I got a long email from a woman I’ll call “Kendra”. Here’s some of it:
I’m writing you because I’d like to get your thoughts on a major frustration I’ve had for a while (if you have time or feel so compelled).
I’m a 32 year old graduate student in electrical engineering. I’ll be finishing my masters next spring, and then I know I want to get a PhD…
It really stinks being a woman who is pursuing an advanced degree in engineering (or physics, which was my undergraduate area). It is even worse as you get older. I have two very close friends, both of whom are women. However, I don’t see them often.
Most time is spent around my “peers”, who are often 10 years younger than myself and almost entirely male. Most guys that age seem a bit phobic of girls and women. Age-wise, I am as old or older than most of the junior faculty in the department. However, none of the faculty seem terribly interested in being friendly. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. If I walk into the lunchroom when the faculty are there, they often stop talking as long as I am there. I honestly can’t tell if it’s the fact that I’m “just a student” or if it’s because I’m female, or possibly both. Either way, I wish I could blend into the wall. It’s obvious that they know I’m there, but also as obvious that they have no desire to include me.
I also don’t have a terribly easy time relating to other people outside of school. I hate to say it, but it seems like the stereotype of the engineer without any social skills is true. So much of what I do is wrapped up in my work that I can’t seem to relate to most people effectively. Although I’m a social butterfly by engineering standards (probably too much so since I’m rather talkative once you get me going), but I am often perceived (especially by other women) as “showing off” simply by discussing things that interest me. The feeling I get is that it’s okay for men to be engineers and talk about that “technical stuff”, but not for women.
I really hate being in this position.
No matter which path I follow career-wise, I sense that I’m always going to be caught in this limbo where people don’t fully accept me as a peer because I am different. I’m either older, younger, female, married with kids, a student, (someday) faculty, what have you…and this cuts off a lot of options for friendships. It’s very isolating and makes me wonder what I am paying in order to have the career I’ve been trying to work toward for so long. I would hope that going someplace else may change some of that, but I’m really not sure.
Does this ever change? Once I have my PhD, will faculty magically start treating me like a peer? Or will other students distance themselves even more because I crossed that imaginary line?
I don’t have an easy answer for Kendra. My Ph.D. was in the humanities, and I went through a graduate program that was evenly divided between men and women who were almost all my chronological peers. We were a gossipy, emotionally entangled lot.
I had a good friend a few years ago who was a Caltech graduate student (I can’t remember exactly what she did. It had “materials” in the name). My friend was, like Kendra, in her early thirties and one of the only women in her program. She also felt isolated from both her peers and her professors. Her fellow graduate students either had obvious schoolboy crushes on her, or they ignored her, unsure of what to do with a woman in what they clearly thought of as “male space.” Her male professors tended to treat her with exaggerated formality, always civil and encouraging, but also a bit distant. She noticed that her chief supervisor regularly went out for beers with some of his male graduate students, but never invited her — out of fear, she suspected, that he might misinterpret an invitation as an inappropriate advance. She was never once sexually harassed — but she found the “walking on eggshells” treatment to be almost as frustrating.
We need to acknowledge that graduate school can be a terrifying business. Working on a Ph.D. in any field is frightening; no matter what your topic or your field, there’s always the fear that your research won’t pan out, that you’ll end up in a dead end, or — worst of all — you’ll discover at the last minute that some other grad student at another university just did their doctoral work on exactly the same thing, and finished a month before you did. Add to that the financial strain that graduate education almost invariably imposes, throw in some family responsibilities, and the whole thing can be fairly wretched. I spent years oscillating between intellectual elation and debilitating anxiety, between authentic cameraderie with my fellows and bitter competitiveness. It was a tough time, and I think it is almost certainly worse for women in male-dominated fields.
As for the questions Kendra asks, I can say that in my experience — and, anecdotally, in the experience of most of my fellow graduate students — things do change once you get the Ph.D. I was never especially close to my dissertation supervisor, though we certainly got along quite well. At the moment he signed my completed dissertation, with all my exams and research and writing done, he said to me just one word: “welcome.” Not “congratulations”, or “well done”, but “welcome.” I already had tenure here at Pasadena City College (even though I technically had only an MA), but in his eyes it seemed, getting the Ph.D. was a hurdle I had to get over in order to become his peer. Honestly, “welcome” was the word I most wanted to hear at that moment. It was the recognition not just of a significant accomplishment, but of belonging.
Of course, once you have the Ph.D. you cease to be a student like other students — even if you’re doing a post-doc somewhere rather than actually joining the professoriate. My friends in the sciences who are doing post-doctoral research (but not teaching, and not being paid as full-time academics) often do report feeling a bit “betwixt and between”. On the one hand, they’ve achieved the highest standard the western academy offers, and on the other, they’re not climbing the tenure ladder and they don’t yet have students of their own. Whatever your sex, whatever your age, it can be a rough time.
But in the end, things do get better. And in the sciences, they have started to get dramatically better for women. The percentage of women receiving advanced degrees in the hard sciences, mathematics, and engineering has climbed considerably in recent years. Caltech now is over 40% female, three times what it was just a quarter-century ago. At times, the continued obstacles all around us blind us to the happy reality that we have already come so far. And though women in science and engineering continue to experience the kind of treatment that Kendra writes about, that sense of isolation will decrease as more and more women like her continue to work for the Ph.D. and continue to take post-docs and tenure-track jobs.
I remember very well one thing my old friend from Caltech said to me: “Sometimes, when it gets really bad, I tell myself I’m taking this shit so other women who come after me won’t have to.” It’s hard to be a pioneer, and it’s hard to carry the burden of being a “change agent.” But sticking with it gives others the inspiration to follow in your footsteps. And as more and more women come into the sciences, as math and engineering departments cease to be all-male enclaves, the sense of isolation that “geek women” experience will inevitably diminish. And though that may not be much comfort to Kendra now, in the long run, I hope that it will be.
