File under “I can’t believe we still have to protest this shit.”
About a week ago, a small tempest erupted in the science blogosphere over a remark made by Dr. Dario Maestripieri, a professor at the University of Chicago, on his Facebook page. The comment read, in full:
My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually high concentration of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain? No offense to anyone.. [sic]
Screenshots of the offending status have been spread far and wide, and a few good commentaries on why this statement is problematic and offensive have been written by, among others, Dr. Isis, DrugMonkey, and Janet D. Stemwedel. I encourage you to read these posts, and at least some of the comments, because I don’t intend to explain in detail why this post is so unfortunate here. Suffice it to say, in DrugMonkey’s succinct words,
Don’t do this. It’s sexist, juvenile, offensive and stupid. For a senior scientist it is yet another contribution to the othering of women in science.
There is still sexism in science. I am most pleased and heartened to see established scientists, like the bloggers I linked to above and (allegedly) some of Dr. Maestripieri’s colleagues on Facebook, speak out against it. Behaviour like Dr. Maestripieri’s contributes to an uncomfortable work environment for female scientists, an environment that makes many of us question whether having a job in the field we love is worth putting up with such condescension and objectification.
Don’t believe this? (cf. these guys, and kudos to the commenters who have already thrashed them.) Let me tell you something.
I am a young female scientist.
And Dr. Maestripieri holds an appointment in one of the academic sections to which I’m applying to do my PhD.
His comment, while extremely distateful to me, is nowhere near brazen enough to make me withdraw my application, and isn’t likely to weigh very heavily among all the other factors I’ll have to consider when I decide which school to attend. But if all else turned out to be equal, this comment could damn well tip the balance. Do I want to have to potentially interact with a man who’s made it clear that he judges female scientists based on their looks first?
And you know what else? If I had been considering joining Dr. Maestripieri’s lab, I would be running the fuck away from that application right now. If I were working for him, I’d have to assume that he’s judging me based on my appearance, and that he’s perfectly comfortable talking about my appearance to me or to colleagues. That’s the sort of academic environment that I want to avoid, and one that I shouldn’t have to put up with.
To be clear, I don’t care whether professors, or anyone really, mentally rate people’s attractiveness; I think most of us do this at least some of the time. But when this thought process leads to unprofessional behaviour, be it overt harassment, subtle differences in treatment based on looks, or comments like this that both make their female colleagues uncomfortable and tacitly endorse this sort of behaviour in others, it is not acceptable.
Dr. Maestripieri’s comment is far from enough to drive me away from a science career. But it could well drive me, and other women, away from his lab, his department, and his university. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their loss.
“I can’t imagine that men are generally incredibly attractive in the field of neuroscience either.” is the punchline of the joke that I would like to tell but I can’t seem to find a good way to tell it without a distasteful set up. I imagine a good way would be through the power of The Hold Steady lyric “Big heads with soft bodies make for lousy lovers” but that’s kinda creepy in this context.
I think it’s funny how the phrase “no offence” is treated as some sort of magic spell, that can make the fact that he just called all the women in his field ugly go away. It seems to me that he is a terribly stupid individual and I hope that he is unable to engage any women in coitus (supermodel variety or otherwise) for a long amount of time. No offence.
O.T. “kinda” is marked as spelled correctly in my spell-checker, “neuroscience” is not.
Good grief. Nobody cares about whether he can *engage* in *coitus*. No woman cares what he thinks about her appearance. The point is that his making any remark about women’s appearance in a work context AT ALL simply reinforces the idea that no matter what a woman accomplishes in her life, her real value lies in her appearance and whether it pleases any random dude in the area.
@Cara, sorry if that didn’t come through in my comment. It was a joke. The point was that this man wrongly feels like he has some reason to judge women for their looks, and the reason he does this has to do with sex. He is reducing his female peers to sexual object. I figured I would merely repay him the favour. Pardon me for attempting humour.