#scimom and me

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Science Online 2011: Underrepresentation hurts us all

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

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.

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

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

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

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.