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TWO LEVEL SYSTEM*
As a rule, my mom is the person that is most likely to hit ‘reply’ on these letters. Due to the time difference, her replies are often one of the first things I see when I check my phone in the morning, half awake and heavily contemplating just staying in bed. The replies are formatted oddly on the small screen and I often mark them ‘unread’ and re-read them over lunch. Recently, when I wrote about femininity and leadership, she wrote back a few sentences in Croatian and then, deliberately emphasized by being preceded by a blank line:
“Don't learn how to speak man. Be what you are - a woman”.
I have no idea what that means.
This past week I learned that a faculty member in my department has been awarded a rather generous grant to support more mentoring and professional development programs for women in physics. The associate head for graduate students, a wonderful person who effectively serves as a dad to every single one of us embittered not-quite-kids, invited me to a meeting where the best way to use this funding was discussed in detail. Working on this grant, he decided, would be a part of my summer teaching assignment. I was grateful – advocating for women in physics and science (and wherever else someone will listen) has become more and more important to me with every year I have spent growing into an academic scientist. It is then fairly ironic to realize that I can’t quite parse what exactly it means to be a woman.
I thought that maybe I should come up with a list of objective sounding traits: women can become pregnant and give birth, women have two X chromosomes, female hormones are progesterone and estrogen while we associate testosterone with men, women have wider hips and breasts. The first and the last item have obvious exceptions – women that are unable to have children or have had to undergo hysterectomies or mastectomies do not stop being considered female. And women come in all shapes and sizes, some with narrower hips and flatter chests, some looking like Paleolithic figurines of fertility deities. There is a fair amount of scientific ‘hot-takes’ on the other two, talk of chickens, some cells in our bodies having different chromosomes than others, and macabre scenarios in which a forensic pathologist might not be able to tell what the gender assigned at birth for a person was, or in another version, what their gender identity was, depending on what sorts of tests they run. While the science of chromosomes and hormones is fascinating, and the way in which it has been shaped by societal expectations of what gender means is almost scary, the part of this discussion that has always struck me the most is that it is something that one cannot feel or see but rather has to learn. More bluntly, had I not at some point been told that I have two X chromosomes because I am female, and that I am female because I have two X chromosomes, I could have probably constructed the same female identity for myself without ever knowing.**
Often when I talk about the lack of female representation in the physics community, my male colleagues will acknowledge that this may have something to do with the truth, but still promptly question whether I have personally encountered discrimination or sexism. This is a myopic question but one that is often worth answering as there can be value in making the issue more relatable by temporarily attaching your own face to it. It is also a question that is hard to answer – all of a sudden all uncomfortably gendered interactions start to seem suspicious and your own judgement questionable. Of course, this too is a symptom of being a part of an underrepresented group. Unfortunately, many women encounter people and actions overt enough to pass this test of self-doubt and seem appropriate to share even when they are not quite sure of how benevolent their interlocutor(s) might be.
Once a male peer told me you could judge how hard an upper level math course was by counting the girls enrolled in it. Once I was the only woman in a study group composed of older men (them graduate students and me an undergraduate) and they would barely make eye contact with me but liked my ideas once a male peer repeated them. Once a faculty member told me I was ‘clearly not a typical physics student’. Once I was the first author on a journal article, but three different male scientists wrote to the second author, a man, to comment on the research. Once an undergraduate student told me she knows she would do much better in a difficult course if she dressed up for it because the older, male instructor liked that. You pick an example that seems like it might go over the best, then hope the conversation won’t devolve into dissecting it too much and disputing your sharply felt discomfort for the sake of some pretend objectivity and both-side-ism.
Having to be strategic in these interactions is frustrating. It is frustrating to have to stop listing experiences that stick to your skin and follow you around. Once I learned that I have to cross my legs at the knees instead of at the ankles. Once I learned that I need to shave my legs. Once I learned that I should laugh, or maybe take it as a compliment, when people joke that my father might have to ‘protect’ me from boys when I grow up. Once I learned that criticizing women’s appearance will always be an appropriate dinner table discussion. Once I learned that other women are bitchy and catty and hanging out with them is all about drama. Once I learned that TV censors dislike ‘fuck’ but have no issues with ‘bitch’. The list goes on, and it is a list of rules, many of which I have had to learn way before I learned about Xs and Ys and hormones.
Being a woman is, in a sense, a life-long process of learning. First, you learn all of the rules. Rules about how to present yourself, how to act and how to re-act. Then you learn that there is a way to codify these rules by something resembling science; it is in your nature to be nurturing and kind because you have a uterus for instance, or it is not in your nature to be non-monogamous because when we lived in caves it was not women that were trying to spread seed wherever there was fertile ground. Hopefully, you get older and learn to question all of this and, very gradually, to doubt yourself less and like yourself more. I am always somewhat heartbroken to realize how many of us have similar stories of realizing we had been judgmental of other women because of ideas we had learned about essentially ourselves. It is remarkable that we internalize so much negativity and so many constraints aimed at people just like us that protecting, defending and upholding other women is almost counterintuitive and has to be learned. Scientists always chase the elusive ‘a-ha’ moment related to their complex, convoluted and often esoteric research yet many women my age seem to be extremely familiar with that sensation when it comes to learning and un-learning facts about themselves. In the recent years more than one friend had talked to me about having revelations about having sex with men – apparently it takes years for most of us to learn that there is no reason for guilt, shame or having sex with men that make it feel like the act is a power struggle you simply cannot win. Most of these issues stem from what we are told, or shown, being a woman should mean, or does mean, rather than anything innate, anything that I could quickly recall upon reading that oddly formatted reply on my phone with sleepy eyes.
Maybe centuries ago, the distinction between people who can give birth and people who cannot made sense. Maybe it even made sense to turn those categories into classes, to imbue them with a power structure that will eventually start to haunt us. At the present moment, however, this seems cruel, unusual and arbitrary. Sometimes I fear that the only way to truly address issues that women face for being women is to go back in time and erase the words, abolish all these things we had had to learn completely. However, solutions that require time machines are typically not good ones.
What my mother likely meant to say is that women should not try to learn yet another way to be something that is imposed upon them in order to succeed, but rather embrace behaviors they feel are natural and let others, well, just deal with it. In a way, maybe that is the best that we can do for now: cut down the number of things we have to learn, make the process shorter, more intuitive, more learner-centered and self-regulated. Maybe younger women and girls will not have to learn what it means to be female but rather design it for themselves, take charge of defining what being a woman means rather than being confronted by it. Maybe their mom’s will get to reply to more cheerful letters.
Best,
Karmela
* While in classical physics a system can typically attain any of a large number of energy values that comprise some continuous spectrum, in quantum mechanics only some energies are allowed. These energies are indexed by some set of quantum numbers and in the simplest case only one such number exists, and it can only take on two different values. Such a system has two energy levels and therefor only two possible states (each distinct energy corresponds to an energy state or a wavefunction). Two-level systems of this sort are ubiquitous in modern physics, be they engineered or just extreme limits of more complex systems. The two energy states can form superposition states i.e. states where the systems have finite probability of being in one state and finite probability of being in the other and only a measurement can resolve their ‘true’ state. This is often interpreted and utilized as the system being in both states at once which has powerful implications for areas of research such as quantum computing.
**Hormones are somewhat different because fertility issues and birth control make them harder to avoid but that may be a thing worth contemplating in itself.
***
ABOUT THIS WEEK
LEARNING: This past week I pushed around some transfer matrices. I obsessed over Gaussian laser beams and gravity for another day. I said a lot of things like ‘there should be a way to glean this just from symmetry’ and ‘can’t we say something qualitative by just counting the degrees of freedom’. One of my office-mates left for India and the other does not work on any of my projects so I was mostly saying this to myself. I saw a talk about mechanical systems that exhibit topological properties. The visiting professor giving the talk, incidentally another researcher from my alma mater, hadn’t thought about the kind of systems I have been studying but seemed excited when I brought it up. He told me about synthetic gauge fields in mechanical systems. Then, we briefly talked about vortices in ultracold atomic shells before his schedule strictly demanded he meet someone else over lunch. Two of my papers remain in referee purgatory.
On Saturday, the final event for my advisor’s art and physics course took place as a part of an art festival at a local center for independent media. It was sandwiched between a zine making workshop and a theater event exploring the way stories of different people get told differently in the papers, on TV and on the web. The event started at 10:30 am with the corner stage adjacent to a gallery still bearing signs of the previous night’s exhibit opening brightly lit by the morning sun. I woke up at 6:30 am to bake a vegan ratatouille for lunch we had planned as a follow-up to both the performances and the course and to put on enough make up on for no one to ask how much I have or have not slept. The ratatouille went over well, the performances were incredible, and I was not the only person willing to wake up early on a Saturday morning. I am really grateful to everyone who came to watch and really impressed by everyone who participated. This was a tough course to teach and it took up a lot of my time but as far as finals go, after Saturday’s showing it would be absolutely unreasonable for me to complain about where the end of the semester took us.
LISTENING: In addition to having been thinking about my mother’s message for the past week or so, this episode of NPR's Invisibilia reminded me of how strange it really is that women have to realize that they shouldn’t hate and shame other women as if this was something extraordinary. This is an interesting episode, possibly not terribly ‘fresh’ to younger people that have spent time on Tumblr and similar parts of the Internet where call-out culture has been employed and debated ad nauseam, but it still presents a very complex issue in a rather emotional and relatable way, including a narrative twist I thought was very effective. Invisibilia has in the past also ran two stories (here and here) about people rejecting the gender binary but I have found both to be somewhat dark and othering and feel conflicted about fully recommending them. Oddly, one of the reporters has recently been featured on this episode of Slate’s Double X Gabfest where she seemed quite in favor of a story about parents raising their children essentially without mentioning their gender until the children themselves indicate a preference. On a more science related note, this episode of Inquiring Minds features an interview with an author of a book about scientific studies of gender and it touches on many of the points I have been thinking of as well.
Unrelated to the rest of this letter, I heard two stories this past week that really stuck with me. One is a heartbreaking episode of This American Life exploring how different education can be for poor minority students and just how hard it is to counter the disadvantages they are born into. It really underscores just how much more complicated achieving equity is than throwing money at underrepresented and poor students and how often the true privilege is in not having reason to doubt your own position within something as basic-seeming as a nice school with a library. The other is Gimlet’s show on the HI-SEAS Mars simulation experiment called The Habitat. Over seven episodes the show follows a crew of potential astronauts living in an isolated, tiny habitat on a volcano in Hawaii, acting as if they were on Mars, space suits when they go outside, powdered food and all. The way the audio from the study participants has been cut with the podcast host’s narration and a collection of facts about NASA’s past missions is truly masterful, the stories about the crew are often very touching and even the somewhat cliché choice of ending each episode with a cover of Space Oddity really works. If you have a couple hours in your week of walking or driving or just doing dishes I would definitely recommend letting this show play while you do so.
On the music front, this Chelsea Wolfe record is pretty great even if you, unlike me, don’t have a penchant for female fronted doom and heaviness. I also really enjoyed this Evoken and Beneath the Frozen Soil split, although I am starting to think that now that spring is finally here and even small-town-Illinois is in full bloom I might have to consider temporarily ditching all of the funeral doom and other varieties of doom metal that the previously bleak weather had made me partial to in favor of something slightly more energetic.
READING: Over the weekend I made my way through roughly three chapters of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation sequel Authority. You might remember that I started reading this book in January, so it is equal parts embarrassing that I have not found time to finish it yet and impressive that it is still holding my attention.
EATING: I had two baking victories this past week. First and foremost, I finally allowed myself to get some sourdough starter from a colleague and made my first loaf of naturally leavened bread. I have been really hesitant to take up a baking project like this since it meant investing in a Dutch oven, a kitchen scale and a proofing basket on top of having to be very precise and timely with the dough (making a loaf of sourdough is a process that really has to start on a Friday night if you want fresh slices of crusty goodness on a Sunday afternoon) but then this colleague offered to give me starter and I blurted out ‘yes’ without thinking and things spiraled from there. I made a few mistakes while making the loaf pictured below, but it is still by far the best bread I have ever made. I am munching on it as I am writing this, still sort of in disbelief that I successfully made it in my small, disorganized kitchen.
When we planned the final event for my advisor’s course and the idea of having a potluck after the performances came up, a student asked me to bring a dish I had previously made for a women in physics gathering. It is really flattering to have someone remember my cooking enough to want to have it again so even though I did not quite remember the recipe I had used at that particular instance I threw together the baked vegan ratatouille I am sharing below and ended up being really pleased with how it turned out. I am counting this as my second baking victory for the week. The process here is actually quite easy and straightforward and there are bound to be leftovers that are as good cold as they are when warm. They can be used as a perfect topping for pasta, polenta or a fresh slice of sourdough bread. Since I had to bring it to a 9:30 am event I assembled it the night before and just threw it in the oven in the morning which adds convenience points to what is already a very satisfying yet light vegan dish.
For about 6 servings you will need:
1 can’s worth of crushed tomatoes (about 15 oz or 2 cups)
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1/2 teaspoon apple cider vinegar (or white wine vinegar)
1 teaspoon garlic powder (or less, to taste)
1 tablespoon dry basil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1 tablespoon nutritional yeast (optional or use Parmesan for a non-vegan version)
1 yellow summer squash, sliced in rounds
1 zucchini, sliced in rounds
1 large or 2 small Italian eggplants, sliced in half-disks
3 Roma tomatoes, sliced in rounds
1 sweet yellow onion, sliced into thin rounds
Prep the eggplant: line a large baking sheet with paper or kitchen towel and lay sliced eggplant on top of it. Generously sprinkle the eggplant with salt and let sit for about 20 minutes or until you can see water droplets gather on it. Dry the eggplant slices and set aside
Preheat the oven to 350 F
In a bowl mix crushed tomatoes, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, apple cider vinegar and all of the spices
Pour the tomato mixture into a large casserole dish (I believe mine is 9”x12”) or rectangular pan of similar depth, reserving about half a cup and spreading the rest across its bottom
Layer the vegetable slices vertically on top of the tomato mixture, alternating vegetables and pushing them all together into a tight-fitting pattern (the picture really does the best job as a description here). Once you run out of vegetables fill any gaps with the reserved tomato mixture and brush the tops with the remaining tablespoon of olive oil
If you are not ready to bake the ratatouille just yet, at this point you can refrigerate it as is, for up to 12 hours
Bake for about an hour until the tomato sauce starts to bubble, and the vegetables are very tender when poked with a fork. When you are satisfied with the texture, turn the oven to high broil and broil the ratatouille for 3 to 5 minutes, being vigilant about the vegetables burning
Tips: use whichever vegetables you have at home that will at least somewhat keep shape. Omit the onions if you dislike them (although they are very sweet and jammy in this dish). Use fresh garlic (about one clove) and basil (a few minced leaves) but blend the tomato mixture in this case. Add shredded (vegan) cheese prior to broiling or top with more nutritional yeast (or Parmesan). Serve with crusty bread, whole wheat penne or polenta, a side salad (I would keep it quite simple and likely just opt for some romaine and a balsamic vinaigrette) and your choice of protein (butter beans braised in olive oil would be a nice choice while a less fussy option would be to use the ratatouille as a topping for some toast and hummus, similarly you could serve it over pasta and top with some crispy baked chickpeas).