Ada Lovelace Day: On Role Models for Women in Science

Today, October 14, is Ada Lovelace Day. You have probably never heard of her (I hadn't before last year's Ada Lovelace Day), but she is often referred to as the first computer programmer. She was born Ada Gordon but had the good fortune of being married to an aristocrat named King who became the Earl of Lovelace, and so she became Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She lived in the mid-1800s, a time when people could have names out of fairytales, but even women of means were rarely educated.

Ada Lovelace Day was started a few years ago to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (singular), commonly taken together as STEM fields. Women are underrepresented in these fields, and though there has been progress, it is frustratingly slow. And in this progress, white women are outpacing women of color. It is often thought that we need only wait until the old, white sexists in these fields are replaced by a younger more progressive population, but that expresses a complete misunderstanding of the causes of the disparity. Plus, I can tell you from experience that the younger scientific community still has a long way to go before becoming "progressive" on these issues, women included.

What are some of the causes, if not old white sexists? The Finding Ada site sums it up:

The reasons for this inequality are many, spanning issues such as social pressure on girls and women to pursue “suitable” careers, subtle misogyny in higher education and the workplace, and a lack of support for women who wish to have a family or re-skill when re-entering the workforce after having a family.

I agree generally, and though of course old white sexists do have their role in preventing the advancement of women (and not just in STEM fields), I tend to think of it as primarily the result of stereotypes. In cultures/countries where the stereotype that men are better at science and math doesn't exist - such as Italy, apparently - the representation of women is more balanced, or even skewed toward women. However, even in fields like nursing where the stereotype works toward the underrepresentation of men, the representation of men increases as you go up the career ladder (I saw this in a talk so can't reference the data); there is still the stereotype that men are better leaders and managers, which benefits the advancement of men over women even in female-dominated careers.

So, stereotypes are evil and allow people to make mental shortcuts, which affect their judgment even in the face of contradictory objective data (read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman). What do we do about it? Ada Lovelace Day is about doing something positive by raising the profiles of women in science and stressing the importance of role models. People are encouraged to blog about women in STEM that they admire and participate in various events, online and in person.

But when I think about what inspired me to become a scientist/astronomer/astrophysicist/cosmologist (all of which apply to me, listed in decreasing order of the representation of women), I don't think role models ever played an important role (cheeky wink!) in my career choices at all. Perhaps the lack of female role models never bothered me personally because I was a tomboy and played sports, and if anyone ever said boys were better at something, I would probably reply "nuh uh!" Perhaps it is because I was blessed with the naive sense that I can do anything because I'm good at everything, which stuck with me until grad school. Even so, I remember trying to learn about astronomy in the career center and thinking, "That seems cool, but I don't want to be an astrophysicist, that sounds much too hard." Who knows what having a role model in science could have done. I do remember having a couple of great female science teachers.

After facing the realism in grad school that I'm not better than everyone (and that that's okay, that doesn't make me the worst), I didn't exactly have many female astronomers or physicists to look up to. The lone female tenured astronomy professor in my department was a hard ass that never seemed to support women (or anyone); but I was educating myself about "diversity" issues in science and learned that it's common for older women who achieved success in a much harsher climate to avoid anything to do with "women in science" as a survival mechanism. Plus, the women I saw (and continue to see) invited to give talks at conferences are all too awesome; but this can also be explained by sociological research.

First, girls at various stages in education out-perform boys, even in stereotypically male subjects such as science and math. In college, the representation of women in these fields starts to fall, and this continues to fall at each successive stage (graduate school, postdoc, professor), a phenomenon known as the leaky pipeline. So, first assume that male and female ability is equal (even if there is evidence that girls outperform boys): when women self-select out of the field, either because of social pressure (perhaps seeing chemistry as a more friendly environment than physics) or whatever reason, the women who stay are more likely to be at the top of the ability curve. There is a biased selection effect, something which astronomers should be familiar with. When there are barriers to advancement, the super awesome women make it, while the average men make it, resulting in a pool of female role models that doesn't reflect the average a few stages back in the pipeline. (This is also a reason why striving for a percentage of female invited speakers, for example, that matches the representation in the field (which is less than 50%), is misguided: there is evidence that women are MOAR AWESOME, so invite MOAR WOMEN!)

Secondly, throwing female role models at the problem might not be all it's cracked up to be. I can't find the reference so it may not be true, but I remember hearing that role models can have a negative impact: when the role models are too few or too awesome, it can be hard for younger people to identify with the supposed role model. Perhaps I remember this because I often don't feel awesome and don't see myself in the small pool of women cosmologists who are awesome and give ALL the invited talks. (As I said above, we could do with inviting MOAR WOMEN, not just the big wigs everyone knows about!) But there could be other issues with the role model solution: this study finds that both women and men are equally beneficial as role models for recruitment (contrasted with the benefits of women for retention), and another study "suggests that role models whose success seems unobtainable can make young students feel threatened rather than motivated" (which may support my "role models too awesome" theory). Just being female and being successful in STEM may not be enough to inspire aspiring young girls. 

None of this should be taken to mean that I don't support Ada Lovelace Day. It is a great chance to celebrate the achievements of women in STEM fields, and I've learned some interesting things already. But I remain unconvinced that role models are the solution many think they are, both from my personal experience and from a few snippets of sociological research I just dug up and half-remember. And when it is seen as a magical cure-all, it over-taxes the few women who have made it to senior positions in STEM, who, as one male said in a women in science meeting, need to "step up" and take on more responsibility, with no hint of irony at all.

Flatland

What is the point of this blog post? Besides the obvious pun, which will become clear to you in a moment, I'm not really sure what the point of posting this quotation is, except that I found it interesting and compelling. I guess I will just write and we'll find the point together.

Near the end of Flatland, by E. A. Abbott, the Sphere is showing the Square (who has already witnessed visions of Lineland and Spaceland) the being, and entirety, of Pointland:

"Behold yon miserable creature. The Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now listen."

(Italics mine.) The first set of italics I found profound in a Zen kind of way. In Pointland, one, everything, and nothing are all the same. Let's just sit with that for a moment.

...

...

...

Got it? Everything is nothing, and nothing is everything.

Now to the mathematics... does a point even exist? How can an infinitesimally small thing, which has no extent in either of our three spatial dimensions, be said to exist? How can it be extant with no extent, as it were? We can write down a lot of things mathematically, like infinity, for example, that are useful to solve problems about the real universe but don't actually exist themselves. How can infinity carry any ontological weight? There are an infinite number of numbers between any two numbers, sure, but numbers are abstractions; they are not real things in the real world, but instead they are properties of things in the world. Similarly, a point is a mathematical abstraction - a way to specify this number exactly - but a thing can't be a point, can it? We would have to know its location to infinite precision (and as I've said, it would have zero extent).

Points are difficult for physics. Zeros and infinities make black holes, which tear apart the very fabric of space and time. Singularities (like black holes) are a sign that something is wrong with our theories or that they are incomplete. The embarrassment of naked black holes is covered up with event horizons, which hide the awkward theoretical rip in space-time. But it is interesting to me, in a very Zen way, how zero and infinity are reciprocals of each other - divide by zero to get infinity, and divide by infinity to get zero. They are inverses, so in some way they're the same - zero is infinity, just viewed upside-down. Everything is nothing.


The second set of italics above, "to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy," is interesting for a completely different reason. Here is the Point making a very profound (to me) point about existence, and yet the higher-dimensional beings call him vile and ignorant. His happiness is a reflection of his ignorance of the higher dimensions (or really any dimensions at all), and this is obviously to be scorned. In some ways I sympathize; the Point is certain that he knows all there is to know, by virtue of being his entire Universe, so while we can't exactly blame him, he is completely and utterly wrong. He hears the Square speak, and thinks it his own thoughts. Being wrong is uncomfortable, but I value the attempt at being right (the aspiration for knowledge, not knowledge itself) more than being ignorant, certain, and blissful.

And yet:

"Infinite beatitude of existence! It is; and there is none else beside It. It fills all Space," continued the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness ah, the happiness of Being!"

 Ah indeed, the happiness of Being. What an intriguing and enticing ignorance!
 

Nautilus

I'm in love with this new magazine, Nautilus. It is named after "a remarkable intersection of science, math, myth, and culture", a mollusk with a fractal logarithmic spiral in its shell. First of all, I love logarithms! In a weird cosmic synchronicity, the random (from a list of names?) band name given to me in Rock Band was "Just a Matter of Logarithms" and you'd better believe I kept it. Second of all, I love science, math, myth, AND culture! I love all of those things! So I was pretty excited to find out about this magazine.

The first article I read, I chose because of the title, "Metaphors Are Us". (I love metaphors!) I was fascinated to find out how metaphors, empathy, morality, and neurology all come together in a beautiful and complicated mess of humanity. Our ability to feel empathy, to connect to someone else's pain and feel it ourselves, relates to very specific functions of the brain:

While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too.

Humans also appear to abstract disgust as well as pain. The insula, which processes gustatory disgust in all mammals (to make us spit out poison, for example), also activates when we think about some shameful thing we did. This "moral disgust" also relates to humans as social creatures:

Many cultures inculcate their members into acquiring symbols that repel, doing so by strengthening specific neural pathways from the cortex to the insula, pathways that you’d never find in another species. Depending on who you are, those pathways could be activated by the sight of a swastika or of two men kissing. Or perhaps by the thoughts of an abortion, or of a 10-year-old Yemeni girl forced to marry an old man. Our stomachs lurch, and we feel the visceral certainty of what is wrong. And we belong.

That beautiful paragraph makes me want to read more by the article's author, Robert Sapolsky.

I haven't finished Issue 1 yet because I was distracted by Issue 0, which I got around to reading today. I probably won't write about all of the issues, but here are more reasons I love Nautilus:

In one article, I learn that music is fractal, and so is a coastline!A fractal pattern looks the same on large scales as it does on small ones; put another way, the parts of a fractal system look similar to the entire system. I'm not entirely sure how music is fractal, but it's still cool!

In another article, I get some fascinating insight into psychological epistemology:

According to Rolf Reber, a psychologist at the University of Bergen, in Norway, “there is growing empirical evidence that people use a common source for evaluations of both beauty and truth.” The source he refers to is processing fluency, the state of being able to easily parse and understand a situation. Essentially, the more easily we can get a handle on a situation (because it’s mathematically simple, we’ve seen it many times before, it’s symmetrical, etc.), the more likely it is to seem right.

This explains so much about people and why they believe what they do! (I have just now decided to call this psychological epistemology. It probably already has a more appropriate and boring name like the "psychology of belief" but... boring.)

So anyway, this is very fascinating for psychological epistemology: the easier something is for us to understand, the more likely we will accept it as true. Simple and elegant solutions just seem right. Things that don't make "horse sense" are met with skepticism. And when we hear something over and over again it becomes much easier to believe, even when it has no relation to reality. (I'm glaring meaningfully in your direction, Fox "News"....)

A third article had me at its title, "Where Science and Story Meet", because I've been wanting to read "The Storytelling Animal" but it's not at my local bookstore. The article was not quite what I expected, but that's good; if I only ever learned what I expected to learn, then I probably wouldn't actually learn very much. Anyway, the unexpected thing I learned was that

The pleasurable feeling that our explanation is the right one—ranging from a modest sense of familiarity to the powerful and sublime “a-ha!”—is meted out by the same reward system in the brain integral to drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions. 

Not only are humans good at pattern recognition, but figuring out the pattern produces happy chemicals in the brain! Solving that equation, putting that jigsaw piece in the right place, or hearing someone else tell you something you already know is true - putting things together into a coherent story - makes us feel good, while not solving that equation or puzzle, or having a friend present you with facts that contradict your beautiful story, makes us hate math and angry at our friends. This pretty much explains why I like to do jigsaw puzzles when I'm stressed, and adds to theories I have about the psychology of gaming. (Or maybe theories other people have that I've read...)

There's more Nautilus to read, and learn and think about, but this story is over for now!

Symbolism and Probability

Last Friday was my birthday and it was a glorious day. Not only did I submit my shiny Paper draft to my collaborators, but after our regular happy our we went to a chocolate happy hour, followed by eating delicious burgers, then drinking wine, and finally closing out karaoke. My sister Kara came up for all of it (except for the Paper part) and we brunched at Golden West on Saturday. She had decided to give me a set of Tarot cards for my birthday, and I wanted the round Motherpeace set that she had, because I believe in the symbolic power of circles.

As luck would have it, the Motherpeace deck was at one of the local Hampden shops, “Crystals, Candles, and Cauldrons” that we stumbled into after brunch! She also got me a crystal that I picked out (turned out to be blood-red calcite which symbolizes vital energy and the opening of the heart chakra! score!). Despite telling her that it would only collect dust in my room, I love the color and the feel of it in my hand. It is both a meaningless rock and a symbol of Great Meaning, which will grow over time because I choose to see it as special. I won’t, however, expect it to cure lower body pains.

We are coming nearer the point now, trust me. Later on Saturday, after a gorgeous hangover nap, I got out the deck, looked at them, read the book, shuffled a lot, and decided to pick out some cards. I would pick a few, one at a time, reading about their meaning and considering how it might apply to me in this moment. The first I picked was the Two of Discs. The book describes the picture as: “A woman nurses twin babies as she is held in a circle by a double-headed snake.” Because the Tarot deck is round, the card can be upright, to the left, to the right, reversed, and anywhere in between, with a different take on the card’s meaning associated with each position. The upright meaning in the book says: “She is able to handle a lot now and there is a great variety of things she does or roles she plays. She can meet many diverse needs.” To me, however, the card appeared to the right, which says: “She’s handling more than her share.”

Well, okay… I don’t actually believe that I’m handling too many things right now, but maybe I could give myself more credit for what I’m actually doing. There’s the Paper that was put off for a long time with a variety of talks, conferences, a summer school, and a good measure of “idontwanna”. Maybe I expect too much of myself to think I should have been doing all of that plus the Paper? But then it’s not like I’ve been working too hard lately (or ever). So okay, that’s what that card says. It’s an interesting card, with the snake weaving itself through two wheels that are on either side of the woman, and with the fact that the snake has two heads.

I first hesitate whether to put the card back in the deck, but then think to myself, what are the chances that I would pull it again? So I shuffle everything for a while and cut the deck again to pick a new card… which is the Two of Discs! The card I just picked! I picked it again! And this time, it appears to the left. I picked the same card twice (a card whose number is two) and in opposite positions! Cue Jack Skellington singing “What does it mean? What does it mean??”

Simultaneously, I am fascinated by all the apparent meanings that I can extract from these events, and I am fascinated by probabilities. There are many examples of things which are a lot more probable than our intuition would tell us, such as the number of people (only 23) you need before the probability that two have the same birthday is greater than 50%. In my case, the probability of choosing a specific card is 1/78, and of choosing that specific card twice is (1/78)*(1/78) = 1/6084. Sounds small, but this only applies if you specify the exact card. The probability of pulling any card twice is only 1/78: given that a card is pulled, the probability of pulling that specific card again is 1/78. It is slightly more than 1% and within 3 standard deviations for a normal distribution, which pulling random cards certainly has. Though 3-sigma events are rare, they happen – even the 1/6084 case is within 4-sigma and falls below the 5-sigma astronomical standard of being a significant event. So who cares?

What can we say other than “that’s interesting”? Well, it turns out we can say a lot, though whether what we say is meaningful is a matter of opinion. While pondering probabilities I was also pondering how I could interpret this occurrence. The Two of Discs to the left says: “She isn’t fully available to everything that pulls on her.” So apparently, I am handling too much, while not being available to everything. This is not obviously contradictory, but I can see how by not being “fully available” I wouldn’t actually be “handling” what I’m taking on, so in that sense it is contradictory… Or maybe I am doing a lot, and by having too much to do I am not doing enough. The suit of Discs represents the Earth or physicality (the others are Swords (air and rationality), Cups (water and emotion), and Wands (fire and energy)), so it relates to tangible things. It is true that I have a lot of (work) things to do (first pull), but also that I don’t feel like I’m actually doing enough (second pull). So, there’s an interesting personal interpretation here that I could take away from the reading and leave it at that.

And then there is symbolism. The two-headed snake is trying to go in opposite directions. The number 2 symbolizes duality, polarity, choice, and receptivity according to the Tarot guide. So the number 2 of discs (circles, the Earth, everything, unity) appears twice but in two opposite directions, and here we have the symbolism of the Yin-Yang, for example. The dual is embodied in the one, the opposites are part of the whole, and what at first appears contradictory is understood to be two different reflections of the same thing. In the realm of the Earth (discs) you have pairs of opposites (night and day, man and woman, up and down, being and non-being). There is choice between one and the other. The two apparently contradictory pulls of the very same card are unified by occurring together.

There is another interpretation besides the unity of polar opposites that could be made, which is embodied in the symbolism of the Fool, the Zero card which is at once the creator goddess and the creation itself (wombic symbolism applies here), also known as the Trickster god. The Fool says, “Don’t take me seriously!” Don’t be stuck on the symbol! The Tarot, crystals, and organized religion are all metaphors that people become lost in by believing they are Real with a capital R. By pulling the same card in opposite positions, the Fool is showing his hand. Everything is possible, but nothing is True.

To wrap up: pulling the same card twice is unlikely, but not by much (not accounting for the directionality), so it’s pretty meaningless. On the other hand, pulling the Two of Discs in opposing positions is very unlikely, and means everything. The choice is yours: meaning is not something that exists out there, but within you.