Alone

In the past few years, I've read stories from many other women in the sciences, little bits and pieces of their experiences that I've learned from, taken heart from.  Part of the reason I wanted to starting writing is that I wanted to share my story, so that I might help some other woman of science in the same way I've been helped.

I also want to be honest.  And I feel like I wouldn't be telling my story honestly if I didn't write about the bad experiences with the good.  And right now, I'm finding it hard to be my normal cheery self.

I don't want to be an angry feminist. I don't want to be mopey and depressing. I would much rather be a hoorah cheerleader for LOVING my science. But dang it, this week... I'm tired.


I'm tired of being the only female in my office.

I am tired of not fitting in because I'm not a tomboy and I don't mountain bike or climb or ski.

I'm tired of being unable to participate in conversations about cars.

I'm tired of only being able to drink one beer if I want the slightest chance of being able to function after.

I'm tired of the whole office clearing out for lunch, and no one thinking to so much as pop their head in my office to let me know, before I raise my head from my work to suddenly notice how quiet the office is, and how empty the lunch room is.  

I am tired of dealing with a capricious boss who will sing my praises as a genius one day and effectively call me an idiot to my face the next.

I am tired of seeing every person who comes in for a job interview be male.

I am tired of torturing myself wondering if this new (male) geophysicist they hired, who has a bachelor's degree to my master's, is making more money than me and will eventually replace me before I had planned to leave.

I'm tired of being the one who doesn't quite fit, and of the treacherous fantasy that whispers that if I just changed the way I dress, researched cars, learned to mountain bike, then, then I'd have my in.

I'm tired of the nagging fear, thinking on how many female geophysicists I know who are my age (maybe two?), that this environment I encounter now will be the only environment I will ever know in my career.

I know in many ways I've got it crazy easy.  No one is sexually harassing me, no one is questioning my right to be there, and I do happen to like the work I'm doing – a lot.  But all these constant reminders of how I don't fit and how precarious my position is in this world.... that drags on a person.

Thankfully, there's a light at the end of this tunnel.  I'm getting out.  I know for sure now I'm starting my PhD in the fall.  I know there's at least one other female in my research group, and from what accounts I've heard thus far my future adviser is one of the nicest in the department.  I can have some hope that my life past the PhD would be different than my situation now, as I'm currently in the strange situation of a geophysicist working in what is effectively an engineering company.  In reality, I have yet to experience what working at a true geophysics company would be like, so I'm holding out the hope that working with geophysicists might be better than working with engineers (or at least these engineers).  I have to hope in the power of statistics – that my sample size of one is not statistically representative!

I find that my awareness of my situation as a female in a STEM field is something of a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, I am that much more aware of the negatives I face.  The gender disparity in my workplace and all it creates is all the more vivid for my awareness.  On the other hand – I can see around the negatives, I can know it's not just me.  This situation doesn't have to be "just the way it is".  Maybe I can't make it better, for myself, right now, but I can hope that in some small way I can make it better for the next female engineer or geophysicist or technician who walks through the doors.  I'm here.  I'm not going away.  I'm damn good at what I do.

And yes, I am wearing pink.

Office Update #395.23: Four reasons it's probably a good thing I don't have an office mate right now

I have arbitrarily decided, as the benevolent dictator of this blog, that Office Updates and Fails are exempt from the alliteration rule.  Accidental alliteration is acceptable.

1. Balkan music boogie-ing
2. Incessant mumbling whilst coding
3. High frequency of data-related moaning
4. Reduced likelihood of chocolate or favorite pen theft
5. Spontaneous air fist-pumps over successful code

Of course, part of me is secretly looking forward to seeing the look on my unsuspecting coworker's face when they find out what I'm also doing when I analyze their data....

Geeking out with gPhones

By way of brief summary, a gPhone is a gravity meter that sits around for days or weeks or months or years and measures gravity very extremely precisely.  People usually use them for measuring Earth tides really really well, because apparently that's interesting to some people.  Me, I'm primarily interested in figuring out how the gPhone has gone haywire this time.

Oh dear.  I haven't explained Earth tides OR measuring gravity on this blog yet, have I?  Right then, that'll be a future post.

For now, though, you are going to indulge me in my nerdiness by geeking out with me over this lovely seismic signal that showed up in all three of the data sets I was analyzing today:

Isn't it GLORIOUS??  You can even see the P and S arrivals!!!!  This is the 6.9 magnitude earthquake that occurred off the coast of Northern California on the evening of Sunday, March 9, 2014.

It turns out that in addition to being good at measuring Earth tides really really precisely, gPhones also make pretty good long-period seismometers.  What's really cool is that these meters are so sensitive they can detect ocean waves crashing on the shore - and we're in Colorado.  Now, you won't see individual wave crashes, more just a lot of noise in a certain frequency range, but if you set up two gPhones right next to each other and look at the gravity they measure over time, this "noise" will look exactly the same, which means it's a real signal, not just some noise from the machine itself.  This completely blew my mind when someone first told me what that was.

GRAVITY IS AWESOME!!!

Stubbornly Stylish Scientist

I WANTED to go contra dancing in Boulder tonight, but, as usual, Mother Nature had other plans, and I am thus stuck at home hiding from the snow that didn't come and almost certainly would have had I driven out.  So, instead, I finished off this post.  Be GRATEFUL for your good fortune.

Since late undergrad or so I began what I thought of, in my vainer moments, as a one woman rebellion against the culture of masculinity in the Earth sciences – I wore a skirt every now and then.  Then, it became a hairstyle more elaborate than the braid and/or headband combo I wore daily for the first three years of undergrad.*  Then, a non-binary selection of shoes.  Then, tentative eyeshadow experiments.  Bit by bit, I pushed back against what I perceived as the boundaries of appropriate attire for a true Earth scientist.

*In defense of my fashion choices, it's somewhat challenging to find anything ELSE that will fit under a bike helmet and then survive the removal of said helmet without leaving the wearer looking like the more stereotypical mad scientist. **
**It's very important not to blow the cover, you see.

Eventually in grad school I progressed to near-daily eyeshadow use, and wearing *gasp* dresses to campus on a regular basis.  After a rather nasty and slow-healing wound on my knee made wearing jeans painful for months, the only clothing I could wear that I felt not-embarrassed-in-public-in were skirts and dresses, and now I find I wear jeans maybe once or twice a week, if that.  I will even, on not too infrequent an occasion, wear PINK.*

*More of a rose-pink than, say, bubblegum.  I leave the bubblegum-pink-wearing to my sister, who is much more skilled in the art than I.

What I've come to realize only recently is that I wasn't really rebelling against the dress-code in Earth Sciences.  (Well, okay, maybe a bit.)  I came to realize I was instead rebelling against my own internal definition of what it meant to be feminine.

I place a great deal of my self-worth in my intelligence.  For better or for worse, I've pretty much always been told that I'm smart, and so I've always been loathe to do anything that detracts from my "smartness", or others' perception thereof.  And it seems that somewhere along the line, I decided that "feminine" equalled "stupid".

Ever since I graduated from the EVERYTHING MUST BE PINK phase around late elementary school or so* I developed this knee-jerk instinct against anything even hinting of femininity (with notable exceptions for formal events like church, recitals, or school dances).  My dress code from about middle school on was jeans-and-t-shirt, no skirts, maybe a sweater/hoodie if I was cold.  Pink was to be avoided at all costs.

*And promptly moved on to the EVERYTHING MUST BE YELLOW phase, followed by the EVERYTHING MUST BE GREEN phase.

Back in my pink phase I also went through a phase for each successive Disney princess – hard.  Think Barbie-doll Snow White cake, taking mandatory naps holding a rose to my chest a la Sleeping Beauty, a hand-sewn Belle costume made by my mother that was a verifiable work of art, a three-tier Cinderella birthday cake....*  I had it bad.  Fast-forward back to the present, and enter the current Disney princess debate.  I never quite lost my love of the Princesses, my repressed feminine side making me squirm just a bit when I saw the anti-pink tirades, the YouTube videos trumpeting the subversive messages revealed in the Princesses' characters.**

*I should also add that this occurred during the first 8 years of my life when I was an only child with an extremely clever and talented mother who had, it must be emphasized, ONE child...

** Which I'm in complete agreement with as far as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are concerned.  I mean, seriously, you meet the guy ONCE and you're in love, and then all you do is fall asleep for a while??  Now, Belle, on the other hand.... Stands up to bullies and is an incurable bookworm who follows her passion despite her peers' intolerance... Now THERE'S a role model.  

When I first saw the Disneyfied real-life heroines by artist David Trumble and his commentary on his motivations (Why should fictional heroines all look the same when real ones don't), I simply filed it away under "Anti-Disney" stuff with the usual flag of "vague unease and annoyance", as, generally, I did agree with the artist's point.  Like a good feminist, I viewed the sparkles and swirly dresses with the proper scorn every time the article popped up on my Facebook newsfeed, even though deep down I was secretly envious of Marie Curie's sweeping ball gown of science*.

*Which would probably be INCREDIBLY impractical in an actual lab

Some months later, I ran across this article.  I'd highly recommend reading the actual article, but in case (like me) you're too lazy to follow every link included in a blog, here's the quote that really got me:

"As I've noted before, the discomfort with princesses often seems to be a discomfort with those things considered feminine—frilly clothes, romance, sparkles, kittens, and sunshine. Making Gloria Steinem a princess is supposed to be silly and artificial because traditional femininity is silly and artificial.

But, as it turns out, making Gloria Steinem a princess is not silly and artificial. Instead, it is awesome. Which suggests, first of all, that femininity is, or can be, awesome."

Hang on a minute, what?  It's okay to be feminine?  It's awesome to be feminine?? Giving into some bits of femininity every now and then doesn't mean sacrificing my credibility as a scientist?  Well, heck.

So.....maybe my internal equation of feminine=stupid wasn't just coming from me.  I mean, it's the cheerleader stereotype, right?  Cheerleader is pretty, cheerleader is feminine, cheerleader is thus always stupid.....except I had a cheerleader in both of my AP Spanish classes.  School dances are stupid, vapid, vain, feminine affairs.... except I learned most of my organizational and people skills from helping organize groups of friends to go, plus I began my love affair with data by building the spreadsheets I used to help organize the events.

Why does it seem like a woman has be become masculine in order to become smart?  That beauty and brains are mutually exclusive?

Now, I realize when I discuss beauty I'm running the risk of opening a whole other can of worms with respect to the issues women face in the world, because of course the immense social pressure for women to be beautiful is generally regarded as Not A Good Thing.  Let me take this opportunity to say unequivocally that I'm not advocating that all women should be feminine.  I want women to could be feminine – if they want to be.

I'm not arguing that women HAVE to dress up pretty, I'm arguing that we need a world where the perception of a woman's intelligence is not dependent on whether she's wearing a dress or hiking pants, high heels or hiking boots.  I demand the right to be ALL the things!  Just as many in my mother's generation fought for the right for women to be masculine, I want it to be okay for them to be feminine, too.  We need a world where the idea of a female scientist a) exists (I'm looking at YOU, Hollywood) and b) can look like this or this or this or this or this.  There's so much talk of how stereotypes about women hold women back, that I wonder if this stereotype, feminine = stupid, isn't another one we should be trying to away with.  We need more sparkly scientists.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go do some hair physics.

5 Ways to Welcome a Woman

There are no small numbers that complete the alliteration, sorry.

This list was inspired by my first few weeks working at a company where I am literally the only female in my building, and I believe the total number of females in the company is something like 5*, out of some 40ish employees**.

*Take that, Rand Paul.  I defy your statistics with my one singular data point.  Sort of like how climate change skeptics are almost certainly using the current winter.... but I digress...

**Who, as far as I can tell, share about 8 names total among the male portion.  Yelling "Ryan" would easily summon half the company.

Bolstered by a year or so of reading feminist articles via ESWN (Earth Science Women's Network, HIGHLY recommend), I was prepared for belittling, attack, rejection, stereotypes.  What I wasn't prepared for .... was loneliness.

I realized quickly that I had taken for granted how easy it was to make friends in a new academic setting, where there was almost certainly a cohort of similar aged companions all new in the same way you were, with veteran students ready to welcome new companions, and, crucially, at least one other female.  Now I faced the double whammy of "welcome to the workforce" and "welcome to minorityhood".

But, goldurnit, I think there's plenty of articles bemoaning what it is to be a woman in science.  Instead, I offer something different - a practical guide, based on nothing else than my expert opinion on all of five weeks in the workforce, for welcoming the first woman (or any woman!) to your company or place of work.  So, without further ado, I present:

5 Ways to Welcome a Woman

1.  Talk

2.  Ask

3.  Inform

4.  Include

5.  Swear

Talk
This is probably the most basic thing ever, and good policy for welcoming ANY new person - talk to them!  Something as simple as saying hi in the hallway, or asking them about the last place they lived/worked, etc., can do a world of good for helping that woman feel welcome.  I promise I will not jump down your throat with a feminist diatribe the second you open your mouth.  I am scared, I am new to this job and this city*, I just want a conversation.  I know I didn't really feel like I could be settled at my current job until I'd had around three longer than three-minute conversations at my work**.  Conversations make us all human, rather than scary faceless others.

*sort of...
**One of which involved a lively discussion on various creative methods of killings spiders, the sizes of which seemed to increase in roughly the same manner as "the fish that got away".

Ask
Probably more a corollary of Talk, but....ask the new woman questions!  Give her a chance to talk about herself, and give yourself a chance to know her.  Obviously, innocuous questions like "what do you do when you're not doing geophysics?" are probably better than "so, cutie-pie, wanna go downtown tonight and analyze MY data?"....

Also, in the first month or so, questions like "Do you know where x is in the building" or "Do you know how to use x software" are good, as they give the new person a chance to either say "yes!" and feel really über confident, or "no" and get help without having to try to figure out just who to ask, and then suck up the courage to ask.  Not that I'm incapable of asking, but.... with all the mental stress of being new AND outnumbered, one less hurdle to jump is a good thing!  In my case, I really appreciated it when one of my coworkers stopped by when I was working late one night to make sure I knew how to deal with the alarm system... because I definitely a) did not know how to use it and b) would not have enjoyed accidentally setting it off!

Inform
These are getting a bit redundant...whatever, five is a nice number.  ANYWAY, make sure your new woman knows the basics.  Who to ask for help (who is IT guy, who is fixit guy, who is finance person, etc.), where to get stuff, how to do things.  It's the little things that help... I think he felt rather awkward about it, but I was glad one of my coworkers was able to brave embarrassment enough to let me know I could ask him if he needed to supply any special bathroom stuff for the women's bathroom.... In case you're wondering, guys, we generally handle the "extra stuff" on our own*.... :)

*I'm still rather mystified by the 3+ bottles of lotion in the women's bathroom.  Is THAT what he meant?  Free hand lotion paid by the corporates?  I actually can't stand wearing lotion during the day, but now the temptation for abuse of supplies requisitions is definitely there...

Include
If you've got a running out-to-lunch day, invite her to join!  A ritual after-work beer?  Hand her one!  These sorts of informal gatherings can be really important down the road for making connections, gaining insight in your field, and getting jobs, so if you care about women's success, include them in these too!  I also like whiskey....

Swear
For the love, I will not shrivel up and blow away if you drop an F bomb in front of me.   Really.  You should have been a fly on the wall of my car when I was driving in Vancouver.  I may not swear in front of humans on a regular basis, but that certainly doesn't mean I can't if I want to*.  If you're directing something AT me..... that's debatable.  But, seriously, I find it hilarious that guys (typically those my dad's age and older) get tied up in knots trying to guard their tongues around me.... just relax, and I'll be able to relax too when I slip up!

*The fact that I wrote out "F bomb" notwithstanding...

Apologies if this post verges on the saccharine cheerful, but I'll defend myself in the lamest way possible by stoutly declaring that it is way easier (at least for me) to write whining sarcasm than cheerful sarcasm.  But if any way this helps some other woman feel welcome in her male-dominated office in the future, or, very much also importantly, it helps a guy feel like yes, he can do something other than be the big bad enemy of woman everywhere, my saccharine sacrifice will not have been in vain!*

*Including that last sentence.  Wince.

Fail #1

This is what happens when you try to calculate a level correction with imaginary numbers:

Not what I showed to my boss

Reminding you of just about the only thing I remember about imaginary numbers - they make stuff curve-alicious!

Feminine Field Work

So if you're someone in a STEM field and either are female or have at least one STEM friend who is female, you've probably seen something of the recent push for greater gender equality across the board, particularly in STEM fields.  I'll spare you the stats, as you've likely heard them and variations on a theme ad nauseam by now.

What I would like to share is my own encounter with the awesomeness that is working with others of my gender.  I never, of course, doubted that having more females in science was a good thing (I'm generally of a "more the merrier" mindset regardless of situation*), but it wasn't until recently I had a first-hand taste of what that might mean.

*With caveats.  There are always caveats.  For instance, bills and mold.

By way of background, I have a somewhat love/hate relationship with fieldwork.  As a geoscientist, it's something you'll encounter sooner or later, even, I'm told, if you're a pure geophysicist (which I, most decidedly, am NOT), so every geoscientist has to learn to at least endure it if they hope to have credibility in their field.

On the "love" side of things, I have seen some truly AMAZING places doing fieldwork or field related activities, including intimate views of several national parks, travel to foreign countries, and LAVA, the red-hot kind.  I also derive a great sense of pride that I've generally survived and usually not made a total fool of myself in these experiences - I'm not the fastest hiker in the world, but I'm lucky enough to not faint or get heat exhaustion, and thanks to SEVERAL spring break field trips in the Colorado plateau, which featured some IMPRESSIVELY windy weather, I can usually pitch a tent and expect it to STAY pitched.*

*Several large rocks and burly geo-friends may or may not be involved.

On the "hate" side of things, I do not feel I've ever been able to describe myself as an "outdoors" person.  I can exist semi-competently in the outdoors, but it is not my element.  I am not one of those women whose skin magically clears up when I spend three days straight sweating my brains out with no more than a wet wipe for sanitation.  I get prodigious dirt beards and prolific acne.  I HATE hills (despite the wonderful views they always seem to have at the top, those darn things), up OR down.  As mentioned before, I am NOT a fast hiker, although a propensity to pick up weird shaped rocks along the way probably doesn't help that.

My fist field season for my master's degree was a bit traumatic.  Yes, we stayed in a hotel overnight (lugging around solar panels for charging geophysical equipment in an area with chronic theft problems is kind of a non-starter), yes, we had a nice air-conditioned vehicle to take us to and from the field site every day, but we also had long days outside in 35+˚C (95+˚F) heat, often on nice black rocks, with no shade*, and a 30˚ talus slope to boot**.  AND a field partner, male, with legs approximately twice the length of mine (seriously, I tried walking in his strides once, it was like doing ballet leaps across the floor).  I remember hours and hours and HOURS of staring in despair at his retreating back (he was navigating, which was good, or NOTHING would have gotten done) some 30 meters upslope from me, that distance getting larger with every passing step.

*Sometimes, as an added bonus, scrubby trees that blocked NO sunlight and ALL the wind, on nice black ash - INSTANT oven!
**Ask me about my great boot stories.  These are the stories I'll be telling my grandkids 50 times in a row in the nursing home.  In a nutshell, BELIEVE your adviser when he tells you to wear leather-sided boots on recent 'a'a flows.

My worst night was the night I cried myself to sleep (as quietly as a I could) after he told me the amount of magnetic data we could get would probably be limited by how fast I could walk.  I knew he was right.  I knew I just couldn't walk as fast.  And I hated, HATED, that my physical weakness (and I'm not really a weakling), and stupid short stubby legs, were standing in the way of my science.

I was also angry and frustrated that I had fit into the stereotype of the weak, slow female in the field.  I have a very contrarian nature, and so part of what draws me to geophysics, I have to admit, is that it's not overly populated with females.  So I have this subconscious urge to blast all these feminine stereotypes (wears pink and lace all the time, can't do math, high pitched silly giggling) out of the water with everything I am.

But I still have to face the reality of who I am, and that I am, yes, a girl.   And that, no, I'm not a super-human field machine.  But I hate, HATE, that I might give someone the impression that I'm not a super-human field machine BECAUSE I'm a girl.

So, some 18 months later, enter my Eureka moment.  Another field experience, but this time I was the field assistant ("field wench"), in MUCH more environmentally pleasant central B.C., with, zounds, a female as the researcher in charge.

And it was AWESOME, because for the first time I wasn't wasting more than half of my brain cells on worrying about keeping up, because my field "master" was, for once, NOT a speed hiker.  Which meant that I had so many MORE brain cells* available for the actual SCIENCE.  And you know what?  We still got good science done.  Well, at least until the gravity meter died on us, but that's besides the point....

*At this point anyone who knows anything about neurology is probably tearing their hair out.  My sincerest apologies.

I also noticed I was WAY less self confident when I didn't know something, either science or field related, because suddenly, with another girl around, the fact that I didn't know something wouldn't send the message that ALL girls didn't know this thing, it was just THIS girl, this human.  This simple realization made it SO much easier for me to ask for help or advice when I needed, rather than tying myself in knots about image.

And before you think something like "Oh, you just shouldn't CARE about image!", may I just say, good grief, image DOES count for something*, and, for context, I'm the girl who doesn't think twice about walking across campus at 9 AM on a Saturday with a kilt on**.  Or singing along, with gusto, in a kareoke bar in front of some of the leading/up and coming scientists in my field - on at least two occasions.  Or highland dancing along to Gangnam Style in public.

*Even if your image is "I couldn't care less what you think of my image"
**Which is technically cross-dressing.  Not that anyone would really care in Eugene...

 The point being, if I'm concerned about image, when I usually take such glee in being unconventional, I'll bet there are many other women who are much more held back by concerns of how they're perceived doing fieldwork, or writing computer programs, or giving talks, in situations where they are the only representative of "female" currently present.

So if there's some initiative on the table promoting diversity, whether it be of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, you name it - I'm for it.  Because life is so much better when you're a human being rather than a specimen.