Written by: Zelda Marais. Assistant Head, Upton Court Grammar School
Dr. Jessica McCarty (renowned Scientist) writes in her Twitter feed this week:
At a NASA Earth meeting 10 years ago, a white male post doc interrupted me to tell me that I didn’t understand human drivers of fire, that I definitely needed to read McCarty et al.
I looked him in the eye, pulled my long hair back so he could read my name tag.
‘I’m McCarty et al.’
Sugar and spice and all things nice
I was born in the summer of 1969 shortly after the first man landed on the moon and proclaimed that it was ‘one small step for man but a giant leap for mankind’. The world was alive with possibility and the sky was no longer the limit. Yet, these incredible turn of the decade advancements had very little impact on my early life. I was still expected to play with boring dolls and wear clean, frilly dresses whilst my brother could build go-karts, climb trees and build treehouses, catch and gut fish, build elaborate skyscrapers and gadgets with Mecano, craft model airplanes, swim in rivers, make catapults and zip lines and stay out late. Never did the old nursery rhyme ring more true:
What are little boys made of
Snips and snails and puppy dog tails
And such are little boys made of.
What are little girls made of
Sugar and spice and all things nice
And such are little girls made of.
Boys had adventures. Girls stayed home and were good.
The stories I loved so much as a child taught me the same. Little Red Riding Hood shouldn’t stray from the path or risk being devoured by the big bad wolf, Snow White’s beauty and kindness made the prince fall at her feet and Cinderella’s pretty dress and glass slippers made the prince turn the kingdom upside down to make her his bride. Male characters would slay villains, dragons and wolves and save the day, whilst girls waited patiently in their towers (growing their hair Rapunzel style and singing along with chirping birds and fluffy animals) to be saved.
Where was Moana and Elsa when I needed them?
My world was small and I didn’t know anything about the amazing things women had always done and were still doing – no one told me – not the media, my parents or teachers. By the time I was born women had already achieved remarkable things: Marie Curie had won the Nobel Prize, Emmeline Pankhurst had fought for women to have the right to vote, Coco Chanel had established one of the most iconic brands in the fashion world and the brilliant mathematician Catherine Johnson did the calculations for some of the most important flights in the early space programme. The only female historical figure I learnt about was Florence Nightingale, who was dutifully engaged in a stereotypically female profession. The role models in my life were housewives, mothers, secretaries, nurses or teachers, all incredibly noble professions, but the men… they were engineers and doctors and CEOs and lawyers and soldiers and pilots and architects and policemen and firemen and head teachers and professors and explorers. As the Mandolorian dryly states: This was the way.
Learning to sing a new song
I was fortunate to have parents who allowed me to wear both dresses and trousers, to do both ballet and judo, to aspire to more than just what I saw around me. I was the first person in my family to go to university and experience a bigger world full of promise. But even there I found that there were acceptable courses for different genders: the Physics and Maths lecture halls were packed with men, the hallowed halls of the Engineering department the fortress of men. The ladies could be found gracing the humanities faculty studying languages and drama or, if they were in the field of medicine, they were training to become dieticians or nurses. This was the way. Don’t get me wrong – I loved studying the literature of the Great Writers – it still enriches my life to no end and I draw on it for inspiration and wisdom every day of my life. But I will always wonder… what if… I was born in the 90s rather than the 60s, or I was born with the Y chromosome instead of the X. As I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps it is symbolic that an X means ‘No entry’ whereas the Y letter shows a path with choices.
Happily-ever-after
However, things were changing for women, albeit slowly, and when my daughter was born in 1997 I ensured that her childhood looked very different to mine. So, she climbed trees and mountains and played musical instruments and built forts and made fires and learned to assemble flat pack furniture (despite being told by science that girls’ weak spatial skills wouldn’t allow her to be good at it) and learned to navigate using a compass and a map and she wore whatever clothes she liked and saw her mom working in a challenging profession and her dad cook dinner and skilfully tie her hair in a ballet bun. She read books and watched films where the female protagonists saved themselves and the day and she learned what the world should have learned back in ’69 when those first steps were taken on the moon; the world is a big place where the sky really isn’t the limit and you don’t have to be restricted because on your gender. Today she holds a First degree in Mechanical Engineering and leads a platoon of men as an Officer in the British Army, a woman in once male-dominated professions. Today she lives in a world where there are no longer glass ceilings and gender bias. And now she can live happily-ever-after knowing that her gender won’t define her.
A twist in the tale
Perhaps not. Recently, my brilliant, well-educated, engineer-officer daughter attended a course related to the field she works in. The course was about the latest development in tank technology and participants were all engineers and leaders in this field. Sadly, the introductory video showed a female dressed in a skirt and low-cut blouse stating how difficult it was to understand the technology behind the tank designs and that she would ask the men to explain it to her. Apparently none of the men in the room thought anything of the way women were depicted in the video, whereas the female engineers were left cringing and fuming in their seats.
When she told me about her experience my heart broke, my blood boiled, my soul raged and I wondered how, despite all the advances and progress towards gender equality, this was still happening.
The truth is that, regrettably, young women continue to receive messages about themselves and the opportunities available to them from every angle of society (family, friends, teachers, and the workplace) which guide them towards valuing physical perfection over intelligence and innovation. The ‘Disney princess’ expectation of my childhood is still despairingly alive and thriving. Furthermore, the objectification of women in the media continues to diminish the capabilities of women in wider society, e.g. the EU Commission’s decision to launch their ‘Science: it’s a girl thing’ with a pseudo-pop video exemplifies how society normalises the reduction of women to their looks and, more worryingly, their sexual appeal. Surely, when 87% of women (aged 11-21) believe that they are judged more for their looks than their ability there is an urgent need to address the imbalanced way women are represented in the media. Only last year a media storm was created when a senior scientist declared that physics ‘was invented and built by men’, further marginalising the important role that women already play in STEM fields today.
Today, as I write this in February 2021, yes, in the year TWENTY TWENTY-ONE, a BBC headline reads: ‘Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party invites women to ‘look, not talk’ at key meetings’. This follows the resignation of Yoshiro Mori, 83, who in reaction to discussions over increasing the number of female board members, remarked that they ‘had to make sure their (women’s) speaking time is restricted somewhat – they have difficulty finishing’. Women would not be allowed to talk during these meetings, only submit opinions afterwards.
There. Are. No. Words.
The poisoned apple.
Gender stereotyping is the commonly held beliefs about the general behaviours and characteristics society attributes to perceived background, age, race or gender. From a young age females are often portrayed as emotional, compassionate and in need of protection, whilst males are stereotypically presented as rational, ambitious, strong and adventurous. This often leads to negative, false assumptions, e.g. that women are irrational and men insensitive or even more damaging, that women are born to nurture and men to lead.
Young people are regularly confronted by false messaging about how they should look, behave and play. These gender stereotypes shape self-perception, relationships and greatly influence choices about careers. They can have a huge impact on a young person’s experiences in a classroom, their academic performance, subject choices and general wellbeing.
In the classroom, teachers may be much more likely to praise girls for being well behaved or for well-presented work, whilst boys get praised when they contribute ideas and understanding, resulting in girls believing that being good is more important than academic competence. Research shows that there is a tendency for teachers to overlook wrong answers given by boys and right answers given by girls resulting in boys seeming more competent and their knowledge more important and girls less competent and their knowledge less visible. Another study showed that teachers tend to talk to boys from a greater physical distance causing many to overhear the conversation, whereas teachers will often speak to girls one-on-one when supporting them. The consequence is that boys are given more ‘publicity’, furthering their confidence in the classroom and later in the workplace. Through their classroom experiences boys are taught from a young age that they are gifted with what linguist Deborah Cameron refers to as a ‘Divine right to Talk’, that what they have to say is worth more than what others, especially women, have to say. This has resulted in the recent backlash by women and the coining of the phrase hepeating – a word used to describe the damaging sexism still prevalent in today’s workplace.
A new history
There are many, many stories throughout history of brilliant women who have impacted the world we live in in astounding ways, with more and more stories of these hidden figures slowly emerging into our consciousness every day. I cannot help but wonder how different, better, the world would be today if all women had the same rights as men to design and create and compose and pioneer. Perhaps Jane Austen said it best:
The quarrels of popes and king, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men so good for nothing and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.’ – Jane Austen
Allow me to share a final story taken from the book ‘Invisible Women – Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’ by Caroline Criado Perez to exemplify why women should never be marginalised.
It took about two hours for Daina Taimina to find the solution that had eluded mathematicians for over a century. It was 1997, and the Latvian mathematician was participating in a geometry workshop at Cornell University. A hyperbolic plane is ‘the geometric opposite’ of a sphere, explains Henderson in an interview. ‘On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface in which the space curves away from itself at every point.’ It exists in nature in ruffled lettuce leaves, in coral leaf, in sea slugs, in cancer cells. Hyperbolic geometry is used by statisticians when they work with multidimensional data, by Pixar animators when they want to simulate realistic cloth, by auto-industry engineers to design aerodynamic cars, by acoustic engineers to design concert halls. It’s the foundation of the theory of relativity, and ‘thus the closest thing we have to an understanding of the shape of the universe’. In short, hyperbolic space is a pretty big deal.
But for thousands of years, hyperbolic space didn’t exist. At least it didn’t according to mathematicians, who believed that there were only two types of space: Euclidian, or flat space, like a table, and spherical space, like a ball. In the nineteenth century, hyperbolic space was discovered – but only in principle. And although mathematicians tried for over a century to find a way to successfully represent this space physically, no one managed it – until Taimina attended that workshop at Cornell. Because as well as being a professor of mathematics, Taimina also liked to crochet.
Taimina learnt to crochet as a schoolgirl. But while she had always seen patterns and algorithms in knitting and crochet, Taimina had never connected this traditional, domestic, feminine skill with her professional work in maths. Until that workshop in 1997. When she saw the battered paper approximation Henderson was using to explain hyperbolic space, she realised: I can make this out of crochet.
And so that’s what she did. She spent her summer ‘crocheting a classroom set of hyperbolic forms’. She has now created hundreds of models and explains that in the process of making them ‘you get a very concrete sense of the space expanding exponentially. The first rows take no time but the later rows can take literally hours, they have so many stitches. You get a visceral sense of what ‘’hyperbolic’’ really means. Just looking at her models did the same for others: in an interview with the New York Times Taimina recalled a professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years seeing one and saying, ‘Oh, so that’s how they look.’ Now her creations are the standard model for explaining hyperbolic space.
When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights. Would male mathematicians have come up with Taimina’s elegantly simple solution on their own? Unlikely, given how few men are keen crocheters. But in Taimina the traditionally feminine skill of crochet collided with the traditionally masculine sphere of maths. And it was this collision that led to the problem that many mathematicians had given up on as a lost cause finally being solved. Taimina provided the link the male mathematicians were missing.
***
It is no secret that our planet faces significant challenges that will influence generations to come. There is a demand for intervention and change in almost every aspect of our world. In order to meet those challenges, the world will need to look for creative solutions from both men and women. It is no longer good enough to see headlines celebrating ‘the first female Vice president of the United States as if it is an extraordinary achievement. Why should we still see headlines, like the one this week from McDonalds, vowing to ‘have an equal number of men and women in leadership roles by 2030’ as something we should celebrate? Why isn’t it already a normal occurrence to see the best person, regardless of gender, age, race, religion chosen for a job? Why are there still court cases about equal pay for men and women?
Let’s commit to changing the story for our children and raise them in a world where the word equality fades into memory because it is no longer a word we try and aspire to but rather a normal way of being. Let’s give our daughters the keys to free themselves from their shadowy princess towers and let them be heard and involved in decision making, politics, peace talks, innovation and research to the benefit of humanity as a whole so that their voices are never again forgotten.
And let us proclaim proudly:
This is the way!
*”Nevertheless, she persisted” is an expression adopted by the feminist movement, especially in the United States. It became popular in 2017 after the United States Senate voted to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren’s objections to confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General.