It is official, I have been in graduate school too long. It has started to change the way I think about the world!<\/p>\n
Last night, I was at a local Science Pub event. This in and of itself, might trigger the \u201cnerd\u201d label for some people, but as a fairly educated person before starting this PhD, and living in a liberal, college town, lots of types of people attend these events now.\u00a0 Science Pubs are almost trendy these days. Our local one is often standing room only, and takes place in a venue that is used frequently for concerts, fund-raisers and shows of all kinds.\u00a0 Even the name of the venue is cool- Cozmic Pizza- you can have pizza and a beer and listen to smart people talk.\u00a0 Not a bad way to spend an weekday evening.\u00a0 Also, the topic was not even that fringe- \u201cYou Are What You Eat: The Evolutionary Importance of Diet in Mammals\u201d<\/strong>.\u00a0 The talk was given by a local professor, Dr. Samantha Hopkins, who is in the Geology Department at the University of Oregon. While her work is often in paleontology, she is a self-described \u201cmammal geek\u201d and her talk was peppered with lots of funny anecdotes and plenty of cute photos of mammals (none of which my partner would agree to let me get as a pet\u2026 sigh\u2026)<\/p>\n All of this was a pleasant experience. I learned a few things, laughed a few times, and enjoyed a glass of Kombucha. However, it was during the question and answer phase that the wheels in my head started spinning.\u00a0 While gender issues in science are not a particular area of study for me, it does come up in my department on a fairly regular basis, and both my daughters are just starting to explore gender issues through courses in their own college experience, so it is on my radar. Yet, it took me a bit to realize, \u201chmm\u2026 so far, all of the people who have asked questions are guys\u201d and I thought, \u201cI am going to pay attention to this and see if it continues.\u201d\u00a0 It is probably no big surprise to anyone that it did continue.\u00a0 Out of around 12 questions (I didn\u2019t start counting until I had my observation, so I had to make a best guess about the total number), only 2 were asked by women, much later in the Q & A session. To make matters even sadder, one of the women qualified her question by stating \u201cthis is probably a dumb question\u201d as she asked it.\u00a0 So, I did a scan of the room, and while I did not do a full head count, it seemed that pretty close to 50% of the audience was female.\u00a0 Furthermore, this was a completely free-choice experience, in a social setting, with alcohol available to loosen social inhibitions, and the topic was even more focused on biology- an area females typically express a slightly higher interest in than males.<\/p>\n While I may have previously made an observation like this, and possibly gone on a slight feminist rant about it, what was truly surprising to me was my next thought.\u00a0 Where my mind went next was \u201cit would be pretty easy to design a research project to explore this more in depth.\u201d We could have people do gender counts when people walk in the door and then keep track of how many questions were asked by each (notice I am also consciously using gender as opposed to sex, as we could only make a best guess by appearances, without doing a more involved study- grad school is teaching me so much about so many things!).\u00a0 We could compare this data across different locations, different topics of Science Pubs, we could try to look at different age groups- there are all kinds of interesting questions to explore! And the fact that I now think of more explicit ways to explore them, instead of just a curious observation, was a sign to me that I just might have been in grad school too long.<\/p>\n PS- and the next sign was that my first thought about it this morning was, \u201cand I could write a Blog post about it\u201d!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is official, I have been in graduate school too long. It has started to change the way I think about the world! Last night, I was at a local Science Pub event. This in and of itself, might trigger the \u201cnerd\u201d label for some people, but as a fairly educated person before starting this… Continue reading