Context and variation

Hey! I miss you!

2011-08-05T08:47:00.000-05:00

Dear Context and Variation readers,

I miss you. A lot. I used to love all our fun conversations in the comments, and what cool ideas and questions you had. I know I moved, and I know there is a gated entrance, but really, it takes just a minute of your time to register so you make it through the gate automatically. And those of us who work behind the gate are petitioning to have it taken down.

In the meantime, please take the minute to register so we can chat. Update your feed so that you see my new posts in your RSS reader. Things aren't the same without you.

Plus, I think you could teach the old school SciAm commenters over there a thing or two about ladybusiness, feminism, and biology.

Love, your faithful blogger,
Kate

Off to bloggier pastures: bringing ladybusiness to the SciAm Network

2011-07-06T08:00:00.001-05:00

If you're on Twitter or read any other science blogs, by now you know that the Scientific American Blog Network has launched. And, I'm pleased to say that I am a part of it! Context and Variation has moved to new digs, surrounded by a network full of bright, interesting people with great communities and great things to say.

But of course, while I encourage you to check out Bora's post where he introduces every one of us, I have to plug a few bloggers in particular.

First, the University of Illinois is the only university to be represented by three bloggers on this new network (yeah, we totally did a press release for it). Alex Wild of Myrmecos (you know, the guy who comes up if you just google insect photography) has created a blog called Compound Eye that will cover science photography. What's exciting about this blog is that Alex, true to his nature, will be very generous with his space and will showcase the work of many other photographers.

Joanne Manaster, who you may know as sciencegoddess on Twitter, hosts the blog JoanneLovesScience.com. Joanne is a truly exceptional science educator and puts great attention on reaching young audiences, from exploding gummy bears, the science of makeup, and Kids Read Science programs. On the SciAm blog network, Joanne will be co-hosting a new blog PsiVid with Carin Bondar. This blog will continue Joanne's work of thinking about engaging audiences and getting them interesting in science in new ways.

In addition to these great U of I bloggers, I also have to mention my fellow anthropologists. Krystal D'Costa is moving her fantastic blog Anthropology in Practice to SciAm. You can expect more thoughtful, detailed, yet readable and fun posts from Krystal. She is a wonderful observer of human nature, and I love how she forces me to be an anthropologist at all sorts of casual moments when I usually take my academic lenses off.

Then there is Eric Michael Johnson's blog The Primate Diaries. Eric is another very talented writer, sharing insights from a great mind. I have enjoyed his posts on sexuality, primatology, sexism, and human evolution.

Oh, and need I even mention? There are lots of female bloggers on this new, kickass network. Check out The Mary Sue's coverage. They're right. The SciAm Blog Network does introduce us to about a zillion new women in the sciences. Incidentally, it does a pretty decent job of introducing readers to people of varying sexualities and ethnicities as well. We can always do better, but it is a strong start.

The people of this network have exceptional voices and important perspectives. And now more people will see what they have to offer. I hope you'll all join me over at my new place, that you'll check out the rest of my network peeps, and that you will enjoy helping me bring the ladybusiness to Scientific American.

Summer of the pill: Will the pill mess up my ability to detect my One True Love?

2011-07-01T20:46:00.000-05:00

Should I advise recently single ScarJo to stay
off the pill to find her next beau? From here.

Imagine you are a single, heterosexual woman. You meet a nice man at the driving range, or on a blind date. You like him and he likes you. You date, you get engaged, you get married. You decide to have a child together, so you go off the pill. One morning you wake up and look at your husband, and it’s like seeing him through new eyes. Who is this stranger you married, and what did you ever see in him?

After some articles made the news when they suggested mate preferences change on hormonal contraception, this seemed to be the scenario in the heads of many women. Is my pill deceiving me? What if my birth control is making me date the wrong man?

Several articles over the years have demonstrated that women prefer men with more masculine features at midcycle, or ovulation, and more feminine features in less fertile periods. Based on body odor, women and men also often prefer individuals with MHC (major histocompatibility complex) that are different from theirs, which may be a way for them to select mates that will give their offspring an immunological advantage. These findings have been replicated a few times, looking at a few different gendered traits. And as I suggested above, other work has suggested that the birth control pill, which in some ways mimics pregnancy, may mask our natural tendency to make these distinctions and preferences, regarding both masculinity and MHC (Little et al. 2002; Roberts et al. 2008; Wedekind et al. 1995).

On the one hand, I think it’s both interesting and important to consider the implications of the birth control pill beyond just contraception. Hormones are messages, so any cells that have receptors for these messages, like specialized mailboxes, can receive them. The pill is made of synthetic versions of estradiol and progesterone, and there are estradiol and progesterone receptors in your brain. And yes, these hormones do change your brain, both during the natural cycle and on hormonal contraception; Scicurious has written well on this in the past.

Jolie, had she been on the pill and chosen her mate
differently. From here. Yes, looks to be a real pic.

On the other hand, I have a lot of questions: First and most important to me, how does any of this translate to non-straight women? I find the constant focus on mate choice between men and women a bit exhausting, and am not sure we can assume non-straight relationships to work the same way. Next, how well do preferences over the cycle map on to actual choices for mates, short term or long term? If we happen to find Brad Pitt more attractive than Justin Bieber at midcycle, does that mean no one will do but Brad Pitt? And finally, what are all the factors that we need to consider in mate choice besides a deep voice or square jawline (again, especially if you try to expand your thinking beyond straight relationships)?

I’ll start with the last two questions that deal with mate preference versus ultimate mate selection. As you all might expect, women and men choose mates for lots of reasons, not just masculinity or complementary immune systems. Bereczkei et al (1997) looked at singles ads and found women often sought mates with high parental care. In a separate singles ad evaluation, Pawlowski and Dunbar (1999) found that women mostly selected men of high resource potential who were interested in long-term relationships (either unlikely to divorce or unlikely to die within twenty years), where men selected women by markers of fecundity (ability to have babies). In a sample of 18-24 year old straight people in the US, Buston and Emlen (2003) found that most people selected mates who had similar characteristics to themselves. And a speed dating sample showed that people under those conditions selected dates based on easily observable traits, like physical attractiveness (Kurzban and Weeden 2005).

Now on to the fact that all of this research is on straight people. I found very little on lesbian women and the menstrual cycle... but what I found was very cool! Brinsmead-Stockham et al (2008) found that, like heterosexual women, lesbian women are quicker to identify unknown faces at midcycle, as long as they were the faces of the sex they preferred. So straight women were good at identifying male faces, lesbian women good at identifying female faces. Burleson et al (2002) found that sexual behavior in lesbian and straight women was mostly similar through the menstrual cycle, with both peaking at midcycle.

So, mate preference may be about telling a research assistant who is the hottest to you at a particular point in your cycle. And it is a fairly robust and consistent finding. However, when it comes to ultimate mate selection the most important thing to consider is a great point made by Pawlowski and Dunbar: finding a mate is about advertising what you have to offer while making known what you want in a mate. Then it’s all about finding some kind of compromise through a series of trade-offs based on what the individual wants, what they can offer, and what’s available in the dating pool. (So, since neither Brad Pitt nor Justin Bieber are currently in the dating pool, my previous comparison was pointless.)

Those of you who met your mate while on the pill: not to fear. I don’t think that the possibility that you may have some suppression of masculinized preferences at one point in your cycle means you’ve chosen the wrong person.

Who knows, it could have opened you up to the Mr. or Ms. Right.

References
Bereczkei T, Voros S, Gal A, & Bernath L (1997). Resources, attractiveness, family commitment; reproductive decisions in human mate choice. Ethology : formerly Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, 103 (8), 681-99 PMID: 12293453

Brinsmead-Stockham K, Johnston L, Miles L, & Neil Macrae C (2008). Female sexual orientation and menstrual influences on person perception Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44 (3), 729-734 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2007.05.003

Burleson MH, Trevathan WR, & Gregory WL (2002). Sexual behavior in lesbian and heterosexual women: relations with menstrual cycle phase and partner availability. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 27 (4), 489-503 PMID: 11912001

Buston PM, & Emlen ST (2003). Cognitive processes underlying human mate choice: The relationship between self-perception and mate preference in Western society. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100 (15), 8805-10 PMID: 12843405

Kurzban R, & Weeden J (2005). HurryDate: Mate preferences in action Evolution and Human Behavior, 26 (3), 227-244 DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.012

Little AC, Jones BC, Penton-Voak IS, Burt DM, and Perrett DI. 2002. Partnership status and the temporal context of relationships influence human female preferences for sexual dimorphism in male face shape. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences 269(1496):1095-1100.

Pawłowski B, & Dunbar RI (1999). Impact of market value on human mate choice decisions. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 266 (1416), 281-5 PMID: 10081164

Roberts SC, Gosling LM, Carter V, & Petrie M (2008). MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 275 (1652), 2715-22 PMID: 18700206

Wedekind C, Seebeck T, Bettens F, & Paepke AJ (1995). MHC-Dependent Mate Preferences in Humans Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 260 (1359), 245-249 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.1995.0087

Summer of the Pill: The latest fashion accessory to hit your uterus: the IUD!

2011-06-24T22:22:00.000-05:00

Found here. IUDs are back in style.
Neon sunglasses? Not so much.

What is used by 20-26% of European, 30% of Israeli, 34% of Chinese, 34% of Egyptian, and 49% of Korean women… but only 1-2% of US women (Harper et al. 2008)? The intrauterine device, or IUD! The IUD is found in two forms: the copper IUD, and the hormone-releasing IUD that releases a tiny amount of progesterone. Both make the uterus inhospitable to pregnancy.

The modern incarnation of the IUD is possibly safer and more effective than oral contraception. Chances of pregnancy on the IUD range from 0-1.1 per 100 woman-years of use, and they get lower with each year you use it (Prager and Darney 2007). That is far better than your chances on the pill.

The IUD suffers from a bad reputation, in part due to misinformation or misunderstanding on the part of medical providers. Harper et al (2008) surveyed 816 physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants who each serve more than 100 contraceptive patients per year in the California State family planning program. They found that 40% of medical providers didn’t offer IUDs to patients, 36% provided infrequent counseling. Further, 46% thought nulliparous women, and 39% thought postabortion women were good candidates for the IUDs. Younger physicians were more likely than older physicians to recommend the IUD (Harper et al. 2008), which suggests a generational gap due to the overinflated descriptions of the dangers of early IUDs.

So let’s go through the actual pros and cons of this form of contraception, so that over the course of the summer you can compare this information to what you’ll be learning about the pill.

Remember, I’m just an anthropologist who studies this stuff. I am not a medical doctor.

Danger danger! Or not

The biggest danger from an IUD is that it could perforate the uterus, or be expelled from it. And that can certainly be painful, reduce fertility, or get you pregnant when you think you are protected. So let’s look at how often this happens.

Prager and Darney (2007) wrote a review on the levonorgestrel IUD (hormone-releasing, like Mirena) in nulliparous (that means no parity, or no children) women. This is important because many still carry the misconception that nulliparous women shouldn’t use IUDs, because of an increased risk of perforation, infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease risk, and difficulty in placement.

There are notable differences between the parous (has had children) and nulliparous (no kids) uterus. The parous uterus is a little bigger, and the cervix dilates a bit more easily. However, it turns out that for the most part these differences are not great enough to produce any differences in side effects or danger to the woman using it.

Prager and Darney (2007) found six studies on perforation or expulsion rates for IUDs (some copper, some hormone-releasing, which are made of plastic and are flexible). They did not find enough data to support a link either way for nulliparity and perforation, because the studies they found had anywhere from zero to two nulliparous women in them. That said, the perforation rates for each study ranged from 0-1.3% in one study, and 2.6 out of 1000 in another (Prager and Darney 2007).

Expulsion rates do not seem to differ between parous and nulliparous women, and again, are very low for all women. The annual expulsion rate among cited studies was 0-4.2 per 100, 0-1.2% per year, and 0-0.2% per year (Prager and Darney 2007). The one important point they do make is that there is a very slightly increased risk of expulsion for lactating women – perhaps this is due to the oxytocin released during nipple stimulation, which could contract muscle?

The other concern sometimes mentioned is that of pelvic inflammatory disease. PID is an infection of the uterus and is usually associated with a sexually transmitted disease. PID can increase the risk of infertility. So for women who haven’t had a kid, but want to some day, the concern about getting PID can loom large.

However, Prager and Darney (2007) surveyed the literature and found that the only studies that support a link between PID and IUDs involves an IUD no longer on the market, or was associated with high-risk sexual behavior.

Hidden benefits

In some women, copper IUDs can increase menstruation. However, the hormone-releasing IUDs tend to decrease menstruation, and many women stop getting periods altogether. Hormone-releasing IUDs can be prescribed to women with menorrhagia, or pathologically heavy menstruation, too.

Prager and Darney (2007) describe a study in which hormone-releasing IUD users were compared to oral contraceptive users. These IUD users had less dysmenorrhea (painful periods), less spotting, fewer days of bleeding, fewer cycles. Further, 88% of the IUD users wanted to continue with that method of contraception after a year, compared to 68% of pill users, and this difference was statistically significant (p = 0.003).

Romer and Linsberger (2009) also looked at satisfaction with the hormone-releasing IUD in a sample of 8680 women across 18 countries: 95% were satisfied with their method of contraception.

The fine print

Insertion of the IUD can be a little more painful in a nulliparous woman, since her cervix has not dilated before. Also, a minority of women may spot for a while after insertion of the IUD... and by a while, I mean a few months. But once those few months of light spotting are over, they often don’t get a period again until removing the IUD. And of course, the IUD is not conducive to sudden desires to start the babymaking process: you will need to schedule its removal first.

However, with the number of women who are ambivalent at best about birth control pills, but do not want to use a barrier method, the IUD offers a lot in the way of safety, efficacy and ease of use.

References

Harper CC, Blum M, de Bocanegra HT, Darney PD, Speidel JJ, Policar M, & Drey EA (2008). Challenges in translating evidence to practice: the provision of intrauterine contraception. Obstetrics and gynecology, 111 (6), 1359-69 PMID: 18515520

Prager, S., & Darney, P. (2007). The levonorgestrel intrauterine system in nulliparous women Contraception, 75 (6) DOI: 10.1016/j.contraception.2007.01.018

Römer, T., & Linsberger, D. (2009). User satisfaction with a levonorgestrel-releasing intrauterine system (LNG-IUS): Data from an international survey The European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Health Care, 14 (6), 391-398 DOI: 10.3109/13625180903203154

C&V Shorts: Make the most of your time and energy

2011-06-21T21:29:00.000-05:00

This is the first in a new series at Context and Variation where I will attempt to be more concise. As I continue along the Summer of the Pill series I want to make sure I still put some attention on other topics within biological anthropology. C&V shorts allows me to share something I find cool, in half the words I usually do.

What would you do if you knew you had eighty years to live? What if you knew you only had forty?

Life history theory is the idea that the timing of major life events is adaptive. That is, when to be born, when to wean, when to grow, and when to reproduce are dependent on selection pressures in the environment. The most important concept within life history theory, then, is that of tradeoffs, because when you time these events is based off how you want to allocate your resources. In your environment, would it be best to grow right now? Should you grow under the care of your mother, or should you be independent? Is it time to have a child? How about your second, or third, or fourth child?

For this reason, many people study life history transitions, which means the critical yet variable period when people move from one state to another: from growing to reproductive cycling, from cycling to gestating, gestating to lactating, even lactating back to cycling. And much of what governs these transitions has to do with energy, because energy is finite: energy you use towards one purpose, like growing, cannot be used for another, like reproducing. This is especially true in humans because we permanently transition from allocating to growth to reproduction at puberty, unlike other species that keep growing throughout their reproductive years.

But energy isn’t the only factor that enters into our physiological decision-making: time is also important. And as I hinted in the first paragraph, if you have some sense that your time on this earth will be short or long, you might make different decisions about when to do what.

Found here. Perhaps part of a
modern menarche ceremony?

A few years ago, Walker et al (2006) looked at all the available data on growth and development in small-scale societies – that means foragers and agrarian populations. They found that girls with a later age at menarche – that is the first menstrual period – are shorter in stature. If we consider only energy, this makes no sense! The later you wait to start reproducing should mean you had more time to grow, so why did Walker et al (2006) find the opposite?

The answer is timing. It turns out that mortality rates tell us something about growth and development: the higher the mortality in a population, the earlier their age at menarche and age at first reproduction. So, the higher your chances of being offed at any given moment, the more likely you are to favor reproduction over growth so you can move ahead with the whole reproductive success thing. So, constraints on time and energy affect our physiology differently, and mean we may have to make different predictions about life history transitions that are dependent on human societies. Predation or access to health care impact mortality, but so do homicide or war.

In 2011, McIntyre and Kacerosky performed a similar analysis, only this time they compared small-scale societies with industrialized ones – industrialized societies are those that are more urban, technology-driven, with greater access to modern health care, like the USA. Their analysis of small-scale societies confirmed Walker et al’s (2006) results.

But McIntyre and Kacerosky (2011) found the opposite relationship in industrialized societies: there, the later you hit menarche, the taller you were. And this makes sense if we think we can assume most industrialized populations have lower mortality than the foragers: within the industrialized pops, those who had the time and energy to grow big by holding off on menarche, did.

McIntyre and Kacerosky (2011) are hesitant to be full adaptationists in their paper, which I appreciate. So, they offer two hypotheses and suggestions for future testing. The first hypothesis falls in line with the life history theory described in this post, though their focus is more on parental investment than mortality. But still, environment, and access to time and energy, set life history trajectories for different populations. However they are also careful to point out a nonadaptive hypothesis: it could be that variability in stature is decreasing as heritability is increasing, meaning we are hitting up against biological constraints for size.

Genes and environment interact to produce phenotype, and this is something most people remember from high school biology. But sometimes it’s nice to peek under the hood and learn a little something about the life history mechanisms that are set into motion by this interaction. Early life events, perhaps even life events of our mothers and grandmothers, start our life history trajectories. Then tradeoffs at certain important transition periods nudge us a little further one way or another for the rest of our lives.

References

McIntyre MH, & Kacerosky PM (2011). Age and size at maturity in women: a norm of reaction? American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, 23 (3), 305-12 PMID: 21484909

Walker, R., Gurven, M., Hill, K., Migliano, A., Chagnon, N., De Souza, R., Djurovic, G., Hames, R., Hurtado, A., Kaplan, H., Kramer, K., Oliver, W., Valeggia, C., & Yamauchi, T. (2006). Growth rates and life histories in twenty-two small-scale societies American Journal of Human Biology, 18 (3), 295-311 DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.20510

Summer of the Pill: Why do we menstruate?

2011-06-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

This is part of my Summer of the Pill series, where I will answer a question about the birth control pill every week for the summer. I will try and make them shorter than my usual posts. Please remember that I am not a medical doctor, so do not use this material to diagnose or treat any condition. I still hope you find these posts informative and useful.

One of the questions I got on my inaugural Summer of the Pill post is one that I have been asked many times over the years: Why do we menstruate, and is it even necessary while on the pill?

Found here.

So first, let me back up and explain the modern birth control pill. Most of the standard, monthly pill packs have three weeks of synthetic hormones that you take daily. These hormones out-compete your natural ones, which is how they suppress ovulation. Over the course of these three weeks your endometrial lining is also building up some in response to these hormones. For many adult women in urban, or industrialized environments, the amount of synthetic hormone is lower than what their body would naturally produce, so the lining of the uterus is less thick than it would usually be.

The fourth week is a placebo week – you don’t have to take these pills, but you are usually encouraged to just so that you keep up the habit of taking a pill every day – and the absence of the synthetic hormones in your body triggers menstruation. Then you slough off the endometrial lining that was thickening and again, if you are one of the many adult industrialized women for whom the pill is designed, then you should actually have a lighter period than what you have in a natural cycle.

The placebo week in your standard pill pack is there because the original maker of the pill thought women would be disturbed by the absence of a period. And there are still many women who would prefer to get their period than not. But what about the women who would just as gladly stop menstruating at the end of each cycle or pill pack? Would this be a safe decision?

In order to get at these questions, I will answer three different ones for you: Why do we menstruate? What did we do back in the day? and What is appropriate today?

Why do we menstruate?

Adapted from Fleagle 1999 by me.

Humans are not the only animals to undergo cycles of growth and regression in our endometrial lining. Yet, only a few animals actually menstruate. Menstruation has occasionally been observed in other great apes (this is the primate group where humans belong, with the chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orangs), and a few other animals. As far as we can tell, everyone else resorbs the lining before growing a new one. It seems to be that those animals who menstruate, do so because the amount of lining they have is greater than what they are able to resorb.

Then, even among those few other animals who have been occasionally observed to menstruate, only humans are copious menstruators. That is, we’re the only ones who seem to do it every time a cycle ends, in a large enough quantity that it is visible (and those of us in industrialized environments know it’s more than just visible – there is a whole section of the drugstore devoted entirely to pads, tampons and cups to help us dispose of it).

Most people seem to think that the reason humans have such thick endometria, that produce the byproduct of copious menstruation, is that we have big-brained babies with high oxygen and glucose needs. We have the most invasive trophoblast of all animals, where the selfish little bugger burrows its way right through the endometrium in order to set up shop and start making the placenta. And so the thickness and differentiation of the endometrium, as well as the precise timing of its readiness for implantation and network of blood vessels at the ready to feed that fetus, make it a highly specialized tissue of a rather significant quantity!

What did we do back in the day?

These days the average industrialized woman menstruates about 400 times in her life, and like I said, that menses is copious. Average menstrual blood loss is around 30mL, but anything below about 120mL is considered normal.

However, women in more traditional environments, particularly those who are foragers or pastoralists, menstruate far less frequently, only around 50 times (Strassmann 1997). Part of the reason for this is that their first period is much later in life, say around seventeen years old rather than twelve or thirteen, and that they expend a lot more energy and eat fewer calories each day (Strassmann 1997).

But there is another reason that the traditional environment, the one we assume humans evolved in, leads to far frequent menstruation: these women usually don’t have access to contraception, and thus practice what is called natural fertility. So the average number of live births for these women can be as many as eight, and even with high infant mortality that’s a lot of babies. Add to that the fact that these women will breastfeed through toddlerhood, and you have several menstruation-free years.

Figure 1. The industrial (top) versus nonindustrial (bottom) pattern of menstruation through the reproductive life span. The pink bars represent infrequent menses, the red bars represent frequent menses; breaks indicate no menses due to pregnancy and lactation. Note that the first period begins earlier in the industrialized pattern, and that fewer births, less breastfeeding, and more calories lead to more frequent menses across the reproductive years.

So the industrial pattern doesn’t look anything like the nonindustrial, or traditional pattern. But the pill doesn’t necessarily look like either pattern – in terms of the number of menstruations it is like the industrial pattern, but in terms of ovulations it’s likely closer to the traditional pattern. The question is whether one of these patterns is necessarily healthier. I will partially answer this today.

What is appropriate today?

The placebo week of the pill is not necessary for contraceptive purposes, and the menstruation that occurs during this time may not be important for most women either. The two things worth talking to your doctor about are breakthrough bleeding, and the additional week of hormone exposure per month.

Breakthrough bleeding is when you have some kind of blood discharge at a time other than when you would expect to menstruate: when on the pill this would be any other time than the placebo week. And this can be very common in some populations even when using the normal pill preparations with the placebo week (Bentley 1996, Vitzthum et al 2001, Vitzthum and Ringheim 2005). Young users of the pill (say under 25 years old), athletes, and users from nonindustrial populations may be especially at risk.

If you have breast cancer or other reproductive cancers in your family history that are of the hormone-responsive variety, you may not want to expose yourself to any more hormone than you have to. The amount of hormone exposure in one’s life is correlated with risk of breast cancer (Jasienska and Thune 2001). However, the question of whether taking the pill helps or hurts your breast cancer risk is a very murky issue, and one that I will try to address in its own post later this summer.

Something you’ll read in this Summer of the Pill series is that making decisions about reproduction is about understanding trade-offs. You need to weigh the reasons you take the pill with the side-effects or negative impact of the pill, if you experience any. And many women out there could make up a pro/con list for taking the pill, or changing preparations, or skipping the placebo week, or changing to an IUD, and find that they weight each item very differently. There is rarely a single right answer.

References

Bentley, GR. (1996) "Evidence for interpopulation variation in normal ovarian function and consequences for hormonal contraception" in Variability in human fertility, eds L. a. M.-T. Rosetta, C.G.N. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK), pp 46-65.

Jasienska, G., & Thune, I. (2001). Research pointers: Lifestyle, hormones, and risk of breast cancer BMJ, 322 (7286), 586-587 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.322.7286.586

Strassmann, B. (1997). The Biology of Menstruation in Homo Sapiens: Total Lifetime Menses, Fecundity, and Nonsynchrony in a Natural-Fertility Population Current Anthropology, 38 (1) DOI: 10.1086/204592

Vitzthum VJ, Spielvogel H, Caceres E, & Miller A (2001). Vaginal bleeding patterns among rural highland Bolivian women: relationship to fecundity and fetal loss. Contraception, 64 (5), 319-25 PMID: 11777494

Vitzthum VJ, & Ringheim K (2005). Hormonal contraception and physiology: a research-based theory of discontinuation due to side effects. Studies in family planning, 36 (1), 13-32 PMID: 15828522

Summer of the Pill

2011-06-14T10:19:00.000-05:00

It’s summertime, and as we shed our winter layers thoughts turn not only to love and sex, but also regulating menstrual cycles, understanding premenstrual syndrome, and potential population variation in the pharmacokinetics of hormonal contraception. Or is that just me, as a ladybusiness anthropologist?

If my inbox is a clue I am not the only person who wants good information on hormonal contraception. Many women are on the pill, and they use it for many reasons, only one of them contraception. Remembering to take the pill or get a new prescription, deciding on the relative impact of the current side effects versus new ones one might get from switching, wondering if it’s really doing its job, wondering if it’s increasing or decreasing breast cancer risk… these questions are like a buzzing in the back of the head at all times for many reproductively-aged women and their partners. And they want the buzzing to stop.

Let me see if I can help. Let’s make the summer of 2011 the Summer of the Pill. Every week I will cover a different topic or answer a different question on the subject of hormonal contraception, in addition to my usual posts.

Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Comment on this post, email me, or @ me on Twitter.

The first post should appear by this Friday.

Why it's cool to be a scientist (especially an anthropologist)

2011-06-09T15:19:00.000-05:00

From here.

This month, I am taking part in I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here! which is a program that links up teenage students with scientists all over the world. We put together bios, answer questions, and do live chats with them. I am looking forward to the chance to share my vast knowledge of ladybusiness anthropology -- and biological anthropology more generally -- with students who are looking to find out whether science is boring or fun.

The way this project is set up is that, over the course of the few weeks we interact with the students, they vote us off one by one; the last person left wins 500 pounds to use towards a science outreach project. If I win, I hope to put these funds towards a project that will link young people together to share their stories of how their lives vary, and what impact that has on their biology. My hope is that this project will achieve two goals: first, to get young people to observe their own bodies and biology in order to be more aware of the science that surrounds them, and second, to show them that variation is what is normal. In the teenage years (and even earlier), there is often a lot of peer pressure to fit some culturally-sanctioned definition of "normal." But what is normal, really, when we all come from such different places and lead such different lives? When we can directly observe how our lifestyle and environment impact our biology, it becomes clear that difference, not similarity, is the true normal.

As a companion piece to my bio, I would like to share why I think it's cool to study and enjoy science.

Science is fun

Found here.

I first got really interested in science because of my AP Biology teacher. Mr. Cabral demonstrated his excitement and zest for biology every day. One day I got so caught up in what he was talking about -- the potential impact of genetically modified corn on crops throughout the country -- that as soon as I got home, I got on our AOL dial-up internet and started digging (this would have been the fall of 1996). I used AOL's clunky search engine and managed to find several interesting websites that talked about Archer Daniels Midland. I printed it out on three ring binder paper -- I think we were out of regular printer paper -- and brought it to him the next day. I remember how motivated I was to learn about ADM, and then how that internal motivation was reinforced by how excited Mr. Cabral was by my find.

This was my first experience with the kind of detective work science can entail. Yes you do experiments, you do labwork or fieldwork, you collect samples or make things blow up or work with stuff that smells. And there is a sense in adventure to that. But another important piece of the work of science is setting out with a question, and doing the sleuthing necessary to find out the answer for yourself.

That will never stop being fun for me.

Science is logical
Fun is what got me started on science, the constant sense of discovery and the enjoyment of developing expertise where no one else has it. But what has kept me in science has been an increasing love, even total devotion, to the idea of the scientific method.

Castle and Beckett, from one of my
favorite detective shows, Castle.

The scientific method is another place where the metaphor of the detective is useful. A detective has a question: “Who dunnit?” And then, if she’s a good detective, she develops a hypothesis about who she thinks did it, then methodically tests her hypothesis. If she finds her hypothesis is not supported, she produces a new hypothesis to try again, based on what she has learned. If her hypothesis is supported, she likely will want more evidence to continue to better support her hypothesis.

The reason I love this method is that, if you are willing to really become a good detective, you can detect unintentional and intentional bias. Some conclusions in science, especially the older stuff, and especially stuff on humans that is related to sex or race, was biased by the preconceptions of who performed and interpreted the work. The entire field of women’s reproductive physiology is tainted by early, false observations by a twelfth century monk that women are not human, that they have a seven chambered uterus, that women can decide on the sex of their babies by lying down a certain way, and wicked women will choose to have girls (Rodnite Lemay 1992). Even research in the twentieth century indicated that the sweat of menstruating women makes babies die and flowers wilt (Bryant et al. 1977; Freeman et al. 1934; Macht 1924). And of course, none of these things are true.

I believe that reality of science always wins. We are constantly becoming more aware of implicit bias and honest mistakes, we are constantly developing new methodologies to test our questions. My students, or my students’ students, will probably find things wrong with my own work and modify or correct it some day. This is very exciting to me!

Science solves important problems
I am a biological anthropologist. That means that I am interested in human evolutionary biology, and in understanding the interaction of biology and culture in the production of a human being. I think we can all come up with problems science helps solve, from making cars and homes more energy efficient, to saving endangered species. Biological anthropology can help answer these from the perspective of human ancestry, evolution and behavior. For instance, it’s great that we are making cars more energy efficient, but how do we change usage patterns? How do we get people to drive less? Really, how do we get a species that evolved to consider short and medium term problems and be selfish, to think altruistically and really long term?

In my corner of the field, bio anthro can help answer the following (and more):

How does environment and lifestyle impact our hormones?
Why do some people have a harder time having babies than others?
What is the impact of our changing environment, to one where we are sitting around more and eating more, on our health?
Does psychological stress impact our physical health? Can sexism or racism have real effects on the body?
How does moving from one country to another change your hormones?
Is taking the pill good for you?
Does what you do as a pregnant woman really matter that much to the health of your baby?

And that’s just the beginning.

Anyone can love science
I want more people, and more different kinds of people, to do science. But I also just want more people to realize how exciting it is to read and learn science. Becoming an engaged science reader, even as someone who already is a scientist, has been a wonderful experience for me. I have developed an appreciation for insects, found out about variation in circadian rhythms, and fallen in love with rivers.

I have realized that there is a lot of great science out there, not just biological anthropology, and it’s all worth fighting for. I have taught a lot of non-science majors since becoming a professor – literally hundreds and hundreds. And when I talk to them, many of them explain that the reason they hate science is that someone made them feel stupid: a teacher, a fellow student, sometimes a relative. I’ve heard several explicit stories where a student was told by a teacher that they weren’t good at science. I’ve had students break down in tears as they describe the sexism and racism that has made them decide science wasn’t for them.

And so, because of the rudeness of another person, the oppression of a system, or a series of incidents that just become too much to bear, they turned away from one of the most logical, exciting, and natural ways of thinking about the world. And many began to dislike it, then mistrust it, then not believe anything they heard about it. And who can blame a young person for turning away from a field, if that is what they are up against?

Nothing, and no one, should turn people away from science, because anyone can love science. Even if you never take another class on it or pick up a single textbook, even if you don’t become a scientist or educator or writer or any of the many jobs where you can use science, you can revel in the beauty of a photograph, the stories of triumph over adversity, the excitement of discovery. You miss out on the simple human pleasure of satisfying curiosity about the natural world if you don’t read science. In addition to improving access and eliminating oppression so that more people can excel in science, we need to make it possible for people to just learn and love it.

One of my favorite things about being a scientist is that I get to hang out with other scientists. At conferences, other scientists present talks or posters to talk about their latest research. If you listen closely to these conversations, along with the jargon, and the statistics, and the graphs and tables and lightning-fast discussions of various technical methodologies, you will also hear people abruptly and delightedly exclaim: “Isn’t this just so cool?”

Yes. Yes, it is.

References
Bryant, J., Heathcote, D., & Pickles, V. (1977). THE SEARCH FOR "MENOTOXIN" The Lancet, 309 (8014) DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(77)92199-7
Freeman W, Looney JM, and Small RR. 1934. Studies on the phytotoxic index II. Menstrual toxin ("menotoxin"). Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 52(2):179-183.
Macht D. 1924. Influence of menotoxin on the coagulation of blood. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 24(3):213-220.
Rodnite Lemay H. 1992. Womens Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus' de Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries: State University of New York Press.

Around the web: belated mother's day edition

2011-06-06T12:19:00.002-05:00

Apologies for the re-post, it was the only way to save the post and comments with the correct tags after the Blogger meltdown the other day!

I've been accumulating a lot of mother-y links lately, thought I would share. First two Mother's Day columns that remind us that we shouldn't just put Mom on a pedestal and give her some chocolate one day a year, but think in a more systematic way about the oppression of women and children worldwide. Read this one by Esther Cepeda, and this one by Nicholas Kristof.

Fertility

Women see Georgia O'Keefe art as erotic around ovulation. I'm not sure this really qualifies as evolutionary psychology, or needs that framework to understand that libido is higher near ovulation, which would increase the chances one would find erotic art extra erotic at that time.

Birth

Chimps give birth like humans. Very cool. I guess we didn't notice until now because they are so solitary when they birth?

Cesarean sections are a major factor in maternal death. I don't like how this article seems to blame the mother, given the way interventions seem to shunt many women towards C-sections whether they want one or not. But there are certainly many factors to consider in this issue, including the mother's past health and the kinds of protocols used at the location where she is giving birth.

Cutting the cord too soon. This is an interesting piece in Time about the timing of cord clamping and its impact on respiratory issues in infants. Many birth centers and hospitals are advocating for a later time to clamp the cord for this and other reasons.

Mothering of all kinds

Hope for teenage mothers. This was a great story about a great program to help teen mothers have more success in school and beyond.

The amount of time a woman breastfeeds is related to her race and income. Not surprising, given that lactation support services are probably harder to come by, and that women who must earn an income can't necessarily afford to go without pay for twelve weeks (that is the minimum maternity leave we get in the US, based on the Family Medical Leave Act, and most places give only that minimum). Even those women who do manage to get into a rhythm with breastfeeding lose it when they return to work, not just because of those short twelve weeks, but because few employers have workplaces set up for pumping.

Amy Poehler's acceptance speech at the Time 100. She discusses the many other women (dare I say allomothers?) who support her as she raises her children and has a career. I may have teared up a little. Okay, I shut my office door and cried.

What measles vaccine refusal really costs. This is something parents should care about.

A hilarious account from a father about all the things you need to worry about -- and expect to be judged upon -- when having a child.

Finally, while this went around the interwebs when Dr. Isis wrote it the first time, re-read her AGORA post about why it's all right to not be your mother.

Miscellaneous ladybusiness

The enduring gender gap in pay. Sigh.

Michele Bachelet should be everyone's hero, if what I read in this story is any indication.

We can no longer escape the reality that BPAs (and other associated bisphenols, which unfortunately are what are being replaced in plastics that claim to be BPA-free) are endocrine disruptors that have negative consequences for health. Well, unless you're Coca Cola. Then you are going to put your fingers in your ears and go "lalala!"

A lovely post on feminist reactions to street harassment. Another, very powerful read: kill me or leave me alone.

An important read about the use of language in journalistic storytelling, and the sexist way the New York Times originally covered the brutal gang rape of a little girl.

Historic STD posters. Were some sexist? Of course. But it only makes me want one for my office more, if for its ironic value.

Do girls steal some of their mother’s beauty? Sex bias in parental investment

2011-05-17T18:05:00.000-05:00

Sons and daughters and differential parental investment

One of my favorite rhetorical tricks is asking my students a question that has an obvious answer based on cultural expectations, but is wrong. So every year, when I start to teach my students about parental investment, I ask:

Who is harder to raise, sons or daughters?

I’ve asked by a show of hands and with iClickers, over the years, and the room of 750 is almost unanimous: daughters are harder to raise. So, then I get off the stage and walk around a bit. What do you mean by that? I ask.

Girls cause more gray hairs.
Girls cause more trouble when they start to like boys.
Girls are more work, and cost more money, since they shop all the time.
Girls talk back more.

And of course, there is always the saying that girls steal some of their mother’s beauty.
So then I show them this:

From Helle et al 2002.

Here is a graph of maternal longevity based on the number of sons or daughters they have. This data was based on a historical population from Finland from 1640-1870 using church records (Helle et al 2002). As you can see, the more sons mothers bear, the shorter their lifespans. You see the opposite for daughters. So sons have a negative impact, and daughters have a positive impact. This same trend has been found in records from a Flemish village (van de Putte et al 2003, 2004), where sons negatively impact lifespan but not daughters. Interestingly, data from church records from the field site where I work in rural Poland provides a slightly different picture: every offspring of either sex reduced lifespan by about 95 weeks (Jasienska et al 2006).

From Jasienska et al 2006.

Once students see these graphs, they quickly realize what is going on. Generally speaking, girls help mothers more at home in terms of chores and alloparenting. And in many cultures, particularly the historical ones studied so far, sons are costly because parents invest more in them, to help launch their own families. Daughters, not so much. In the Polish population, there may be other factors where daughter investment is important, or it is just costly to have so many offspring and you have maternal depletion regardless of daughter help.

Sex bias in parental investment is an important part of understanding both the biology and culture of parenting, and the developmental trajectories of children. The Trivers-Willard hypothesis, which has been tested many times in humans and animals, suggests that parents should invest more in sons when conditions are good, and more in daughters when conditions are bad. That is, when you have lots of resource you should put it towards a son in order to increase the chances he will have high reproductive success, since his is assumed to be more variable and high effort could lead to high reward. But in periods of low resource, daughters are a good bet because they are more likely to have at least some reproductive success no matter what.

From Hrdy 1990.

Of course, differential investment based on resources is further conflated in humans due to culture and, I would contend, our almost universal favor for patriarchy (Smuts 1995). Here is an image of an Indian family waiting at a clinic. There is a mother, an older son, and a twin boy and girl. Notice the extreme difference in health between the infant boy and girl – they are twins, yet the infant girl is emaciated. This is because in this population sons are always fed and cared for first, and whatever is left over, if there’s anything, is given to daughters.

So, parental investment can have real effects on the parent in terms of lifespan, and perhaps also their own future reproductive capabilities. Further, the conditions under which you may have children can vary, but how much a parent chooses to invest in their children varies too.

The piece of this that may be toughest to parse out, particularly in humans, is how the condition of the mother (or parents) can vary, and how that variation impacts the sex ratio of their children. In some species, like red deer, it is easier to imagine a mechanism: these animals have diapause, a period where their embryos are dormant until it is a good time to gestate and bear them. It is easier to insert some kind of selection process into a period where several embryos are all “frozen” and sex has been determined. But what about humans that produce singletons and invest huge, overlapping amounts of support to their children over decades? How would a sex bias based on maternal condition operate? And is there anything the offspring can do about it?

Changes in maternal breast size during pregnancy

It turns out that measurements as easy as stepping on a scale, and knowing your bra size, can begin to unpack the answer. First, a confession: I consider the author of this paper Andrzej Galbarczyk more than a colleague, but a friend. Andrzej is the graduate student who oversaw my Polish field site last season (Mogielica Human Ecology Study Site, director Dr. Grazyna Jasienska). He has translated consent forms and surveys for me and we’ve had many valuable and important conversations about my fieldwork. He is a smart, kind and thoughtful person and scholar. So, I let him see an early draft of this post to make sure I understood his point of view.

Galbarczyk performed an internet survey in Poland with 120 women, where he asked them to report their pre-pregnancy weight and bra size, their bra size directly after giving birth, and the sex of their offspring. He found two notable differences in these women: mothers of daughters weighed less before pregnancy, but had a greater changes in breast size during pregnancy.

The evidence about maternal pre-pregnancy weight is consistent with the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, as mothers who had sons were more likely to be heavier, and thus have more resource to invest. The second significant difference, that mothers with daughters had larger breasts after pregnancy, seems could be argued either way: Galbarczyk argues that it supports Trivers-Willard because mothers of sons could have been devoting more resource to growing their offspring rather than their breasts.

In other animals and primates particularly, mothers of male infants produce more energy-dense milk, yet mothers of female infants may produce a greater quantity of milk (Hinde 2009). And breast size is a pretty noisy signal of milk quality or quantity. So, what is the meaning of this difference in breast size?

Adaptation or physiological inevitability?

Galbarczyk suggests the difference is related to the evolutionary underpinnings of human female breasts. Women develop breasts around puberty, and though they certainly change in size and shape over time, keep them their whole lives. Other animals develop their mammary glands only shortly before lactating and then they regress again. Many contend that human breasts are an honest signal of fertility. This is at least partially confirmed by the correlation between breast size and estradiol concentrations (Jasienska et al 2006).

Galbarczyk thinks that the larger breasts seen in postpartum mothers to daughters may be a way to attract a mate for parental care. Perhaps this would help where she has given birth to the less-favored sex and needs to really convince him to participate; this could be a signal from the mother or the female fetus. Or maybe by appearing more attractive, she can have another reproductive opportunity, which would give her a chance to have a son.

You all know how I feel about evolutionary storytelling. In certain ways I do find this particular argument compelling, from the perspective of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. But the evidence for the adaptive scenario around breast size is circumstantial.

Also, I don’t want this story to detract from some very interesting data: remember that Galbarczyk found that in this population, mothers of daughters weigh less before pregnancy, and develop larger breasts afterwards. Very cool. So perhaps we should consider a mechanistic, rather than adaptive explanation?

I have two thoughts about this, both related to androgens (androgens are the class of hormone that testosterone falls under). First, I wonder if there is an effect of fetal androgens from a male fetus on breast size. If so, mothers of daughters would have larger breasts simply because they aren’t having their breast tissue growth or density suppressed by androgens. It could simply be physiology that doesn’t have adaptive meaning.

Second, the mothers of sons were heavier before pregnancy. Heavier individuals tend to have higher circulating insulin levels, and the ovary can respond to higher insulin by producing more androgens (Poretsky 1991, Dimitrakakis et al 2004). So you could have a suppressive effect on breast size from that avenue as well. You don’t need an adaptive scenario for either of these mechanisms, just a consequence of how hormones work.

I would love to see Galbarczyk or someone else follow up on these thought-provoking results by measuring women, rather than relying on self-report, and by measuring their estradiol, progesterone and androgens. Understanding the different factors and motivations that lead to sex differential investment and outcome is a great field of study, and this work gets us thinking in a new direction.

References

Dimitrakakis C, Jones RA, Liu A, & Bondy CA (2004). Breast cancer incidence in postmenopausal women using testosterone in addition to usual hormone therapy. Menopause (New York, N.Y.), 11 (5), 531-5 PMID: 15356405

Galbarczyk A (2011). Unexpected changes in maternal breast size during pregnancy in relation to infant sex: An evolutionary interpretation. American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council PMID: 21544894

Helle, S. (2002). Sons Reduced Maternal Longevity in Preindustrial Humans Science, 296 (5570), 1085-1085 DOI: 10.1126/science.1070106

Hinde K (2009). Richer milk for sons but more milk for daughters: Sex-biased investment during lactation varies with maternal life history in rhesus macaques. American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, 21 (4), 512-9 PMID: 19384860

Hrdy, S. (1990). Sex bias in nature and in history: A late 1980s reexamination of the “biological origins” argument American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 33 (S11), 25-37 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330330504

Jasienska G, Nenko I, & Jasienski M (2006). Daughters increase longevity of fathers, but daughters and sons equally reduce longevity of mothers. American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, 18 (3), 422-5 PMID: 16634019

Poretsky L, Seto-Young D, Shrestha A, Dhillon S, Mirjany M, Liu HC, Yih MC, & Rosenwaks Z (2001). Phosphatidyl-inositol-3 kinase-independent insulin action pathway(s) in the human ovary. The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism, 86 (7), 3115-9 PMID: 11443175

#scimom and me

2011-04-26T17:36:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking on this #scimom meme for some time. To be honest, I’ve had a hard time figuring out what I could write that would be a useful or thoughtful contribution, despite the fact that I tend to be pretty comfortable mixing personal stories in with the science I write about on this blog. Heck, I’ve even shared my birth experience for all to read!

But writing directly on the intersection of science and mothering? That is somehow a much more frightening prospect, even though I am in a friendly discipline. It is hard to face the reality that my colleagues respect my reproductive decisions, in the historical context where that has not always been the case in academia, and in the personal context where my decisions are judged and challenged by others all the time, even if they aren’t colleagues: first because I am a woman, then because I was pregnant, and now because I am a mother.

So, I want to tell you two things: how I make my life work, and why I do it at all.

Putting in the time
I get asked a lot how I balance my life, how I get any sleep, how I have a tenure track job and a blog and am an amateur athlete and mother all at the same time. The answer is that balance is not attainable, but that I’m really happy exactly as things are.

The supermagical key to being a mother and an academic scientist is: you need to devote a lot of time to both. As romantic and wonderful as it sounds to try to do both at the same time, it almost never works. When young women ask me how I do it all, I answer that the two keys for success are social support and full time childcare. For me, that means a supportive partner and forty-five hours a week of childcare outside of my home.

Usually, the woman asking pauses. I can see the barely masked horror on her face as she realizes that I don’t have a happy existence where I do puzzles with my daughter with one hand while tapping at my laptop with the other. I look like a nice enough person, so she rejects what I’ve told her -- that my child is out of my sight most of the work week -- and tries again. “Okay, but really, how do you do it?” And I reply that I need social support and full time childcare. This is how I address the can’t-be-in-two-places-at-once problem. Some hours I do the puzzles, other hours I do the writing. I almost never mix the two.

At the beginning of each semester, my husband and I sit down with our schedules: our regular faculty meeting times, lab meetings, office hours, teaching hours, and how much time we want to exercise. We also look at our daughter’s schedule, since she has swimming twice a week. Then we slowly work out an equitable arrangement of pickups and drop-offs that we stick to, with the closest thing we can approximate to religious fervor, for the whole semester. I no longer go out for social coffees or lunches and stay at my desk the entire day (though at least I am standing). When our daughter goes to sleep, I often work for a few hours, though I certainly don’t do this every night unless I have a major deadline approaching. This is the reality of my job if I want to be a mom and academic.

Can you be a scientist and mom if you don’t have social support and full time childcare? Yes, though I would contend you need at least one of the two. And here’s why: I need a supportive partner because, when the mommy guilt kicks in, he is the one who encourages me to go to the extra team practice, or stay the extra hour at work I need to hit my deadline. He is the one who reminds me that he wants a close relationship with our daughter, too, so bugger off and let him cuddle her for once. You don’t need a partner to do these things for you, but you do probably need someone to hold the right perspective for you in those moments you feel crazy.

And I need the full time childcare because this whole idea that you can get all your work done during naps, or every night once your kid goes down, is a fantasy we need to stop entertaining. Just because our job is flexible doesn’t mean it can fit into fewer hours unless you, like Hermione Granger, got special permission to use a Time-Turner. And while this job doesn’t necessarily require a sixty hour workweek, it does require at least forty. So if you don’t have at least forty kid-free hours a week you will not make adequate progress.

Why I do this
I enjoy my job. I even love it. But I love it because I made it a job that I wanted. In its worst moments I am still filling out too much paperwork, dealing with too much bureaucracy, or student cheating, or people who do not appreciate the contributions one makes to the discipline by, say, blogging or teaching.

But this job’s best moments far outweigh the worst, and if I didn’t feel that way, I would find something else to do. So far, in this job I have gotten to pursue the research agenda I find the most interesting, which has had me pursuing new methodologies, new areas of study, and new ways of thinking about female physiology and health in a way I find exciting on a daily basis. I have been able to effectively mentor about a dozen undergrads and several grad students. I have created learning environments that make me proud to teach in a university setting. And I have been able to put on my ranty pants when it comes to evolutionary psychology.

I am going to tell you a secret. I do this job, I am this kind of person, because I want to be a role model for other young women, that they can have jobs and have kids and still have other things going on in their lives.

But really, most of all, I do this for my own daughter, far more than for any of you reading today.

I do this so that when my daughter plays house with her friends, she introduces the idea that the Daddy does the dishes, or puts the baby to sleep. Already my daughter likes to play gym or office as well as house. That’s not to delegitimize parenting and domestic work, but to simply place it alongside the other activities people do. None of these activities should be particularly privileged above each other as being more feminine, OR more important.

I do this so that she has a role model when her first teacher says girls just aren’t as good at math. I want her to remember that Mommy and Daddy do science every day, and that that science requires a lot of math.

Finally, I do this so that she has a role model to hold on to when her first classmate says that only boys are good at sports. I want her to remember that Mommy is the one with the big muscles in that moment, not only so that she can have big muscles one day but so that she knows I can kick that kid’s ass.

Being a #scimom
This #scimom meme is compelling for all sorts of reasons. I hope it will make scientist mothers less invisible, and de-scrutinize women’s decisions, whatever they may be. I’ve said before that there are ways in which women are conditioned to be risk-averse over the course of their lives, and a lot of this has to do with the scrutiny, the drama, the push and pull of differing expectations on our time, our lives, and our bodies.

There are external factors that need to be fixed like maternal leave, and people that need gentle reminders about their implicit biases. And there are changes that women need to make within, where they work to operate against their internalized sexism. These battles feel especially public, and make me at least feel especially vulnerable, as a working mother. That’s why this is all so hard to talk about.

Women are incredibly powerful, we just don’t act like it often enough. Perhaps the #scimom meme will contradict the risk aversion and provide us with the courage to gang up on the problems of the world. This story on Michelle Bachelet has been on my mind ever since I read it last week. Read about Bachelet, and think on her life and what she is trying to accomplish right now. She knows it takes women to create a revolution. Let’s move things along.

AAPA symposium on Evolution through the Life Course: Why we shouldn't prescribe hormonal contraception to twelve year olds

2011-04-20T11:12:00.007-05:00

When Dr. Grażyna Jasieńska invited me to give a talk on my thoughts around adolescents and hormonal contraceptives as part of an invited symposium on “Evolution through the Life Course,” I thought it was going to be an embarrassing experience, because I would not be presenting the quantitative data more common at the American Association of Physical Anthropology meetings. But I can’t say no to Grażyna, who has served as a wonderful mentor and cheerleader for almost ten years. Besides, if I can rant on a blog, surely I can let myself rant in a talk every now and then.

What follows is a bloggy version of the talk I gave Thursday the 14th, at the meetings in Minneapolis. Writing this post will, I hope, help me begin to turn this into a manuscript. Normally I wouldn’t dare write something on a blog that I would eventually want to publish. However, this is a piece that would benefit enormously from the kinds of conversations that happen in the science blogosphere. Further, I hope to publish it as an opinion piece well-studded with evidence. I think that by sharing my early thoughts now, my later thoughts will be more sophisticated.

* * *

Variation in adolescent menstrual cycles, doctor-patient relationships, and why we shouldn't prescribe hormonal contraceptives to twelve year olds

From Vihko and Apter (1984).

Vihko and Apter (1984) showed that there is variation in age at menarche, and that that variation tells us something about how long it should take an adolescent to start to achieve regular ovulatory cycles. The later your age at menarche, the longer you will experience irregular cycles. However, even in girls with ages at menarche twelve and under, it still took on average five years to achieve regular cycles. This indicates that, in adolescents, irregularity is in fact regular.

Lipson and Ellison (1992) have also looked at age-related variation in progesterone concentrations. Progesterone is the sex steroid hormone secreted by the ovary after ovulation, which is in the luteal phase. Luteal phase function is the one that seems to be the most variable within and between populations, and so progesterone is a great way to understand how female bodies vary. They found that those with the lowest hormone concentrations were on the extreme ends of their sample – 18-19 year olds, and 40-44 year olds and, as you might expect, hormone concentrations were higher as you moved towards the middle of that age range. So both younger and older women have low hormone concentrations relative to women in their reproductive prime, which is 25-35 years of age. But of course, this means that low hormone concentrations when you are in those early or late age ranges means that you are normal for your age.

From Lipson and Ellison (1992).

Now, the United States has the highest rate of unintended teen pregnancy among industrialized nations. So I can understand why there are so many papers, and such a great effort, to get young girls on hormonal contraception (Clark et al. 2004; Clark 2001; Gerschultz et al. 2007; Gupta et al. 2008; Krishnamoorthy et al. 2008; Ott et al. 2002; Roye 1998; Roye and Seals 2001; Sayegh et al. 2006; Zibners et al. 1999).

But I’ve noticed two things: first, that hormonal contraception is used imperfectly in this population, with some estimates that 10-15% of adolescents on hormonal contraception still get pregnant (Gupta et al. 2008). Second, discontinuation rates for hormonal contraception in young girls are high, with many girls complaining about side effects, particularly breakthrough bleeding (Clark et al. 2004; Gupta et al. 2008; Zibners et al. 1999). I have to admit some concern over the fact that many of the papers I read that mentioned these discontinuation rates and side effects were almost condescending in their tone. The implication was that the side effects weren’t a big deal.

One of the ways clinicians and sexual health educators are trying to improve hormonal contraceptive use in adolescents is to emphasize their off-label use as a “regulator” – that is, the pill can regulate your cycle, regulate your mood, regulate your skin. The idea is to emphasize the positive effects of hormonal contraception to combat the side effects young girls both worry about, and actually experience. This also tends to produce campaigns and commercials with images of idealized young women that young girls would want to model themselves after – skinny, confident, and of course very feminine.

From here.

Despite the criticisms I’ve begun to name, there are substantial benefits to hormonal contraception in adult women. When women take hormonal contraception in adulthood, particularly in the 25-35 year range, they are very effective contraception. The pill also may reduce risk of reproductive cancers, though results are mixed (Collaborative Group 1996; Collaborative Group 2008; Kahlenborn et al. 2006; Marchbanks et al. 2002; Modan et al. 2001; Narod et al. 1998; Smith et al. 2003). And of course, off-label use to treat painful periods or premenstrual syndrome can be beneficial for many (Fraser and Kovacs 2003).

However, the benefits of hormonal contraception in adults seems to be limited to more industrialized populations. Bentley (1994; 1996) first raised these concerns. She discussed the possible genetic, ethnic and developmental differences between women that could produce variation in pharmacokinetics, which could in turn vastly change the experience and efficacy of hormonal contraception in a global context. Virginia Vitzthum and others have also shown that there are high discontinuation rates and complaints of breakthrough bleeding in rural Bolivian women on hormonal contraception (Vitzthum and Ringheim 2005; Vitzthum et al. 2001). Other studies have shown similar discontinuation rates and side effects in other non-industrial populations (de Oliveira D'Antona et al. 2009; Gubhaju 2009).

You might notice that the issues in non-industrial populations mirror what has been seen in industrial adolescent girls. This isn’t surprising, given that they also have in common fewer ovulatory cycles and lower hormone concentrations.

So, I worry about whether the clear benefits of hormonal contraception in adulthood can be applied to adolescent girls, some as young as eleven or twelve years old. With the imperfect administration and high discontinuation rates, they aren’t that great as contraception. But there are additional, physiological concerns. What are the effects of giving doses of hormones to young girls with newly developing hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axes? The variation I mentioned before, where irregularity is regular in adolescence, is because the feedback loop between the brain and the gonads is priming and developing in this period, and this takes time. The sensitivity of the feedback loop is being set. If we flood this feedback loop with extra hormone, does this alter its sensitivity? It is a question worth testing.

Further, if we flood this immature system that normally has irregular cycles and low hormones, are we increasing lifetime estrogen exposure? High lifetime estrogen exposure is a risk factor for breast cancer and other reproductive cancers. Is it possible that hormonal contraception in adolescence could have the opposite effect of hormonal contraception in adulthood? Again, we need to test this hypothesis.

Future work on this topic includes asking whether adolescent menstrual cycle variation is any different today than twenty to thirty years ago. The only data we have (at least that I know of) are from the aforementioned 1984 and 1992 papers, and maybe some derivative papers using the same datasets. But we all know there have been massive changes in body composition, diet and health in the last few decades that deserve consideration. So, this work needs to be re-done on a current population.

We also need to ask how adolescent reproductive functioning varies within and between populations. While this has been studied extensively in adult women, we don’t have a sense of adolescent population variation. This will give us a sense of what ecological variables produce variation not only in age at menarche, but in how long cycle irregularity persists and reproductive hormone concentrations.

Some additional, provocative, post-meeting thoughts

Bristol Palin. Image from here.

In this symposium, Karen Kramer delivered a beautiful paper just before mine on teen pregnancy, and I had some great conversation with session participants and attendees, that has further evolved my own thinking on this issue. I want to say something just a little provocative:

While I think teen pregnancy should be avoided, culturally we overstate its dangers and consequences because we have a real problem with young people reproducing. This can lead young girls to overlook potentially more serious issues like sexually transmitted infections, HIV, and cervical cancer, all of which girls and women are at risk for if they use only hormonal contraception and have otherwise unprotected sex.

Let me explain two important points here. First, in most industrialized nations we are not set up well to support young mothers because of the way families are isolated, yet social support is a strong predictor of birth weight, postpartum depression, and labor progression (Collins et al. 1993; Feldman et al. 2000; Turner et al. 1990). So there are very strong and obvious reasons why teen pregnancy and motherhood can be incredibly challenging in industrialized environments. I wonder sometimes if that lack of cultural support is related to a fear that more young girls will get pregnant if they feel they have permission to procreate. This is similar to the argument in favor of abstinence-only sex ed: if they don’t know their options, or are shamed into believing this option is the worst possible one, then of course they won’t make them. But adults aren’t rational. I’m unsure why we expect adolescents to be.

We also need to consider population variation in adolescence and pregnancy. Variation in age at first birth in traditional populations is quite wide, from sixteen to almost twenty six years of age (Walker et al. 2006). In more traditional populations you see a lot of allomothering and grandmothering to support first time mothers, who are often teenagers (Hawkes 2003; Hrdy 2009; Kramer 2005; Kramer 2008). So, support systems are built in, and it does not alter the trajectory of your life in the same way teen pregnancy does in an industrialized population.

This range of variation in age at first birth, and the fact that most of those young mothers do just fine, perhaps even end up with higher reproductive success, leads me to my second point: the physiological evidence against teen pregnancy might be overstated. In her talk, Karen discussed a paper of hers in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that described the negative health outcomes of teen pregnancy (Kramer 2008). In it, she reviewed literature that suggests that when you control for lack of prenatal care, first pregnancy, and low socioeconomic status, the common assumption that pregnancy is harmful to teens is significantly weakened.

Further, in her own work with Pumé foragers in Venezuela, mothers under the age of fourteen were the only group to have greater infant mortality than the referent group of late reproducers (Kramer 2008). Yet when we teach young girls about their bodies, we tell them that their bodies are not equipped to have babies in their teens and that there are extreme consequences (in fact, I have said exactly this in the past). The reality is that those consequences are worst for very young teens, and may not be as significant in older teens.

Am I advocating teenagers get pregnant? Absolutely and unequivocally no. But I think they need access to correct information, not skewed information. This means telling them the truth about our uncertainties about the health implications for hormonal contraception in adolescence, it means educating them about the importance of barrier methods, and it means making sure they understand the health risks associated with unprotected sex.

This is a nuanced issue that requires nuanced thinking. Despite my concerns about adolescent hormone contraceptive use, there are problems with barrier methods as well, particularly when there may be a cultural bias against their use, or in situations when women cannot safely use contraception in an obvious way with their partner (Gupta et al. 2008). Again, what is important here is conveying correct information, so that each individual can weigh the pros and cons as they relate to her own context. This means it could be an excellent idea for some twelve year olds to be on hormonal contraception, and a terrible one for other girls through the age of twenty. It is going to have to be up to them.

I hope this post generates some thinking and some conversation, and I welcome people who might push me in a different direction than where I’m currently thinking. I am sharing this now, before putting it together as a manuscript, to provoke thoughts and comments.

References

Bentley GR (1994). Ranging hormones: do hormonal contraceptives ignore human biological variation and evolution? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 709, 201-3 PMID: 8154705

Bentley GR. 1996. Evidence for interpopulation variation in normal ovarian function and consequences for hormonal contraception. In: Rosetta LaM-T, C.G.N., editor. Variability in human fertility. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p 46-65.

Clark, L. (2004). Menstrual irregularity from hormonal contraception triggers significant reproductive health fears in adolescent girls Journal of Adolescent Health, 34 (2), 123-124 DOI: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2003.11.091

Clark, L. (2001). Will the Pill Make Me Sterile? Addressing Reproductive Health Concerns and Strategies to Improve Adherence to Hormonal Contraceptive Regimens in Adolescent Girls Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, 14 (4), 153-162 DOI: 10.1016/S1083-3188(01)00123-1

Collaborative group (1996). Breast cancer and hormonal contraceptives: collaborative reanalysis of individual data on 53 297 women with breast cancer and 100 239 women without breast cancer from 54 epidemiological studies The Lancet, 347 (9017), 1713-1727 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(96)90806-5

Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies of Ovarian Cancer, Beral V, Doll R, Hermon C, Peto R, & Reeves G (2008). Ovarian cancer and oral contraceptives: collaborative reanalysis of data from 45 epidemiological studies including 23,257 women with ovarian cancer and 87,303 controls. Lancet, 371 (9609), 303-14 PMID: 18294997

Collins, N., Dunkel-Schetter, C., Lobel, M., & Scrimshaw, S. (1993). Social support in pregnancy: Psychosocial correlates of birth outcomes and postpartum depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65 (6), 1243-1258 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.65.6.1243

D'Antona Ade O, Chelekis JA, D'Antona MF, & Siqueira AD (2009). Contraceptive discontinuation and non-use in Santarém, Brazilian Amazon. Cadernos de saude publica / Ministerio da Saude, Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz, Escola Nacional de Saude Publica, 25 (9), 2021-32 PMID: 19750389

Feldman PJ, Dunkel-Schetter C, Sandman CA, & Wadhwa PD (2000). Maternal social support predicts birth weight and fetal growth in human pregnancy. Psychosomatic medicine, 62 (5), 715-25 PMID: 11020102

Fraser IS, & Kovacs GT (2003). The efficacy of non-contraceptive uses for hormonal contraceptives. The Medical journal of Australia, 178 (12), 621-3 PMID: 12797849

Gerschultz KL, Sucato GS, Hennon TR, Murray PJ, & Gold MA (2007). Extended cycling of combined hormonal contraceptives in adolescents: physician views and prescribing practices. The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, 40 (2), 151-7 PMID: 17259055

Gubhaju, B. (2009). Barriers to Sustained Use of Contraception in Nepal: Quality of Care, Socioeconomic Status, and Method-Related Factors Biodemography and Social Biology, 55 (1), 52-70 DOI: 10.1080/19485560903054671

Gupta, N., Corrado, S., & Goldstein, M. (2008). Hormonal Contraception for the Adolescent Pediatrics in Review, 29 (11), 386-397 DOI: 10.1542/pir.29-11-386

Hawkes, K. (2003). Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity American Journal of Human Biology, 15 (3), 380-400 DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.10156

Hrdy SB. 2009. Mothers and others: the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding: Belknap Press.

Kahlenborn, C., Modugno, F., Potter, D., & Severs, W. (2006). Oral Contraceptive Use as a Risk Factor for Premenopausal Breast Cancer: A Meta-analysis Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 81 (10), 1290-1302 DOI: 10.4065/81.10.1290

Kramer, K. (2005). Children's Help and the Pace of Reproduction: Cooperative Breeding in Humans Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 14 (6), 224-237 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20082

Kramer KL (2008). Early sexual maturity among Pumé foragers of Venezuela: fitness implications of teen motherhood. American journal of physical anthropology, 136 (3), 338-50 PMID: 18386795

KRISHNAMOORTHY, N., SIMPSON, C., TOWNEND, J., HELMS, P., & MCLAY, J. (2008). Adolescent Females and Hormonal Contraception: A Retrospective Study in Primary Care Journal of Adolescent Health, 42 (1), 97-101 DOI: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2007.06.016

Lipson, S., & Ellison, P. (2008). Normative study of age variation in salivary progesterone profiles Journal of Biosocial Science, 24 (02) DOI: 10.1017/S0021932000019751

Marchbanks, P., McDonald, J., Wilson, H., Folger, S., Mandel, M., Daling, J., Bernstein, L., Malone, K., Ursin, G., Strom, B., Norman, S., Wingo, P., Burkman, R., Berlin, J., Simon, M., Spirtas, R., & Weiss, L. (2002). Oral Contraceptives and the Risk of Breast Cancer New England Journal of Medicine, 346 (26), 2025-2032 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa013202

Modan B, Hartge P, Hirsh-Yechezkel G, Chetrit A, Lubin F, Beller U, Ben-Baruch G, Fishman A, Menczer J, Struewing JP, Tucker MA, Wacholder S, & National Israel Ovarian Cancer Study Group (2001). Parity, oral contraceptives, and the risk of ovarian cancer among carriers and noncarriers of a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. The New England journal of medicine, 345 (4), 235-40 PMID: 11474660

Narod, S., Risch, H., Moslehi, R., Dørum, A., Neuhausen, S., Olsson, H., Provencher, D., Radice, P., Evans, G., Bishop, S., Brunet, J., Ponder, B., & Klijn, J. (1998). Oral Contraceptives and the Risk of Hereditary Ovarian Cancer New England Journal of Medicine, 339 (7), 424-428 DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199808133390702

Ott, M., Adler, N., Millstein, S., Tschann, J., & Ellen, J. (2002). The Trade-Off between Hormonal Contraceptives and Condoms among Adolescents Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 34 (1) DOI: 10.2307/3030227

ROYE, C. (1998). Condom use by hispanic and african-american adolescent girls who use hormonal contraception Journal of Adolescent Health, 23 (4), 205-211 DOI: 10.1016/S1054-139X(97)00264-4

Roye CF, & Seals B (2001). A qualitative assessment of condom use decisions by female adolescents who use hormonal contraception. The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care : JANAC, 12 (6), 78-87 PMID: 11723916

SAYEGH, M., FORTENBERRY, J., SHEW, M., & ORR, D. (2005). The developmental association of relationship quality, hormonal contraceptive choice and condom non-use among adolescent women Journal of Adolescent Health, 36 (2), 97-97 DOI: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2004.11.009

SMITH, J., GREEN, J., DEGONZALEZ, A., APPLEBY, P., PETO, J., PLUMMER, M., FRANCESCHI, S., & BERAL, V. (2003). Cervical cancer and use of hormonal contraceptives: a systematic review The Lancet, 361 (9364), 1159-1167 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(03)12949-2

Turner, R., Grindstaff, C., & Phillips, N. (1990). Social Support and Outcome in Teenage Pregnancy Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 31 (1) DOI: 10.2307/2137044

Vihko R, & Apter D (1984). Endocrine characteristics of adolescent menstrual cycles: impact of early menarche. Journal of steroid biochemistry, 20 (1), 231-6 PMID: 6231419

Vitzthum, V., & Ringheim, K. (2005). Hormonal Contraception and Physiology: A Research-based Theory of Discontinuation Due to Side Effects Studies in Family Planning, 36 (1), 13-32 DOI: 10.1111/j.1728-4465.2005.00038.x

Vitzthum, V. (2001). Vaginal bleeding patterns among rural highland Bolivian women: relationship to fecundity and fetal loss Contraception, 64 (5), 319-325 DOI: 10.1016/S0010-7824(01)00260-8

Walker, R., Gurven, M., Hill, K., Migliano, A., Chagnon, N., De Souza, R., Djurovic, G., Hames, R., Hurtado, A., Kaplan, H., Kramer, K., Oliver, W., Valeggia, C., & Yamauchi, T. (2006). Growth rates and life histories in twenty-two small-scale societies American Journal of Human Biology, 18 (3), 295-311 DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.20510

ZIBNERS, A., CROMER, B., & HAYES, J. (1999). Comparison of continuation rates for hormonal contraception among adolescents Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, 12 (2), 90-94 DOI: 10.1016/S1083-3188(00)86633-4

The Scorpion and the Frog: don't try and tell me why I do this

2011-04-16T09:15:00.000-05:00

On April 8th, I was fortunate to be in the company of Matt Richtel, Scott White, Diana Yates and Dan Simons as part of a talk and panel discussion sponsored by the Beckman Institute and the College of Media at the University of Illinois. Matt Richtel is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist for the New York Times who has written on distracted driving, your brain on computers, and, as many of you know, neuroscientists on a raft. Matt also writes a comic and has published two works of fiction. It was a pleasure getting to know a journalist so committed to respecting scientists and getting the story, and the science, right.

Matt began the event with a short, engaging talk on the interaction between scientists and journalists. He started with the fable of the scorpion and the frog, yet never quite resolved for the audience whether he saw the scorpion as the journalist or scientist. He shared several experiences with scientists who were uninterested in talking to the press, some who pushed him to add complexity or uncertainty to a story, and some who managed to convey simple, compelling ideas in their quotes. I want to briefly describe what he said about these three populations.

For those uninterested in talking to the press, Matt suggested that, for some, this may be due to a distrust of the press, or fear of how one will be represented to colleagues. He described a time that a female scientist agreed to talk to him, on the condition of not having her picture taken for the story. She was a former model, she explained, and didn’t want her image associated with her science, lest her colleagues take her less seriously. Unfortunately, I think there are plenty of fields where this is a legitimate issue, if past issues in the science blogosphere are any indication. That said, I think he makes a good point that while you do take a risk in talking to the press, and there may be times where your work isn’t perfectly represented (and even times where it is grossly misrepresented), most of our colleagues know not to just blame the scientist. Besides, if you have a colleague that is that punitive, they aren’t a very good colleague!

Matt told a story about a scientist who worked with him on a piece, then backed out and asked that all of his material be removed. Over the course of a difficult conversation, the scientist revealed his fear that his colleagues would judge his quotes as overstating the results of the evidence. Eventually, they worked out an alternative quote that simply added in a qualifier (I believe it was the word “almost” but I don’t remember). Keeping the qualifier, or pushing for its inclusion, can satisfy a lot of scientists talking to the press, and in doing so it adds a necessary element of uncertainty. The scientific method s not about proving things, it is about disproving them. You want to disprove the null hypothesis (an example of this would be that your hypothesis is that estrogen varies with lifestyle, and the null hypothesis is that there is no difference in estrogen based on lifestyle). And, when you get evidence that supports your hypothesis, this doesn’t prove a thing. All it does is support the hypothesis in the context of that particular study’s parameters. Given this understanding of the scientific method, perhaps journalists could see how much scientists chafe at bold conclusions or words like “proof” or “fact!”

Finally, Matt described a class of scientists who are not only good to work with, but provide statements that convey complex ideas in an engaging, easy to understand way. He calls these scientists Quote Monkeys. Quote Monkeys not only distill a difficult idea for a lay audience, yet convey excitement and delight in science. He used the example from his “your brain on computers” series where one scientist said “Bring back boredom!” This captures the idea that not multi-tasking all the time, that having downtime to process events rather than always being plugged in, is good for our brains. (So, if you’re reading this on your phone in the bathroom, put the phone down. You know who you are!)

After Matt’s wonderful talk, Scott, Diana and I served as panelists, with Dan Simons moderating. Scott White is a professor in Aerospace Engineering who has had some media attention for his supercool self-healing materials. I appreciated his approachable, dry style. Diana Yates is a journalist who covers the life science beat for the University of Illinois News Bureau, and she has done an amazing job over the years showing the rest of the world why the science that happens here at Illinois is so exciting. Dan Simons co-authored a great popular science book The Invisible Gorilla (I bought it for my brother in law this past winter before I realized Dan was on campus), and has a social media presence as well, curating interesting material mostly on cognitive psychology. We each gave a little introduction to ourselves regarding our experiences with journalists; I largely talked about how social media is what has connected me to science journalists, and my experiences with CNN.com and USA Today writers (both positive).

The questions we received were good ones, ranging from how to keep from looking like a fool while talking to journalists to how to write science stories without resorting to clichés or self-help hooks. For the first issue, we discussed the importance of asking a journalist for her/his timeline (is your story due in 20 minutes, hours or days?) and that one should request seeing the quotes that will be used before the story goes live. You also don’t have to say yes to every request; if the timeline is too short or you have looked up the journalist and they or their employer aren’t reputable, just move on. For the second question, I talked about reframing the question that captures the audience’s interest from “how does this affect me?” to “why should I care?” or “why is this cool?” I mentioned Ed Yong as an excellent example of a writer who delights the reader, regardless of whether he is discussing algae, racism, or bat fellatio. He shares his excitement and is a guide, not a sage; I think Ed’s work is compelling for the same reasons NPR’s Radiolab is so good. You get the sense the narrator is learning along with you, though in Ed’s case I think you also get the sense that he has scientific expertise to add credibility to his analysis and what he chooses to cover.

One audience member made a rather bold, critical claim that journalists and scientists were in cahoots to promote the journalists and get the scientists tenure. The other panelists handled this one delicately. I did not (what, you are surprised?). Academic readers of this blog are likely aware that writing a blog is a professional risk, as is talking to journalists, especially when one is a junior faculty member. As John Hawks said in his panel on blogging in the academy at Science Online 2011, blogging is at best a tertiary activity. But if you use your blog not only to reach out to layfolks but also to make broader claims about your field, you may have critics as well as fans. I know the risks I take every time I put up a new blog post or agree to talk to a journalist. But I have also decided that my enjoyment, and the benefits to my own goals of scientific outreach, far outweigh the risks. I want women to read my posts and pass them on to their daughters. I want readers of sites like Jezebel and Feministe getting excited about biology. And I want every person who has found evolutionary psychology claims intuitive to think on the bias that produces that false intuition.

When I was a child, my parents had the following Man of La Mancha quote in our bathroom, on a poster directly opposite the toilet:

Too much sanity
May be madness
But the maddest of all
Is to see life as it is
And not as it should be.

I learned to read with that quote. I sang it in my head. And when I was younger, it meant absolutely nothing to me. I don’t remember the moment exactly when it went from something I chanted in my head to something that defined my own outlook on the world. But I want to make this job into the job it should be, not the job it is. To me, that means blogging, talking to laypeople about science, and interacting with science communicators and journalists.

But don’t tell me I do it to get tenure.

Come hang out with the cool kids: the 2011 American Association of Physical Anthropology Meetings, Minneapolis

2011-04-12T14:49:00.000-05:00

Biological anthropologists are a cool lot. We study bones, death, fossils, phylogenetics (how things are related to each other), hominin evolution, behavior, reproduction, physiology, primates, communication, cognition, genetics, migration and more. We study how these things vary, what produces their variation, and why that variation is meaningful. So the AAPAs tend to be a fun conference full of lively conversation, strong sessions, and engaged attendees.

Plus, you see a lot of people wearing sandals with socks.

This year, that particular population might be slightly underrepresented, because we are having the meetings in Minneapolis, where snow is predicted on Friday and Saturday. While that has impacted the wardrobe that will be crammed into my carry-on luggage tomorrow, I still expect a great meeting, because there are several wonderful symposia planned, a lunch event for women in biological anthropology, and a BANDIT Happy Hour on Saturday at 5pm. Julienne Rutherford has curated a great list that can be found by reading the posts under her AAPA label.

Me? I'm going to self-promote, but I'll encourage you to do the same in the comments.

On Thursday morning you can find me in Session 3, the invited podium symposium chaired by Grazyna Jasienska and Diana Sherry entitled "Evolution and Health over the Life Course" in Salon C. The session starts at 8am with what looks to be a great talk by Beverly Strassmann, "Evolution and health from infancy to adolescence in the Dogon of Mali."

My talk is at 9:30am, is co-authored with my former students Theresa Emmerling and Ashley Higgins, and is entitled "Variation in adolescent menstrual cycles, doctor-patient relationships, and why we shouldn't prescribe hormonal contraceptives to twelve year olds." I'll be talking about what we know of adolescent menstrual cycle variation, what we know of the impact of hormonal contraception on different reproductively-aged women, and some pilot data from our focus groups on doctor-patient relationships. I hope the last bit will provide a bit of framework for understanding how and why US women use hormonal contraception in such comparatively high proportions for off-label use.

On Friday afternoon, you can find me in Session 31, the invited podium symposium chaired by Julienne Rutherford and me entitled "Eating for Two: Maternal Ecology and Nutrition in Human and Non-Human Primates" in Marquette V/VI. The session starts at 2pm with a talk by Betsey Abrams and Julienne Rutherford entitled "Risky business: an evolutionary perspective on placental nutrient transport and postpartum hemorrage." I am VERY excited to hear this paper!

My talk is next, at 2:15pm, and is called "Pro- and anti-inflammatory food proteins and their impact on maternal ecology." This talk is co-authored by two of my students, Laura Klein and Katherine Tribble. I'll be doing a bit of a review of the literature to place this topic in context, and discussing some pilot data.

I may be biased, but the rest of this symposium is pretty kick-ass.

2:30 Yildirim et al speak on vaginal microbial communities and maternal ecology (University of Illinois research!)
2:45 Milich et al discuss habitat quality and reproduction in female red colobus monkeys (University of Illinois research!)
3:00 Julienne Rutherford has prepared a version of her talk to be shown at 3pm on energetics and life history plasticity in callitrichine primates as she is on maternal hiatus
3:15 Valeggia shares insights into the metaboliv regulation of postpartum fecundity
3:30 Nyberg discusses HPA activity in pregnant and lactating Tsimane' women
3:45 Miller shares recent work on breastmilk immunity in Ariaal women
4:00 Pablo Nepomnaschy will be the discussant for the first half of our symposium.
4:15 In our second half, Hinde et al discuss commensal gut bacteria and breastmilk
4:30 Quinn and Kuzawa developmental trajectories in infants and later milk composition
4:45 Fairbanks shares her work on nutrition, energetics and vervet maternal investment
5:00 Piperata and Guatelli-Steinberg discuss how social support may impact the costs of reproduction
5:15 Dunsworth et al look at some very interesting data on energetics versus pelvic constraint in determining human gestational length
5:30 Finally, Leslie Aiello wraps it up as the discussant of the second half of our symposium.

Science bloggers and writers, like any of the topics above? Consider interviewing some of these symposium participants! You won't be disappointed.

Panel today, 11am: "The Scorpion and the Frog, How Journalists and Scientists Can Learn To Trust Each Other (though occasionally they shouldn't)."

2011-04-07T08:30:00.000-05:00

Come see me blather on about how social media can bring the scorpions and frogs together. The main speaker is Matt Richtel, New York Times science journalist.
* * *
Matt Richtel, Pulitzer Price winning journalist from the New York Times, will present a special lecture on Thursday, April 7 at 11:00 a.m. in the Beckman Auditorium. His talk is entitled "The Scorpion and the Frog, How Journalists and Scientists Can Learn To Trust Each Other (though occasionally they shouldn't)."

Matt's talk (about 30 minutes) will be followed by a discussion of Science and Journalism with a small panel of colleagues from science and the media (Kathryn Clancy, Diana Yates, Brant Houston, Dan Simons & Scott White).

Abstract for Matt Richtel's presentation:

More so than ever, journalists and scientists need to be great partners in disseminating discovery and truth. But they need to learn to better understand each other's needs and methods. Here are some concrete tips for so doing, told through war stories (some personally embarrassing to the speaker, some to the scientists), and as told too through the examples from the Pulitzer Prize winning series "Driven to Distraction" about the risks of multitasking behind the wheel.

Matt Richtel's Bio:

Matt Richtel is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and novelist. Since
2000, he has worked in the San Francisco bureau of the New York Times, covering technology and its impact on society. His recent series "Your Brain On Computers," focuses on how heavy technology use impacts behavior and the brain. His series about distracted driving won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. His first novel, Hooked, was a critically-acclaimed tech-centric thriller. The sequel, Devil's Plaything, hits bookstores in May, 2011.

If I objectify you, will it make you feel bad enough to objectify yourself? On shopping, sexiness and hormones.

2011-04-06T11:54:00.000-05:00

Found here.

When I was younger, periods were not a fun time, and I was plagued with dysmenorrhea, which is a fancy term for really bad cramps. In high school, I would often take 1000 mg of ibuprofen every four hours to alleviate symptoms to get through all my classes, band, sports practice, and homework (what, it took you this long to realize I was, and am, a dork?).

After having my daughter in 2008, and the thirteen months of lactational amenorrhea that followed it (lactational amenorrhea means absence of periods due to lactation), my periods resumed. Pain during my periods has almost totally ceased, but I have noticed more cycle-related variation in emotion. In particular, my patience and tolerance for rude behavior, and my tendency to cry sentimentally at even the lamest greeting card, skyrocket in my premenstrual phase. I already have low tolerance for rudeness, and I already cry easily. But something about progesterone decline -- which is a normal process towards the end of ovulatory cycles -- seems to make it harder for me to repress these behaviors in order to fit in culturally with those around me.

I tell this to you to say, I don't doubt that hormones, and hormonal variation through the cycle, plays some role in variation in female behavior and emotion. And I find this kind of work inherently interesting. I hate to repeat myself, but you will find echoes of my structural and methodological concerns with evolutionary psychology in this post as well.

* * *

Durante et al (2011) observe that women spend more money on their appearance than men, and claim that this sex difference is cross-culturally consistent (I wonder, is this consistent across cultures without money?). In order to understand this sex difference, they wish to see whether spending or shopping behavior is dependent on cycle phase. Therefore the authors hypothesize that women choose sexier clothing during ovulation -- "even if the women themselves are not consciously aware of this biological fact" (Durante et al 2011: 922), a problematic turn of phase if I ever saw one, but I'll get to that later. They also consider the effects of priming a shopping woman with images of attractive women and hypothesize there is a greater effect of this priming on high-fertility women.

Methods

The participants were female undergraduates and were compensated with course credit or money. The authors claim the participants had no idea the study had anything to do with the menstrual cycle, but the participants had to use LH strips at midcycle to see when she was ovulating (this is a urine test to check for a luteinizing hormone peak, which comes before ovulation).

Here's the important part, for me:

"The first urine test was scheduled 2 days before the expected day of ovulation. If an LH surge was not detected, women came back each day until an LH surge was detected or six tests had been completed, whichever came first" (Durante et al 2011: 924).

Here are my questions: what is 2 days before the expected day of ovulation? The follicular phase -- that's from menstruation to ovulation -- is the most variable phase of the menstrual cycle (Fehring et al. 2006; Lenton et al. 1984). I wonder how many ovulations they missed because of this. Perhaps even worse, how many participants had six LH tests and didn't have a detectable LH surge? It sounds like they were included in the project. But, they either ovulated before the authors started testing, or they had an anovulatory cycle. That means the authors were including participants in their study that weren't ovulating... in a study of behavior during ovulation.

Participants viewed a made-up shopping website on a high-fertility (near the LH surge) and low-fertility (about eight days later) day, where they had to select ten items they would like to buy that day. They were randomized into two groups: one shown a site featuring casual clothes, the other featuring clothes and accessories. The clothing on these made-up sites were "pretested to be sexy" (Durante et al 2011: 925). While that is a phrase I never expected to write on this blog, the separate validation they did to determine sexy versus nonsexy clothing seems fine.

Results

Hypothesis 1: Near ovulation, women should be more likely to choose sexier and revealing clothing and other fashion items rather than items that are less revealing and sexy (Durante et al 2011: 923).

Women chose a greater percentage of sexy clothing and accessory items near ovulation: 59.8% ± 21.6 during ovulation, 51.3% ± 22.4 during low fertility. This was a statistically significant difference, but they did a repeated measures ANOVA, and I don't understand why they didn't do a paired t-test. Further, statistically significant or not, I question how meaningful it is when the averages are so close and the standard deviations almost completely overlap.

H2: Ovulation should lead women to be especially likely to choose sexier products when women are primed to compare themselves to attractive female rivals (Durante et al 2011: 924).

H3: There should be no differences in product choice between ovulating and nonovulating women when women are primed with unattractive women or men (Durante et al 2011: 924).

Follow-up studies primed sub-sets of participants (so a different cohort, same recruitment methods as above) to think about 1) attractive local women, 2) unattractive local women, 3) attractive local men, 4) unattractive local men. They did this by showing photographs of people who they claimed to be local and asking participants to rate their attractiveness.

When primed with attractive women, the percentages of sexy items chosen were 62.7% for ovulating women and 38.2% for low fertility women (I could not find standard deviations for these values so have no idea how much the two groups overlap). Priming with unattractive women, attractive men, or unattractive men produced no significant difference between low and high fertility women.

H4: Ovulation should lead women to choose sexier products when primed to think about local attractive women who constitute potential direct rivals. However, ovulation should not influence product choice when women are primed to think about women from distant locations because such women do not constitute direct rivals (Durante et al 2011: 924).

The authors used a different method for assessing fertility this time; they asked women their normal menstrual cycle length and counted back from menses to estimate when ovulation would be. So AGAIN, we don't know how many women actually ovulated in this study, and we don't know whether a significant portion of women were then grouped in the high-fertility group who shouldn't have been.

This study is like the previous one in terms of photo priming, but this time the photos were said to be local or distant, and were of women only (so the four groups were local attractive, local unattractive, distant attractive, distant unattractive).

The authors claimed that the relationship between fertility, photo attractiveness and location was "marginally significant," but the p-value was 0.09. That is, in fact, not significant, as significance is generally only considered under 0.05 unless you cheat and say your study is special and should consider a different limit (they don't say this in their study).

That said, the only significant effect found of photo priming on high versus low fertility women was in the local attractive women group: high fertility women chose 65.8% sexy items versus low fertility's 39.1% (I could not find standard deviations for these values so have no idea how much the two groups overlap). These results are almost identical to those found when priming women with attractive women without saying if they are local or not.

How biological are we talking here?

The authors claim a biological cause for the differences found above. And maybe there is, to some extent. But there are two major issues with the authors’ conclusions.

First, there is the major methodological flaw of including women who probably aren't ovulating in their high-fertility group. Heads up to people who don't study female physiology: women, even healthy women with “normal” cycle lengths, don't ovulate every cycle. So if understanding a behavior during ovulation is important to your hypotheses, you need daily hormones on top of that LH test. Then, you know, if you can't document ovulation, you need to exclude those women from your sample. Oh, and while we're discussing methods, the authors don't mention whether the participants were in a relationship or not, or what their sexualities were, or their races or socioeconomic statuses. These are all important to understanding variation in female-female competition (Campbell 2004). And since ornamentation is likely related to honest signals of health, it would be good to know waist to hip ratios, or BMI, or facial symmetry (Streeter and McBurney 2003) (hello, I’m handing someone a dissertation here! Just remember to cite me correctly).

But the second issue relates to the theme I saw throughout this paper, that changes in mood or choice behavior due to ovulation or presence of attractive women is a "biological fact." Female-female competition is certainly found within human behavior, and behavior changes through the menstrual cycle. But is it fair to call these behaviors strictly biological, or should we have a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between biology and culture?

There are alternative cultural theories out there. Objectification theory proposes that there are consequences to living in a culture that sexually objectifies women: when women are continually appraised based on their looks, it leads to a disconnect between their body and individual (Moffitt and Szymanski 2011). This disempowers women and leads to them feeling as though their bodies exist for the pleasure of others. And if this is what women learn they have to offer others, and they seek affirmation, praise or attention from those around them, it makes sense for women to compete around attractiveness, particularly sexiness.

I would posit that shopping, particularly when primed with the image of an attractive woman, is a kind of objectification. So really, what Durante et al (2011) are measuring are the results of objectifying their study participants. Under these circumstances, a woman is more likely to start treating herself as an object to be evaluated on the basis of her appearance, so it makes sense that she would choose sexier clothing, in an effort to produce a culturally-appropriate, attractive body.

As the study stands, there is no way to parse out the impact of biology or culture -- and many cultures encourage objectification, female-female competition and female attractiveness towards men. As for how that interacts with high versus low fertility samples... that's the interesting part of this paper. If we can trust how the women are parsed. Which we can't, since some of the high-fertility sample might not have been ovulating.

These high heels are made of deer antlers

Antler booties from Camilla Skovgaard.

The authors also seemed enamored with the idea of comparing their female participants to male animals. Twice they mention the idea that they want to determine whether sexy clothing is analogous to a peacock's tail, a deer's antlers, or a lion's mane (really). These three examples, according to the authors, reflect a courtship function, a same-sex competition function, or both functions respectively. The authors go on to say that their results suggest that sexy dressing in women is like deer's antlers, or, a same-sex competition function.

First, since when are a deer's antlers only a same-sex competition function? Second, doesn't it say something that they couldn't find any examples of this kind of display in a female animal? This begs the question of why female humans do so much more displaying and maintenance of their appearance compared to other female animals, and again, this suggests interactions between biology and culture (Smuts 1995).

We can spin all the stories we want to explain why many human females make efforts to be physically attractive. And I do think Durante et al (2011) are on to something here as, despite methodological concerns they did find differences in high- and low-fertility choices. But if we continue to do this research on undergraduates in western contexts without sufficient hormone analysis, I'm unsure that its meaning extends beyond the participant pool.

References

Campbell, A. (2004). Female competition: Causes, constraints, content, and contexts Journal of Sex Research, 41 (1), 16-26 DOI: 10.1080/00224490409552210

Durante, KM, Griskevicius, V, Hill, SE, Perilloux, C, & Li, NP (2011). Ovulation, female competition, and product choice: hormonal influences on consumer behavior Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (6), 921-934

Fehring, R., Schneider, M., & Raviele, K. (2006). Variability in the Phases of the Menstrual Cycle Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, Neonatal Nursing, 35 (3), 376-384 DOI: 10.1111/j.1552-6909.2006.00051.x

Lenton EA, Landgren BM, Sexton L, & Harper R (1984). Normal variation in the length of the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle: effect of chronological age. British journal of obstetrics and gynaecology, 91 (7), 681-4 PMID: 6743609

Moffitt, L., & Szymanski, D. (2010). Experiencing Sexually Objectifying Environments: A Qualitative Study The Counseling Psychologist, 39 (1), 67-106 DOI: 10.1177/0011000010364551

Smuts, B. (1995). The evolutionary origins of patriarchy Human Nature, 6 (1), 1-32 DOI: 10.1007/BF02734133

Streeter, S. (2003). Waist–hip ratio and attractiveness New evidence and a critique of “a critical test” Evolution and Human Behavior, 24 (2), 88-98 DOI: 10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00121-6

Around the web: put attention where it needs to be put

2011-03-24T14:01:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I submitted a book chapter and a journal manuscript. I have two substantial blog posts I'm working on, but neither will be ready for this week. However, I have been slowly accumulating Posts of Awesome that I'd like to share. I want to highlight people, writing, and topics that need and deserve more attention in the science blogosphere. I mention a lot of these things on Twitter, but I know a lot of my followers don't use Twitter. So here goes.

Ladybusiness

If you have any interest in pregnancy, labor and birth, I do hope you're reading Science and Sensibility. S&S is a evidence-based blog written by practitioners and scientists, sponsored by Lamaze International. I really like their more technical, informative posts on labor and birth, and today's post on positioning during the second stage of labor is a winner. The writing is always accessible for layfolks, yet still provides great information for scientists and medical folk.

Remember that Wax et al (2010) article showing homebirth had a mortality rate three times higher than a hospital birth (and the sensational Lancet editorial)? A lot of folks came down hard on the article when it first came out, myself included, but two more pieces came out yesterday that call into question the authors' conclusions. The first issue is that there were actual mathematical errors in the data (meaning, the data was probably entered into an excel sheet incorrectly), the second is that they fundamentally did the meta-analysis wrong. Wrong. As in, according to one statistician who had no stake in the story or topic, so wrong as to overlook all its other problems.

A few more spicy tidbits: cosmetic breast surgery is on the rise, and one county in Florida has a 70% cesarean rate. Seventy. Percent. Due to some smart marketing and bad decisions, a treatment to prevent pre-term birth that used to be affordable is now more expensive than gold.

Something a little more fun: older female elephants make better leaders. Here's a video to go with the paper.

Finally, this is sort of ladybusiness, but as Dr. Isis points out, it should really be family (or even just human) business: Why it's alright to not be your mother, a guest post on AGORA.

Queering biology

The reverberations from Jesse Bering's post on homophobia as an adaptation continue. And the responses have been brilliant. I especially love Jeremy Yoder's take over at his blog, Denim and Tweed: An adaptive fairytale with no happy ending.

And then today, DeLene Beeland shared this great post on Twitter: How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time over at Orion Magazine. This is a beautifully-written, thoughtful takedown of the naturalistic fallacy.

Other things to read right now

Danielle Lee has two great pieces worth reading (and I found them both because of Greg Laden): an article on the contribution of Henrietta Lacks, and the Black community, to cell culture, and a profile on Danielle in a natural hair series at Essence.com.

I read this article today by Gina Trapani on her work to make the technical world more friendly to women and other underrepresented or new folks.

An interesting interview and review of the book Consumption, by Kevin Patterson: How western diets are making the world sick.

A piece on Impostor Syndrome at SciAm (behind a paywall). I don't want to pathologize all underrepresented groups in science (because frankly, these feelings make sense in the context of environment, even if it's desirable to move beyond them), but issues around impostor syndrome resonate with me.

The video for the MLK, Jr session from Science Online 2011 is now up. Alberto Roca, Danielle Lee and David Kroll are the fabulous panelists.

Things I wish I didn't have to link to

Our amusement with Charlie Sheen just demonstrates how little we care about violence against women -- especially certain kinds of women. Read The Disposable Woman.

Skepchick Rebecca Watson shares some of her hate mail, and why she doesn't feel like internetting today: Why I deserved to be called an offensive bitch.

Pat Campbell reposted a twelve-year-old manifesto on gender and education that still holds true: The Gender Wars Must Cease.

Some LOLz and some cutes: a section I added because the last three links were so depressing

This first link doesn't exactly bring the LOLz, but is an enjoyable read: Female Science Professor continues her series on Academic Novels.

Some great apes from Zooborns: a two new baby orangs, and baby chimp. They put my maternal instinct into overdrive.

And a LOLcat via Scicurious: I'z in yer papers, messin' wit yer stats.

References

Wax, J., Lucas, F., Lamont, M., Pinette, M., Cartin, A., & Blackstone, J. (2010). Maternal and newborn outcomes in planned home birth vs planned hospital births: a metaanalysis American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology DOI: 10.1016/j.ajog.2010.05.028

Editorial staff (2010). Home birth--proceed with caution. Lancet, 376 (9738) PMID: 20674705

The Open Laboratory 2010: for sale now!

2011-03-22T08:57:00.000-05:00

Looking for once place to read the best science writing of 2010? Want a peer-reviewed resource that you can show your colleagues that are social media naysayers to demonstrate the power of science blogs? Look no more: Open Lab 2010 is now available for purchase at Lulu.com!

Two of my posts on IVF were selected for Open Lab (to be put into one essay). I'm brushing shoulders with some very fancy writers. I do hope you'll buy it.

Science Online 2011: Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name

2011-03-17T13:36:00.000-05:00

If you haven't seen it yet, or just want to relive it, our women in science blogging panel is now available for viewing:

Perils of Blogging as a Woman under a Real Name from Smartley-Dunn on Vimeo.

Key highlights: when I told the audience about how I squatted over a toilet to birth my baby. Oh, there was also a lot of great feminism in there too.

This is the panel that inspired this post, and then these great posts.

On bad first drafts

2011-03-16T11:27:00.000-05:00

From I Can Haz Cheezburger.

My blogging mojo has been channeled almost entirely towards a book project I've undertaken with Julienne Rutherford of UIC and Katie Hinde of UCLA (though shortly to be of Harvard). The book is called Building Babies: Primate Development in Proximate and Ultimate Perspective and it will be published by Springer in 2012. Each co-editor has a chapter in there, and then we have a number of other rather fancy-pants contributors as well.

The first drafts of the chapters were due yesterday. I did not submit my chapter (er, to myself). I'm running about a week late. I thought I would come clean with this, because there are a number of elements of the writing process that I think remain obscure for students and other junior scholars. And after I share a few thoughts about academic writing, I thought I would show you some of the draft I'm working on.

First drafts suck

They really, really do. If you think your first draft is amazing, give it to someone else, and that someone else can't be a pet, spouse or parent. First drafts suck because we write the most obvious things in them, the most vague. First drafts don't have enough context. First drafts are where you use cliches because you haven't figured out how to say what you're saying in a sophisticated way. They are often under-cited. They are out of order. And, they aren't that compelling.

This is why so much student writing is bad -- but it's not their fault. Close together deadlines, ones that align with other projects, and little teaching of time management means most students start writing projects just before they are due. So they essentially submit first drafts of papers, with a little copyediting if you're lucky. Plus, somehow a lot of students have picked up this idea that first drafts are better or more authentic than revisions. This is patently false. They are simply the place our favorite worst stuff goes to die (this is why revision is so often called killing our darlings, to use a term from scio11, though its origin is much older).

But everyone has bad first drafts, so it is absolutely useless to feel bad about them. Give them to your advisor or your colleague if they have said they will read a first draft (otherwise, revise it after consulting with someone else first). They write bad first drafts too. You have to write a first draft in order to get to the revision, and to me, this was a liberating realization. Get it all out now! Don't worry about using the right word! Just get the words on the page, get about the right content in about the right order, and if something is repetitive, just leave it for now. Because after a little breather away from it, or a look from a trusted colleague or advisor, you will hack it up and remake it into something far better.

Revising only sucks sometimes

Revising sucks when you get your first comments back from a colleague, because it is terrifying to share that vulnerable, bad first draft with another person (ever had that moment after you print it out or hit send when you realize your prized metaphor was a trembling nod to your failed attempt as a fiction writer?). It sucks at those moments when you feel at cross-purposes with the thesis of your paper. And it's frustrating, also, that revising is the most important yet under-taught skill in academic writing.

But here's the thing. Revising can be glorious. If you abandon any sense that you own your words, and remember only to own your mind, it allows you to be merciless in cutting out all the badness of that first draft: the cliches, the vague repetition, the jargon. If you return again and again to your outline, or abstract, or data, or whatever materials you keep to help you remember what the paper is about, you will start to see the right shape of the piece. And then you can also build in the context.

The best moments of revision are when you remember why you were writing the piece in the first place. Do you want to produce a fundamental review that will be useful to other practitioners in your field? Do you have an amazing piece of data to share? A well-grounded hypothesis that you want to articulate? What was surprising or compelling about that work when you first set fingers to keyboard?

One last thing I'll say about revising is that owning your mind is not the same as owning your ideas. You need to be willing to let go of being right, and you need to be willing to change if the evidence is against you. Accepting reality and working with it in an interesting way is the mark of a good scientist, and a good revision.

My first drafts suck

The title of my chapter is: "Inflammatory factors that produce variation in ovarian and endometrial functioning" (eventually, I think, I will need to change the title to better reflect the manuscript). I thought this would be an easy piece for me, since I have been doing a lot of work on C-reactive protein, a biomarker for systemic inflammation, and I have been studying the endometrium and ovaries for many years.

I was wrong. Oh, so wrong.

A few quick searches pulled up an embarrassingly large number of citations for chemokines and cytokines, for toll-like receptors, natural killer cells, and other immunological terms I barely remembered from high school and college. So I re-drafted my outline, set aside a lot of time for reading (as in, several days straight), and then finally set to work.

The problem with the literature on this topic is that it is wholly mechanistic. I can now tell you what interleukins are expressed in the periovulatory phase versus the implantation window, or which ones are suppressed or overexpressed for certain pathologies, but I can't tell you what that means in a broader sense, or what produces variation in any of these immunological factors in a systemic way that might impact local inflammation in the female reproductive system.

Here is my section on normal endometrial functioning (alas, given the literature, the section on pathology in the endometrium is far, far longer). First draft ahead! Remember, I am sharing this embarrassingly bad prose for the good of SCIENCE.

The endometrium is composed of the functionalis and basalis layers; the functionalis comprises two thirds of the endometrium and is the part that proliferates and sheds each reproductive cycle. The basalis is adjacent to the myometrium, and is the place from which the endometrium regenerates after menses. The proliferative (also known as follicular) phase is when estradiol promotes proliferation of endometrial tissue, where the secretory (also known as luteal) phase is characterized by progesterone control of decidualization and menstruation. The endometrium typically proliferates with narrow, straight glands and a thin surface epithelium, and angiongenesis continues as ovulation nears (King and Critchley 2010). After ovulation and during the secretory phase, the endometrium differentiates: endometrial glands become increasingly secretory, and by the late secretory phase spiral arterioles form. If implantation does not occur, the corpus luteum degrades, progesterone declines, and this triggers a cascade of events to produce menstruation.

Menstruation is a key inflammatory process of the endometrium. Menstruation is when the functionalis are shed at the end of the human reproductive cycle. The basalis regenerates over the course of the next cycle. The demise of the corpus luteum and the associated withdrawal of progesterone precipitate inflammatory mediators that cause tissue degradation. For instance, progesterone inhibits nuclear factor κ B (NF-κB), which increases the expression of inflammatory cytokines like IL-1 and IL-6 (Maybin et al. 2011). The withdrawal of progesterone is also associated with an increase in endometrial leukocytes and IL-8, which regulate the repair process (Maybin et al. 2011). At this time other inflammatory factors promote MMP production to break down endometrial tissue (Maybin et al. 2011). Further, it is thought that progesterone withdrawal, not an increase in estradiol concentrations, leads to the repair of the endometrium so that it can resume activity for the next cycle (Maybin et al. 2011). Thus, variation in progesterone concentrations may lead to variation in inflammatory activity, degradation, repair and cycling in the endometrium.

First question: why should I care about any of the above? So what if any of this happens? Then, you might not know this, but I do: the only two citations in these two paragraphs are both review papers, and one of the authors overlap between them. Therefore, it's quite under-cited. To be fair, in this section it is less important that I demonstrate the depth of the literature, but a review that only cites two other reviews isn't doing its job.

Do I inspire excitement in my field? No. Do I provide an appropriate context for this material in order to situate the reader? Not so much. Right now, these two paragraphs contain the exact information I wanted them to contain, based on what was in my outline. That is, I've described the basic functioning of the endometrium, and menstruation. It's flat because that's all that I did.

My job in this chapter is to take this vast reproductive immunological literature, pair it with what little we have in anthropology and ecology that helps us understand the way genes and environment might produce this variation, and then describe the necessary context in future work to understand these mechanisms. In some places, a lack of context may help me make my case, because it will demonstrate why anthropologists need to be in the field. But if my whole manuscript looks like the two paragraphs above, it will be an unreadable yawnfest that doesn't contribute a thing to anthropology.

So, I guess I would expand the "kill your darlings" advice. First, accept your darlings. Accept that you have them like everyone else, and that darlings aren't just turns of phrase but entire ideas, hypotheses, fields of thought. Then, once you have accepted that your darlings make you just like every other academic writer out there, from the middle schooler to the full professor, kill them. With fire. Finally, make sure you provide what is left with context or else there is no reason to read what you wrote.

And now, I have been sufficiently inspired to go finish my bad first draft.

References

King, A., & Critchley, H. (2010). Oestrogen and progesterone regulation of inflammatory processes in the human endometrium The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 120 (2-3), 116-126 DOI: 10.1016/j.jsbmb.2010.01.003

Maybin JA, Critchley HO, & Jabbour HN (2011). Inflammatory pathways in endometrial disorders. Molecular and cellular endocrinology, 335 (1), 42-51 PMID: 20723578

Around the web: sex, birth, brainz

2011-03-09T11:10:00.004-06:00

This semester I have decided not to do weekly roundups of links useful to the courses I teach, because last semester it was exhausting to me, and as it turns out only minimally read by my students. However, I continue to bookmark stuff I find interesting, and I have reached such a critical mass that I've decided to share it. Some of what I want to share is focused on the ladybusiness, but I also want to share some links on brainz, and for students.

Let's talk about sex

A few posts have come out recently on sex: who wants it, who gets it, and the sexual health of adolescents. Mark Regnerus writes "Sex is Cheap: Why young men have the upper hand, even when they're failing at life," which I thought was reductive and pretty disparaging to both young men and women. I was surprised at how the author talked only about heterosexual sex (why is this ok? why is this interesting?), and how he shared a single quote for each woman he interviewed, and magically it fit nicely into his own narrative. It seems like the story here is in the choices young women and men are making... so it would make sense to share the more nuanced results of the interviews Regnerus says he conducted. That said, I did learn a few things, the most disheartening related to unwanted sex:

"Finally, as my colleagues and I discovered in our interviews, striking numbers of young women are participating in unwanted sex—either particular acts they dislike or more frequent intercourse than they'd prefer or mimicking porn (being in a dating relationship is correlated to greater acceptance of and use of porn among women)."

Unwanted sex is one of those gray areas where the sex is technically consensual... but one partner doesn't really want to do it. How have we gotten to the point that more young women don't feel it's ok to say no to their partners? I don't think it's because of a poor dating pool as seems to be the working hypothesis of the author, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

To contrast, Yes Means Yes is an anthology edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti that became a blog to continue the conversation on rape culture and female sexual empowerment. In a post on said blog, Gender Differences and Casual Sex: The New Research they look at some of the same material as the post above, as well as a new paper by Terri Conley showing that men and women aren't that different in their perspectives on casual sex as was once thought. The blog contributor, named Thomas, does a great rundown of the study's findings and explains how earlier studies of casual sex -- like the study many of you have likely heard of, where men and women are randomly propositioned in public -- is both unlikely and particularly repulsive to women given rape culture, and therefore sets up a sex difference that a more nuanced study easily demolishes.

Birth and babies

Randi Hutter Epstein, author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank, wrote a short but sweet piece on labor inductions in Psychology Today. She shares some of the shortcomings of a medical model that thinks that any labor over thirty seven weeks can be safely induced. This relates to a recent story about a March of Dimes initiative to reduce early inductions, and some hospitals in the Chicago area are taking part.

And, while I wrote this a little while ago, it seems important to link the above to the kerfuffle that arose when a study came out last year claiming that home births were far more dangerous than hospital births, and the editors of the Lancet used the study as a chance to jump up and down on home birth. Given that only half of a percent of women in the US do home births, it makes more sense to use this as an opportunity not to bash home births but have a frank conversation about whether the cascade of interventions guaranteed by stepping into a hospital to give birth leads to a safer delivery for mom and baby.

Next, Scicurious of tag-team blogging fame and general awesomeness, has a real winner. Today, she reviewed cool research on sex roles from the seventies. She shows how our perception of the gender of a baby impacts how we treat it (and how dolls might make better toys than footballs for babies, no matter what).

And then, for your dose of cute (well, cute if you don't mind amniotic sacs and vaginas, which I don't), here are Five Miraculous Animal Births (don't know why they are miraculous, but they are certainly cool).

Brainz

First, Sci has another great post, this time on research on exercise, hippocampus size and memory in the elderly that made me vow to play derby until I need a cane to skate.

You might have seen the recent buzz about PKMZeta, a protein that may aid in strengthening old memories. Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science (check out the spiffy new banner!) has a three-part series on it. I also loved David Dobbs's piece exploring problems in cognitive science: Is Cognitive Science Full of Crap? (Yes. Well, sometimes. Maybe. Except sometimes not and then it's really very cool.) John Hawks also has an interesting piece called Numbers as Cognitive Technology: this post explores how we understand numbers, at a population variation (regarding language), developmental (regarding John's twins, who I imagine to be very cute, with thought bubbles of fingers and toes above their heads) and even comparative (Alex the Parrot!) level.

Then, a more devastating piece that, to me, highlights some of the problems with the medical metaphor of humans as machines: Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology writes about a New York Times piece about how the field of psychiatry has changed with time.

Oh, and this one was absolutely nothing to do with brainz, but it's written by Dr. Zen of NeuroDojo so I've shoehorned him in here :). Dr. Zen looks at the two peer-reviewed papers to come out after the #arseniclife fiasco and shows how one in particular intentionally miscategorizes the great post-peer review that happened on blogs as "anonymous electronic communications," since in fact the majority of the commenters were using their own names (and even if they weren't, again, there is a big difference between anonymous and pseudonymous). This sounds an awful lot like the response that came out after #aaafail, where, rather than addressing the many critical, thoughtful bloggers, it all got labeled as "outside commentary."

Learning links

First, for graduate students: Mamacademic: How I hack parenthood, grad school, etc. A nice piece on the perils of parenthood, because it is constructive. Then, a related post both on pregnancy style and how to deal with questions around parenting in graduate school. And while this next post isn't directly about grad students, GayProf discusses a disturbing panel he attended where faculty recommended having children in order to achieve work/life balance, a way that was clearly not situated in the context of whether one wants to have children, and who ends up doing most of the work of childrearing. Not to mention, you know, the rampant heterosexism.

But on to the links you actually expected under this heading. Dan Simons, fellow prof here at the University of Illinois and co-author of The Invisible Gorilla, wrote a great piece on study habits and what students think they know versus what they actually know. Read it, then study the way he tells you to! Hint: re-reading the text is not how you learn the material.

Then there is this perspective over at Observations, a Scientific American blog, that posits we should teach kids more about the process of science. How can this translate into better science ed in higher ed as well? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Most of what I do centers on having students do actual studies, or assist in research in my lab, or sometimes propose avenues of research as part of a project. But maybe there are more fun things we can be doing in a classroom setting that would lead to more students understanding the scientific method and the process of science.

I also want to share this great tutorial on how to choose a research project. This is useful for students at all levels... and post-docs and faculty, too.

Your dose of random

Steve Silberman interviews Seth Mnookin regarding his new book The Panic Virus. I've been avidly reading all of Mnookin's press materials and look forward to reading the book, but as always Silberman does an exceptional job so I particularly recommend his post.

This article made the rounds in the twittersphere on how to improve comment sections. I just liked it a lot and found it a great tutorial on fostering online communities.

Then, for my anthropology peeps, an important article on problematizing the thrifty gene, particularly around race and racism. Something to share with your students.

People have been rocking out in the SciAm Guest Blog. Check out this book review of Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit by Valerie Jones.

If you haven't had enough counter-evidence to the idea of science blogs as an echo chamber, check out Colin Schultz's treatment of a recent paper on linking patterns in science blogs versus traditional journalism.

Finally, check out this interactive map on well-being in the US in the New York Times. I found a lot of the patterns really interesting, in terms of what portions of the US lit up when.

[11:26am CST: Edited to add two links for Scicurious, because the links were on my list but then I forgot.]

USA Today piece on evolutionary psychology

2011-03-07T15:26:00.000-06:00

For those of you who don't follow me on Twitter, just a quick note to let you know that I was interviewed for a piece on voice pitch and infidelity for USA Today by journalist Dan Vergano. It was a great experience, and a thoughtful piece.

Deep voices trigger infidelity jitters.

Mate magnet madness: When the range of possible explanations exceeds your own hypothesis

2011-03-04T10:06:00.000-06:00

Figure 1. My apologies to Baby Jaguar
for not finding a picture that included
him.

My daughter will be three in just a few weeks. She loves telling stories. These stories have the same, uncomplicated arc every time: she and her friends Dora, Diego, Boots and Baby Jaguar go on an adventure to rescue Mommy from the giant condor. Or sometimes Mommy and Dora and Diego and Boots and Baby Jaguar are rescuing her. Or sometimes Daddy does the rescuing.

There is almost always a net, then a pair of Rescue Scissors needed to cut the captive free. But the variation in these stories is very small, the framework borrowed heavily from one of the few mythologies known to my little girl: Dora the Explorer.

Evolutionary psychology is often a kind of story-telling, and instead of borrowing from a preschool cartoon they borrow from the concept of anisogamy. Anisogamy is sexual reproduction formed by unequal gametes, in our lineage a big egg made by females and little sperm made by males. This provides the foundation for differential reproductive investment, where females often put in the time and effort of gestation, lactation and care. From here, proponents of EP see essential differences between what men and women want in relationships, and the kinds of relationships that are optimal, and a model this broad makes it possible to shoehorn any behavior into its adaptive framework.

Figure 2. The actual image that
accompanied Tierney's column.

Enter John Tierney, my (not) favorite journalist for the New York Times. This is the man who thinks that sexism is a radical act (I am referring to his charming articles on gender disparities in science). So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when he outed himself as an EP fanboi in his most recent piece, “The Threatening Scent of Fertile Women.”

Tierney covered the work of Jon Maner and others who have studied relationship maintenance – the suite of behaviors that keeps a couple together. In particular, Tierney focuses on the problem of the wandering eye, or rather, the possible mechanisms that prevent it in a monogamous couple. The idea here is that relationship maintenance is evolutionarily adaptive, because when a couple stays together it is easier to raise offspring and increase reproductive success.

The range of explanations

The study that frames Tierney’s column is Miller and Maner (2010). Thirty eight undergraduate men rated the attractiveness of a woman with whom they interact, at several points over her menstrual cycle. The authors found NO relationship between where a woman is in her cycle and how attractive a single man finds her, but a negative relationship between the chance a woman is fertile and how attractive a partnered man finds her.

What do Miller and Maner (2010) discuss, and what is the idea Tierney is so enamored with?

“It’s possible that some of the men in Florida were just trying to look virtuous by downgrading the woman’s attractiveness, the way a husband will instantly dismiss any woman pointed out by his wife. (That Victoria’s Secret model? Ugh! A skeleton with silicone.) But Jon Maner, a co-author of the study, says that’s unlikely because the men filled out their answers in private and didn’t expect the ratings to be seen by anyone except the researchers.

“It seems the men were truly trying to ward off any temptation they felt toward the ovulating woman,” said Dr. Maner, who did the work with Saul Miller, a fellow psychologist at Florida State. “They were trying to convince themselves that she was undesirable. I suspect some men really came to believe what they said. Others might still have felt the undercurrent of their forbidden desire, but I bet just voicing their lack of attraction helped them suppress it.””

This conjecture is unconnected to the study’s methodology and results. Nowhere in that study did they assess the participants’ state of mind or ask them how they felt about this. How do we know they were trying to convince themselves of anything? This finding, while interesting, does not test their hypothesis for an evolutionary framework for relationship maintenance that includes adaptively suppressing attraction to others.

Maner et al (2009) studied the attention people pay to images of attractive people of the opposite sex when first exposed to sexual words like “lust” and “kiss.” They recruited 120 straight undergraduates, thirty six of whom were in committed relationships. Individuals in committed relationships paid far less attention to the attractive images than those not in relationships. Tierney titters,

“The subliminal priming with words related to sex apparently activated some unconscious protective mechanism: Tempt me not! I see nothing! I see nothing!”

I’ve done my own share of human subjects research, and subjects will often tell you or do what they think you want, or they will just not be honest if they don’t want you to know the truth. What if, as originally posed by Tierney himself, the respondents weren’t warding off temptation but wanted to look virtuous? What if, now bear with me because this might seem crazy, the people in these studies were in love with their partners and genuinely uninterested in anyone else? Too often EP wants to provide a single explanation for a behavior, when the range of possible explanations far exceeds their hypothesis.

An anthropological perspective

Jamie Jones, Associate Professor at Stanford and blogger at Monkey’s Uncle describes anthropology like this,

“…[A]nthropology is the science charged with explaining the origin and maintenance of human diversity in all its forms. To achieve this end, anthropology must be unapologetically grand in its scope. How can we explain human diversity without documenting its full extent, through both time and space, and across cultures? … Where does the tapestry of human diversity come from and how is it that we continually manage to resist powerful homogenizing forces and hang on to our diversity? What commonalities transcend local difference to unite all humanity? How is it that civilizations rise and fall? And what is the fate of humanity?”

Jamie beautifully depicts the importance of documenting and understanding diversity even in the face of efforts to simplify human nature. Thus, to me, an anthropological perspective is often at odds with EP explanations for behavior.

An anthropological perspective asks, what happens if you take these basic observations and, instead of deciding on a favorite explanation and applying it to everyone, put them into a model in which you can vary context (age/sex specific mortality rates, distribution of resources, what have you) and see what range of strategies actually give fitness benefits? That is, when you actually throw some variation into the equation, is this still the best strategy for the partnered men with whom Tierney feels simpatico?

Right now we don’t know. Much psychological empiricism rests on undergraduates who participate in studies for course credit. When one wants to make connections to evolutionary adaptedness, they may be a place to start, but not end.

I have a real problem with continuing to use this population to make statements of universality for all humans. Undergraduates usually are trying to avoid pregnancy and build their financial and social capital, so relationship maintenance for the sake of reproductive success rarely exists. Until we can show that relationship maintenance, and the particular behaviors Miller, Maner and others study within that are shown across many populations, and particularly across reproductively-aged folks, their argument for adaptation fails.

Figure 3. Celebrations of marriage.

Another problem is that most work on relationships in EP tends to be heteronormative, meaning that they think nothing of assuming that either everyone is straight, or the universally best behavioral strategy is to be straight. They also tend to assume that the best strategy is to be monogamous, with occasional sneaky infidelity permitted if one can get better genes or more offspring that way (keep in mind that there is a difference between what might be biologically advantageous in a certain context, and what is culturally appropriate – the argument here is not against the culture of monogamy).

But heterosexual monogamy is only one reproductive strategy of many that humans employ. Depending on how you measure it, monogamy and polygyny (single male, multi female marriage) vie for the most frequent strategy – in fact, polygyny occurs in about 80% of modern human societies (Murdock and White 1969). There are even a few rare populations that practice polyandry, which is the marriage of a single female and multiple males. And, even in those populations where monogamy is practiced, serial monogamy is far more frequent than lifetime monogamy: this means that individuals have a series of monogamous relationships rather than find one mate for life (so no, divorce is not a modern human invention).

When taking an even broader, comparative perspective, monogamy isn’t practiced by our closest relatives at all. Chimpanzees and bonobos, both equally related to us, are promiscuous. This is a scientific term for a reproductive strategy that involves females and males making reproductive decisions to mate with many individuals at each fertile period. Bonobos are also promiscuous, but they also use heterosexual and homosexual sex to reduce stress and aggression, and form bonds among one another. Gorillas, our next closest relative, are polygynous. Orangutans are very solitary, but essentially promiscuous. It’s only once you delve into the lesser apes, the gibbons, that you see any monogamy, and they are far less monogamous than we first thought (Brockelman et al 1998).

Maintaining a heterosexual, monogamous relationship is certainly advantageous at certain times, in certain contexts. But it is not universally adaptive, even within humans. Without anyone studying these behaviors in populations that use different reproductive strategies, and in the absence of comparative data to support these assertions, we are at an impasse.

Conclusion

In the words of a friend, EP is plugged into evolutionary theory with little more than a ratty old extension cord. EP takes some very basic, ancestral conditions, like differential costs of reproduction, and uses it in a sufficiently vague way that any behavior can relate to females generally being the ones to put in all the time and effort into making babies. Yet EP often ignores the three conditions necessary for natural selection, the mechanism for evolution. For natural selection to act on a trait, the trait must be variable, heritable, and produce differential reproductive success. Rarely does EP understand variation in a trait, rarely does it examine whether said trait has a genetic component, and rarely does it test whether their trait confers a reproductive advantage.

Are fertile women a threat to partnered harmony, their scents providing a temptation that noble men must suppress? I can’t rule it out, but I also think it is one of the least likely of many possible explanations.

Unfortunately for readers of the New York Times, Tierney loved this idea more than he loved interrogating it.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Charles Roseman, friend, faculty curmudgeon and Bastard Colleague from Hell, for taking a look at an early draft of this post and providing commentary crucial to its improvement. Any rhetorical or scientific errors are my own.

References

Brockelman, W., Reichard, U., Treesucon, U., & Raemaekers, J. (1998). Dispersal, pair formation and social structure in gibbons ( Hylobates lar ) Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 42 (5), 329-339 DOI: 10.1007/s002650050445

MANER, J., GAILLIOT, M., & MILLER, S. (2009). The implicit cognition of relationship maintenance: Inattention to attractive alternatives Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45 (1), 174-179 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.08.002

Miller, S, & Maner, J (2010). Evolution and relationship maintenance: Fertility cues lead committed men to devalue relationship alternatives Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 1081-1084

Murdock, G., & White, D. (1969). Standard Cross-Cultural Sample Ethnology, 8 (4) DOI: 10.2307/3772907

Image sources

Dora picture: http://www.doratheexplorertvshow.com/dora/dora-explora-pics.htm
Lady magnet: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/science/22tier.html?_r=2&ref=johntierney
Same-sex marriage: http://markusisthedrug.onsugar.com/date/2009/05/07

ResearchBlogging Editor's Selections: PMDD

2011-02-24T15:43:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note to let you all know that my PMDD post was chosen by both Krystal D'Kosta and Jason Goldman for their Editor's Selections this week over at ResearchBlogging.org.

Join me in a conversation about hormonal contraceptives! Eat free food!

2011-02-22T11:02:00.000-06:00

Women in the United States use hormonal contraceptives more than any other nation in the world. Doctors and patients in other countries report a hesitance to prescribe hormonal contraceptives for off-label use (to improve the skin, or regulate the cycle) where most pharmaceutical advertisements in the US celebrate exactly those uses.

Why do women in the US use hormonal contraceptives more frequently? How did you and your doctor decide that this prescription was right for you?

If you live in or near Champaign-Urbana, we would like to have you come participate in a focus group on exactly this topic! We would like to validate a survey that will be used online, but also get freeform responses from real women about their real experiences.

Please email us to participate! We can answer any questions you may have. You must be:

Over eighteen years old
Female
Have been prescribed hormonal contraceptives at least once

Participation involves:

Filling out an eligibility survey and indicating your time preference for the focus group (5 minutes)
Attending a focus group, where you will fill out a survey and discuss your broader experiences with hormonal contraceptives (90 minutes)

We will provide you with some tasty snacks during the focus group. So far we have found that participants have really loved being a part of this, because it’s given them a chance to reflect on their own contraceptive choices. Join us! Email us today! You will be helping us put together a comprehensive research program to understand why US women take hormonal contraceptives far more than women from other developed countries.

IRB approval for this message: #12269, amendment 02/22/2010

Tag-teaming research blogging: Me and Sci do it up, PMDD-style

2011-02-20T23:51:00.000-06:00

When I was in college, my favorite hangout was the basement of the Harvard Book Store, where they had the used books and cheap remainders (they were also across the street from my freshman dorm, Wigglesworth, and yes, that is a most excellent name). I worked my way through several sci-fi and fantasy series, and got nearly all my Women’s Studies books, because of that one lovely room.

One night in my freshman year I was browsing the philosophy section with a new boyfriend, a person with whom I often felt inferior and less-educated. I saw an author name on the spine of an old hardcover and, hoping to impress the boyfriend, pointed it out. “Hobbes Machiavelli, I’ve read stuff by him,” I said. I arched my eyebrows with what I hoped was an air of intelligence.

The boyfriend, and a nearby witness, both turned towards me. “Hobbes and Machiavelli are two different people,” he said slowly.

As a blush crept up my face, I realized several things: the excerpt of “The Prince” I had barely skimmed in high school was by Niccolo Machiavelli, Hobbes was a totally different dude, and my boyfriend thought I was a posturing idiot.

It’s a good idea to know what you’re talking about before opening your mouth.

* * *
These days, if I don’t know the answer to something, I don’t try to fake it. Recently, a Twitter follower suggested I write on this New Scientist story and the empirical article upon which it was reporting on brain activity, hormones and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. As I am not an expert on issues of the brain, rather than try to be I enlisted brilliant neuroscientist Scicurious to do tag-team blog posts where we could each cover the material where we had expertise. I had a few thoughts about the way the New Scientist article author framed the study, and about the hormone analyses. So I’ll talk about that, and Sci will cover BRAINZ in this post.

What is this study about?

Rapkin et al (2011) seek to understand why a minority of women experience Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), a suite of premenstrual behaviors that include severe and debilitating irritability, depression and anxiety. They used PET scans to look at brain stuff (cue Scicurious) and also looked at hormone concentrations to see if the reproductive hormones that decline in the premenstrual phase had anything to do with it. They found no difference in hormone concentrations between control and PMDD women, but did find variation in cerebellar activity by menstrual phase. You need to read Scicurious's take on this, because she provides important background and context to the study of the cerebellum for mood.

The New Scientist piece makes a lot of the potential effect of progesterone on GABA receptors in the brain, but as far as I can tell the article itself does not measure GABA receptors. Progesterone, allopregnanolone and GABA are all interrelated and important chemicals when it comes to mood (Concas et al 1998), but like I said, since the study didn’t actually look at GABA, I’m not going there. Sci has also made some important points about this issue, and on what the study authors found (which is admittedly cool) with what they discuss around GABA (which might be a wee bit of a stretch).

Nits to pick with New Scientist

Zukerman, the author of the New Scientist piece, begins her piece, entitled “Why women get anxious at ‘that time of the month’” with this:

“Is it that time of the month? These are the words no man should ever utter. How about this for a diplomatic alternative: "Are your GABA receptors playing up?"

You may be spot on. It seems that these brain cells are to blame for some women's monthly mood swings.

Many women feel a little irritable before menstruating, but up to 8 per cent suffer extreme symptoms, including anxiety, depression and fatigue.”

There are a few things that trouble me about this. First, without citing any actual incidence of this symptom, the author claims that many women suffer from irritability before their period. This just perpetuates the idea that irritability is a common premenstrual trait, when the premenstrual phase is an incredibly variable period. This is despite the fact that at most only eight percent of women actually get these symptoms to the point that they are debilitating (the two studies the study authors cite give a 5% and 8% incidence, so 8% may be high).

From a public health or science research perspective, eight percent of reproductively aged women is a pretty significant quantity. I absolutely want more research to be done on PMDD and, full disclosure, I’m running some pilot studies to work on it in the future myself. However, these results don’t necessarily translate to women who may just get a little irritable or experience other mild behavioral symptoms before their period.

And that is why both the title and the “Is it that time of the month” joke at the start of the story were misleading. Besides its obvious sexism, where any female behavior that deviates from the pleasing and passive risks eliciting that question, the link here in the mind of a popular reader is that women’s behavior is governed by hormone and brain interactions more generally than the paper actually implies.

So, to reiterate: PMDD impacts maybe eight percent of reproductively aged women (notice that I keep specifically referencing “reproductively-aged women,” which further shrinks the pool of women down to those between menarche and menopause). This is nothing to sneeze at. But this isn’t everyone.

Hormones

In order to see if there were differences in hormone concentrations between normal and PMDD women, Rapkin et al (2011) took blood on the days of the PET scans: this translated into one follicular phase (first half of the cycle, between menses and ovulation) and one late luteal phase collection (the week or so before the next menses). They found no difference in the mean concentrations of estradiol and progesterone between the two groups, at either time period.

Table 1 from Rapkin et al (2011). None of these differences between groups are significant according to the authors, but they didn't report p-values anywhere I could find.

There are several problems with this. First, the sample size is tiny. I have certainly been known to run analyses with fewer subjects, but the way I and other folks who do hormone work get around this is to sample each individual many more times. When collecting hormone information on reproductively-aged women, for instance, you want to collect a minimum of one menstrual cycle’s worth of data… every single day.

More power!

My advisor raised me right, and so I did a power analysis of the data the study authors provided. A power analysis is a way to determine the statistical power of a test. You can do it beforehand to determine an appropriate sample size for your experiment, or afterwards if you didn’t find something statistically significant and don’t know if your analysis was effective. When there are small but important differences between two groups, but the sample size is also small, your statistical test can be insignificant and thus miss that important difference.

Let’s take the hormone and time period that should be the most meaningful: progesterone in the late luteal phase. PMDD women had 5.50 ± 5.27 ng/mL, and control women had 6.76 ± 7.53 ng/mL. If we say that the smallest difference between these two groups that would be interesting is around 6 ng/mL (just splitting the difference between the two standard deviations, but this is pretty generous), then according to my calculations this test only has a power of about 60%. Therefore, 40% of the time a test with a sample size this small wouldn’t catch a potentially important difference between the groups. To put it into more perspective, the standard is to have a power of at least 80%.

What’s blood got to do with it?

On Fertile Ground, by Peter T. Ellison. Go to the Amazon page to embiggen the image and you'll see the plastic tube one of the women is holding to collect spit.

Most people with a clinical background or doing a more clinical collaboration seem to be needle-happy. That is, when they want to measure hormones, they take it out of your arm rather than from the many other places you can get it: blood spots (using a little lancet on your finger), saliva, urine, and feces. This will some day be a blog post in its own right.

Here is the short answer: saliva is very often better than venous blood. Hormones are secreted from their organs in a pulsatile way, meaning they are released in short bursts, which leads to measurements going up and down quickly. Since they circulate in the blood, serum measurements of hormones are likely to pick up this noise. This is yet another reason why only two samples for each of the twenty four subjects is troubling. There are other reasons, related to what version of the hormone you are measuring when getting it from blood, spit or elsewhere, the higher compliance and greater frequency of sampling you can do with saliva, and the fact that you don’t have to stick your subjects or increase their risk of infection.

The only studies looking at variation in hormones across the cycle in menstrually-related mood disorders use blood (Bloch et al 1998, Rubinow et al 1988). The Bloch et al 1998 measures 10 women with PMS and 10 controls using serum every day for a cycle (hooray, every day!) but they measure testosterone, cortisol, and other hormones not comparable to this study. Plus, they are looking at women with PMS, not PMDD, which is a much more broadly-defined syndrome. It would be harder to find a difference between these two groups than controls and women with PMDD.

The Rubinow et al 1988 is old enough that I can’t get it online, the abstract says nothing about how frequently the hormones are measured or the number of women in the study, and I don’t know how strictly they define menstrual disorders (again, as opposed to the rather strictly-defined PMDD).

Variation is the spice of life

My last issue with the hormones is with the two windows during which they measured them. Women were measured in their follicular phase anywhere from 8-12 days into their cycle for the first measurement; then the late luteal phase measurement was 10-14 days after a measured LH surge (which occurs around midcycle).

Here is the kind of variation I see when I measure women’s hormone concentrations every day. What you’re looking at is salivary estradiol (pmol/L) measured daily in over twenty Polish women, aligned by midcycle drop date. The first graph is all the women together, the second is the average and standard deviation.

Individual Polish women's estradiol concentrations.

Average Polish women's estradiol concentrations.

Here is salivary progesterone from the same population, aligned by the end of the cycle. Again, the first graph is everyone individually, the second is average and standard deviation.

Individual Polish women's progesterone concentrations.

Average Polish women's progesterone concentrations.

A few important things to note: this isn’t the same way the study authors aligned their data (though the way I have shown it here is more physiologically meaningful) and the units are different. However, if you look at about the times when the study authors were taking their measurements – mid to late follicular phase and late luteal phase – you see a TON of variation between those days, both within and between women. This is why a single measurement in that general window is, in essence, of no use. You have way too much noise in a single measurement to be able to begin to say anything about differences between groups.

The punchline

PMDD is very likely related to hormone concentrations – if not in their average values between groups, then in how those hormones differentially impact brain functioning (the brain sensitivity stuff Sci discusses so well). But we won’t know these potential differences if we don’t gather the hormone data correctly. Just because brain scans are cool -- and really, they are and I applaud the study authors for doing stuff that I simply cannot do and finding interesting results -- doesn’t mean you can give the hormones the short shrift.

References

Bloch M, Schmidt PJ, Su TP, Tobin MB, & Rubinow DR (1998). Pituitary-adrenal hormones and testosterone across the menstrual cycle in women with premenstrual syndrome and controls. Biological psychiatry, 43 (12), 897-903 PMID: 9627744

Concas A, Mostallino MC, Porcu P, Follesa P, Barbaccia ML, Trabucchi M, Purdy RH, Grisenti P, & Biggio G (1998). Role of brain allopregnanolone in the plasticity of gamma-aminobutyric acid type A receptor in rat brain during pregnancy and after delivery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 95 (22), 13284-9 PMID: 9789080

Rapkin AJ, Berman SM, Mandelkern MA, Silverman DH, Morgan M, & London ED (2011). Neuroimaging evidence of cerebellar involvement in premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Biological psychiatry, 69 (4), 374-80 PMID: 21092938

Rubinow DR, Hoban MC, Grover GN, Galloway DS, Roy-Byrne P, Andersen R, & Merriam GR (1988). Changes in plasma hormones across the menstrual cycle in patients with menstrually related mood disorder and in control subjects. American journal of obstetrics and gynecology, 158 (1), 5-11 PMID: 2962499

Support scientists, support the sciences, support US innovation

2011-02-15T21:22:00.000-06:00

Innovation and creativity are strong, valued traits in the US. Scientific and technological progress are marked by these two traits, long hours, hard work and collaboration. I got into biological anthropology because I believed I could make a real difference with my work and that it would translate into improving the lives of women in the US and around the world. I wanted to look at the modern problems of our ancient bodies, like PCOS and endometriosis, explore their origins and understand how to prevent them.

There are two issues at stake here in the conversation about the proposed House cuts via HR 1. The first is the survival of young investigators like me, the second the vibrancy of public universities like the one where I work.

I am in my third year as a tenure-track professor in a field that straddles the social and life sciences - my work is expensive by anthropological standards, but probably cheap by other basic science standards. I am on an NIH R21 proposal (no score yet) as a far-down-the-list collaborator. I am in my third submission at the NSF as a PI. Were I to do my work at the level I want, I would need over $100,000 a year in direct funding, ideally much more. So far I have received two small internal grants that, together, don't cover a year of work. I have found some very interesting ways to do some cheap yet awesome science, but it takes a lot longer to do it this way than to do it with money. I don't have any publications in the pipeline from this work yet (thankfully this will change any day now), in part because of its difficulty and in part because I spend all my waking hours writing grants and teaching.

Public universities used to get their money from, you know, the public. But funding has been reduced at the state and federal level, to the point that public universities survive on two sources of income: overhead from the grants faculty produce, and tuition from students. Thus, public universities recruit out-of-state students and increase their overall tuition, and we faculty frantically try to fit in one more grant proposal in time for the next grant cycle.

If young investigators are starved, if public universities are starved, we lose some of the greatest resources this country has to offer both in the production of innovative science and the education of the majority of our citizens.

Please read the note below and call your Congresscritters tomorrow.

Dear Colleague,

For months the new House leadership has been promising to cut billions in federal funding in fiscal year (FY) 2011. Later this week the House will try to make the rhetoric a reality by voting on HR 1, a "continuing resolution" (CR) that would cut NIH funding by $1.6 billion (5.2%) BELOW the current level - reducing the budget for medical research to $29.4 billion!
We must rally everyone - researchers, trainees, lab personnel - in the scientific community to protest these draconian cuts. Please go to [this link] for instructions on how to call your Representative's Washington, DC office today! Urge him/her to oppose the cuts to NIH and vote against HR 1. Once you've made the call, let us know how it went by sending a short email to the address provided in the call instructions and forward the alert link to your colleagues. We must explain to our Representatives how cuts to NIH will have a devastating impact on their constituents!

Sincerely,

William T. Talman, MD
FASEB President

hat tip Isis, drdrA, ProfinTraining, and many others

Agora: for women in science

2011-02-15T08:19:00.000-06:00

Agora is the women in science community developed by the L'Oreal Foundation. Recently I was asked to write a piece for them that talks about my work. You can find it here.

A snippet to entice you:

"The reason it’s so important to me that I be that activist scientist – someone whose work is informed by an understanding of the biases inherent in the process of science, and who promotes a deeper understanding of science to the general public – is that women’s health is something that many non-experts opine about, providing sometimes dangerous disinformation."

Who are you and what are you doing here? The results

2011-02-10T20:58:00.001-06:00

Thanks to Ed Yong and a number of other very smart people, I was inspired after Science Online 2011 to perform a survey of my readers to figure out who comes here, why they do, and what they'd like to see more of. I enjoy engaging with other science writers, bloggers, and fellow anthropologists, really I do. But I hoped to gain some insight into how I might reach an even broader audience, to increase awareness of the kinds of science I do and that I find interesting. There are political ramifications to having a lay population completely unaware of the basic functioning of the female body, particularly around reproduction, when we have so many strong feelings about it. Feelings will always win in a one-sided fight: put it up against evidence, though, and at least some people will start to operate more rationally.

Science Online 2011 taught me a few other things in terms of how to reach that audience. By bringing in a personal element, showing enthusiasm, or giving the reader more things to look at than a wall of text, I could invite different kinds of people in. As everyone now knows, you can try DMing Ed Yong (hee hee, sorry Ed!). I tried to do those things in subsequent posts. And so, this happened:

Figure 1. My hits from the first day of #scio11 to yesterday. Eep.

My survey went from the 17th of January until the 21st or so; I stopped at sixty respondents. As you might imagine, my readership has changed.

That said, I think I learned a lot from the survey, so I want to share it with you and see if we can broaden the conversation.

Who are you?

The people who filled out my survey were about my age, were my ethnicity (European), and were mostly women (I suspect the f:m ratio would have been even higher if I hadn't taunted Twitter at one point that the female respondents were beating the males). Here are the graphs (notice that the bars/pie slices represent absolute numbers of respondents, and percentages are listed next to each choice):

I regret the way I wrote the ethnicity question. I was trying to figure out how to ask people's ethnicity from a more global perspective -- that is, I couldn't exactly write European-American, African-American, etc, because I have readers from other countries. These ethnicities also mean something very different depending on where you live. This led to confusion in almost ten respondents, many of whom were white but not all, who just put in the "other" section that they were white/black/mixed race/etc.

Two last questions in this section were about the respondent's education and vocation. Here is what I got.

A full third of respondents have PhDs. Damn, people. But I was pleased to see at least a handful of folks that were still in college (and I hope desperately that they aren't just my current semester of students!).

So... I guess I and my doppelgangers read my blog. This demonstrates a few important things:

People read people who are like them.
If you want people who are not like you to read your blog, you probably have to step out of your comfort zone.

This is significant for a number of reasons. More prominent women sciencebloggers, for instance, likely means more female readers. Same goes with more sciencebloggers of color, of different sexualities, different physical capabilities, different countries, different ages. And since sciencebloggers can draw people into science, can excite them, inspire them to stay when they are feeling scared, and otherwise mentor them, having broader representation in scienceblogging is a Very Good Thing.

Conversely, if I want to reach something other than the white-female-straight-middle-class-academic audience, I need to be doing something different than what I'm doing right now. Some of that lies in promotion and marketing, but more of that likely has to do with voice, style and content.

What do you want from me?

Most of this section of the survey was freeform response, but I did have a few graphable questions.

What I find interesting here is that readers mostly want to read about the life of a scientist stuff (there are many women sciencebloggers who do this more regularly and eloquently than me), and more plain-old anthropology. Ladybusiness, reproductive choice, women's reproduction, not nearly so much.

On the one hand, I think I would like to expand my writing a bit to try to write posts that have an anthropological perspective and broad appeal. On the other, if ladybusiness isn't your top priority, readers, you don't know what you're missing!

I'd like to think that's what I demonstrated last week with my iron-deficiency anemia post. If I weren't scrabbling for tenure I could probably write a post a week on anthropological perspectives on women's health like that post. Men and women commented on, and wrote on, that post. It made it to reddit, a few great feminism blogs, and lots of other non-science individual bloggers and livejournalers.

So ladybusiness is here to stay, but I am going to try to expand my reach. Anthropology is a discipline most don't get in high school, so most people know next to nothing about it. It would be a great thing if I could expose more people to how cool the field can be.

What you had to say

I had two open-response questions, one on how I could attract more laypeople, and another that was just open for questions and comments. For the first question, you said:

Explain more terms, go for a less scholarly tone.
Many of you found me through Twitter, so continue using that medium.
Try for less of a wall of text (break it up, use pictures, etc).
Use more keywords so they get Googled.
Write "basics" posts that can be referred to again and again by laypeople, teachers and students.
Use surveys and other interactive widgets.

For the second, mostly you just said really nice things. Several women in academic positions more junior than me said they read me to stick with academia. I wanted to share just one quote, because it demonstrates what I'm aiming for, even if I don't really think I'm there yet (but thank you!):

"...I really enjoy [your blog], and thank you for being one of the voices that makes ongoing work in science into something I feel I can read and follow, rather than some impenetrable ivory tower only accessible through poor mainstream media interpretation. (Even laypeople get tired of saying "They did a study! You know, the 'they' that 'does studies,' whoever 'they' are.") The perspective on women's issues is a particular bonus as well."

I think those of us who want to write for a broader audience, if we can inspire this feeling in our readers, even some of the time, we're doing well.

And finally, what I want from you

I didn't write this post to inspire a conversation just about why you read my blog: I don't need more of a lovefest and feel a little like I've reached Internet Saturation anyway! But I'd like to know:

Why do you come here?
Why do you read any science blog?
How do you think we can get your friends to read us too?

If we could inspire people to reach for other connections, with material and people they don't know, instead of the zone of comfort they do know, it would be a marvelous thing.

An embarrassment of riches

2011-02-07T11:35:00.000-06:00

I have been quite the fancypants lately. In addition to the flood of new traffic from Science Online 2011, and in particular my post on the women scienceblogging panel, folks have been heading here to talk about broader issues of underrepresentation and racism, and, of course, iron-deficiency and the ladybusiness.

Then, because of a happy accident and the fact that Laura Weisskopf Bleill of Chambanamoms.com wanted to help me promote some focus groups I am running for a study on doctor-patient relationships around hormonal contraceptives,* I became a Chambana Mom to Know. At the same time I was recruited by the ever-clever John Hawks to do a bloggingheads.tv diavlog where we discuss women in science, blogging in academia, my fieldwork, the ladybusiness, #aaafail, and lots of other stuff.

I am feeling quite overwhelmed by the fact that I have a lot of new readers, and this is no longer the intimate space it once was (usually when I write, I imagine myself to be talking to a group of female friends while we sit on the couch and hang out - it now feels like giving a seminar to a medium-sized room full of people, where we are somehow still able to manage cool sidebar conversations). This is new and exciting, and while there is a part of me that will grieve for that little space where I knew most of the people who read me, I am delighted to bring anthropology to more people and keep pushing myself to write more accessibly for more people.

So, I am trying to think of next steps in terms of my writing. I still owe you all a summary of the survey I did on my readers a few weeks ago: given my day job commitments, that is the plan for what will probably be my single big post of the week.

However, I also want to continue to do two things: shorter researchblogging posts on articles I find interesting, and longer posts on specific issues around women's health, anthropology and medicine. So if there are particular papers you want me to read, particular topics you want me to cover... say so in the comments!

*I need to double-check with the IRB about whether I have approval to advertise this on the blog. If it turns out I do, expect a post on it this week!

ResearchBlogging Editor's Selections this week

2011-02-04T10:47:00.000-06:00

Krystal D'Kosta, the new social sciences editor at ResearchBlogging.org, shares her Editor's Selections this week, and I'm one of them for my iron-deficiency post! Check them all out here.

Iron-deficiency is not something you get just for being a lady

2011-01-31T15:40:00.002-06:00

When I was thirteen years old, I got my period. Soon after, I remember going with my mother to the nurse practitioner's office -- her name was Debbie. Debbie told me that once girls got their periods, they were more likely to be anemic, and I would have to watch out for it. She suggested I start to take an iron supplement.

Something about that conversation irked me, even when I discovered that I was slightly anemic a few years later. I disliked the implication that one could be pathological just by being female. And I didn't understand how it was that menses, which is only about thirty milliliters of blood loss per menses, could have such a profound impact on women's iron status.

When I was in college, I studied this in a bit more depth in my undergraduate thesis. I discovered two important studies:

First, most people assume that the sex difference in iron stores in males and females, which begins at puberty, is due to the onset of the period and looks like this:

Figure 1. Made-up data to demonstrate the assumed way the sex difference in hemoglobin is produced.

However, the sex difference in iron status in males and females derives from an increase in male iron stores at puberty, not a decrease in female iron stores. This has to do with oxygen transport and testosterone (Bergstrom et al 1995). This means that the difference that occurs at puberty actually looks like this:

Figure 2. Made-up data to demonstrate the actual way the sex difference in hemoglobin is produced.

Second, the main culprit for iron-deficiency anemia (IDA) in men is upper-gastrointestinal bleeding, so when men present with IDA the first thing they do is an endoscopy. When women present with IDA they give her iron supplements and tell her to go home because it's just her ladybusiness. Kepczyk et al (1999) decided to actually do endoscopies on women for whom a gynecological source was diagnosed by a specialist for their IDA. They found a whopping eighty-six percent of these women had a gastrointestinal disease that was likely causing their IDA. Therefore, menses likely had nothing to do with their IDA, and the assumption that menses made them pathological actually obstructed a correct diagnosis.

The majority of the women in that study were bleeding internally, and no one had figured it out until then because they had periods.

When I went to graduate school, I wanted to study menstrual and endometrial functioning because the assumption that it inherently causes disease seems to lead to a life of frustration with the medical system for many women. I figured it would be good for us to better understand variation in this part of the body... so that's what I did. I went to rural Poland, where my colleague Dr. Grazyna Jasienska has a lovely field site perfect for testing my questions about the endometrium: I wanted a non-industrial population, but couldn't choose one so remote that I didn't have access to a hospital, since the women would need to do ultrasounds for me to image their endometria. Then, I didn't set out to test specific questions about IDA, but Dr. Jasienska wanted to do some blood tests on my subjects for a related study, and happened to do a full work-up on them.

Without meaning to, I ended up with two very useful pieces of evidence: measurements of their endometrial thickness, and their iron status. I also knew their dietary iron intake since I did 24-hour diet recalls. I realized that I had the evidence in front of me to test the relationship between menstruation and anemia directly, rather than indirectly like other studies I had read.

It was a matter of some simple correlations (Clancy et al 2006):

Figure 3. Red blood cells (RBC) and hemoglobin (Hg) are positively correlated with endometrial thickness (from Clancy et al 2006). Click to embiggen!

Take a look at the p-values for the relationship between endometrial thickness (ET) and red blood cells (RBC), and ET and hemoglobin (Hg): both are statistically significant. What's more, the relationships are positive. That means that the thicker the endometria, the better the iron status. I'll admit, when I ran these stats my hypothesis was simply that there would be no relationship, likely meaning that the effect of ET on iron status was at most neutral. But a positive effect? At least in this test, there is no support for the prevailing medical assumption that menses is correlated with IDA.

I was reminded of this study of mine recently, because it was cited by someone else studying something a bit different (vanity Google Scholaring will get you that). Elizabeth Miller, a graduate student (though she may have since defended) at the University of Michigan, wrote a very interesting paper on maternal hemoglobin depletion, which is the situation where pregnancy and lactation deplete iron stores. Miller (2010) studied this phenomenon in two populations in northern Kenya, a settled population and a more pastoral one, as a way to understand the differential impact of interbirth interval, energetic constraint, and dietary iron intake on maternal depletion. I'm going to focus just on the part of this study related to issues of menses and IDA.

Miller found that iron stores slowly increase in lactating mothers with months since birth, but also that the more children these women had, the lower their hemoglobin. This makes sense in terms of where iron needs to be allocated during pregnancy and lactation, and how women with many children might not have enough time or resource to replete their iron before having their next kid.

But the really cool finding, to me, was that resumption of menses after pregnancy was positively associated with hemoglobin. Resumption of periods after pregnancy is highly variable, and largely dependent on energy availability and lactation practices. These results, that iron stores increase once you start getting your period again, indicate again that menses is not having a negative effect on iron stores. So this is the second study I know of to show a positive relationship between menses and iron status.

Ladies, unless you are menorrhagic (bleeding more than 120 milliliters each cycle) your period is not doing you wrong. If you have iron-deficiency anemia and your doctor is insisting it's because you slough off your endometrium from time to time without doing a single test to confirm it, you may want to insist on an endoscopy. It could save your life.

References

Bergström E, Hernell O, Persson LA, & Vessby B (1995). Serum lipid values in adolescents are related to family history, infant feeding, and physical growth. Atherosclerosis, 117 (1), 1-13 PMID: 8546746

Clancy, K., Nenko, I., & Jasienska, G. (2006). Menstruation does not cause anemia: Endometrial thickness correlates positively with erythrocyte count and hemoglobin concentration in premenopausal women American Journal of Human Biology, 18 (5), 710-713 DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.20538

Kepczyk, M. (1999). A prospective, multidisciplinary evaluation of premenopausal women with iron-deficiency anemia The American Journal of Gastroenterology, 94 (1), 109-115 DOI: 10.1016/S0002-9270(98)00661-3

Miller EM (2010). Maternal hemoglobin depletion in a settled northern Kenyan pastoral population. American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, 22 (6), 768-74 PMID: 20721981

Science Online 2011: Underrepresentation hurts us all

2011-01-28T00:16:00.001-06:00

In my second year of graduate school, I was in a study group with a few other grad students: in particular I remember a white female student and an Asian-American female student. Somehow we got on the topic of admissions, where we all admitted, jokingly, to feeling like impostors. Then the white female student stated that she didn't believe in affirmative action, and expressed her view with quite a bit of anger. "Besides," she finished, "I just don't see race."

I was completely paralyzed, and felt like I had no way to articulate what was wrong with what she just said. She happened to leave the room shortly after her statement. I turned to my Asian-American friend.

"Doesn't see race?" She almost shouted. Tears sprang to her eyes. "When she says that, she doesn't see ME." I looked at her, mute, wanting to cry myself for the shame of not knowing how to be a better friend.

* * *

I haven't always been the best ally. At times, I probably haven't been an ally at all. The story I related above was the only one I dared share where I could sufficiently pseudonymize the characters. It was not the first, nor was it the last, time I was struck dumb by racism.

I did learn to speak up and interrupt racism, and slowly have figured out ways to make the elimination of racism and sexism priorities in my life. But I have a long way to go.

The MLK, Jr Memorial panel at Science Online 2011, like the women scienceblogging panel, was up against some stiff competition: Defending Science Online, Standing out: Marketing yourself in science, Blogging networks and the emerging science communications ecosystem and Not All Marketing is Evil: Getting Life Science Companies to Support Science Online. I'll admit to sitting near the back with the thought I might divide my time between this session and one other. Yet within the first few minutes I sat there, I knew I was in the right place. David Kroll, who you know all over the internet because of his great blogs Terra Sigillata and Take as Directed, opened by playing the guitar and singing Bob Marley. Within a few bars, about a third of the audience was singing along with him. I was too busy trying not to cry to join in.

I was emotional for a number of reasons... because of the wonderful contradiction of David sitting up there and singing, because of the warmth of the room, where it felt like we had a shared mission. David contradicted the paralysis a lot of allies face, because we are so afraid of doing it wrong, of making the mistake that exposes the racism and privilege we are working so hard to cover up.

In addition to discussing Martin Luther King, Jr's history in Durham and the surrounding area, David shared with us the following quote from Irving Epstein (which it turns out David wrote about a year ago here):

In 2005, more than two-thirds of the American scientific workforce was composed of white males. But by 2050, white males will make up less than one-fourth of the population. If the pipeline fails to produce qualified nonwhite scientists, we will, in effect, be competing against the rest of the world with one hand tied behind our backs.

Danielle Lee of Urban Science Adventures, and Alberto Roca of Minority Postdoc, were also panelists. Danielle was engaging and smart: she talked about issues of underrepresentation in science, as well as access and trust of science in minority communities. Alberto, who I had also heard speak as an audience member at a few other panels, also talked about underrepresentation issues in science, the invisibility and isolation of being a person of color in science, and how to operate against that isolation. Here are a few of their broader points (any butchered or incomplete thoughts are my fault only):

People of color and from underrepresented groups often have to pass in order to survive in science.
People have to be mentored all the way up the chain: several stories were mentioned where women and people of color were not adequately prepared or professionalized for their jobs and suffered for it.
Impostor syndrome is universal.
You act like a role model when you have a voice, so if you aren't speaking up you aren't a role model. Also, if you are invisible or are ignored/underappreciated, you will have a harder time being an effective role model. So the knife cuts both ways.
As Danielle says, science needs a new PR campaign. The African American community has serious trust issues with science and with good reason: this community has been exploited, undervalued, ignored.
Related to the above, there was some discussion of issues of religion and science; namely, that it is a mistake to completely discount or scoff at those with religion. Religion, faith, and religious practices have an important cultural component for many minority communities in the United States and beyond, and to write off their beliefs is to write them off as people. Even if that's not what is intended, that is certainly what is heard.

The entire session was moving -- all three panelists were so thoughtful and kind to one another, they answered audience questions so well, and the audience was committed to the issue of underrepresentation in science. I have a few last thoughts of my own that I'd like to share, as a way to extend the conversation about women scienceblogging to be more inclusive.

First, I don't think white people or people with privilege should shy away from conversations about underrepresentation, race, or ethnicity. It is time to just be comfortable with the fact that we are going to make mistakes. If we are well-meaning and want to eliminate racism and other oppressions, then the mistakes we are going to make will not be as bad as the worst ones faced by those to whom we're trying to be allies. Those of us in this community who are academics tend to encourage our students to make mistakes, because we know they will learn from them. But the stakes feel so high in this situation that we are paralyzed. Guess what? Being paralyzed is actually worse than making a mistake. You can apologize for a mistake. There isn't much you can do to fix things if you stay out of an important fight.

Second, you know the isolation we talk about as women scientists and science writers? Multiply that times a million and you probably have the isolation of being a person of color in the sciences. There are some different ways in which sexism and racism play out in the public sphere, at least in the US: people might be a bit more willing to make sexist comments than racist ones. However, the impact of racism is at least as harmful, probably more harmful in most ways, because it leads to social disparities in education, health, salaries, living conditions.

There are people out there who study the effects of social disparities and internalized racism on health, and folks, it's not good. For instance, the mortality rates of blacks are significantly higher than for whites in heart disease, cancer, unintentional injury, flu and pneumonia, HIV, cirrhosis and homicide (Williams 1999). Measures of internalized racism are correlated with a higher waist circumference, abdominal obesity and insulin resistance (Tull et al 1999, Chambers et al 2004). Issues of acculturation plague immigrant women, especially second-generation women, who experience more explicit instances of racism in their lives through acculturation (Viruell-Fuentes 2007).

Finally, science will be a richer, more interesting topic when there is more diversity. And I don't just mean it in the Small World sense: I mean that while I love the scientific method, I know the process of science to be strongly biased by who performs it, and so it is absolutely necessary that we have many different people doing and thinking about science in order to have the best possible perspective on it.

Back when I was a union organizer in grad school, my organizer and mentor told me that graduate school doesn't weed out the weak, it weeds out the strong: it weeds out those with strong senses of self who don't want to be exploited, who realize there are other things to do in the world and other ways to live a meaningful life. I think that is true for a lot of people who leave academia and science, and unfortunately most of the ones I know who left were women and people of color.

Here's the problem. I want them back, I miss them: they were my dear friends. Those are the kinds of people we need to lead science, do science, communicate science, encourage and excite young people to be scientists.

Reach out for people. Be an ally. Interrupt racism and sexism. Implement changes where you work to better recruit and retain people of color. Put people of color in positions of power: they probably know how to fix this mess much better than you do. Risk making mistakes; say you're sorry once you realize it.

But whatever you do, don't just sit there.

References

Chambers EC, Tull ES, Fraser HS, Mutunhu NR, Sobers N, & Niles E (2004). The relationship of internalized racism to body fat distribution and insulin resistance among African adolescent youth Journal of the National Medical Association, 96 (12), 1594-8 PMID: 15622689

Tull SE, Wickramasuriya T, Taylor J, Smith-Burns V, Brown M, Champagnie G, Daye K, Donaldson K, Solomon N, Walker S, Fraser H, & Jordan OW (1999). Relationship of internalized racism to abdominal obesity and blood pressure in Afro-Caribbean women. Journal of the National Medical Association, 91 (8), 447-52 PMID: 12656433

Viruell-Fuentes EA (2007). Beyond acculturation: immigration, discrimination, and health research among Mexicans in the United States. Social science & medicine (1982), 65 (7), 1524-35 PMID: 17602812

Williams DR (1999). Race, socioeconomic status, and health. The added effects of racism and discrimination. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 896, 173-88 PMID: 10681897

The women scienceblogging revolution

2011-01-26T09:20:00.018-06:00

At least, that's what it feels like to me.

You've commented on my last post, you've written your own posts, you've tweeted and retweeted. You've been insightful, brilliant, and kind. You have been allies to each other. You haven't fed the trolls.

The people of the science blogosphere are good, thoughtful people. If a real conversation about eliminating sexism was going to happen anywhere, in a way that emboldened women and made allies of men, it was going to be here. I think the combination of meeting in person, having those many women-only conversations, having such smart people in the women scienceblogging panel, and bringing the conversation back online, to where we all met in the first place, has been really good for us.

So I want to share two last things. First, I'd like to link to as many posts people have written on this topic as possible. If you don't see your post here, link to it in the comments and I'll put it up here. (I looked at hits in my statcounter to come up with the list, so I could have easily missed yours.)

Second, I am slowly (because it is the start of the semester and I have a million other writing projects far more important for tenure than this blog) writing a post reflecting on the MLK, Jr session I attended at Science Online 2011. I hope that as we continue talking and reflecting on issues of women in the science blogosphere, we broaden the conversation to talk about race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other related identities that are not represented or supported as strongly as they could be.

Posts related to #scio11 or the #scio11 conversation

The biology files: Women who write about science

Observations of a nerd: I've never been very good at hiding

The Intersection: Sex in the Blogosphere

This is Serious Monkey Business: Raison d'etre of the female undergraduate primatology blogger

Almost Diamonds: Hidden Women, Hidden Writers

The Happy Scientist: Just Ask

Fumbling Towards Tenure Track: Self-promotion tour 2011

Neuron Culture: Hey You Men Who Yell "Nice Tits": STFU

Neuron Culture: Guest post (my original post, crossposted)

Blue Lab Coats: Linky linky... blogging and doing science while female

Neuroanthropology: Wednesday Round Up #139 (the post gets a mention here)

Science in the Triangle: Why scientists (should) blog

The Loom Room: Are men who do textiles superheroes or spoilt? (a post about a totally different field, but a commenter brings up our conversation)

Only the Educated are Free: How I cannot fight sexism because I am afraid of men

Neuroanthropology: Women and Science Blogging

Outdoor Science: Why are female science writers invisible?

Scicurious: Where are the female science bloggers?

Neurotypical? On self-promotion

One Small Step: Some thoughts, a poll, and an invitation

Denim and Tweet: We need to hear what we'd rather not

Almost Diamonds: Writers don't spring from Zeus's forehead either

Athene Donald: Unwritten Rules

The Intersection: Rising against the wind

Nature Network: Women in science - where are we now?

Alice Rose Bell: The politics of online science

Thus Spake Zuska: But I want to earn everything all on my own merits! #scio11

Broader posts about gender and scienceblogging: more must-reads

There and (hopefully) back again: Gender and blogging (and everything else)

Purely Anecdotal: The good

The Incubator: A pregnant postdoc in the 21st century

Child's Play: On becoming Birkin and letting go of Gainsbourg

Scicurious: Let's talk about sex in science

Young Female Scientist: Be the visible bitch

The Hermitage: How gaming makes me a better graduate student: gear

Science Online 2011: Even when we want something, we need to hide it.

2011-01-22T21:57:00.000-06:00

A few years ago, I was standing outside the building where I taught, unlocking my bike. It was one of the first days of the semester, and I had just finished teaching. I was wearing one of my teaching uniforms: wideleg trouser jeans, a black boatneck sweater, and beautiful forest green heels. Except in really bad weather, I wear heels when I teach because it helps me feel older, like I have some authority. Being sometimes several decades younger than my colleagues, but usually less than a decade older than my students, meant my gender and age made me a sort of sexualized second class citizen.

An older faculty member approached me to unlock his own bike. He complained about where some students had locked their bikes because they obstructed the bike lane. He mentioned that he had told the police but that they never did anything about it. I nodded sympathetically.

"Of course," he then said, "if I had been dressed like you, maybe they would have listened!"

And just like that, I was no longer a colleague. I was a woman.

* * *
The perils women sciencebloggers face are not that different than those we face in the real world... though the exposure of the internet can occasionally make it less safe. And the risks that women avoid out in the world, are not unlike those we avoid in the blogosphere. That was one of many important conclusions made in the panel Sheril Kirshenbaum, Anne Jefferson, Joanne Manaster and I ran for the Sunday midday panel entitled "Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name." I believe Sheril was the one who first suggested the topic.

This panel ended up being a great experience, for several reasons. First, leading up to the session, I had the opportunity to meet with other women at the conference and discuss the topic. I found myself in large, women-only groups on a number of occasions (though I just realized, this happens to me a lot at academic conferences too: I think I avoid schmoozing with men more than I realize, a point I will return to later). Each time, I brought up the panel to hear what they had to say, and they made beautiful points, expressed legitimate frustrations, shared both good stories and horrible ones, and in general kicked ass. There were some seriously smart and savvy women at Science Online 2011.

"Even when we want something, we feel the need to hide it"

Because I'm not sure whether these women want to be identified by the points they made or stories they shared, I'm not naming names here. But after each impromptu mini-panel, I took copious notes. Here is what the women I spoke to had to say:

There is serious friend bias in who gets promoted in the science blogosphere, and it ends up that men promote other men quite a lot (in order to avoid potential defensiveness, I will say that we did also discuss several notable exceptions). We need to share the empirical evidence about the fact that people like to read people who are a lot like them, as a kind of sensitivity training for men, to help them train their brains to appreciate many different voices.
We are all very, very tired of making a point on a blog, on twitter, or in a meeting, being ignored, having a man make the same point, then having that man get all the credit. Very tired.
We still can't be ambitious without being considered a bitch. People will always fall back on that term if they think you are too aggressive, but the same behavior is not criticized in men. One woman brought up an article she read by a journalist who said, of all the famous women she had ever interviewed (including leading political figures like Hillary Clinton), only Catherine Zeta Jones had ever admitted to being ambitious: the others had denied it. Even when we want something, we often feel we need to hide it.
Women already have to be two and a half times better than a man to get the same job in science (referring here to the Wenneras and Wold article), women who blog using their real names have to be even better than that if she doesn't want her blog counted against her when going up for promotion.
Both the attacks and appreciations are different for women bloggers. We get unwanted attentions and compliments on our appearance, surprise that we are an authority on certain topics or have an interest in male-dominated topics, or are bullied in a way that feels gendered when a man decides we are wrong on the internet.
The risk-aversion women bloggers display only hurts us. If we continue to be risk-averse women will never occupy positions where they can influence the community of bloggers -- we need to take on editorships, we need to manage networks, run carnivals, so that we can then involve and promote more women. The blogosphere, like academia, is not a pure meritocracy.
There are differences in the pros and cons of blogging depending on whether you are pseud or use your real name, and different ways you find support in the community.
If we think we have it bad, look at other underrepresented groups: the situation is in some ways even worse. We need to avoid the Oppression Olympics and think about how to pull everyone up the ladder with us.

And remember... this is what was covered before we even started the panel!

"I want to puke on their shoes"

The panel itself was great, because the four of us panelists had different backgrounds and stories to share. Anne and I are both academics who spent some time in the science blogosphere with pseudonyms before engaging with our real names. However Anne is in a more male-dominated discipline and co-blogs with a man; mine is a bit more equal, but also I study women's reproductive physiology, which leads to more reflective, sometimes more personal writing. Joanne makes science videos for a broader audience and has a great mind for visuals, humor, and for a really engaging style. Sheril co-blogs with a man as well, in a high profile website, and has published two books (I must admit, I am frantically trying to finish two books right now so that I can finally start her book The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us!).But again, while I think all my co-panelists had some very important things to say, and some great stories (and awful stalker stories), the audience is what made the panel. Here are a few things they had to say (I wasn't able to take notes as readily during the panel, but I will link to the video of the panel when it's up):

We need to be clear about how bad it really is to write under your own name -- some women have had no problems at all where others have been driven out. Depending on the topic you write about and the kind of audience you write for, you will have different experiences, and many women will have only good experiences. We shouldn't be too negative.
Some people think writing for a female audience is lame. Apparently there is a listserv of science writers, and about once a year a conversation starts up about whether science writers should write for women's magazines -- apparently many people come down on the side of not thinking science writers should write for them. (My take? Any time anyone says there is anything wrong with writing for women, it is sexist.)
One fantastic young woman talked about how she avoids discussing her blog with her peers for fear of becoming the "soft skills chick." Doing anything other than the hottest science seems to delegitimize women very quickly; however in some cases men get rewarded for doing the same thing (examples that come to my mind are picking up extra teaching and service, or having offspring, the latter being empirically supported).
Robin Lloyd already mentioned this in her article, but Ed Yong attended our panel (one of, I think, only three men). He mentioned that he gets DMed on Twitter regularly by men who want him to Tweet or promote their posts. He said he had never been DMed for promotional reasons by a woman. I was completely flabbergasted by this comment (and I don't think I was the only one), because it had never occurred to me that I could even do that sort of a thing.
The brilliant Zuska made several great comments (as Sheril pointed out, she really should have been on the panel!). One that really struck me is that we need to interrogate assumptions about women and provide empirical evidence against them. The reason this came up was that we were discussing where attacks can come from, and how sometimes the attacks come from women as well as men. I believe someone made the comment that women can be worse, and alluded to the idea that women make bad bosses for women. Zuska pointed out that when you look at the evidence male bosses are still worse to women than women are to women. And of course, towards the end of the panel Zuska also used what is likely her most famous and beloved line, "I want to puke on their shoes."

Building an old girls' club

At the end of the day, being female is a risk factor for unwanted attention if you choose to put yourself out there in any aspect of your life, from your job to your blog. But a risk factor is not the same thing as a foregone conclusion. We can choose not to engage and participate, not to take on positions of power (like, say researchblogging editorships) or attention (blogging on a network). But we're holding ourselves, and women younger than us, back. We aren't directing or shaping the debate. We aren't holding people accountable when they ignore or forget issues relevant to women and other underrepresented groups.

Women need to connect with each other in private spaces, like email and private forums, and we need to continue to write "life of science" posts that mentor other women. Anne and I have been writing each other every week for a few years now, sharing the work we need to get done, the work we are going to let go and not feel guilty about, the happy and sad happening in our lives. Those emails help me structure my week and make action plans for my big academic projects. What's more, Anne and I probably know more about each other than many people who see each other every day. And that relationship has given me the confidence to write this blog, to engage with sciencebloggers, to be a mommy and a scientist and a professor.

Be bold. Be ambitious. Be a little bit of a bitch. Plan your life in such a way that it gets bigger, not smaller. I plan my life so that my daughter, now almost three, will feel as though anything is possible; I want to be her example that a woman can occupy space and be pleased with herself.

I hope more of you blog, I hope more of you who already blog promote your blog and get your name out there, I hope you email me or someone you feel you could connect to when you need a reminder that you're not alone. Because, why be small when you can be big?

Robin Lloyd's great piece in Scientific American on our women bloggers panel

2011-01-18T12:30:00.001-06:00

I was mentioned in a piece by Robin Lloyd in Scientific American today regarding the panel I co-chaired with Anne Jefferson, Sheril Kirschenbaum and Joanne Manaster at Science Online 2011 this past weekend on the Perils of Blogging as a Woman under her Real Name.

A quick highlight:

The entire concept of a woman science blogger overturns various long-held assumptions about science and gender. Kirshenbaum urged the session audience to bring important science and health information to women readers even at old guard, mass-media "women's" magazines such as Redbook. "I am adamantly a believer that we have to reach beyond [conventional science news outlets]," she said. "Science is not addressed to women. It's written for men and marketed to men even if men at the magazines don't claim that it is."
A face-palm reaction rippled among the 20 or so mostly female attendees of the session when "Not exactly rocket science" blogger Ed Yong (@edyong209) said, "I suspect there is a bias in terms of what is pushed to me through Twitter." He explained that, although other male writers often ask him to retweet links to their latest blog posts, not a single such request has ever come from a woman writer. Women in the room immediately broke into laughter, and commented about the novelty and presumptuousness to them of such a practice. Said Yong, "The fact that people haven't done this speaks volumes."

Check it out!

Cross-posted at Laboratory for Evolutionary Endocrinology

Who are you and what are you doing here? A survey

2011-01-17T12:07:00.000-06:00

Some practical advice that I gleaned from the Blogs, Bloggers and Boundaries session at Science Online 2011 was to find out who my readers are, what they liked, what keeps them coming back, what they want more of. I needed to get a SurveyMonkey pro account anyway for a scholarly project I will be launching in a few months, so I tested it out by putting this together. Please answer honestly, and share any additional thoughts or comments below!

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Science Online 2011: The craft of blogging, and getting this durn blog to count for something

2011-01-15T22:17:00.003-06:00

In my experience as an academic, the first time I attend a conference I am all about the panels and symposia. I run frantically from one room to the next, barely stopping for food or to use the restroom, and take notes at every speaker. Then, with every year I attend the conference, I attend fewer talks and spend more time catching up with friends and networking with a combination of collaborators and people I hope will write external letters for my tenure case. Both the early zest, and the later relaxation and connections with other people, are really enjoyable states. My first experience with Science Online has been sort of a combination of the two, because it was organized in a way to maximize our enjoyment of the speakers, while also very intentionally setting up opportunities for us to socialize in a way that helped awkward scientists get to know each other with minimal effort.

Friday, January 14th

I arrived on Friday just in time to see Bora, hug him, and run to my first afternoon workshop. I attended Joanne Manaster's and Carin Bondar's workshop on making your own short video, then Clifton Wiens's workshop entitled "Science Documentary - The Challenges and Possibilities." Joanne and Carin were energetic and hopeful, and offered a lot of practical advice. They also had us break up into small groups twice to discuss first what kind of short videos we were interested in producing, and then to work together in that same group to talk through one of our ideas. Based on some interesting conversations in the first round on leeches, and an eye toward SEO search terms, we came up with a short video concept entitled "Lady Gaga's Meat Dress or Justin Bieber: Who Would Leeches Prefer?" We had a lot of fun thinking through how that would look... and to be honest, I kinda want to see the thing made now. My small group had a number of wonderful people, and with apologies for who I am forgetting we had Ariel Neff, Holly Tucker, Randi Hutter Epstein, Bora Zivkovic, Jai Ranganathan, Megan Lowman, and several others.

Friday night we had a Books and Beer event, which I mostly spent ogling all the people I had been reading and admiring for years (I got to hug Ed Yong, and meet/hug a number of other truly wonderful people), and then we went out to group dinners that we had to sign up for ahead of time. I signed up for the group dinner that Anne Jefferson was in, because she and I have been friends for years, and had never met. It was so exciting to meet, and hug, and feel that instant connection of friendship in person that had developed online. Notice, that's now three hugs I've received from people I'd never met in person before. This will be a recurring theme.

At the group dinner, a number of women ended up together, chatting about Anne's and my upcoming panel on blogging as a woman. Holly, Christie Wilcox, Melissa, Kea, and others weighed in with insightful comments, observations, and frustrations. I am beginning to think we will never get to everything we want to get to in that panel in just an hour... but we'll try (Sunday, 11:30am, Room B!).

Saturday, January 15th: morning

Saturday is the first full day of the conferences, with panels and speakers and demos. For my morning panels, I chose topics that would help me think about the crafts of blogging and communicating science: Making the History of Science Work for You, Experiments with the imagination: science and scientists through the medium of fiction with Jennifer Rohn and Blake Stacey, and The Entertainment Factor - Communicating Science with Humor with Brian Malow and Joanne Manaster.

All three panels were great, but I wanted to spend a little time unpacking some of my own thinking about the wonderful fiction panel.

Jenny and Blake are both published authors of fiction, and they organized their time in such a way as to really encourage the audience to participate. We discussed the pull to get the facts right, but also the pull to get the people (the scientists) right, when writing fiction that contains science. Jenny discussed fiction as "a stealth tactic to slip in science," which I liked, and we talked about what it means to get more people excited about science, and the trade-offs of often having to trade some reality for drama. Blake made some nice points about how a reader can suspend disbelief if the science is off in something, but if they get the scientists wrong, it's a horrible mistake. Showing scientists act in a way that they would never act is inauthentic, and dehumanizes them. If we want more people excited about science, and getting into science, scientists have to be portrayed realistically.

I was interested in what we could learn from fiction and storytelling to help us capture more readers in our science writing. Recently, I have had two experiences that have shown me that it's important to take into account how literal-minded some layfolks can be when reading or learning about things, as opposed to the skepticism scientists often bring.

For the first experience, last month I wrote a guest post for Scientific American entitled "I don't have a 28-day menstrual cycle, and neither should you." It was pretty popular, was retweeted widely, and got a lot of comments (at least for me). I did some sleuthing to try and figure out who was reading it or talking about it, and found someone had cut and pasted my entire post into a forum at thenest.com. If you read the comments, you'll see how outraged many of the women were at what I thought was a humorous, if provocative, title. They took the title literally.

The second experience is related to teaching. For the last several semesters in the courses I teach, I have discussed the economic situation of my university with my class on the first day, where the money goes, how their tuition is on the rise, and what my contract covers (in terms of research, teaching, and service, and the expectations of the time I'll allocate to the three, which happens to be 55%, 35% and 10% respectively). In that same lecture, indeed only moments later, I explain my radical teaching philosophy and share with them my passion for teaching and connecting with them and sharing my excitement for the material. Every semester I have done this, I get at least a few student evaluations who say "From the first day Prof. Clancy showed she hated us and hated teaching, and said she was only here to do research and that's what she's paid to do. She hates students!!!1!11!!" Again, even though the "reveal" was seconds after the set-up, a number of students took me literally.

Now, it's entirely possible that I lack much writing and speaking finesse, and this leads to these misunderstandings. But I suspect a certain literal-mindedness from lay readers and new learners of science, because of the way that they are taught that science is something you KNOW, something with irrefutable FACTS where you are right or wrong. They don't learn the process of science, so they don't know to suspend their disbelief, they don't know to think about the whole picture, they don't expect something with nuance. The question I have is, does that mean in order to communicate with a wider audience that we should lose the nuance, or do we just know that we are going to lose readers, or, is there some way to encourage the reader to rise up to the level of our writing? They're smart enough, they just don't have a scientist's toolbox. Can we give them that toolbox as science bloggers and writers? How would we do that without being pedantic?

Saturday, January 15th: afternoon

I attended another two great panels: Blogs, Bloggers and Boundaries? with Marie-Claire Shanahan, Alice Bell, Ed Yong, Martin Robbins and Viv Raper, and How is the Web changing the way we identify scientific impact? with Jason Priem, Paul Groth, Martin Fenner, and Jason Hoyt (check out their Google Doc here). I want to touch on the second panel, because it feels particularly important to someone like me, a tenure-track professor foolish enough to blog under my real name.

I asked (and it was retweeted many times to apparent amusement!) whether the panelists could create alt-metrics that could look more official. What I meant, which I don't think I conveyed that well, was that I know that blogging is important, I know its value, and so does everyone in the room. What those of us who are practicing scientists have trouble with are the majority of our other colleagues, because the rest of them don't blog, and are not only skeptical, but occasionally openly mocking or hostile. Blogging is still seen as frivolous in slow-to-catch-on academia. In some disciplines or at some universities, it may very well be a black mark on one's tenure papers. So how can we show the impact we are having on society in a quantitatively measurable way that doesn't take significant effort on the part of the end-user/scientist? Or perhaps more selfishly, because this would certainly help with tenure: how can we demonstrate with alt-metrics that our online science work brings prestige to our institutions? Can we create a blog impact factor, or a personality/brand impact factor? I can tell you the number of twitter followers I have, the number of times particular posts have been read, and even the type of browsers my readers use. But I can't always measure whether a post or tweet is having a positive effect on people unless they tell me.

After the panel, I ended up talking to Paul Groth and Jason Priem for a little while, and what I heard was encouraging. The social science research to link alt-metrics with impact is underway now, alongside the developers trying to build those new metrics. Perhaps in another year or two, we will have both empirical evidence of the importance and effect of social media, and the tools for scientists and science communicators to measure it for themselves. Then I can put a line in my CV that identifies my social media and web presence and its impact on fellow scientists and the public.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, which makes me both happy and sad: happy to be having my panel (did I mention that it is Sunday, 11:30am, room B?), happy to be heading home; but sad to already have to leave friends with whom I feel so close. I feel a different kind of camaraderie here compared to what I have at academic conferences: here, we have a shared mission to make the world a better place with science and to share our curiosity, delight and excitement with as many people as possible.

Of course, the good news is that I can take all these wonderful people home with me in my pocket -- it's called Tweetdeck for Android.

Crowdsourcing revisions to my OpenLab piece

2011-01-13T15:29:00.000-06:00

On January 7th, Jason Goldman of the Thoughtful Animal and this year's Open Lab Editor, announced the finalists for Open Lab 2010, a yearly anthology of about fifty of the best pieces of online science writing.

Magically, out of 900 posts, two of my IVF posts made it: My IVF story: pregnancy and My IVF story: conclusions, to be made into a single essay.

I know. Holy crap! I'm excited, pleased, proud, and surprised. I was a reviewer for this year's edition,* so I know it was time-consuming work -- I can only imagine how much more work for Jason himself. I really appreciate how this anthology is produced by the community, and reflects the best thinking of a large group of people, and how many selfless volunteers put in work.

Unfortunately, I'm also a little harried right now. The deadline to turn in my revision is January 21st, but on the 20th I have an NSF proposal due, as well as the papers for my probationary review (that's the review tenure-track folks get every year). I'll be away this weekend for Science Online 2010, with my kid, and classes start next week.

I want to combine these two posts as thoughtfully, and seamlessly, as possible. I have a few different ideas about how to do this in a way that reduces the total size of the essay, rather than lengthens it, but I also thought: why not ask my readers? Maybe you read the posts and had questions or felt like things were missing from the original version; maybe you felt elements of it were redundant. I'd like to hear what you think! This will help me when I carve out time to revise the two posts into an essay.

To sweeten the pot, I'll send a little present to each person whose comments I use when I make my revisions. Maybe some origami sticky notes or a titanium spork? I'll also make sure to acknowledge each of you on the blog.

*Obviously I didn't review any of my own stuff -- each reviewer only got a small portion of posts to read each round and I didn't even know who the other reviewers were until the end.

Letter to the AAA Executive Board on online anthropology and #aaafail

2011-01-12T12:13:00.001-06:00

I just wanted to post the letter that a number of us wrote to the AAA Executive Board. You can view the pdf here. President Dominguez provided a very prompt and kind response. Hugh Gusterson, also on the Executive Board, offered his thoughts in a recent Chronicle piece here.

To: Virginia Dominguez
Cc: Leith Mullings, Deb Martin, Nan Rothschild, George Armelagos, Florence Babb, Laura Graham, Ana Aparicio, Alisse Waterston, Jason Miller, Hugh Gusterson, Susan Gillespie, Lee Baker, Jean Schensul, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Ida Susser, Ed Liebow, Kate Clancy, Daniel Lende

January 10, 2010

Dear President Dominguez, President-Elect Mullings, and the AAA Executive Board,

We are a group of anthropologists who maintain an online presence, through social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. The focus and tone of our presence varies, from outreach to research, from teaching to career development, from the personal to the political. However, we are united in our passion for our discipline. We join with those who have applauded the wording of the “What is Anthropology?” statement which clearly outlines the interdisciplinary nature of anthropology and its methods, both scientific and humanistic. This statement achieves the inclusivity that the removal of “science” from the Long Range Plan threw into question.

However, we also want to express our concern over AAA’s public characterization that it was only the mainstream media and other outside coverage that engaged in active discussions of the actions of the Executive Board (EB), or that this media coverage didn't in some ways reflect real tensions and reactions within the anthropological community. As a group, we played key roles in the online discussion regarding the AAA EB recent omission of the word “science” from the Long Range Plan (LRP), as well as subsequent responses by the EB. By parameterizing the public discussion as only taking place in the media and among "outsider" bloggers attempting to construct an “us versus them” binary, the impression is given that there has been no internal dissent or dialogue.

In reality, there has been a vibrant conversation taking place on our blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on other forms of social media, expressing myriad views regarding not only the LRP wording, the actions of the EB, and the role of science in anthropology, but also deeper questions of anthropological identity. Indeed, it was through blogs and Twitter feeds like ours that the media and outside bloggers first realized the depth of concern and confusion the EB’s actions elicited within the anthropological community. This concern and critique were more complicated, and frankly more interesting, than the dichotomous rift promulgated by the New York Times and other outlets, but it was real and it was taking place among anthropologists. We know the EB is aware of the vibrant online community of anthropologists that has been deeply engaged in this issue. We hope the EB will publicly recognize how anthropologists online helped advance debate over the controversy, playing a central role in creating a publicly available discussion that engaged the Executive Board, anthropologists of different persuasions, and the larger media.

Online communities represent a powerful tool for dissecting tensions and misunderstandings as well as for constructing a broad forum for interdisciplinary collaboration and identity-building. We believe this controversy could have been largely mitigated by more effective discussion of the Long Range Plan in public forums online, and more timely release of all documents related to the controversy. With respect to the association’s long-term planning, we also believe the EB will be well-served by developing a more explicit and robust approach to anthropology online, including issues around open-access scholarship, public dissemination of ideas, teaching, interdisciplinary collaboration, and connection with and support for anthropologists who work online. Our own experience during this controversy shows the potential and importance of online engagement. Many of us were operating in isolation before the news of the changes to the LRP allowed us to find each other, to coordinate postings and conversations both on- and off-line. We have been grateful for the online anthropology community that has come together because of our opinions on the AAA LRP. Some have described this conversation as a renaissance for the discipline, and others have committed to learning more about each other’s subfields because of the tension that we finally had to acknowledge, all because of the AAA’s removal of the word “science.” We encourage the EB to consider how to support anthropologists working online, and to encourage further online collaboration and dissemination among AAA members. This will strengthen the discipline, and also permit more timely discussion and engagement among AAA members as the AAA acts on its Long Range Plan.

We view our online role as anthropologists as contributing a valuable service to the discipline we love. We are hopeful that this episode in our shared history will prove to catalyze important and inclusive dialogue regarding who we are as anthropologists as well as the channels we use to communicate with one another. We encourage the EB and the AAA membership as a whole to participate in this online community, to hear and join with the voices that are coming from within our discipline. This is an opportunity to move past marginalization and work together toward rebuilding a truly interdisciplinary anthropology based on mutual respect.

Sincerely,

Julienne Rutherford, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago
Blog http://aapabandit.blogspot.com, Twitter @JNRutherford
Kate Clancy, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Blog http://professorkateclancy.blogspot.com, Twitter @KateClancy
Daniel Lende, Associate Professor, University of South Florida
Blog http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology, Twitter @daniel_lende
Ryan Anderson, PhD candidate, University of Kentucky
Blog http://ethnografix.blogspot.com
Krystal D’Costa, Digital Analyst, New York City
Blog http://www.anthropologyinpractice.com, Twitter @anthinpractice
Francis Deblauwe, Program Developer, Alexandria Archive Institute
Blog http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog
Blog http://ux.opencontext.org/blog
Carlina de la Cova, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Twitter @Bonesholmes
Eric Michael Johnson, PhD candidate, University of British Columbia
Blog http://primatediariesinexile.blogspot.com, Twitter @ericmjohnson
James Holland Jones, Associate Professor, Stanford University
Blog http://monkeysuncle.stanford.edu, Twitter @juemos
Rosemary A. Joyce, Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Blog http://ancientbodies.wordpress.com, Twitter @rajoyceUCB
Eric Kansa, Project Lead, Open Context
Blog http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog
http://opencontext.org
Erin Koch, Assistant Professor, University of Kentucky
Blog http://www.somatosphere.net
Kristi Lewton, Lecturer, Harvard University
Twitter @kristilewton
Carl Lipo, Associate Professor, California State University, Long Beach
Blog http://www.evobeach.com
Megan McCullen, Visiting Instructor, Alma College
Blog http://ethnohistorian.wordpress.com, Twitter @GLEthnohistory
Carole McGranahan, Associate Professor, University of Colorado
Twitter @CMcGranahan
Colleen Morgan, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley
Blog http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com
Eugene Raikhel, Assistant Professor, Unversity of Chicago
Blog http://www.somatosphere.net
Douglas Reeser, PhD candidate, University of South Florida
Blog http://recycledminds.blogspot.com
Michael E. Smith, Professor, Arizona State University
Blog http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com
Matt Tuttle, Journalist, Norfolk Anthropology Examiner
Twitter @Anthroprobably
Kyle W. West, Research Coordinator, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Blog http://kylewwest.blogspot.com, Twitter @kyle_west

Science Online 2011 Panel this Sunday: On the perils of blogging as a woman under a real name

2011-01-11T12:02:00.000-06:00

Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name

Sheril Kirshenbaum, Anne Jefferson, Joanne Manaster, Maryn McKenna and Kathryn Clancy

This Sunday, 11:30am-12:30pm, Room B

Panel description: Being a woman scienceblogger has its own set of challenges, writing under your real name a few more. Readers may want you to be beautiful, to be their mommy, to be accessible to them in a way they don’t expect of other bloggers. They also may hold your decisions and lifestyle to a different standard. "There just aren't any good women science bloggers out there." "She was picked just because she was a woman." "I would cure cancer just to capture your heart." "You are a terrible mother if your baby is in daycare and you are in the lab." These statements exemplify the sorts of unwelcome comments that women science bloggers can face, and reflect broader issues of cultural and institutional sexism. How do we navigate those issues, and ensure our own safety, while covering the science that we love? How do we get our writing noticed when people claim we don’t exist? Panel members and attendees will tackle these issues and others as a way to move towards a solution in the issue of gender representation in science blogging.

Sounds awesome, if I say so myself. I have some additional thoughts I'd like to share for our audience members, so you can think of your own contributions to the panel (and I plan on expanding on these, at least a little, in the panel itself).

I blogged and participated in the academic blogosphere for many, many years pseudonymously before deciding to start writing under my real name. I think spending time as a pseudonymous member was really beneficial for me (and very different, and sometimes I really miss it). I learned the lingo and culture, I got to share my thinking honestly with fewer professional repercussions, and I got to make mistakes (lots of them). I think anyone who wants to write with their real name, should first write (or at least comment) pseudonymously, particularly if you're a population susceptible to attacks (i.e., from an underrepresented group in science, person who studies something politically charged, etc).
I've noticed disparities not only in who is selected to write at high-profile networks, but what kind of work gets covered by mainstream scienceblogs. For instance, even though I think the physiology of women's reproduction is incredibly important for everyone to understand, given how politically charged issues are around reproductive choice, it doesn't get covered that often (there are of course notable exceptions). The few times I see women discussed, it's almost always a behavioral study.

If you cannot attend #scio11, or you can attend but want to help frame the conversation now: What questions do you have? What comments? What must be covered or considered to move this conversation forward productively?

Guest post: Sex-differential use of the same objects versus sex-differences in object preference

2011-01-07T10:49:00.001-06:00

Last year, I had the good fortune to meet Stephanie Meredith at the American Association of Physical Anthropology meetings in Albuquerque. Stephanie is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. I believe it was Julienne Rutherford, long time friend, placental enthusiast and AAPA Bandit blogger, who introduced us. I became quickly captivated by Stephanie's good humor and intellect, and in particular her perspective on gender roles in non-human primates. As someone with a Women's Studies background who doesn't get to use it as often as I'd like, I absolutely loved talking with her, and thought her work was really interesting.

When I read Ed Yong's post about Kahlenberg and Wrangham's new article on gendered stick-carrying behaviors in chimpanzees, I wrote Stephanie and asked her what she thought. She wrote me a detailed, thoughtful response -- with citations -- after thoroughly reading the original manuscript. I liked it so much that I asked her if I could post it to my blog, and she graciously accepted.

* * * * *
After reading the article, I have the same questions and cautionary feelings about the data that I did when I heard Wrangham give this talk at the AAPAs in ABQ. According to the paper (Kahlenberg & Wrangham, 2010), we're talking about sex differences based on 117 observations of the behavior over 14 years (which was more than I remembered, probably in error, from the talk, but it's still not all that many). The median rates of stick-carrying for females, who carry more frequently, top out at 1.6 times per 1000 hours of observation for a set of 4 females in the 6-8 year age group. All in all, this seems to be a very rare behavior. In some cases, this behavior lasts for 4 hours, in some cases only for a minute. Of course, evolutionarily important behaviors certainly can be rare and of short duration (e.g., infanticide). But since we're obviously not talking about a behavior that characterizes every day in the lives of male and female juvenile chimps, its evolutionary importance can't be taken for granted, either, and I think we need to be careful and clear about exactly what conclusions we draw about its potential evolutionary significance.

My questions are really just that—questions about the nature of the data that will not be answered in published articles but can easily be answered over a beverage with the authors. I'd like to know how much variation there is among individuals in rates of these behaviors--do some individuals carry a lot and some not at all? Do some individuals typically carry for a long time and others typically carry for only a minute or two? Are most of the carrying bouts long, or are most short? Are most of them characterized by overt infant-care behavior, or does that characterize only a few of them? Do individuals continue to carry throughout their juvenility or is this an ephemeral phenomenon (it’s possible that one can infer this from the paper, but the way they binned individuals into age categories made it difficult for me to get a sense of the how much longitudinal data they have for each individual)? Do animals with younger siblings around do it more than ones without? Sometimes, this sort of information from the people who’ve watched the animals can nuance those dry and seemingly unimpressive numbers in such a way that you better understand how this particular small but significant difference really might be biologically important. For that reason, I'm generally curious about the details of the observations that allow for subjective, qualitative impressions about what's going on with whom and in what conditions.

Unanswered questions aside, there is the obvious issue of how best to interpret the importance of an apparent sex-difference in a very rare behavior with no obvious function. The authors’ interpretation is that this stick-carrying is effectively “practicing for motherhood” by juvenile females. That seems perfectly reasonable. Given that interpretation, though, this behavior is just another manifestation of a sex-difference in infant-interest and it can simply be rolled into a larger set of behaviors we call "infant interest." You could dissect primate infant interest behaviors if you wanted—grooming directed at infants, lip-smacking at infants, increased rates of grooming of mothers of newborns, infant carrying, etc.—but they're all a part of the same phenomenon, which is getting close to and interacting with infants in order to practice mothering behaviors so that you will have a better chance of being a successful mother yourself. But that isn't very catchy because it isn't very different from every other primate that shows sex-differential infant interest. No one disputes that there is a plesiomorphic sex-difference in infant interest for chimps and humans (and many other primates). And no one disputes that this sex-difference and the practicing it facilitates are adaptive, since female primates that have no access to infants before they themselves have their first offspring tend to be crap-tastic mothers.

So, the authors go on to suggest that the real find here is that sex-differential object play that is not socialized by adults may be a plesiomorphic characteristic of chimps and humans. Well, ok. That would be true if sex-differential object play that is not socialized by adults characterizes both species. So far, it only characterizes one group of wild chimps. Admittedly, I'm a bit confused about whether that's really the case, because the chimp people are a tight-knit little group of people, and before writing a sentence like "Given that regular stick-carrying has not been reported outside Kanyawara, a social learning component appears important," the obvious thing to do would be to ask the other chimp people if they've seen this but not reported it. In fact, I’d be amazed if that very conversation didn’t come up sometime before or after Wrangham’s talk at the AAPAs. After doing a little asking around, you could then simply state that it hasn't been seen in other communities or that it has and needs further quantification. If it hasn't been seen in other communities, it isn't species-typical and can't be used to suggest a symplesiomorphic behavioral sex-difference of chimps and humans. If it has been seen in other populations but not reported or quantified, then their assertion that it is symplesiomorphic is actually stronger than they’ve stated. If you’re a chimp person, this should be easy to resolve. Regardless, though, of whether or not this characterizes chimps as a species, sex-differential object play that is not socialized by adults has already been demonstrated in captivity in rhesus macaques (Hassett et al., 2008) and vervet monkeys (Alexander & Hines, 2002). So plesiomorphic sex-differences in object preference (to the extent that one accepts that this characterizes humans) has already been demonstrated, and for far more distant cousins than chimps.

I think the interesting point here is that we're talking about sex-differential use of the same objects in juveniles--when females play with sticks, they exhibit infant-care related behaviors, and when males play with sticks, they tend to exhibit weapon-related behaviors (although they also sometimes exhibit infant-care related behaviors). That’s something different than sex-differences in object preference. That hasn't been demonstrated experimentally with monkeys. And it’s not about the object and its characteristics, but is something about differences in individuals’ responses to the same stimuli. But not much was made of that point. I wonder if they're going to have a companion paper about weapon stick-use in males. I think it'd be a more compelling story presented all together. Of course, to suggest that this is a plesiomorphic characteristic of chimps and humans, it still has to be established for other populations of chimps. That might take a while, given how infrequent a behavior it is. But I do think that the sex-differential use of the same objects during play is pretty cool. Insofar as those uses are related to sex-differences that will later emerge in maternal care and fighting/displaying in adults, they are not altogether surprising, but it is still cool in that it is one more way in which humans aren't actually unique, which means it's one more line of evidence/inquiry that can be used to better understand human behaviors from an evolutionary point of view (and that is true regardless of whether this "shared trait" is symplesiomorphic or homoplastic in this population and humans).

Stephanie Meredith's bio

I am interested in understanding how developmental systems produce primate behavioral sex differentiation, with an eye toward elucidating the evolutionary histories of different system components (e.g., particular components of socialization, particular aspects of individual physiology, etc.), as these data are useful for testing hypotheses about the evolutionary history of human gender. My current research focuses on social and endocrine factors that shape the development of behavioral sex differences in ring-tailed lemurs, which are gregarious, female-dominant strepsirrhine primates. You can find my website here.

References

Alexander, G., & Hines, M. (2002). Sex differences in response to children's toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus) Evolution and Human Behavior, 23 (6), 467-479 DOI: 10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00107-1

Hassett, J., Siebert, E., & Wallen, K. (2008). Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children Hormones and Behavior, 54 (3), 359-364 DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2008.03.008

Kahlenberg SM, & Wrangham RW (2010). Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children. Current biology : CB, 20 (24) PMID: 21172622