My first indication that something was off was an email from a colleague: “Congratulations on your cool science result getting some press. Also congrats on the apparently successful gender reassignment surgery.”
This was followed shortly by another email, from a student, who had seen news of the research on a website in Chile: “The only con is that they think that ‘the astronomer Kelsey Johnson’ is a he.”
I was not surprised that a few of the news outlets got some of the science wrong (one of them by a factor of a million) about the discovery of the birth environment of a globular cluster 50 million light years away, but I didn’t expect this.
After those two emails, a quick search revealed good news and bad news. The good news was that the story had been picked up internationally by a number of news media. The bad news was that a significant fraction of the stories indicated that I was male. To be fair, “Kelsey” can be an androgynous name, but female pronouns were used in the original news release, so these had to have been deliberately changed. One of the news organizations that changed my gender had actually interviewed me, in person.
Scientist are usually encouraged to produce results that spark the interest of the press. Seeing your work and your name in the news is exciting. But seeing yourself identified with the wrong gender is demoralizing. Sloppy reporting to be sure, but why does it matter? The women who set the path before I came along had to deal with much more egregious social norms and behaviors. By comparison, these “small” things hardly seem noteworthy. However, even small things add up over time to create an environment that makes it clear when you’re an outsider.
Seeing my gender changed in the press was for me only the most recent small thing in a string of mostly small, seemingly innocuous things, none of which seem worth alarm bells.
I suspect that most people experience this feeling of being an “outsider” in some form recurrently during their lives — maybe at a party with a group of people very different in socioeconomic status, or in a class where the other students seem to be in the know, or just at a restaurant where they feel inappropriately dressed.
Because feeling like an outsider is uncomfortable, most people tend to avoid situations that make feel that they don’t belong. This need to belong is smack in the middle of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — and its impact on influencing human behavior shouldn’t be underestimated.
If you do an image search of the word “scientist,” you will likely get a flood of pictures of mostly white males wearing lab coats. Science, math, and engineering are starved for visible female role models, but they are out there. An abundance of female scientists appeared on social media recently with the #girlswithtoys hashtag after a professor at the California Institute of Technology told an interviewer on NPR that scientists are “boys with toys.” Now thousands of images of female scientists with their telescopes, microscopes, rovers, and space shuttles are a few clicks away. Some of them are even wearing lab coats.
I would like to think that the words of the Caltech professor were spoken without a deliberate attempt to be sexist, and I don’t think that my gender was switched maliciously. However, intent doesn’t negate the action. If only these were isolated incidents, maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but many women in science still face the death of a thousand cuts.
As a now middle-aged female scientist, I think I’ve developed a pretty thick skin, but there are girls and young women out there thinking about what they want to do when they grow up and what might be possible. A sense of belonging will be a powerful force in determining the path they choose. The same can be said for young people of different ethnicities, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and religions.
The message here is that we all have unconscious biases — I do, you do, the Caltech professor does, and so does the press. The fact that these biases are “unconscious” makes them even harder to combat. When one of my kids does something wrong, I often hear the refrain, “I didn’t try to!” That is a good start, and a necessary one. But it is not sufficient, and it won’t stop harm from being done. As we tell our kids, “You have to try not to.”
Kelsey Johnson is an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia.