Introduction to “The Princess Scientist”

This is a republication of a piece that was originally part of "May Newsletter 2023".

As a female and mother who navigated the world of academia in the biomedical sciences, I have been working on a book that talks about the real “sex discrimination” I encountered. Here is the introduction to the book as a little teaser. I plan to release some chapters as essays on my substack over the next few months.

The concept of “The Princess Scientist” came up at dinner during a very male-dominated scientific conference in 2017. During a discussion about encouraging more women to enter academic science, one male professor proudly announced that he had bought his daughter a t-shirt that said, “I don’t want to be a princess; I want to be a scientist.” Everyone at the table applauded him.  I asked him, “What if she wants to be both? Why are they mutually exclusive?” He looked astonished. Even some of the women seemed puzzled by the idea of a cliché gender role being consistent with a career as a scientist. No one was able to answer the question. For decades, we spent so much time trying to avoid stereotypical gender roles- like girls being princesses and boys being firemen- that many failed to see how the “gender neutral” model often disparages female stereotypes, while embracing all that is stereotypically male. In the pursuit of eliminating gender stereotypes that purportedly hold women back, we have created a new stereotype that subtly discriminates against women-not all women, but a lot of women. I should mention that I am not a princess, but if I decided I want to wear a pink ball gown to the lab, and I wasn’t working with anything flammable or radioactive that day (or doing anything that would make excessive flounce and lace an incumbrance), I should be able to do it without anyone judging me. And to be honest, the pink ballgown isn’t the aspect of the princess story that is most at-odds with a career in academic science. It’s the “married happily ever after and raising a family” part.

If a woman chooses to prioritize her family along with her job, she should not be judged as less of a scientist, but she often is. There are surface level efforts to help young mothers in academia, such as campus daycare and offering an extra year for tenure review to new parents, and I will be the first to praise these efforts as they make life easier during the early years of child rearing. However, they don’t help when children are school-age, with after-school activities and homework.  This is the point where the flexibility of an academic science career could blend seamlessly with child rearing, as so much of one’s job as a professor running a research lab involves reading papers, writing grants and papers, and preparing lectures or talks. It’s easy to work on these things from home, or on a laptop after taking your children to various activities. Certainly, it’s easier to be productive if you lock yourself in your office all day but the multi-tasking mom/professor can still be an eminent scientist. The problem is that the entire system-from merits and promotions to funding- favors those who prioritize job over family.

In academic science, time away from your family is rewarded. Burning the midnight oil in your lab and working on weekends are treated as a sign of dedication. Taking speakers to dinner, attending out of town conferences and organizing campus activities are implicitly mandatory for a university professor. For some women this is not a problem and there are a variety of factors that can make immersion in this career either more or less difficult.  For many women, however, these implicit requirements for success present a choice between family and career. The sexual “discrimination”, if we must use that word, that I observe is not women being paid less for the same job, or women being denied advancement because of their sex, but a metric for merit evaluation that favors traditional male roles and encourages women to embrace those roles in order to succeed. I’m not blaming anyone for unequal representation of women in academic science, or for any hurdles I encountered in my own career. I chose the career path I did, and I chose my own life priorities. What I decry is the narrative that there is some sort of patriarchy forcing women into traditional family roles that hamper their career advancement, rather than a movement to marginalize women who prioritize their families. You can argue by exception all you want, and point to the superwoman with the perfect support system that has time for her kids, publishes hundreds of papers in high impact journals, and is dean of her department, but statistics support my thesis that the system favors women who do not prioritize family. Women constitute nearly 50% of the workforce, but only 27% of those in STEM related jobs. Of those women in academic science, only 50% have children, compared to 72% of men. The institutional support provided for women with families is aimed at helping them spend more time away from those families. “The Princess Scientist” delves into some of the hurdles that women and moms face in an academic science career.