a mentor who is already in the career that you want.

How to handle conflicts and disagreements in mentor/mentee relationships?

JC: Fortunately, I haven’t had any major conflicts, and this is mainly because I always had a chance to share my opinions and be listened to with an open mind. Disagreements are normal, but if you talk about them and each party has a chance to explain their thoughts, then hopefully you can agree on a solution. Most of the conflicts I’ve seen are usually due to lack of communication, and so I think this is really key in maintaining a good relationship with your mentor or PI.
RR: In addition to good communication, mutual respect and trust are also important in mentor/mentee relations. If you find yourself in a toxic relationship, be sure to seek advise from other trusted mentors and peers. It may be better for your career and health to move on, however hard and scary that may seem.

“Most of the conflicts I’ve seen are usually due to lack of communication”

How could we foster interdepartmental mentorship programs at JHU? What might faculties do for that? How can postdocs take initiatives to seek expertise outside of their department or school?

JC: For me, I only had opportunities to have interdepartmental collaborations from my research projects. I also look out for seminars from other departments that interest me. Additionally, our institutional Professional Development and Careers Office has useful seminars about careers options. However, one really has to take initiative and spare time for these seminars, so I think it would be very useful if there is a system in place for postdocs to find mentors.
RR: We should normalize having a mentoring committee for each postdoctoral fellow, as is required for certain fellowship and grant applications such as the NIH Pathways to Independence (K99/R00) award. This committee could provide feedback on a fellow’s research proposal, help them practice job talks and offer networking connections. Departments that are recruiting new faculty could allow postdocs access to “chalk talks”, which are informal presentations by candidates to faculty on their proposed research. To build a mentoring network outside of their institution, postdocs should to join a professional society in their field, regularly attend their annual meetings and volunteer in society committees.

Resources:

Tobin, MJ. Mentoring: Seven roles and some specifics. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 170: 114-117 (2004)

Chopra, Edelson and Saint. Mentorship Malpractice JAMA 314:1453-55 (2016)

Meiners recently published a research paper on the native bee biodiversity in Pinnacles National Park, about 40 miles east of Carmel in California. Following up on a previous survey of the region, she and her colleagues wanted to sample the area to monitor the level of native bee biodiversity. Compared to honey bees, native bees live more solitary lifestyles and have more selective habits when it comes to pollination.

Meiners and her team took pleasure in the process of identifying about 50,000 different bee specimens. “Bees are beautiful and fun to identify. They can be metallic blue, bright green, have little mohawks of hair on their heads or interesting ridges on their exoskeletons.” Even the delicate patterns of the wing veins provide species variation clues. In total, she and her colleagues found 450 different bee species in the surveyed region.

And while this number seems impressive upon first glance, Meiners pointed out that there are relatively few studies available for comparison, citing just 23 similarly extensive surveys in the entire United States. She emphasized that Pinnacles National Park is the only area where scientists have surveyed native bee populations over multiple decades, allowing scientists to better track trends over time. “Without repeated sampling, what we know about wild bee decline is complicated by all this natural fluctuation and actually pretty restricted to agricultural areas, where we know they don’t really live.” In short, Meiners would like to see more native bee research done in the future.

Meiners’ research not only helps to advance our knowledge about native bee populations in Pinnacles National Park, but it also lays the foundation for further research. “In the paper, I really tried to highlight this point that more studies like ours are needed to really understand the value of natural habitats (before they’re gone) and the status of native bee decline”. By researching native bees with their uniquely interdependent relationship with plants, scientists can gain insight into the overall ecological health of a region.

Wild, native bees are key ecosystem service providers in both natural and agricultural landscapes. Compared to the unstable European honey bee, on which United States agriculture is heavily dependent, little is known about the four thousand North American species of native bees…

Meiners et al. (2019) Plos ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207566

But how is this done in practice? As part of her routine, Meiners collects bees by laying colorful “bee bowls” filled with soapy water that attract the bees and preserving them in ethanol. Otherwise, she catches them in a net and then transports them in vials. For this, she roams through a specific sampling area each day. Rather than spotting them by eye, Meiners usually listens carefully to her surroundings to find bees: “You learn to be able to differentiate the flight patterns and the sound of a bee versus a fly versus a wasp flying.” By now, she has become so attuned to identifying different insects this way that her ears remain alert off the clock.

Once she collects the bees from nature, Meiners takes them back to the lab to be pinned and labelled. She’ll store the bees in climate-controlled boxes to prevent beetles from eating their specimens. Meiners explained that in order to identify bees under a microscope, they must be killed. The samples they collect, however, do not make a significant dent in the overall population of the many native bee species, most of which only live as adults for about a month.

Of course, I wanted to know how many times she had been stung. Her response surprised me: “The answer is five, though I’ve collected and handled at least 10,000 bees. It’s only five because native bees aren’t as aggressive as honey bees. Most of the species are solitary or less social than honey bees, so they aren’t guarding a hive and have less reason to want to sting you to protect it.” These five stings were typically encounters with unseen bees in the net.

Meiners’ interest in bees began in eighth grade, when she wrote a research paper on honey bees and won third place in the Colorado state science fair for a related experiment. Encouraged by her teacher, a female scientist, this early success sparked a lifelong vocation as a scientist. She later attended Mount Holyoke College, the first institution of higher education for women in the U.S. and she considers its all-female campus a factor that contributes to her success. “It’s about prioritizing women and education,” Meiners said. Namely, she didn’t learn to “let men speak first or dominate the conversation,” and she left university feeling empowered in the workforce. “I don’t let anyone tell me to be quiet about things I think are important.”

Joan Meiners’ educational background and career is not limited to bees, either. She majored in neuroscience and worked at a coastal ecology lab to research sea turtles and crab ecology, followed by research on the Canada Lynx in Colorado. She also works hard to bring science issues into the public sphere in her role as an environmental data journalist: “[I]f you stop spending time on a project once it’s published in the academic literature, it often never achieves its potential or metamorphoses into any policy changes.” Her goal is to get more projects that would normally be locked up in the “ivory tower” pushed through to the public sphere. She feels that by accurately gauging audiences, journalists can expose more scientific research, not just “flashy” research, so it sees the light of day outside of academia.

About the author: Erica Eller is a freelance writer and editor focusing on sustainability and conservation. Originally from the US, she currently lives in Istanbul. Website: https://ericaeller.com, Twitter: @ericaeller

In this guest post, Sophie Okolo presents the life of Marie Maynard Daly in the context of her experience as a minority woman in STEM.

Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003) was an American biochemist and the first African American woman to obtain a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States. She was awarded her doctoral degree from Columbia University in 1947. I first heard about Daly when I was researching the history of women in STEM for a multimedia STEM project. As a woman and a minority, it was wonderful to learn that she made a significant impact on chemistry and biochemistry. Daly overcame the dual hurdles of racial and gender bias by conducting several important studies on cholesterol, sugars, and proteins.

Chemistry was one of my favorite subjects in college, and it was great to learn about the chemical reactions and equations that Dr. Daly established. Daly’s outstanding work continues to have a lasting impact on scientific research. As a young girl, Daly was an avid reader. She had a budding interest in science and became inspired by her father’s love of science. He had been forced by economic circumstances to drop out of Cornell University, where he had been pursuing a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Due to her father’s experience, Daly was committed to developing programs to increase the enrollment of minority students in medical school and graduate science programs. She established a scholarship fund for African American science students at Queens College in honor of her father.

In 1975, Daly was one of 30 minority women scientists to attend a conference sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The conference explored what it was like to be both a woman and a minority in science. This dialogue resulted in a report entitled The Double Bind: the Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science (1976), which made recommendations for recruiting and retaining minority women scientists. 

For many minority women the women’s movement is seen as a movement of middle and upper class white women which does not specifically address itself to the concerns and issues faced by minority women.

— The Double Bind: the Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science

Most of the women experienced strong negative influences associated with race or ethnicity as children and teenagers. As they moved into post-college training in graduate schools or later in their careers, they felt more strongly the obstacles facing women. When the women entered their career stage, they encountered both racism and sexism.

The minority woman scientist is caught in the middle of a difficult
situation. She is often being pulled from both sides by women’s groups and minority organizations. If she affiliates with both, they can place a
tremendous demand on her time.

— The Double Bind: the Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science

It has been more than 40 years since the report, and not much has changed about the challenges and status of minority women in science. The top three reasons for the underrepresentation are:
 Stereotypes that STEM is not for girls
 Financial problems related to the cost of a college education
 Lack of quality education in math and science in poor school districts

Daly’s story helps us to recognize and acknowledge the significant achievements of women and minorities in science. Their stories continually inspire me because they showed courage in the face of adversity. I am especially grateful because they have paved the way for future minority women scientists, despite the challenges. My degrees in bioinformatics and public health have opened doors in my career, but this hasn’t come without perseverance, patience, and even failure. I have learned a lot, and continue to learn, as I navigate a career in STEM. For women who want to follow a similar career path, the best advice I can give is to work smart as well as hard, find a mentor, and remain committed.

On February 11, let us encourage and promote women’s participation in education, training and science and technology.

References and Further Reading
 Dr. Marie Maynard Daly: A love for the heart. (2018, February 28). Retrieved from
https://blog.helix.com/marie-maynard-daly/
 Debakcsy, D. (2018, February 18). Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003), America’s First Black Woman Chemist. Retrieved from https://womenyoushouldknow.net/marie-maynard-daly-first-black-woman-chemist/
 Brown, Jeannette. (2014, March 8). Minority women chemists yesterday and today. Retrieved from https://blog.oup.com/2014/03/minority-women-chemists-yesterday-and-today/
 Marie Maynard Daly. (2010, October 13). Retrieved from
https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/marie-maynard-daly

About the author: Sophie Okolo is a researcher and science writer with experience in healthy ageing, patient engagement, and scientific research. She focuses on the intersection of technology and healthcare, including how innovations transform the management of chronic disease for diverse populations. She has a master’s degree in public and community health and bachelor’s degree in bioinformatics. Follow her on Twitter @sophieokolo

Much has been written about the dearth of women working in the technology industry. From an apparent low interest in technology-related subjects at school through to the small number of women employees in tech companies today, there is a serious and undeniable under-representation of women in the tech industry. This is despite the fact, that women have been some of the most innovative pioneers of technology historically.

Key statistics are below:

• Women own only 5% of start-ups in the US
• In the UK, only 5% of women are in a technology leadership role
• Only 3% of British high school students say they would choose the technology sector as a career choice
• Only 16% of women have had a career in tech suggested to them

What are the issues underlying this?

An in-depth study was performed by Catherine Ashcraft, Director of Research and Senior Research Scientist for the National Centre for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) in the US. Over the last 12 years, Catherine has helped to grow the role of women in technology and has documented the process. Her study has been critical in identifying and evaluating the underlying issues.

According to Ashcraft’s study, there are three primary issues which have resulted in the lack of women in technology-specific roles. The reasons are:

Societal influences and biases – There has been a manufactured perception that girls are not suitable for technology-based roles. Yet, a report commissioned by the Girl Scout Research Institute based on a survey of 852 teen girls in the US found 74% of them professed interest in STEM and that these girls were significantly more interested in creative and problem solving skills than girls who were not interested in STEM. Unfortunately, gender bias is instilled in girls from school age in several ways, for example, pioneering women in technology are rarely mentioned or discussed. Going further, most technology-related roles are dominated by men, which also feeds into the narrative that women aren’t suited for technology-focused careers.

School education – Societal biases have seeped into school curricula and teaching. The focus of computer science (CS) subjects doesn’t consider how girls can be more involved and interested in such topics. The study suggests that subjects that pique the interest of girls generally do so because they involve problems and issues that appeal to them. Over time, girls who do have an interest in technology-related subjects tend to be put off because they don’t find it relatable.

Workplace systems – Technology workplaces carry the same biases that have existed traditionally; that women are not suitable for technology careers or they will not be able to bring anything to the company if they are in a tech-orientated role. This has resulted in the poor statistics of women in technology roles.

Does ethnicity play a role?

Some research suggests that ethnicity affects girls’ interest in, perceptions of and planned future participation in tech/IT careers. Ashcraft references a survey of 852 girls of different ethnicities, which found that African American and Hispanic girls expressed greater interest in CS and IT than White girls surveyed, at 47%, 47% and 36% respectively.

Of the girls surveyed, African American and Hispanic girls showed more interest in certain aspects of STEM than White girls, including understanding how things are built, solving puzzles and problems, and creating an app, video or computer game.

However, compared to White girls, African American and Hispanic girls reported lower exposure to STEM careers and lower adult support of STEM careers. Interestingly, these girls were significantly more aware of gender barriers in STEM fields. They reported a high reliance on internal assets, including self-confidence and desire to overcome obstacles, which supports and complements their high interest in STEM fields. Ashcroft also refers to a survey of 1,434 introductory computer science students in which female respondents, and more specifically African American students, were more likely to cite an “interest in helping people or society” as the primary reason for choosing a computer science major/minor.

It is worth noting that socio-economic status intersects with ethnicity to account for some of these differences. African American and Hispanic girls show stronger financial motivation in choosing career path and this presents opportunities to market STEM careers to girls.

What can be done to improve participation by women in the technology industry?

Ashcraft’s report suggests that there is not one ‘single’ thing that can be done to break down the barriers to girls’ participation in tech and IT careers. Rather, a combination of factors which involves multiple change agents and a multi-faceted approach to changing the way girls and women view tech careers will be most effective in encouraging participation in the sector.

To truly improve the number of women working in IT and technology, the three key issues identified by  Ashcraft et al. need to be addressed. This means making computer science subjects more compelling to girls, highlighting the women pioneers of technology in computer science classes, and showcasing problems of interest to girls. For example, a curriculum that shows how computer science can improve people’s lives and solve social problems, and uses collaboration and active learning strategies will attract and retain a more diverse group of students.  Having women themselves create and develop these educational environments will help in making girls and women feel more comfortable in their educational or working setting.

The focus on improving participation by women in the technology industry is also centred around hiring women and addressing the pay/skills gap. However, there is an opinion which suggests that this approach would only superficially address the matter – the underlying issues outlined above will continue to exist.

How can systemic change occur?

Ashcraft presents a model which depicts the people and elements needed for systemic change to occur. At the centre of the model is girls’ perceptions, interests, confidence and career decisions. The model suggests that these are directly influenced by formal and informal education, media and popular culture, peer influences and the influence of family, community and role models. So, in order for girls’ perceptions of tech and IT to change, the portrayal and perception of tech and IT, by and in all of the surrounding influences, also needs to change.

Influencing both the girls’ and their direct influencers perceptions of tech and IT, are a number of other agents and factors. They are: researchers, parent and families, teachers, administrators, curriculum and decision-makers, school counsellors, legislators and policy makers, higher education faculties, industry professionals and researchers. The way in which tech and IT, and more specifically, careers in tech and IT, are portrayed and presented by these individuals and institutions is intrinsically linked to the way in which girls perceive the subjects, and their suitability and desire to pursue a career in the industry. Change must be seen in each of these areas to permeate the perception of the sector by girls, before they decide that they can’t – or don’t want to – pursue a career in IT.

It’s hoped that, as these issues are addressed and the traditional view of IT and technology as a male-dominated industry is challenged, it will become the norm for women to work in tech, instead of the exception.

References:

Girls in IT: The Facts. Catherine Ashcraft, Elizabeth Eger, and Michelle Friend. National Center for Women and Information Technology.  2012

Generation STEM: What Girls say about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. The Girls Scout Research Institute. 2012.

A statewide survey on computing education pathways and influences: factors in broadening participation in computing. Mark Guzdial, Barbara J. Ericson, Tom McKlin, and Shelly Engelman. ICER ’12 Proceedings of the ninth annual international conference on International computing education research. Pages 143-150.

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wocintechchat/albums/72157664006621903

About the Author

Lucy Wright is Senior Copywriter at Core, a London-based managed IT service provider with customers in more than 50 countries. As Senior Copywriter, she is responsible for creating content within the Marketing team and promoting Core’s IT services through digital content, blogs and social media. She began her copywriting career in B2C ecommerce before moving to the IT sector. A journalism graduate, Lucy has written for publications in Spain, China and the UK. You can Tweet to Core @CoreGB.

Can you start off by telling us a little bit about your research that led to this project? In particular, why is it important to feature gender and race/ethnic diversity in learning mathematics through storytelling?

MathsThroughStories.org draws from a body of research over the past three decades that highlights pedagogical benefits of teaching mathematical concepts through storytelling, particularly in the form of story-picture books. One of these research projects has been conducted in a few different countries (including England, Ireland, and Malta). It is an investigation into teachers’ self-reported frequency of using story-picture books in their mathematics instruction as well as their perceived barriers to (and perceived enablers for) the integration of stories in mathematics teaching. A key finding is that while early years practitioners regularly make use of storytelling as part of their daily mathematics teaching, teachers of primary (elementary) school children (5-11 years old) are much less aware of such teaching approach. The principal reported barrier is the lack of awareness (and hence pedagogical knowledge) of how story-picture books can be incorporated into mathematics teaching. Thus, MathsThroughStories.org wants to help raise teachers’ awareness in this area, and to essentially encourage them in giving this approach a go.

In terms of why it is important to feature gender and race/ethnic diversity in mathematical stories, I draw from the idea of Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada and Ross (1972), that picture books are read to children when they are most impressionable and when they are forming their self-images and future expectations of themselves. Imagine a classroom where the teacher only reads mathematical stories where boys and men are always the protagonist solving problems using their mathematical knowledge and skills, while girls and women are secondary characters lurking behind a tree. If you are a girl listening only to stories with such characteristics, how would you see yourself in relation to mathematics now and in the future? Thus, as educators and parents, we need to critically examine what otherwise seems to be a very colourful, cute and harmless educational resource.

Your research uses Claudie Solar’s feminist pedagogy to empower girls in their mathematics learning. Can you start by briefly telling us why this feminist framework is important to understanding gender inequality in representations of story-picture books?

Solar’s (1995) feminist pedagogy framework is a useful tool to help us visualize what mathematics teaching, learning and curriculum that is inclusive to girls and women might look like. It focuses on four key aspects: inclusion (versus omission); speech (versus silence); active participation (versus passivity); empowerment (versus powerlessness).

The first two aspects (i.e. inclusion and speech) are particularly useful in helping frame my research. The goal of my study is about exploring and revealing the extent to which female characters are presented (or underrepresented) in mathematical story-picture books. I measure this by using a number of indicators, one of which is the average amount of spoken dialogue assigned to male and female characters per book (as measured in the number of words). This particular indicator resonates well with the focus of ‘speech (versus silence)’ aspect of Solar’s framework, for example.

I think not only is this framework useful for researchers like me who are interested in exploring gender representation, it is also useful for mathematics teachers and curriculum designers to bear in mind ways to make mathematics teaching and curriculum more inclusive and relatable to girls and women.

Still on your Representation of Girls and Women study, can you share with us some of the most significant findings of your study on girls’ visibility in mathematical story-picture boos? There are some interesting patterns about how gender appears on covers, and the dialogue and portrayal of girls vs boys in these books.

Sure, but first let me say that this is still an on-going piece of research and has not been published in any peer-reviewed research journal yet, so do take that into account. 

In brief, I have used four key indicators to examine gender representation in 64 randomly-selected mathematical story-picture books that meet a number of selection criteria. The first and second indicators measure the extent to which male and female characters appear in book titles and front covers respectively. In relation to the former, while 38 of 64 books contained no gender identifier (e.g. the book ‘Less Than Zero’), as many as 23 of the remaining 26 books contained only a male name(s) (e.g. the books ‘Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi’ and ‘Albert Adds Up!’). Only three books contained a female name(s); for example, ‘Minnie’s Diner: A Multiplying Menu’.

The second indicator (gender representation on front cover images) brings some good and bad news. While the front cover of over half of the books (35 out of 64) features both male and female characters, the majority of the remaining books (22 out of the remaining 29 books) feature only male character(s), and only a few (7 out of the remaining 29 books) features female characters.

The third indicator examines the average number of male and female characters with spoken dialogue per book. On average, I have found that there are around 3.38 male characters with dialogue per book versus only 2.27 female characters with dialogue per book. Alternatively put, male characters with spoken dialogue featured 1.49 times more than their female counterparts, and such difference is statistically significant. The fourth and final indicator examines the amount of spoken dialogue assigned to male and female characters. On average, I have found that while male characters are assigned around 245.70 words per book, female characters are only assigned 166.27 words per book. Alternatively put, male characters are featured 1.48 times more often than their female counterparts in terms of number of spoken dialogue words assigned to them. Again, such difference is statistically significant.

It soon becomes apparent that regardless of which indicators we are using, the underrepresentation of female characters in mathematical story-picture books does exist and need to be highlighted.

Your research on gender representation also draws on Ernest’s reproductive cycle of gender inequality (above) in mathematics education This work shows how gender stereotypes create gender inequality, which in turn feeds into lower participation in mathematics and fewer opportunities in learning and careers. What are some practical steps that mathematics educators can take to help break this cycle?

An excellent question! There are many actions that teachers (and parents) can take to help break this cycle. In the context of my research, it would be that they are selective in choosing mathematical story-picture books that they buy and read to their children. Specifically, they should avoid any mathematical story-picture books that reinforce the idea that only boys and men have mathematical knowledge and skills to save the day, while girls and women are waiting to be saved. Better still, girls (and boys) should be given opportunities to create their own mini mathematical story-picture books. Here, girls are empowered to choose their own characters. If there aren’t enough mathematical story-picture books out there in the market with strong female protagonists, then girls can create ones themselves. Perhaps, they might even choose themselves as being the protagonist. I would argue that the more opportunities girls are given to associate themselves centrally and positively with mathematics, the more likely the issues described by Ernest will be addressed. MathsThroughStories.org provides some support for teachers and parents to help their children create their own mini mathematical story-picture books here.

Name one historical woman in mathematics you think everyone should know about that they may not have heard of. Why is she important?

I hope it won’t be too inappropriate for me to consider the great Katherine Johnson as a ‘historical woman’. While she is still alive and well (less than seven months away from reaching her 100th birthday), the legacy that she is known for is truly historical. Back in 1950s where the use of computers as we know of today to help calculate trajectories for NASA missions was very limited, Katherine served as a ‘human computer’ to either verify machine-based calculation or to come up with her own calculation when machines failed to do so. What is also remarkable about Katherine, an African-American, is that she excelled in her career even during the height of racial tension in the USA. Not only had she had to contend with a degree of sexism, but also racial prejudices. Thus, when we look back at her achievements through these lens, it becomes even more apparent just an amazing person she is. I hope the recent non-fiction book about her and her fellow female African-American mathematicians at NASA called ‘Hidden Figures’, and later a Hollywood film by the same name, help more people like me, who until recently had never heard of her, become more aware of Katherine’s (and her colleagues’) incredible mathematical achievement.

Who are the living women who have had most significant impact on your development as an educator and researcher and what did they teach you?

In terms of living women who have influenced my research perspectives on gender and (mathematics) education, I would say Heather Mendick, whom I have been working with over the past three years as executive members of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics (BSRLM). One of the books she wrote, ‘Masculinities in Mathematics‘, has helped me to better understand how the alignment of mathematics with masculinity can be problematic for girls and women studying the subject, and how more need to be done to address this issue.

What would be the most significant take away from your body of research on gender in mathematics that we can all start working on today?

The first take way is for us as a society to acknowledge the fact that there is indeed gender disparity existing in mathematical story-picture books. Giving me this privilege to be interviewed by STEM Women is one such way. Are there any other ways that STEM Women’s readers can help raise this issue?

The second take away is for us to help authors (and publishers) see what gender disparity in mathematical story-picture books looks like. We should encourage them to study examples of stories where either there is a strong female protagonist (see two examples below) or ones with equal contribution of both male and female characters in using their mathematical knowledge and skills to solve problems.

Finally, I would encourage networks like STEM Women, who are already well placed to write factually-correct mathematical stories, to create mathematical story-picture books with strong female protagonists. My initiative (MathsThroughStories.org) would be happy to support this in anyway we can. As a society, we could do with more mathematical stories like that.

Can you recommend one or two of your favourite mathematical story-picture books to promote gender equity and diversity?

Two particular mathematical story-picture books come to mind: Sarah Albee’s ‘The Dragon’s Scales’ and Demi’s ‘One Grain of Rice’.

The former has a strong female character, named Holly, who uses her knowledge of weights to outsmart an unfair dragon and to stop it from blocking villagers to harvest their beloved berries. The latter is about a young village girl named Rani who devised a clever plan to get even with a selfish raja. The raja has decreed that the people in his province, the majority of whom are rice farmers, must give nearly all of their rice to him every year. During the famine, he refuses to let them have some of the rice he has been collecting from them. Rani then finds a way to use her knowledge of doubling to get the raja to happily, though unknowingly, give her and her fellow villagers one billion grains of rice in just thirty days.

While both of these stories focus on different mathematical topics, they have the same underlying message: female protagonists have the power to use their mathematical knowledge and skills to address the unfair treatment of selfish characters, in order to do good for their respective community. I very much like this kind of mathematical stories where young readers (both males and females) are taught from an early age that girls and women can too save the day using their mathematical prowess.

Guest Bio

Dr. Trakulphadetkrai’s research interests are centred around the use of story-picture books to help teachers and parents develop their children’s mathematical understanding. ​In addition to his lectureship in Primary Mathematics Education at the University of Reading’s Institute of Education (UK), Dr. Trakulphadetkrai also currently serves as an executive member of a number of national mathematics education organisations in the UK.

You can contact Dr. Trakulphadetkrai on Twitter or his personal website. See his academic publications.

You can learn more about his MathsThroughStories.org initiative by visiting its website, Twitter and Facebook.

True story:
I made 74 press requests for women & 15 for men on [topic]. No women give interviews (although several suggested other names). 11 men gave interviews, 2 stating they weren’t experts.

5:1 ratio. Still failed. https://t.co/3tK2WoDjV5

— Mika McKinnon (@mikamckinnon) January 4, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

This tweet was seen over 792,000 times with more than 16,000 interactions, clearly demonstrating that the topic touched a nerve. We asked Mika to share her experience and her thoughts on the gender imbalance in journalism reporting. 

Your Twitter thread about your experiences as a journalist in contacting women for interview really resonated with a lot of people. Why do you think that is?

We’re at a crossroads in North American culture where we recognize the injustices of our society and want something better.

I started my career in science, and participated in countless initiatives to recruit more women into STEM fields with me. In recent years, we’ve also started talking about the barriers that block women from progressing, or drive them out of science after they’ve devoted years of their lives to training and building experience. That basic injustice hurts.

When working as a science journalist, the conversation shifts to whose voices are given a platform. We express frustration at panels of all-men experts, then write stories that only feature those same voices. We’re having more and more conversations about how our habits creates an endless loop where coverage provides visibility and prestige, elevating those same voices disproportionately to others of similar professional caliber, and what we can do to break out and create new patterns.

It feels like every month, a new database pops up claiming to be the ultimate solution to finding new experts to showcase — BBC’s Expert Women, the Canadian nonprofit Informed Opinions, or more specialized databases like 500 Women Scientists. But like recruiting more girls to enlist in science majors doesn’t automatically mean we’ll have more women in senior professorships and agency leadership roles, journalists using databases of women in science addresses just one aspect of a big, monstrous problem that doesn’t solving the root injustices.

What I think resonated is taking something we know is a problem — underrepresentation of women in science, and particularly media coverage of women in science — and looked at how our superficial solutions of databases and goodwill aren’t enough. This isn’t a simple issue with a simple answer. It’s not about more women volunteering to talk to media, or about more journalists asking women for interviews, or even about the language we use when trying to overcome the barriers for why both those things don’t universally work. It’s looking at how even when you do everything right to make things better, sometimes that isn’t enough.

You noted a 5:1 ratio in how often men respond to requests for interview versus women. Why do you think this disparity exists?

The situation I wrote about on Twitter was an extreme abnormality for me. For every news article I write, I typically need two experts — one who worked on the research, and someone else from the same field of study who didn’t that can provide an outside opinion. This limits who I can talk to — not every study has a woman coauthor, and some fields have much greater gender disparities than others.

My ratios are usually about 75% of women initially turning down interview requests, dropping to 50% if I follow up to find out their reason for declining and work with them on a solution. Very few men turn down my interview requests, and when they do it is almost universally for logistics of being unable to schedule the interview prior to my deadline.

I had a particular story where I was getting grumpy over a 100% decline rate from women, particularly when I had only a 25% decline rate from the men I approached. I got stubborn about fixing it, ending up with a 5:1 approach rate (and still no women), so I tweeted about it because it was a particularly unusual and frustrating experience.

Of the reasons women experts give for not being able to give interviews, which do you think is the most important issue for the science community to be mindful of? How can we better address this in research training or professional development of women scientists?

The most common reasons women give me for declining interviews are:

• Lack of time – This is fair, as women receive disproportionate service demands, and something I don’t push back on.
• Discomfort with press – This is a self-perpetuating problem, but is something that can be addressed in part with media training by universities, professional organizations, or media agencies. It’s fair to ask for a someone more familiar with press to sit in on the interview (like an advisor or public information officer). Not every journalist can do this for every story, but it’s also fair to ask if it’s possible to get a list of questions in advance, or to review quotes prior to publication.
• Distrust of press – Pay attention to who is making the request. I teach experts to research bylines so they can evaluate the credibility of journalists. They can also check out the science coverage in the particular publication.
• Fear of repercussions – Women and other underrepresented people are often disproportionately punished for missteps, or become targets for harassment campaigns when they gain visibility. This is something I’ll talk to potential interviewees about, but it’s also something I won’t push on because it’s can be a real risk.
• Referral to greater authority – Even full professors will redirect me to more well-known names in the field (who due to increasing gender disparity with seniority, disproportionate award and prestige markers, and bias in media coverage, are usually men).
• Insufficient expertise – This is particularly true for graduate students, who despite actually doing the research, often decline by suggesting I talk to their advisors or team leaders (who due to the increasing gender disparity with seniority, are usually men).
• Unfamiliarity with exact topic – Women will typically turn down interview requests in their field if it does not directly overlap with their area of specialization, whereas men will frequently accept with a disclaimer like “I’m no expert, but…”

For all three of the last concerns, it’s important to understand that journalists are writing accessible articles, not technical articles. This means that interviews may be to teach the journalist background information, and it’s always to try to get quotes that can be used in the article. For most purposes, if a scientist is familiar enough with a topic to teach an undergraduate lecture, they probably understand it in sufficient detail to give an interview. I don’t need the Most Expert Expert Who Ever Experted. I need someone who knows more than most people about the topic who can talk to me right now and point out any irregularities, subtleties, or complications that I wouldn’t get from teaching myself about the topic by reading Wikipedia articles.

You gave excellent and practical advice for journalists to make women experts more comfortable about responding to media requests. Why do you think this is important?

No one person is going to solve the problems of gender bias in science or in media. We’re all in this together, and we all need to use our expertise and skills to help each other out to make things better than they are right now.

What else do you think journalists can do more of, to ensure fairer representation in the media?

The most important thing for journalists to do is pay attention to whose voices they are showcasing and why. After that, following up to understand why they’re not getting the diversity of voices they want to cover is important, and be flexible on addressing the barriers preventing people from participating.

How did your journalist peers respond when you shared this story?

Many shared their own stories, resources for finding women experts, reasons they get turned down, and tips they have for solving barriers. I also heard from event organizers who shared similar problems.

But from some, I also heard disbelief or shock. These reactions were typically from people who don’t pay attention to the people they approach as sources, who will hopefully start paying attention in the future!

Mika, you are a field geophysicist, disaster researcher, scifi science consultant and science writer. What advice would you give women scientists considering following a similar path in consulting and science writing?

My job is to be excited and curious in public. I currently find it rewarding to do a diversity of jobs that allow me to do this in different ways, but it’s not a path for everyone. If you want to freelance, the most important things are to be creative in how you apply your skills, organized in your assignments, and reliable in being competent at work.

About

Mika McKinnon is a consultant, public speaker and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She has trained as a geophysicist specializing in disasters, including tsunami, earthquakes, asteroid impacts. Ask her to bring science to your fiction, write a story, run a workshop, give a talk, or more! Follow her on Twitter @mikamckinnon

Read Mika’s advice to journalists seeking women experts below!

Challenges Overcoming Bias in Science Coverage https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

“I sat there thinking, I’ve been working here for 10 years, and I never had that… I’m also a professor at University of Southern California,  and there are very few female professors in hard science and engineering fields. So, there aren’t enough female role models girls can look up to and feel like this kind of thing is normal. It’s a huge detractor. There aren’t enough role models pulling girls in.”

An American longitudinal study can shed light on how Professor Sengupta’s individual experience is part of a broader pattern affecting women engineers.

The research examined the reasons why women engineering students drop out before completing their course. Contrary to public perception, the study finds that family plans and self-confidence in STEM knowledge (such as math abilities) do not have a significant impact. Instead, the study shows that women tend not to finish their engineering degrees because they lack “professional role confidence.” This idea encompasses a person’s assessment that they can fulfil the roles, competencies, and identity required of engineers.

The study follows 288 randomly selected students who began their engineering degrees in 2003 at four universities, following their progress at 2007. The universities included: MIT, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and Smith College. The findings of this study are consistent with other empirical research, finding that men are more likely to persist in engineering than women.

Women are twice as likely to switch to a different STEM major than men. Interestingly, amongst the small proportion of men who switch out of engineering, they’re more likely to go into a non-STEM major. This suggests that women’s interest and proficiency in STEM is not the reason why they leave engineering, while this may be true for the men who leave engineering courses.

Professional role confidence is greatest amongst Hispanic and Asian American students.

Professional Socialisation

The study argues that becoming a successful professional requires more than just technical skills. It also depends on professional socialisation. That is, how we learn both the practical and unspoken (tacit) expectations of what’s required of us in our fields. We also need to be able to identify with the values and norms of our profession. This includes adopting the types of mannerisms, demeanour, and self-presentation (including dress) that’s expected. The researchers write:

“If a profession’s norms of interaction are highly masculine or perhaps even antifeminine… it may be more difficult for women to gain this type of confidence…. Through professional education, students are expected to develop views of themselves as competent, skilled, successful professionals and to become committed to and enthusiastic about their future careers.

Present findings show that early professional role confidence predicts persistence measured three years later. If women develop less confidence about their abilities to be successful professionals and express more ambiguity about their fit or comfort within the discipline, then women will remain in engineering at lower rates than men.”

Engineering still relies on, and rewards, stereotypes of masculine behaviour. Women not only have to navigate this culture, but they have the additional burden of “proving to others that, despite gendered expectations, they are skilled engineers.”

Need for Role Models

The lead researcher, Stanford University researcher Erin Cech, explains that professional role confidence arises because engineering careers are not communicated to students as something that fits in with women’s lives or knowledge:

“Women engineering students go to the same classes, take the same tests, and get the same GPAs as men, sometimes even higher… But, what we found is that the women in our study developed less confidence in their engineering expertise than men did and they also developed less confidence that engineering is the career that fits them best, even though they went through the same preparation process as men… [This] stems from very subtle differences in the way that men and women are treated in engineering programs and from cultural ideologies about what it means to be a competent engineer.

Often, competence in engineering is associated in people’s minds with men and masculinity more than it is with women and femininity. So, there are these micro-biases that happen, and when they add up, they result in women being less confident in their expertise and their career fit.”

A big part of the problem is that engineering programs do not demonstrate how women might navigate their engineering careers. There are not enough women engineers being brought into their classroom to demonstrate that women can be successful in this field. Providing women engineering students with internships would help them gain practical skills to bolster their career planning.

Internships and workshops need to explicitly address the gender dimensions of professional roles, expertise, and career fit. The focus should be on practical ways to support students plan and navigate professional issues and address how to change the gender biases within engineering culture.

Learn more:
The study, “Professional Role Confidence and Gendered Persistence in Engineering,” published by American Sociological Review.

Learn more about these amazing scientists below!

Harriette Chick

Microbiologist, nutritionist and first scientist to show sunshine impacts health

Dr Harriette Chick was born on 1875, was the first scientist to show that sunshine was important for the synthesis of Vitamin D in our skin. Growing up in Victorian England at a time when women did not have the right to vote, she studied science at University College London in 1894, earning a PhD in bacteriology, whilst spending time working in both Vienna and in Munich. Eleven years later, in 1905, Chick became the first woman employed by the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London, the only not-for-profit medical research institute in Britain at that time.

After WWII, rickets became a growing health problem, leaving children with soft bones that broke easily. Harriet’s meticulous study of the diet and activities of a group of rickets-ridden children in Vienna led her to realize that the problems seemed to ease with the arrival of summer each year. By examining children kept in the shade and those allowed in the sun, she figured out the critical role of sunlight for bone health.

She would go on to lead a new Division of Nutrition at the Lister Institute, focusing on deficiencies of water-soluble vitamins. Even after retiring, she continued to write reviews and lived to the age of 101 years.

Fabiola Gianotti

Particle physicist and first woman leader of CERN 

Dr Fabiola Gianotti was born on 1960. She received her PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Milan in 1989. She has worked as a research physicist in the Physics Department of CERN since 1994, leading protects such as the detector R&D and construction, software development and data analysis. She has published over 500 publications in her impressive career.

In November 2014, Dr Fabiola Gianotti was announced as the head of CERN, Europe’s most renowned particle physics laboratory. Established in 1954, CERN did not appoint its first woman leader for another six decades. Fabiola has been hailed as one of the world’s leading scientific minds, including by Time, who chose her as a runner up as their Person of the Year in 2012. Dr Gianotti serves on several university and international science committees, including the Scientific Advisory Board of the United Nation Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon.

Florence Nightingale

Nurse, feminist, first woman awarded the Order of Merit, and first scientist to develop graphical statistics

Born into a middle-class family in England in 1820, Florence Nightingale showed strong academic aptitude, but it took much convincing of her parents to allow her to join a short nursing training program in Dusseldorf. At age 33, she became the superintendent of a women’s hospital in London. In 1854, during the Crimean War, Nightingale was invited to oversee the nurses helping British troops in Turkey, where she earned the nickname, “Lady of the Lamp” for her strong attention to her patients’ needs.

Nightingale established modern nursing education by formalising its scientif practices. In 1860, she established the Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, and she provided training for midwives and nurses in workhouse infirmaries. In 1907, she became the first woman awarded the Order of Merit.  (1907). May 12, the day of her birth, is known as International Nurses Day, commemorating nursing contributions in health professions.

Many people recognise Nightingale as a nurse, but few realise she was also an innovative statistician. Have you heard of the Nightingale Diagram or the Nightingale Rose? When Florence Nightingale returned from the Crimean War, she realized that the majority of soldiers were dying, not from their wounds, but from infections (typhus and cholera, among others) acquired inside the hospital, triggered by neglecting hygiene conditions. She depicted this in her diagrams (right image), with blue representing deaths occasioned by diseases, red for the deaths due to wounds and black for all other causes of death. She used these data visualization tools to make her successful case for better sanitation in hospitals.

Read more: http://goo.gl/U1xCv

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Astronomer and first person to discover what the universe is made of

Born in 1925, Dr Cecilia Payne was the first woman to earn a doctorate in Astronomy from Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard) in 1925. Her thesis, establishing that hydrogen was the overwhelming constituent of stars, has been described as the most brilliant thesis in astronomy. She would go on to make more than million observations of variable stars to determine stellar evolution. Despite this, she remained a lowly paid technical assistant at Harvard until 1956 when she became the first woman to be promoted to full Professor and later as Chair of Astronomy, the first woman to head a department at Harvard.

Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, Jeremy Knowles bemoans how little public recognition exists for Payne-Gaposchkin:

“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”

Mary Somerville

Mathematician, astronomer, historian and the world’s first “scientist”

Mary Somerville was born in 1780 in Scotland who is famously known as a polymath; excelling in mathematics, astronomy and science history. Along with the astronomer Caroline Herschel, they would become the firs twomen members of the Royal Astronomical Society. In fact, such was her impact, that the word “scientist” was coined by Philosopher William Whewell to descirbe Somerville, in his 1834 review of her book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. While Somerville was obviously not the first person to practice science, it is a double delight that this term was invented to describe not only a woman in STEM, but also in praise of her public communication of science in beautiful and engaging prose. So in a sense, Somerville was not the first “scientist” but she was also the first science communicator to reach a broad public audience!

The enduring impact of Somerville’s opus, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, continues to be celebrated. It was an internationally best selling book that pre-dates Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by 25 years.

Somerville studied mathematics, but she also engaged in a wide-ranging scholarship of other disciplines. She translated French astronomy books into English and had political clout as a scientific authority in England. Like many scientists, Somerville had diverse interests and she was highly creative (she played the piano!).

She described herself as “intensely ambitious,” explaining that: “I felt in my own breast that women were capable of taking a higher place in creation than that assigned to them in my early days.”

Her landmark book, On The Connexion… painted a vibrant picture of scientific discovery.

“In contrast to the vague speculations of eighteenth-century natural philosophy, her 500-page book covers a tight field of hard sciences — astronomy, physics, chemistry, geography, meteorology and electromagnetism. Its groundbreaking style, clear and logical, occasionally opens out into passages of sublime perspective, such as the description of universal gravity as a force equally present “in the descent of a rain drop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the moon”. Somerville ranges over subjects from stellar parallax to terrestrial magnetism, from comets to giant seaweed.”

Jane Cooke Wright

 Physician, cancer researcher and first woman elected president of the New York Cancer Society

Dr Jane Cooke Wright was born in Manhattan in 1919 to a distinguished African-American family. She obtained an art degree from Smith College in 1942 and three years later obtaind a medical degree, graduating with honors, from the New York Medical College.

In 1964, working as part of a team at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, Dr. Wright developed a nonsurgical method, using a catheter system, to deliver heavy doses of anticancer drugs to previously hard-to-reach tumor areas in the kidneys, spleen and elsewhere. She was the only woman, and only Black person, among the seven researchers who founded the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and later became head of the chemotherapy department and associate dean at New York Medical College. It was the first time a black woman had held such a senior position in a medical school.

Dr Wright worked alongside her father, Dr Louis T. Wright, who was one of the first Black students to earn an M.D. from Harvard Medical school and the first African-American doctor appointed to a public hospital in New York City. Together at the Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem hospital, “The Wrights were one of the first groups to report the use of nitrogen-mustard agents as a treatment for cancer, which led to remissions in patients with sarcoma, Hodgkin’s disease, chronic myelogenous leukemia, and lymphoma. The Wrights were also some of the first researchers to test folic acid antagonists as cancer treatments. ”

After her father died in 1952, Dr Wright took over as Director. The American Association for Cancer Research writes:

“She was among the first researchers to test chemotherapeutic drugs in humans, which produced effective dosing levels and helped saved lives. Dr. Wright began her pioneering work in 1949, and during her 40-year career she published over 100 research papers on cancer chemotherapy and led delegations of cancer researchers to Africa, China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. By 1967, she was the highest ranking African-American woman in a United States medical institution. In 1971, she became the first woman elected president of the New York Cancer Society.”

Dr Sandra Swain, 2013 president of ASCO, said of Dr Wright:

“Not only was her work scientific, but it was visionary for the whole science of oncology. She was part of the group that first realised we needed a separate organisation to deal with the providers who care for cancer patients. But beyond that, it’s amazing to me that a Black woman, in her day and age, was able to do what she did.”

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimates that only around 30 percent of researchers worldwide are women (1). Similarly, according to the Economics and Statistics Administration of the US Department of Commerce only 24 per cent of STEM jobs are held by women (2), with individual disciplines like Engineering having a significantly worse gender bias. There’s also extensive literature on biases against women in STEM (3), affecting all aspects of academia, including hiring, publishing, citation counts and teaching. Given these disheartening statistics, it is clear that there is still a long way to go before we can even start thinking about gender equality in STEM.

Why am I, a man in STEM, writing about this? Because to me these statistics also show another thing: men, who are dominating these fields, have an obligation to support women in STEM and help level the playing field. But how can men help to facilitate change and support women in STEM? All the things I try to implement are the result of listening to women – who sacrificed their spare time to educate me – and taking their advice. Thus, maybe the single best, most actionable thing is this: step back, shut up, give women space, and listen to them.

What can this look like on a more concrete level? Ask yourself about your own environments: is it men, including me, who are taking up all the airtime at meetings (4)? Chances are that this is the case, as women are interrupted more often than men (5) and speak significantly less at professional meetings (6). So take a break and let others speak. To whom are you paying attention (7)? Is it the always same male crowd? For social media some tools let you check the gender breakdown of the people you read (8). Make sure to identify those voices you’ve ignored so far and listen to them. Along the same lines, ask to whom you are giving an audience. Make sure also to boost the messages of women instead of only focusing on your (male) buddies (9). Generally, the male overrepresentation in STEM means you’re likely to default to male perspectives. Make sure to steer actively against this.

This becomes even more important in the context of organising conferences, events or communities at large, as representation matters. Achieving a 50:50 gender split at conferences is still not a given and is the sad reason why #YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting) and #manel are common hashtags on Twitter. Try to consult speaker databases that relate to your topic of interest (like the Open Speakers Database (10) for all things open). Additional ways to counteract gender-biased presenter lineups are listed in Ten Simple Rules to Achieve Conference Speaker Gender Balance (11).

Furthermore, look at who is participating not only at your co- organised conferences, but also at your communities at large, be it a research project or a lab you are running. Do you end up having a homogenous, male participant base? This might be because the community’s culture and behaviour are all but inviting for anyone else. Formulating well-stated, positive community values along with a code of conduct can help with a cultural change. The Diversity, Equity, Inclusion report of OpenCon offers excellent guidance and lessons learnt (12) on these topics. Kirstie Whitaker gives a good example of a code of conduct for the lab (13). Lastly, you will need to enforce your code of conduct and reinforce good behaviour in your communities, as only this will lead to lasting change.

If you are not the one setting the official rules for the communities you are involved with, you can still play your part in supporting women in STEM. Ask the organisers about their gender balance amongst the presenters and decline the invitation if it is a manel or YAMMM. Be explicit about your reason for declining (14) and ideally even offer them a list of women they should ask to present. In my experience this can often have a direct effect on who will speak at an event.

You can similarly push conference organisers and project leaders to adopt a code of conduct if they haven’t done so already. And lastly, there is an opportunity for you to speak instead of listen: it is important that unacceptable behaviour should be called out by everyone, not only the targets of it, especially as men face fewer negative consequences than women for doing so (15). So, step in when you observe inappropriate behaviour as well as sexist jokes and assumptions. It is what Mikka McKinnon pointedly called Intervene when you see BS (16). Don’t be quiet in these situations, but speak out and offer support.

This is by no means a complete list of things that men can and need to do to support women, inside and outside STEM. It does not magically solve all structural biases inherent in the current STEM environment. But I believe it makes for a good start for improving oneself, including me: take some steps back, listen to women who have all the unwanted experience in how STEM fails them, and learn how you can make a difference. Only then can you help the world of STEM to become a better place for all.

Notes

This article was first published on Digital Science in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day (October 10, 2017), under a Creative Commons license and reproduced here with permission from the author. You can download other articles in the report, including one from our own Buddhini Samarasinghe.

Top image credit: original photograph by Alaina Percival, CC 2.0 via Flickr. Adapted by STEM Women.

References

1. Women in Science – Fact Sheet No.43 
2. Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation 
3. Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies
4. Check Who’s Dominating the Conversation
5. Influence of Communication Partner’s Gender on Language 
6. Study: Deciding by Consensus Can Compensate for Group Gender Imbalances
7. The Byline Survey Report
8. Followerwonk 
9. On Twitter, Men Are Retweeted Far More Than Women (And You’re Probably Sexist, Too)
10. Open Speakers Database
11. Ten Simple Rules to Achieve Conference Speaker Gender Balance
12. Enforcing a code of conduct 
13. Code of Conduct 
14. Take the Gender Avenger Pledge
15. Allies against Sexism: The Role of Men in Confronting Sexism
16. https://twitter.com/mikamckinnon/status/801181948504719360

About the Author

Dr Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is biologist-turned- bioinformatician. He just submitted his Bioinformatics PhD thesis about the genome evolution of lichens. When he is not analysing the genomes of fungi he keeps himself busy with open science-related issues, covering academic publishing, open source and participatory research. He is the co-founder of openSNP, a crowdsourced open data repository for personal genomes that helped 3,700 people to donate their genomes into the public domain. Starting November he will be the Director of Research for Open Humans, an open research community that centres studies and projects around the participants.

Follow Bastian on Twitter @gedankenstuecke

This 12 September 2017 is the 25th anniversary of Dr Mae Jemison’s flight on space shuttle Endeavour as the first Black American woman to travel in space. Dr Jemison began her career as a physician who served in the Peace Corps, before making history as an astronaut. To celebrate Dr Jamison’s achievements, let’s take a look at her contributions and the trajectory of other iconic women in spaceflight.

While there have been many iconic women pioneers in space travel, their ascent has been a triumph over gender inequity. Up until the 1980s, the media largely focused on women astronauts’ looks, making disparaging jokes about their femininity getting in the way of their missions. Thus they ignored the mental and physical stamina required to go into this field, not to mention the high level of education demanded of astronauts, who are qualified scientists. For example, the first woman to travel in space in 1963, Dr Valentina Tereshkova, did so after acquiring a Phd in engineering.

Only 50 years a go, astronaut John Glenn dismissed the scientific qualifications of women astronauts using biological determinism. He told a USA Subcommittee: “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order. It may be undesirable.”

Making the (Space) Jump

The must-see documentary by MAKERS features footage and interviews with the pioneer women who joined the American space program including the inspirational Dr Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and the extraordinary Dr Mae Jemison. There are many interesting tidbits about the practical issues that helped make the case for gender equality. For example given that weight is an important concern to space flight, and the fact that women generally weigh and eat less than men, this helped rationalise the idea of allowing women into the space program.

Dr Randy Lovelace was the American physician who led aerospace medicine and he tested and passed the first 13 women for inclusion into the space program. He found that women performed better than men in the stress tests, and they also complained less during their physical tests. Having passed the training program, these women had to make their case to the USA congress in 1962 because the law did not allow women to become jet pilots for the military, and that was a prerequisite for astronauts. Their request was rejected and the program was stopped almost two decades.

Women of Colour Wanted

The documentary notes that women’s eventual inclusion was not due to progressive views per se, but because women activists increased political pressure and there were economic concerns of lawsuits. Technological innovations also ushered in equality. With better design and safety provided by shuttles, astronauts were no longer required to be jet pilots and could instead qualify as mission specialists (researchers and physicians for example). In 1977, for the first time in a decade, NASA put out an advertisement for a new recruitment drive, adding: “Astronauts wanted: Women, minorities are urged to apply.” White women and people of colour did not apply because they’d been excluded for so long, which is why NASA recruited Star Trek icon Nichelle Nichols to help make their message of inclusion clear.

Women’s Endless Frontier

The documentary provides a fascinating insight on women’s space history, including the unique challenges faced by these women in their education and addressing bodily practices in space! A couple of stand out quotes:

On equality: “Women have lived in space, and women have died in space. And there is probably no greater equaliser than that.”

On recruiting more women in future:

“I don’t particularly think the ‘first’ part matters so much except to the spectator crowd. It’s the work. Come be part of this adventure. Look what you can do. I don’t want someone saying, ‘Well the first has already gone, so there’s no reason.’ It’s not about the first. The first is a moment in time. It’s an artefact in the history books. It’s an artefact on the TV shows. The exploration, the discovery, the scientific opportunities the chance to make such a difference in the world is still all there. You are still a part of it. You can be a part of it. An endless frontier. Your endless frontier. Go after that endless frontier.”

Having reflected on the amazing journey of getting women into the space program, let’s now take a look at Dr Jemison’s career as well as two other space pioneers. Dr Anna Fisher is a trained chemist and the first mother in space. Dr Sally Ride, was a physicist known as the first American woman in space, and is now recognised as a role model for other sexual minorities in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA) communities.

Dr Mae Jemison

Physician and first Black woman astronaut

Dr Mae Jemison is a qualified medical doctor of many talents. Starting with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1977, Dr Jemison completed a medical degree in Cornell University Medical College, and later studied in Cuba and Kenya. She also trained in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand. After completing her degree, she workd at the Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center. She went on to become a general practitioner as well as serving in the Peace Corps as a medical officer and researcher in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

In 1986, she was admitted into NASA’s astronaut training program. Six years later, in 1992, she flew into space aboard the Endeavour, becoming the first Black American woman astronaut. She has received numerous awards and belonged to various scientific organisations, including serving on the Board of the World Sickle Cell Foundation from 1990 to 1992. She later went on to receive a teaching fellowship at Dartmouth.

She has famously advocated for science and the arts to work more closely together:

“The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.”

Below she talks about her work with 100 Year Starship.

Dr Anna Fisher

Chemist and the first mother in space

Dr Anna Fisher earned a Master’s degree in Chemistry and Doctor of Medicine, both from UCLA. She initially focused on x-ray crystallographic studies of metallocarbonanes, a field in inorganic chemistry. She then interned as a medical doctor in Harbor General Hospital in Torrance, California, with a specialty in emergency medicine, and later worked in other Los Angeles hosptials.

She was selected as an astronaut candidate in January 1978 and flew aboard Discovery in 1984. After taking 8 years off to raise a family, she returned to NASA and became the first mother in space when she went up on STS-51-A. She has held various integral management and technical roles. She was the chief of the Space Station branch whilst the International Space Station (ISS), was being built (1996-2002), helping with international relations and supervising astronauts and engineers. She went on to work in the Mission Control Center, as well as being the lead CAPCOM for Expedition 33, and the lead manager for the Oron Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) and supports European payloads for the ISS Integration branch.

Dr Sally Ride

Physicist, astronaut and first American woman in space

A STEM leader on many fronts, Dr Sally Ride, was born in Los Angeles in 1951 and went on to become the first American woman to fly in space. Ride earned her PhD in Physics from Stanford University in 1978, she same year she joined NASA, as part of the first group of women astronauts. On June 8, 1983, physicist Sally Ride blasted off into space on the space shuttle Challenger, breaking through the gender barrier as the first American woman in space. She went on two shuttle missions, served on many NASA review panels and later continued as physics professor at the University of California, San Diego. A Stanford graduate, she earned four degrees as well as a doctorate in physics. She was a varsity tennis player too. Later, she went on to promote young women achieve success in STEM careers.

Being the first has its challenges. Ride acknowledged she felt the weight of living up to other women’s expectations for her to be a leader. In 2008, she said: “I saw it in the eyes of the girls and the women and the grandmothers that I met, what it meant to them.” As a feminist, she took this seriously. At the same time, she endured sexism at work and from the media:

When it was announced Ride had been named to a space flight mission, her shuttle commander, Bob Crippen, who became a lifelong friend and colleague, introduced her as “undoubtedly the prettiest member of the crew.” At another press event, a reporter asked Ride how she would react to a problem on the shuttle: “Do you weep?”

When she passed away in 2012 of cancer, at age 61, Ride’s long-term partner announced Sally was lesbian, ultimately marking her a role model to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA) communities in STEM around the world.

Former astronaut Charles Bolden spoke of Ride’s grace and professionalism and said, “She will be missed, but her star will always shine brightly”. Her organisation, Sally Ride Science, a company she started to help teach students about STEM, particularly young women and girls, released this statement:

“Sally lived her life to the fullest, with boundless energy, curiosity, intelligence, passion, commitment and love. Her integrity was absolute; her spirit was immeasurable; her approach to life was fearless.” 

Learn More
Want to know more about pioneer women of colour who supported the NASA space program? Check out our website for an interview we did with Candy Torres, a Latina software engineer who helped code for missions by NASA and the International Space Station.

Watch the MAKERS documentary below!

Featured in the image above is Poppy Northcutt who, at 25 years of age, was one of the first women to support NASA’s mission control.