BU Astronomy has Lady Problem

There hasn't been a single woman graduate student entering the astronomy department at BU since the fall of 2011. That class had one woman. She left after the first year to go be with her boyfriend. My class entered in the fall of 2010; there were 9 women. Of these nine women, one has left by choice, and four others have been asked to leave. As with UCI, the number of women that are asked to leave is disproportionate. A higher percentage of women leave than men (in my informal tally). Why is that? I don't believe that it's because the women aren't smart enough to get through. There is something systemic going through the department. And now apparently they are raising the minimum physics GRE score to 50%. The argument is that there is a correlation between GRE scores and success in classes, comprehensive exams, and research. But it is fairly well established that standardized tests are biased towards men, and it's a correlation, not exact. I would not have gotten in had that been the cutoff when I applied. However, I have the highest GPA that the BU astronomy department has seen in 15 years. 15 years! I passed the comps on the first try. I have a published paper, and a second one in the docket. If the cutoff had been in place, BU would have missed out on an excellent student. After a rocky start at UCI, I have excelled at BU. I wish they would be able to see past the test scores, etc. and not be so rigid about this. This policy will continue the trend of not having any women in the department. The few that do get in notice that there aren't very many of us. I'm not going to lie if I get asked about it. This is bullshit and it cannot continue. Either BU will have to change its policies, or they can deal with the consequences.

I Like Pink. I Like Princesses. I'm an Astrophysicist.

Deal with it.

This video has been getting lots of shares around Facebook, which is not surprising, given that I know a lot of ladies in science:

While I don't have problems with the product, I've been getting more and more prickly about the presentation. See, every time people try to talk up how awesome science is, they have a tendency to put down things like "pink" and "princesses." It makes things that are traditionally "feminine" into something that's bad, like there's something wrong with it. That the ideal state is "masculine." And that's pretty bad, too. And as someone who likes those things, it makes me feel like I'm not a "real" scientist.

I've always been traditionally "girly" and "prissy." As a baby, my mom would try to get me to play in the dirt. I didn't want to get dirty. When I had the ability to pick out my own clothing, it was strictly pink and skirts and dresses until 2nd grade, when I occasionally started to wear stirrup pants and bike shorts under giant, baggy t-shirts(it was the early 1990s; please don't mock my sartorial choices). I refused to wear jeans until I was 12 or 13. When people asked me my favorite color, I would say "Pink, blue is for boys." (I eventually grew out of that, and I wasn't getting that attitude at home, so clearly, there was some socialization going on.)

When it came to toys, maybe choices were less gendered than they are now, but when I was very young (pre-school age) all of the toys my parents had for me were gender-neutral. Legos, train sets, giant colored blocks, this set that you made towers with and then dropped marbles down the track (my mom LOOOOVED the noise that made!). I concede that it is entirely possible that my parents actively avoided the gendered toys, but I have to believe these items still exist for children. There were also toys like Lincoln logs and tesselation blocks, which I wanted so badly but never got. I really liked these toys, but I also really liked playing dress-up in my sparkliest, most princess-y outfits. My mom wouldn't buy me Barbie dolls, although family members did, so they weren't verboten. As I got older, I tended towards these more feminine toys. I had a lot of barbies and barbie accessories (including Disney princesses!), American Girl dolls, and one of my favorite games was Pretty Pretty Princesess.

Despite all these gendered toys that I preferred as I got older, I still managed to do science. We had elementary school science fairs, and my projects in 5th and 6th grade were pretty kick-ass. Ask me about my 6th grade project on the fat content in ice cream. I was doing extremely sophisticated sampling for a 6th grader. Even though I didn't play with "science" toys, my parents still encouraged me to keep up my interest in the subject, while simultaneously not keeping me from the more "girly" things that I enjoyed. I think that's what's missing from the discussion. Rather than discouraging girls from liking pink and princesses, we should let them know that it's ok to simultaneously like math and science. This requires parental guidance, but I'm guessing that the people who are buying their kids educational toys and who are interested in these issues are able to put that kind of effort in their parenting. There's really no need to put one thing down to build something else up. Just keep an open conversation with your kids about these issues, and they'll turn out fine. And if it turns out they like princesses AND science (or even just princesses), they'll know that there's nothing to be ashamed of.