feminist blogs

When I said that I would be around for about ten days, I was apparently not paying close attention to the guest-blogging schedule Jill sent out. It turns out my guest-blogging stint is up!

I would like to thank Jill for inviting me to write here, and Piny and Zuzu for sharing their space. But most of all, I would like to thank the Feministe readers. I got some absolutely wonderful responses to my posts, and I’ll be taking much of your advice, especially from the Birth Fears and Leaky Pipeline threads. You have great insight, and I like that there’s a variety of viewpoints here so I can see all sides of an issue. Well, all but the misogynist side, which I could get anywhere else.

I do in fact have my own blog, but I write there quite rarely. I might increase my posting slightly after this, especially if any of you start reading it, since I found blogging with an audience so much fun. I promise to at least write a birth story there, and link it here in a shameless-self-promotion thread. I will also try to keep you in the loop on the outcome of my career-decision-making and job search.

I will see you all in the comments. Thanks, everyone!

In response to my introductory post, a few people commented that they were looking forward to my posts on the topic of women in the sciences and engineering, as they know girls or young women who show aptitude and interest in science and they wanted to know how to encourage them. My first couple of related posts, however, aren’t exactly encouraging. This, therefore, is my attempt to be a little more helpful.

In my own life, it seems my interests naturally gravitated towards the sciences, and since nobody told me I couldn’t do science, I just assumed I could. But when I think about it, I did get a certain amount of encouragement, especially from my father. He had a few computers over the years (I particularly remember a Tandy laptop) and introduced me to the BASIC programming language. I wrote math games (probably my father’s suggestion) and a karaoke-like program that would play the melody to “Material Girl” while the words scrolled across the screen (my own idea, or possibly my sister’s). I had dolls and costume jewelry, but I also had LEGO blocks and tinker toys, which I’ve always thought of as “gender-neutral” toys, but according to the Toys-R-Us gender segregation system are definite boy toys.

I was a social misfit as an adolescent and, as part of my stubborn streak of individuality, simply refused to conform to most gender roles. While my childhood was filled with Brownies and Girl Guides (you Americans would say Girl Scouts), as a teenager I joined a male-dominated group open to both sexes. That group taught aerodynamics and wilderness survival, which in my opinion were much more fun than crafts and camping-lite. When I decided that airplanes were my passion, my mother encouraged me through the process of getting a government scholarship for a private pilot’s license.

That’s not to say that I gave up feminine-coded activities altogether. I was an avid reader, including such frivolous literature as Sweet Valley High and the incest-obsessed V.C. Andrews novels. Language skills are important no matter what direction a person’s career takes; a scientist who cannot communicate her ideas is not a successful scientist. I took baton-twirling lessons; I’m not sure that it helped me much, but it didn’t hurt either. My room was painted pink with a heart theme.

My parents didn’t see my interests as odd, or if they did, they hid it well. While my mother is not very-well educated, she was the woman in her group of single-mother friends who would program the VCRs and solder the broken lamps of her friends, and later, clean off their Windows 3.1 desktops for them. She did all our minor home repairs and some major renovations, and it didn’t occur to me that there was supposed to be a man around to do these things. My father liked to have me handing him tools when he was repairing the engine on his boat. In retrospect, that’s something a father does with his sons, but since my father had only daughters and I was interested in how the engine worked, he encouraged my questions.

Since I’m a sample size of one, and I don’t have a doppelganger to use as a control, I’m not sure which aspects of my upbringing were most important in my decisions. The biggest thing I can think of doing is simply not discouraging any girl or young woman who is interested in the sciences. Tell her you know she can do it. Help her follow her interests. If she likes chemistry (or cooking, which is chemistry), buy her a chemistry set. If she likes astronomy, take her to a planetarium. Even if her dreams are a little romanticized, they may lead her in a direction that makes a good permanent career. Enroll her in math camp or computer programming camp over the summer. These things are all pretty simple, but apparently not done enough. Those who run these camps say that parents bring the boys in, but the girls have to beg to be allowed to come. Don’t pressure her into sciences that don’t interest her, though. The dinosaur books and tape went right into the garbage. My parents may have wanted me to be a doctor, but blood grosses me right out, and so they encouraged the physics/engineering route instead.

Model gender-deviant behaviour yourself. There has to be some interest you have that doesn’t fit neatly into your own gender role; let your children and those of your friends see you participating in whatever interests you, regardless of its gender connotations.

I know several geeky women read Feministe: what sparked your interest in the sciences and technology? What kept your interests going? What obstacles were in your way?

When I was born, they looked at me and said,
What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy.
And when you were born, they looked at you and said,
What a good girl, what a what a smart girl, what a pretty girl.
We’ve got these chains that hang around our necks.
People want to strangle us with them before we take our first breath.
–What A Good Boy, Barenaked Ladies

I’ve been known to hang out on certain bulletin boards where people use abbreviations like “DH” (dear husband) and slightly-nauseating terms like “baby dust” (a magical substance that can get you pregnant, but which is presumably less damp than semen.)

In the first trimester, there was a thread on the topic of whether or not to find out the sex of the fetus during pregnancy. (Actually, most posters write “gender of the baby,” but let’s go with the correct “sex of the fetus.”) Some excerpts of the thread:

The minute I can. I hate calling the baby “it”, and I don’t like green/white/yellow clothes… I want to know! :D

One point as to why we want to wait… when pregnant with DS we had friends that were also PG. They had 2 u/s and both times were told they were having a girl. So they bought a wardrobe, designed the nursery, etc… all in pink and purple. And they had a boy. Talk about being shocked! DH and I also have a plan to avoid the neutral stuff for a long time. First, we will buy one girl outfit and one boy outfit for hopital pictures and taking the baby home. Grandma will go crazy once she knows the gender and the baby will have several outfits… probably in a matter of a couple hours! Shortly after DS was born, they went to dinner and came back with 3 or 4 boy outfits! Of course we will have some neutral gender stuff, but I am a shopper and it won’t be long before baby has a full gender specific wardrobe!

I have to know. I like to be prepared. I’ve only had boys so far and everything I have is for boys. I don’t have any unisex stuff, even the newborn onesies are blue with trains, planes and cars.

That last one is interesting to me. I design airplanes for a living, and I have a vagina. Nevertheless, if I were to put any daughter I should have into a onesie with an airplane on it, some of these writers would consider it borderline child abuse. But how will people know she’s a girl?

As you can tell from the general tenor of the comments, most people chose to find out the sex. And then went out and bought clothes in the appropriate colours, decorated their nurseries with sports themes or pretty princesses, and fantasized about the gender-conforming people their children will grow to become.

My husband A and I discussed whether or not we wanted to find out the sex at the mid-pregnancy ultrasound. A didn’t want to. He said the only reason to find out was if we were going to treat the child differently depending on its sex. And obviously, as the good feminist couple we are, we weren’t going to be doing that.

His argument made sense. And yet, I wanted to know. Fitting my desire into A’s argument resulted in the following inescapable conclusion: I did want to treat the sexes differently. Not only that, I had a preference for the sex of my child, and I wanted to get past it if the child turned out to be the other sex.

Please don’t immediately lump me in with the pink-and-lavender or blue-and-khaki pushers I quoted above. I don’t intend on browbeating my child into playing with only the appropriate toys, etc. But if I’m going to be honest with myself, there are ways in which I’m going to differentiate. In fact, I think it’s impossible not to do so in our current cultural milieu. I will be looking at my child’s genitalia immediately after birth, and categorizing it into one or the other sex. And then we will have to name the child. We have two different names in mind: one for a male child, one for a female child. (I know there are those who like “gender-neutral” names, but even then the plan is rarely to use the name no matter what the child’s genitalia look like. In fact, people like to use gender-neutral names for girls, and “masculine-sounding” names for boys. Just another manifestation of the hierarchy of status in our society.) We will choose our pronouns. And everyone around us, from our parents to strangers, will treat our child differently depending on that name and those pronouns. No matter how hard we try, this child will be growing up with gender-socialization messages at every turn.

My desire to find out is a desire to “bond” with my future child. I think I would have an easier time doing that with a name and a set of pronouns. And since the name and the pronouns depend on the sex, I wanted to know.

Will this child’s sex change our behaviour in any way other than choosing a name and pronouns, and, of course, biological things like the way we position diapers and clean genitalia? I would like to believe that it won’t. I would like to believe that I will let my child’s personality unfold without regard to gender roles. But I don’t have that much confidence in myself. Every study on interaction between parents and children have shown that, even if the parents themselves believe in treating both sexes equally, they don’t actually do so. They play more roughly with boys and more gently with girls. They encourage their boys to take risks and their girls to be cautious. They’re more physical with boys; more verbal with girls. I think it would be foolhardy to think that, just because A and I have spent a lot of time discussing our own gender socialization and how it has impacted our lives, we’re immune to the all the subconscious elements of the gender dichotomy in our society.

As in all pregnancy- or birth-related disagreements, my preferences won out. We went into the ultrasound and told the tech we wanted to know the sex. But 18 weeks is a little early to tell, and the fetus was not in a good position to get a clear crotch shot. So, as it turns out, we still don’t know. A got his way in the end. So I’ll have to wait another couple of months to start the differing treatment.

In my department here at Big Name University, 30% of students receiving undergraduate degrees are women. 15% of students receiving master’s degrees are women, and 7% of doctoral students. I’m not sure what the numbers are for assistant professors hired, and for professors given tenure, but I’m sure they follow the same pattern. At every step, the proportion of women is less than the step feeding it. This phenomenon has a name: The Leaky Pipeline.

It’s hard to determine the causes. First of all, most students of both genders drop out at each level before getting to the next. And when asked, women don’t tend to give substantially different answers than those men give. They were done with their educations. They wanted to get paid the salaries available in industry. They lost interest. Whatever.

But why do women disproportionately leak out? For one, the graduate school years are also the prime years for childbearing. We all know who gets the burden of pregnancy, birth and childrearing. Women in academia are often in relationships with men who are also in academia, or other peripatetic careers, and women are more likely to change their educational and career plans to accommodate those of their partners. Other forms of systemic sexism put larger barriers in women’s paths than those in men’s, and chip away at women’s self esteem. Take a quick look at the “sexism in our everyday professional lives” thread and you can see where some of the impetus for leaving academia is coming from.

I’ve wanted to be in academia for a long time. I like the flexibility, the freedom, and the respect. I like the students. I like the idea of being a role model to young women and men, who don’t currently see very many female faces at the front of their engineering classrooms. But a research PhD followed by this postdoctoral appointment is showing me an unfortunate truth: I don’t enjoy research. I don’t like having to come up with new and original ideas. I don’t like the daily grind of implementing the ideas and testing the ideas. I don’t like writing papers and dealing with the politics of getting them published. The only part of my current job I do like is supervising a graduate student; that’s somewhat fun. And I like listening to other people’s ideas, and hearing about their research.To succeed as an academic at a research institution, one has to be passionate about one’s work. One has to be so enamored with one’s field of study that one is willing to work 80 hours a week to get the research done, get the results, publish the paper, do the politics, get tenure. I don’t think I’m up for it.

Teaching, I enjoy. I’m a great public speaker, and while some aspects of my teaching still need work, I think with some training and practice I would be good. I see myself at a small college teaching undergraduates their first calculus class. I think I’d like that.

So why do I feel so guilty?

I don’t want to be counted in the “leaky” statistic. I feel like I’d be failing feminism. Another woman takes her training and then can’t take the heat at a Research I school. Another woman drops out of the race when the kid comes along. It’s proof that women just don’t cut it.

If any woman can make it, I should be able to. I’m extremely bright, if I may say so myself, and have been trained at one of the top schools in the country. I have a husband who wants to be a stay-at-home parent, and who is willing to follow me around wherever my career leads, while doing both the majority of the childcare and the “wifework” necessary for my career advancement. If I do anything but aim for the big prize, which I’m constantly told is a full professor position at a top-ranked university, I will have “failed to live up to my potential.” Everybody has such high hopes for me: my family, my boss (who was also my PhD advisor), all the professors of my past.

I know this is irrational. I know it’s not my job to singlehandedly change the world, and if I pursue a research career I will probably both fail and make myself miserable in the meantime. But I don’t want to be another statistic, another drop that has leaked out of the pipeline.

Sometime in December I expect to push a human being out of my vagina.

Am I afraid?

I’m a little afraid of complications. Premature labour, pre-eclampsia, shoulder dystocia… those are all somewhat frightening things. I’m not at all afraid of the pain; I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to handle it.

I’m planning an unmedicated, low-intervention birth. But I’m not actually against any particular intervention, when used appropriately. I think too many labours are induced or augmented; Pitocin is an overused drug by far. That said, if I am convinced that a clear medical indication exists for the use of Pitocin, I will use it. The same is true with intravenous fluids, stripping my membranes, rupturing my membranes, epidural anesthesia, episiotomy, forceps, vacuum extraction, and cesarean section. I would consent to each of these, given the right circumstance, and none of these interventions scares me much.

What scares me is having any of this done without my consent. You may think that medical consent is absolute; a doctor/nurse/midwife would never touch a woman or administer treatment without her consent. But the stories are everywhere. A woman consents to a simple cervical exam in late pregnancy to see if and how much she’s dilated; the midwife strips her membranes (separates the membrane surrounding the amniotic fluid from the cervix) without even telling her. A woman consents to intravenous fluids because she’s told she’s dehydrated; the nurse “slips in” some Pitocin.

Even minor non-consensual acts can feel extremely violating to a woman. A nurse, without saying what she’s doing, grabs a woman’s leg and moves it. A lactation consultant walks in the room, and without introducing herself, grabs a woman’s breast. The experience of being in the hospital so often feels as if one is being disembodied, objectified.

And even when consent is given, it so often is poorly informed. Health-care providers intentionally frighten women to get them to acquiesce. Continuous electronic fetal monitoring has been shown to be of no benefit to maternal or perinatal mortality or morbidity, but a woman refusing it will often be asked “do you want your baby to die?” Small risks of non-intervention are inflated; larger ones of an intervention the doctor currently wants aren’t even mentioned. Women are told the pain of labour is going to get much worse, and the anesthesiologist is going to be busy in a few minutes, so if they ever want pain relief, they had better get it now. Emjaybee, a regular commenter here at feministe, had a traumatic birth that culminated in a nurse running away with her baby, without her or her husband’s consent.

There’s a term for this: birthrape. Some don’t like the term; they think it minimizes the experience of victims of sexual assault. But what else do you call fingers and instruments in a woman’s vagina, when the woman has explicitly said she doesn’t want them there? I’ve experienced sexual assault myself, and maybe that’s part of why this kind of bodily violation frightens me so.

What causes this and where do the solutions lie? Is it that obstetricians are sadists? I don’t think the answer is that simple. Most doctors want to do what’s best for their patients, although that’s not their only motivation. They also need to protect themselves in a non-sensical legal climate. In malpractice cases, scientific evidence is not the guiding philosophy. What’s important is the “standard of care.” That is, it doesn’t matter that continuous fetal monitoring doesn’t improve outcomes; what matters is that every other obstetrician in the country insists on using it.

And obstetricians are not immune to the messages our culture sends about women. Women don’t know what’s best for themselves; they can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves and their fetuses. Even the Supreme Court thinks women can’t be trusted to make medical decisions for themselves that they won’t regret later.

Also contributing is the fetus-fetishism of our culture. Women are seen as birthing machines. Good mothers sacrifice themselves for their children. Nearly every intervention privileges the health of the baby over the health, or even life, of the mother. Remember the Angela Carder case, in which the hospital got a court order for a cesarean, which contributed to the deaths of both Ms. Carder and her fetus? This philosophy is often exacerbated by financial considerations: a dead mother doesn’t cost much to an insurance company, but a permanently disabled newborn may cost millions of dollars to support over its lifetime, and the doctor can be sued for that amount. This New Yorker article blames the Apgar score: a simple metric measuring the health of the baby at birth; no such metric measures the mother’s health.

The advice I’ve been given: stay away from the hospital. As the Navelgazing Midwife puts it, “when you buy the hospital ticket, you go for the hospital ride.” Believe me, I would love to have a homebirth. But that is simply not possible for me or a huge number of women. The only affordable health insurance available to me is through my work, and it doesn’t cover homebirth. In fact, it only covers birth in one particular hospital. “Well, then get a homebirth midwife out of pocket!” Even if I had a spare $3k lying around, which I most certainly do not, it wouldn’t go to a homebirth. It would go in the bank for emergencies, since I have no financial leeway right now. Or it would go to pay off some of my debt. Is respect and informed medical decision-making reserved for those women who are both medically low-risk and at the top of the economic ladder? Why shouldn’t women who have to birth in the hospital have their bodily autonomy respected?

I’m doing the best I can. I’m eating well and exercising to keep myself low-risk. I’m seeing a group of nurse-midwives, who have a primary cesarean rate of half the national average, as well as low episiotomy rates. I’ll be refusing cervical checks, so no one can strip or break my membranes. I’ll refuse an intravenous drip, so no one can sneak anything in. I shouldn’t have to make that kind of defensive decision. I should be able to trust my care providers. I’m educating myself about birth to an insane degree, and trying to pass on as much of it as I can to my husband, who is better at being charmingly assertive than I am. But I’m still scared. And I shouldn’t have to be.

The New York Times asks: Is the “Mom Job” really necessary?

“Necessary?” They’re asking if elective plastic surgery (a tummy tuck, breast lift, and liposuction) is a requirement? Are women’s bodies, especially mothers’ bodies, so flawed in our current culture that we are now required to pay thousands of dollars to be allowed to be seen in public?

Also, I wish that the NYT chose to focus more often on issues affecting more than the top 1% of the income distribution.

One of the roles I think feminist blogs can play in our lives is what the “Women’s Libbers” liked to call “Consciousness Raising.” While the phrase evokes a coven of Farrah-Fawcett-haired women in an avocado and harvest-gold living room, I think the concept still has feminist legs. In short, we tell our stories about living while female in the world, and over time relate the individual stories to the systemic misogyny of our culture.

What I’d like to focus on today is stories of our professional lives. There are many people who think that while there still may be battles to be fought on the home front and within our individual relationships, the fight to win equality at work is mostly won. After all, nobody would dare to show sexism at work; it could get them fired!

In a comment to my introductory post, AJ writes:

I haven’t experienced too much as a female student in such a male dominated area, but every now and then I get somebody doubting my credibility because I was born with two x chromosomes.

This comment reflects my feelings as well. I have had some great mentors of both genders help lead me to where I am now. I don’t live in a chilly climate, I’m not being sexually harassed at work, and most people I interact with treat me and others appropriately. But the second half of AJ’s comment is telling: “I haven’t experienced much, but…” There’s always a but. And we tend to minimize the “buts,” the incidents that go against our belief that everything is perfectly fine in this beautiful post-feminist world.

Often it’s only in telling our stories that we see how egregious they really are. I was interviewed by a professor of women’s studies as part of a project she’s doing on gender relations in aerospace engineering. “Everything’s great!” I told her. “My gender hasn’t held me back at all. Although, the lab director gets a female junior faculty member to send his faxes when the secretary is out. And guess whose job it is to clean out the lab fridge…” Her eyebrows went up and she started scribbling. Everything is perfectly fine, except when it isn’t.

I have two stories of my own, and then one secondhand story, because it’s just that good.

Story 1:

This is way back in my undergraduate days, my first year of university in fact. My calculus professor was an older man, a metallurgical engineer. He liked to tell stories of the good old days when he was a student. Somehow these stories always got around to how there weren’t any women back then. Example: “I would like to encourage you to work together on your homework. Back when I was a student, all the guys…” (hesitates, looks around uncomfortably) “I mean, back then, they were all guys, see. Not that I have a problem with there being girls in engineering school! In fact, I think it’s great! It’s wonderful! Women bring so much to engineering, they’re so much more nurturing and caring. Engineering needs a softer touch!”

Story 2:

As a student, I was attending a dinner for a professional society in my field, at which one of my friends was going to receive an award. The keynote speaker was an engine designer, who had decades ago worked on a famous, historically important aircraft engine. (Yes, there is such a thing as a famous, historically important engine!) After he was introduced, the first thing he said was “I would like to apologize to the ladies in the room. I’m afraid my presentation has many formulae and graphs and other mathematical details.” And he didn’t stop there! Every time he came to a slide with charts or numbers, he apologized “to the ladies.”

Now, I actually understand where he was coming from. It was a dinner: there may have been non-technical spouses present, and they would have been understandably bored with numbers they were not trained to decipher. And in this older man’s life, the majority of technically-trained people were men. But he failed to notice that the woman who introduced him was… an aircraft engine designer! I was glad to see that she didn’t take this slight lying down. When thanking him afterwards, she made sure to mention that as an engine designer she was fascinated by the charts and numbers, and was glad to see he had included them.

Story 3:

This did not happen to me, but to a colleague. Mary (not her real name) is also an aerospace engineer, and she got her doctorate the same time I did. This may not be relevant, but unlike me, Mary is a “girly girl.” She performs femininity much more than I do, with her expensive haircuts, omnipresent makeup, and feminine mannerisms.

At a professional conference, she went out to dinner with a group. There was one senior professor, a few junior professors, and a few graduate students. She, a student, was the only woman. As is usually the case in this kind of group composition, the senior professor was “holding forth,” dominating the conversation while his academic juniors listened respectfully. The topic of conversation was his daughter’s roommate. Apparently this roommate was very attractive young woman, in this professor’s opinion. She was an aspiring model and actress. Unfortunately, she wasn’t particularly good at managing her finances. So the professor gave her money. “And just so you knowhow truly beautiful this young woman is, I gave her $2000. She was that beautiful. I mean, take Mary here. Mary is pretty. But she’s only worth, oh, about $100.”

I notice now that all three of these stories are about older, powerful men, mostly just bumbling in their attempts to relate to others. The standard response is a shrug. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We’re just going to have to wait until these dinosaurs retire or die (mostly the latter, since academics tend to never retire) and then we can live in our beautiful post-feminist utopia. There’s some truth to this response. But it’s foolish to deny or minimize these incidents. It lets us think our work is done. It minimizes the magnitude of our accomplisments: not only do I have a PhD, I have one despite being repeatedly (if not constantly) told I don’t belong in this world. The stories are important, because while they seem like exceptions to us, taken together they have a systematic effect.

Your turn. Tell a story about sexism you’ve encountered in your own workplace.

I’m Dr. Confused and I’m a rocket scientist.

That’s not quite true. I haven’t done any work on rockets, though I am probably relatively close to qualified to do so. I have a Doctorate of Philosophy in Aerospace Engineering. I work more on the “aero” side of things than the “space” side. As part of my undergraduate degree, I did in fact have to take one class in space propulsion (that is, rockets), and I assure you, it’s much easier than you’ve been led to believe. Aerospace engineering on the whole is not as hard as it sounds. I find it much easier, for instance, than getting a photocopier to staple my documents, or using public transit in a country in which I don’t speak the language. I’ve only been a doctor for a few months now, and frankly, nobody calls me doctor in real life, which may be why I feel compelled to use it in my handle.

I wasn’t going to tell you exactly what it is I did, but in a couple of the posts I’m planning during my guest-blogging stint here at Feministe, my area of study comes up tangentially and is hard to avoid. Just don’t use it to try to find out who I am, ok? I’m looking for a tenure-track academic job, and I don’t need potential employers finding the comments I’ve left on this blog. Not that I’m ashamed of any of the things I’ve said, but I’ve told a number of stories from my past that I wouldn’t share in a professional context.

I will be guest-blogging here for about ten days. Topics you may look forward to: sexism in our everyday professional lives, the leaky pipeline in science and engineering academia, the intersection of feminism with pregnancy and birth, gender-stereotyping of children, and whatever random thoughts come into my head during the next week.

My first substantive post will be sometime this afternoon. I’m only up right now due to pregnancy-induced mid-sleep hunger, and am hoping to get some more sleep.