Yesterday was Cal Day here at the University of California Berkeley. It’s a campus-wide open house, which is always a fun way to engage with the local community. As part of this, I served as a panelist for the Expand Her Potential in Science event hosted by the amazing CaT Bobino (who is as cool as the cover pic on her website suggests).
During the Q&A, an 8th grade girl named Destiny asked if the hurdles faced earlier in life are ever advantageous later for being a scientist.
I love this question.
It hadn’t really dawned on me before, but as soon as she asked it, I could hear in my head the voices of numerous co-authors over the years who have uttered amazement at my perseverance, not giving up when reviewers are particularly tough, but revising, resubmitting, pushing the project forward. Sometimes I fear it is more foolishness on my part than admirable perseverance, but whatever.
So, I told Destiny that I think all of the hard-knocks life can throw at you, especially girls and even more especially for people of color, those help you to build a really strong resilience muscle. And THAT will definitely help you be a good scientist. You don’t go into science to feel the love, as science by definition is a critical process. The stronger your resiliency, the better you will be at pushing forward, taking in the constructive criticism (and other types of criticism as well), re-working your proposal or project or paper or class lecture and constantly getting better.
Science, especially when you have two X chromosomes and/or a decent amount of melanin, can feel like death by 1,000 paper cuts. No one of the paper cuts is ever, I suppose, all that big of a deal, as the metaphorical colleague down the hall always says that I’m being too sensitive. So, I just shake my head, swallow hard, and move on. Resiliency gets me through 99 of them. But, I do find that I always crumple at the 100th. I have learned to let myself go home, lick my psychic wounds, watch Netflix, and eat a bunch of red vines.
But when you have a strong resiliency muscle, you are able to get back up after a few hours, or a few days, or a few weeks, or sometimes maybe it even takes a few months or years, but resiliency picks you up and you persevere.
And then today, in The New York Times, there was this article, “Why Men Quit and Women Don’t”
https://nyti.ms/2K2vcuL
Turns out that women drop out of marathons at a slightly lower rate than do men, especially when the weather conditions are particularly tough.
This is not at all surprising. And maybe we don’t want to read too much into these data. But, it’s thought-provoking.
Maybe it’s my rich adipose tissue (thanks to all those twizzlers and my two X chromosomes), or my willingness to commiserate with friends, or that I survived childbirth that I have persevered all these years in academia. But I doubt it.
Thanks to Destiny’s great question, I am pretty sure that I got invited to be a women-in-STEM panelist mostly thanks to this ultradistance resiliency run we call “female science professor”.