On Physicsing while Female

        This blog is called Food Fashion Physics for a reason.  I have an interest in food and in fashion, and while I primarily discuss those things here, my first love is physics.  I am pursuing a PhD in Physics.  I qualify as that peculiar creature some people call a "smart girl".  In fact I would even say I am a rather smart girl, one who very much values and partially defines herself by her intelligence.

        You may have heard that there are not terribly many women in Physics or other STEM fields for that matter.  This is what makes me a peculiar creature.  Many people, including us rare female physicists have long wondered why we are so rare. This lack of women remains a great problem for STEM fields.

Where are the female scientists?  They probably are not hiding
in the Schrodinger equation.

        I have heard many proposed explanations for the lack of women, but there is one in particular I want to focus on today.  Many claim that women do not go into STEM fields because they are taught that science is unfeminine.  I cannot speak for all female physicists, but I can say that I and other female scientists I asked were either not actively aware of this message, or never much cared about it.  Maybe that's why we pursued physics.  Perhaps there are legions of potential female scientists and engineers who abandoned a future in science because they believed it was an unfeminine pursuit.  In truth, the lack of women in STEM fields is driven by forces more complicated, nuanced, and subtle than this or any single factor.  But the lack of women in science is not the purpose of this post.  What I wish to discuss instead are the ways in which women in science absorb the message that science is unfeminine.  For years I thought the message either didn't exist, or that no woman who actually pursued science cared about it.  What I have come to learn is that many of us did unknowingly absorb the message that science is unfeminine, but in a very different way than the women who never pursued science did.

        For most of my recent life I have described myself as a "girl who does not get along with other girls."  Pursuing physics means I spent most of my time around the men in my classes.  This never bothered me because I was more comfortable around men than women.  I felt special to be one of two female physicists in my graduating class of 30 physics students.  I was proud to see myself as one of few trail blazing women.  This isn't to say I was without female friends.  I was friendly with other STEM girls, mostly fellow "girls who do not get along with other girls."  Most of us felt some degree of discomfort, or difficulty connecting with "typical girls."  One friend went so far to say that she would not take math classes with too many girls in them because that indicated they were too easy for her.

Yea...most of my friends are dudes

         I have another friend, a social scientist, who was much more comfortable around women than my other female friends, and was in fact quite feminine.  She once complained that most female role models or strong female characters she saw growing up had abandoned their femininity as if it were a shackle holding them back.  This upset her because she grew up believing she couldn't be strong without rejecting the femininity that was a key part of her identity.  I didn't know what to say to her at the time.  It seemed perfectly obvious to me that the strong female characters had to reject acting feminine in order to succeed.  This conflicted with the fact that I considered my friend to be a very intelligent person who also only ever wore skirts and dresses.  I didn't think much of this incident until a few years later when someone asked me why I thought there were so few women in physics.

This basically sums up the outlook we learned

        Many of us were not so tormented by this choice as my friend was.  If you could only be smart or feminine; strong or feminine; unique, ambitious, useful, valuable or feminine; the choice was obvious for us smart girls.  We were smart first and girls second.  No one explicitly told us that traditional femininity was in direct conflict with being ambitious or useful.  Yet when we only hear about powerful, successful women who rose above the expected behavior of their gender to succeed, it is easy to view traditional female traits and behaviors as incompatible with success.  From there we would start to link femininity to vapidity and weakness.

       To anyone who knew me when I was young, the fact that I blog about fashion must be quite shocking.  Growing up, I hated shopping, had little interest in clothing, and generally resented any attempt to make me presentable that required effort.  I did not hold the people who enjoyed these things in high esteem either.  They were being traditionally feminine, which as I saw, meant they were being shallow, they were being mindless conformists, they were not being smart.  I wasn't quite a tomboy, I wasn't athletic enough, but I certainly identified with them more than with other girls.

My idea of being fashionable circa age 14.
Notice I rocked the strong brow before it became popular.

         I remember watching Cheaper by the Dozen 2 when I was about 11.  This movie would have been entirely forgettable if I hadn't been very upset by one scene in it.  One of the daughters in the movie, Sarah, was a tomboy, the character I most readily identified with.  She develops a crush on a boy and covertly tries to steal makeup so she can wear it and look pretty for this boy.  I didn't care about the stealing.  It was the fact that she wanted to wear makeup to impress a boy that bothered me.  To my 11 year old self, make up was what girly girls who cared too much about their appearance wore.  This character wearing makeup felt like a personal betrayal.  She had turned coat.  It felt like she was giving up her entire unique tomboy persona, her true self, to impress some unworthy boy.  Smart or unfeminine women "learning to be feminine" to attract a man is a terrible and painfully common movie trope.  However, it simply never occurred to me that this tomboy who wanted to wear makeup could do so without giving up everything that made her special and valuable.

Sarah from Cheaper by the Dozen before she turned coat

BETRAYAL!

      About a year later, my closest friend at the time whom we will call Kelley, started hanging out with the preppy girls.  This was the friend that I had beheaded barbie dolls with, that I had mocked the preppy girls and played video games and dreaded puberty with, and now she was hanging out with the very girls we had disdained for their girliness.  This time the betrayal was much more personal.  Kelley had changed.  My best friend in the whole world was willing to give up the things I liked about her for something as utterly lacking in value or purpose as being feminine.   As far as I could tell we could never again perform our 'surgeries' on Barbies, nor do any of the things we had once enjoyed together.  I did not take this well and the friendship quickly unraveled.

This both shows what we did to barbie dolls and acts as a visual analogy of
what became of our friendship after Kelley started hanging out with the preppy girls

         These stories should give you a picture of the view of femininity I and many smart girls like myself carried around as we grew up.  Knowing I grew up with the view that femininity is just some useless thing that gets in the way of being smart or strong, you can imagine how confusing it was for me to develop an interest in my appearance and in fashion.  I was a creative person and had many creative interests.  The interest in fashion grew out of that creativity, yet  I was so nervous about people knowing about this interest.  I feared that it would show that I had changed, or had given up that fundamental, driven, intelligent part of myself in exchange for an air headed fascination with a topic as shallow as fashion.  I avoided allowing people to think this by always emphasizing that my interest in fashion was purely a creative outlet;  a form of self expression that I approached rather intellectually.  I would say I respected people who put thought and skill into how they presented themselves, not those who followed whatever the media told them was pretty.  All of this was, and is still true about my view of fashion.  I only felt I needed to qualify and justify my interest in fashion because I feared I would fall into the trap of traditional femininity if I didn't.  I could not risk anyone thinking that my traditionally feminine interest was anything short of an intellectual one.

This is my prom dress, evidence of my early fashion interest.
 I made it out of duct tape and old physics homework.
This pretty much sums me up.

          About midway through college I realized I had not compromised my ambition or intelligence or strength by baking or wearing high heels and skirts.  As the only person many of my male friends felt comfortable talking with about personal issues, I began to appreciate how traditionally feminine characteristics such as empathy and patience could actually make a person quite powerful.  I learned that not only can women be smart and pretty or strong and feminine, but that these is strength in femininity itself.  I began to realize that there was something very sexist in the notion that intelligence was the antithesis of femininity and beauty.  There was something wrong with the idea that a woman can be great and powerful but only if she acts like a man.

        Men are not the only ones who must overcome their own sexism.  Women, smart women, smart women like me who "didn't get along with other women" must overcome our own sexism too.  This can be particularly difficult.  I spent so long rebelling against gender roles and resenting the social pressure to be feminine. This makes it difficult to continue trying to redefine gender roles and simultaneously say that the very femininity I rebelled against is valuable.  I am still trying to perfect this, and admittedly still get strangely angry when I see a woman being basic, and still feel more on edge around people I perceive as girly.  I still worry that my male peers will not view me as an equal if I try too hard to look nice.  While I am still working these things out, I'll at least say traditionally feminine traits have long been undervalued.  We miss out on so much feminine women can bring to the table when we tell them that only masculine traits are relevant to success.  My hope is to achieve a world in which there is no smart-pretty dichotomy, where you can accept or reject elements of masculinity or femininity without your perceived intelligence being jeopardized.

Ugg boots fill me with illogical rage.

        To destroy this dichotomy, let's tell our children stories of great women of history.  Many rejected their femininity, many embraced it, and many found it utterly unrelated to their ability to change the world.  Their stories can show us that there are many ways to be a smart woman.  Let's stop making TV shows like the Big Bang Theory in which the intelligence of a female character is inversely proportional to how attractive she is.  Let's teach young women that smart can be sexy, but that they have so much more to offer the world than just being sexy.  Let's teach them that the way they present themselves has nothing to do with their intelligence. And please, whether directly or indirectly, through characters, movie tropes, or even who you choose to ask for help on your math homework, let's stop telling girls that intelligence is unfeminine.  I know many very brilliant, very logical women, who are also rather girly.  These people are not intelligent in lieu of their femininity, their intelligence is part of their femininity .

Stop telling me that all female scientists look like this.

Some of us look like this,

but some of us look like this.  There are many ways to look
like a scientist.

        My freshman year of college I sat in an honors electromagnetism classroom full of mostly male students.  The professor had yet to arrive.  As we waited, a cockroach entered the front of the room and scurried across the floor.  The room was silent, and all attention turned to the offending cockroach.  Someone suggested we should kill it, but no one in the room full of men moved to do what was supposedly a man's job.  A heavy silence set in again.  I stood up and approached the front of the room.  My brazenly feminine bright red five inch heels clicked loudly, shattering the quiet as I approached the tiny beast.  Delicately, I put the toe of my platform shoe down over the cockroach.  The crunching sound reverberated through the room.  I wiped my shoe off, sat back down, and waited for lecture to start.  Three years later people still remember the crunch.  I could not have done this without the red shoes.  This incident came to represent how I balanced masculine and feminine traits inside of me.  Only by valuing both masculine and feminine features can we achieve great things--like crushing a cockroach.
   

These are my red shoes.  I wear them to crush roaches and
the patriarchy.