Mentoring Pour Homme #WiSTEMspotlight

As part of Digital Science’s celebrations for Ada Lovelace Day, for the month of October we are running a series of blog posts where inspiring women and men in STEM are sharing their personal stories. Anyone can get involved and we encourage you to read and share your thoughts using the hashtag #WiSTEMspotlight.

Leonie studied chemistry focusing on computational chemistry. She earned a doctoral degree from Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz investigating topics around highly accurate quantum chemistry.  Her work received her graduate school’s annual best thesis award.
During her doctoral studies, Leonie got interested in science communication and publishing. Together with fellow students, she founded the Journal of Unsolved Questions, a journal for negative and null results. The project got international recognition and received several prizes. In 2014, after working for Nature Communications as a manuscript editor for a year, she joined Nature as the journal’s fundamental physics editor. Projects that she has worked on in addition to her regular manuscript curation tasks include a better system to reward and recognize peer review and a support forum for young quantum physicists who want to found quantum-technology start-ups. She is a science writer in her spare time and has written features for the New Scientist and for various journals of the Nature family. Recently, she has become politically active, campaigning for and supporting refugee resettlement in the UK. 

For my Ph.D., I worked on a very theoretical topic of quantum chemistry – multireference coupled-cluster theory. It involved lengthy equations, a seemingly infinite number of lines of FORTRAN code (including nasty memory allocation bugs) quantum mechanics and special relativity. Fun and challenging stuff, in other words. But I have lost count of how often men, young and old, came up to me at conferences and seminars with a slightly bewildered stare, stuttering something like:

“But you are a girl!! And you do hard-core theory???”

I am sure that this was never deliberately meant to offend anybody. These men probably even thought that they were paying me a compliment and genuinely didn’t realize that this was actually a bit demeaning to womankind.

Many male scientists have a positive attitude towards women in science and want to support them. When consciously thinking about gender issues, looking at statistics of women in physics or seeing evidence for the infamous leaking pipeline problem – the fact that the percentage of women in a subject stays constant all the way until postdoc level but then sharply plummets when taking the step to PI – it is obvious that something must change. However, for many men, although by no means all, this understanding on a rational level doesn’t always translate into empathic and adequate behaviour when reacting intuitively to a situation. And who are we to put all the blame on the men? We’ve all grown up in an environment with implicit cultural assumptions about men and women which doesn’t teach men to develop this sort of intuition.

If it were only bewildered and weirdly admiring glances directed at women doing heavy theory, this issue wouldn’t be worth writing home about. But the problem becomes bigger when you consider that this intuition leads people astray in graver moments, too. Take for example a middle-aged, and generally very nice, male PI who I met during graduate school. He voluntarily, and somehow gleefully, told me a story about how he didn’t give a female student a recommendation for a scholarship, despite excellent grades and overall performance, because he thought that she wasn’t “genius” enough and “just worked hard”.  Or take unwanted advances, especially at conferences: Speaking to other women in science, one gets to know how common it is that an otherwise fine man’s slightly overblown self-confidence eventually leads to him being persistent despite having heard “no” a couple of times.

For generations, women have simply been shrugging off these experiences. Each comment individually is not a big deal after all. But when you feel a bit down, your head sometimes becomes a whispering gallery of echoes, repeating words and deeds collectively in an infinite loop. To silence these echoes, women get mentoring during which they try to grow a thicker skin.  Men, on the other hand, get harassment and implicit bias training. This is a great start. But to expect that, in just a few hours, they can miraculously shed their cultural heritage and develop the sort of intuition that automatically induces adequate reactions to all situations is a bit demanding. (For completeness, women get this training, too, which is to be supported unequivocally; after all there is overwhelming evidence that women absorb implicit biases about gender just as much as men.) Neither shrugging nor mentoring women nor a few hours training seem like good solutions, in particular because I don’t know any man who wants to be the cause of these sorts of whispering gallery echoes. And waiting until the cultural conditions have changed would take aeons.

Recently, at a panel discussion about diversity in politics, I heard a constructive and positive suggestion in this regard when a middle-aged man raised his hand and exclaimed with disarming honesty:

“You’ve got to point out to us when we say offensive things. We just often don’t get it!”

Pointing out these subtly belittling sentences or actions in real time would indeed be the best training men could get. However, conversations about these issues, especially between a man and a woman who don’t know each other very well, are by no means easy.  Not all people are as eager as the panel-discussion attendee to be made aware of inappropriate sentences and those who are, don’t wear badges saying “please correct my gender bias”.

From all I have learned about managing disagreements, bringing in a neutral third party — someone who doesn’t have any stakes in the game – usually helps. In this case, the buck stops with those men who “get it”, those who often recognize subtly gender-biased behaviour. There are binders full of men who “get it”, I know many myself, and if they carefully mentored men who don’t, pointing out situations in which they could have reacted better, they would do an invaluable service to womankind that we would be eternally thankful for.

Here is my plea for Ada Lovelace Day: Men, if you see other men making slightly awkward and not entirely appropriate comments towards women, please go up to them, introduce yourself and politely explain how this situation might have been handled better. I’ll make sure you get a “HeForShe” pin!