FeminismIsFree!

Continued from Part One.

My last major business trip was to Sweden. See, if I just left it at that, it would sound like, really c-o-o-l but in fact, what it was was really freaking C-O-L-D (February!) and yo, it was also really freaking b-u-s-i-n-e-s-s. The trip consisted of twelve-hour days in a mostly unheated test lab putting the brand-new centrifuges we bought for the large-scale plant we’re building through their paces. The highlight of the trip was the weekend between the two work-weeks I spent there, when in an attempt to hop on the Swedish public transit system for some sightseeing Saturday morning I managed instead to accidentally attend a big-ass anti-US rally in the Stockholm central train station. “Surreal” is probably the best one-word description I can use to capture that event (though I couldn’t stop myself from forking out a mere 10 kronor for an awesome souvenir button!):

Admit you want one.

But I am thinking back to one particular day, when I was troubleshooting the steam sterilization cycle for the first centrifuge. I had hopped up onto the piping and platform frame around the centrifuge but found I couldn’t quite get close enough to inspect the centrifuge bowl seal lines, nor the bowl itself, with both feet planted firmly on the frame. So I climbed up a little higher and found that combined with wedging one foot between the support legs on the system waste collection tank, I had a reasonable vantage point for everything I needed to observe. I gave the thumbs-up to the technician that the manufacturer had loaned us for the testing and he switched the steam on to the centrifuge and then hit the GO button to start the sterilization sequence.

Pneumatic valves popped open and steam at 30 pounds per square inch pressure and about 250 degrees Fahrenheit roared through the piping about one inch from my face, knocking violently for the first few seconds, then settling down into a low hiss. The entire frame shuddered as the piping metal temperature shot up forty degrees in less than twenty seconds. The waste tank got uncomfortably hot against the top of my boot and the heat baking off the piping started making my eyes water. Then the bowl seal lines kicked on and the bowl itself began to rotate. Slowly at first, over the next ten minutes as overall system temperature surpassed 200 degrees the bowl rotation approached its maximum speed, generating well over 10,000 times the force of gravity against the bowl sides. The previous low whine of the bowl motor, laboring to spin up a nearly half-ton piece of stainless steel from a standstill to over 5000 revolutions per minute, became a 100-plus decibel roar. Put my head about two feet from this thing, also overpressurized to more than twice atmospheric normal with superheated steam, and picture what would have happened to me if one of the structural bolts holding the bowl to the frame had failed or one of the bowl seals had blown.*

The only realistic explanations for this scenario are:

1. I am too dumb to understand that I am risking hideous disfigurement and death by standing there.
2. I know that I am risking hideous disfigurement and death but I am standing there because I am a hero and this thing is going to save the world as soon as I, the only person who can possibly do it, fixes the sterilization cycle issue.
3. It’s so goddamn cold in the test lab that I no longer care what I’m risking as long as I can at least temporarily stand next to something really warm.

While it is possible that no. 3 did come into play a little tiny bit, really the answer is, “None of the above.” Actually I’m doing something that probably at least one other person on the team and no doubt thousands more worldwide could do just as well and the chain of events by which this particular centrifuge may be one of thousands of components in a particular biochemical process that produces a compound that may save some lives someday is a long one.

So what was I doing there?

Our Controversial! New! Research! has concluded that most women don’t want to be where I was or if they start off thinking they do, they quit wanting to be there after a while and decide to find a more womanly people-oriented, less tool-oriented job. The article does rather coyly mention a few outside factors that might possibly be influencing those decisions–family care pressures, rampant sexism, you know, that trivial crap–but it swears! that in at least ONE of the Controversial New Studies, all those factors were controlled for and still, those ladies just decided to either not enter the fields of engineering and hard science or to bail once they’d spent some time in it.

In part one we explored how women are trained from babyhood to avoid machinery and all things loud, complex and mechanical and by association and as sexuality becomes and issue, to avoid large groups of males altogether; and to avoid anything that might seriously dent their physical attractiveness, from regular dirt to permanent scarring. This accounts for the majority of mathematically-and-scientifically gifted women who either don’t even attempt fields that violate this deep-set internal conditioning or who, between these internal pressures and all the additional external ones inflicted upon females in these professions, end up fleeing for more comforting shores.

But there are still a few who grimly hang on. Why do they do that? How can they do that, if the conditioning is so pervasive..? Why aren’t they conditioned, too?

Oh, they are quite conditioned, too. I should say, we are. I know personally every nuance of that early conditioning–I don’t remember its onset, of course, but every time I find myself in an applicable situation, it rears its ugly screaming head. For those who have never had to experience this phenomenon, it is quite akin to the sensation that someone who is shy experiences when finding themselves required to speak in public. As those who are shy know well, the terror inside never does go away, not even after years of public speaking; it’s always something you force yourself to do, and also, force yourself to do without showing the faintest hint on your face or in your voice of the cringing misery, quivering nerves and sometimes borderline panic attack welling up inside. Yes, it’s very much like that. But many shy people go on to become lifelong brilliant orators of one kind or another, and many women go on to become lifelong brilliant engineers and physicists. But shy people generally don’t also have other people who actively try to keep shy people as a group out of the orator fields, nor are they disproportionately expected to handle all child and home care in their families, nor are they told that they are probably just genetically not suited to be orators because of their shyness and they’re going against nature and there is probably something weird about them for really even trying when there are so many other professions more suited to shy people. So women have the double whammy.

So WHY don’t ALL of them eventually leave the fields..? Hounded outside and inside as they are, quite relentlessly, 24/7?

Unfortunately, I can only speak anecdotally here. There are very few women who do not bail. On my nearly 300-person job site, until last year I was the only female employee who both had an engineering degree and the word engineer in her job title (we have now increased to “2″). I am the only woman on the site who both has the word engineer in her job title and who actually does engineering work. (There are three other women with the word engineer in their job title–they are a “validation” engineer, which involves writing sampling protocols and then taking samples with swabs and rinse cups; a “commissioning” engineer, which involves writing guidelines for commissioning and using Microsoft Project a lot, and a “quality” engineer, which involves reviewing and approving multiple flavors of protocols and writing white papers for government auditors to read.) So, there just aren’t very many of us around–very few data points from which to extrapolate. So mostly I can only talk about what has kept me personally from caving into the pressure, which I admit I have frequently longed to do and a few times, almost given in and done. Maybe someday, somebody will actually do a study on us and present us with something really interesting, and novel, in terms of gender-based research in the hard sciences and engineering.

1. Stubbornness.

Generally speaking, I’d rather die than fail at anything I believe is worth doing well. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m even being very melodramatic here. I’m not sure that somebody else couldn’t substitute reasoned judgement for sheer muleheaded determination that I was going to DO what I SAID I was GONNA DO, but without that awful stubbornness, I, me personally, would never have made it as far as I have in my life, career-wise.

2. Intellectual arrogance, both general and mathematical.

I doubt my nose could point higher into the air. It isn’t that I haven’t met people smarter than me; I absolutely have, and I know there are tens of thousands more that I haven’t even met whose brains might even be significantly more high-powered than mine. However, I haven’t met TOO many! and the vast majority of people I have met doing my kind of work sure don’t fall into that category. Even more pertinently, I have yet to meet anyone who had a negative opinion of me, a woman, being an engineer whose brain was not a Cheerio compared to mine. I’m completely and unassailably arrogant about my brainpower. Whatever insecurities and terrors haunt me, that ain’t one of ‘em.

3. Rebelliousness.

I’m familiar with the stereotype of any woman who is actually respectable as an engineer, and by “respectable” I mean, “considered worthy of respect by others.” She’s dowdy and harsh and joyless and pendantic…kinda like a feminist that talks about heat transfer and horsepower instead of Teh Patriarchy, kwim? As my Airborne Ranger drill sergeant said to me once during Basic Training with an air of genuine bewilderment, “What are you doing here, ? You don’t have to do this. Any man would love to take care of you.” Oh-ho-ho-HO! Like wavin’ a red flag in front of a BULL! (or, I suppose, a cow. Sigh.) Instantly motivates me every time some version of that is inflicted upon my shell-like ears to yearn to immediately fling on something plunging and skin-tight, slap a “Happy Bunny” temporary tattoo on my bicep, and grab a socket set and dismember the nearest piece of large machinery or possibly whip out a spreadsheet and do some second-order differential data analysis.

4. Internalized sexism

This one I’m not proud of. However, I promised myself I’d be honest, as with admitting that every time I approach a large, shiny, loud piece of machinery with moving parts, deep down inside I’m terrified of breaking it, looking like a stupid gurl, getting hurt!! or damaging my pretty face or flesh. I want the prestige and the influence and the money that comes with doing man stuff. I acknowledge that man stuff is where the real prestige, influence and money is, regardless of what soppy crap our culture (and others) tries to throw out there about the joys of helping others and how our female caretakers are the real foundation of our society. I want to prove I am as good as any man, since in our society everything associated with them is the pinnacle of human achievement, and I want their stuff–not by proxy by marrying or fucking one, but directly, as MINE, to be dispensed however and to whomever I want. I should not be embracing it in this fashion; I should rebel against that by refusing to let such stupid, irrational values influence what I do with my life. However, that isn’t the case. It is a fair part of what’s kept me in the game.

Or maybe I just have an “inorganic” gene.

What a wonderful world it would be if we really could find that out.

*Lest you think I exaggerate, there is a well-known (in Big Pharma circles) and unfortunately true decapitation story that a certain centrifuge manufacturer likes to share with customers during safety training sessions.

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