Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016

I’m not going to tell you how to be a woman science blogger

Kate Clancy

Recent studies have highlighted the gender disparity that still exists in scientific fields, and women as science bloggers can face similar pressures. Kate Clancy, author of the blog Context and Variation, gives valuable suggestions for how to combat sexism while advancing your own work.

If you are reading this chapter, it is likely that either you identify as a woman, or you know someone who does. Good for you! We’re pretty cool folk. There is also a good chance that you are thinking ahead to the kind of casual sexism, alienation, discrimination, or labeling that may happen to you as a result of the gender with which you or someone you care about identifies. Less good for you! But I understand why you are worried: we have all either experienced directly, or heard stories about, the unpleasantness that sometimes goes with being a woman on the Internet.

Is it harder to be taken seriously if you are a woman? Sure. In a cognitive study at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, researchers found that both male and female research participants processed images of men globally, meaning that men could be perceived as a whole entity. Images of women, by contrast, were processed locally, meaning they were objectified as body parts.¹ There are too many scientific papers to count on differences in the perceived value of male and female writing—though there are several recent papers worth mentioning on differences in citation counts, and the positioning of male and female authors in academic papers.² Colleagues in anthropology have found that women have been underrepresented as speakers in a major primatology conference, and invited as symposia speakers far less often when men are the symposia organizers.³ You can even take the same piece of writing—a résumé for a lab technician—slap a male or female name on it, and find that both male and female professors prefer to hire the man.⁴

Between these data and seemingly incessant cultural conditioning, women are taught their whole lives that they are vulnerable. This means that many of them feel the need to enter warily into every new situation. They can’t enjoy a night stroll because they have to watch for men in the bushes; they can’t have a drink at the bar without making sure no one puts anything in it. In a similar vein, women in science often feel like they need to overperform to prove that they deserve to be where they are. Unfortunately, even when women try to overperform, awareness of gender stereotypes often leads them to feel that their underperformance is inevitable.⁵ So in addition to being seen by some as less competent due only to our gender, our many years of this conditioning have made us feel less competent than our peers, which may in turn cause us to speak less competently.⁶

Stereotype threat is when your awareness of a negative stereotype triggers a subpar performance in an activity supposedly influenced by that stereotype.⁷ This awareness can be triggered from the smallest of acts: a woman can be asked to check “male” or “female” in a demographics box before starting a math test, or a proctor can remind a group of students that men tend to outperform women in the task they are about to complete. Stereotype threat has been shown to affect girls’ and women’s performance in STEM, even among those with positive attitudes toward these fields.⁸ Stereotype threat messes with your ability to hold multiple pieces of information in your head at one time, makes you stressed out, and can cause you to be vigilant.⁹ Add to that the vigilance from stories about women who write online being stalked or threatened, and you have a fair bit of your brain occupied with being afraid.¹⁰

Here’s another thing to keep in mind: women and men have been conditioned to understand praise differently. Preschool boys and girls have been found to be motivated by several types of praise. But by the time boys and girls get to fourth and fifth grade, boys are unaffected by the type of praise they receive. Girls, by contrast, are motivated by praise of the process of their effort, and of its end result, but they have been shown to be demotivated by praise about themselves as people.¹¹ Perhaps these results are consistent with how uncomfortable you get when someone praises you: it competes with the message, long transmitted to girls, that you are supposed to be humble.

It also competes with the message you may have learned that anything good that happens to you comes from luck or the support of others, whereas your failures are your own. In other words, women and men have learned to attribute successes and failures differently as well. Generally speaking, girls are more likely to develop attributional styles that lead to their crediting others for their successes and themselves for their failures. Boys, the lucky bastards, tend to do the opposite.

We need to stop. Stereotype threat and vigilance use up our creative energy. Not owning our successes keeps us uncertain of our worth. Together, these issues lead to impostor syndrome, procrastination, writer’s block, and holding back from our best ideas. I know this because it has happened to me quite a bit over the years. I’ve had long bouts of writer’s block worrying about which group of men would decide to attack my comments section that particular week, lingered for days on a single drive-by rape tweet from a stranger, and been slowed by internalized sexist bullying from women. That paralysis is normal and understandable. But it doesn’t put content on the Internet.

We all deserve better lives than ones ruled by fear. And the world deserves our brightest, best selves.

Let’s recalibrate by remembering all the reasons you considered becoming a science blogger in the first place. Here’s the most obvious: like all humans, you are smart. I would also guess that you find science interesting, so interesting that you want to share it with others. You suspect—if you’re being honest with yourself, you know—that you could be really good at it. And the idea that someone else could read and enjoy your writing, maybe several someones, gives you a thrill.

Now write down all of the ways that you are amazing on a sticky note—I know you won’t be able to fit them all because you have only one of those little square ones, so just hit the high notes. Then put that sticky note in this book, on top of the first couple paragraphs of this chapter. (If you are reading this on an e-reader, put the sticky note on your desk or your laptop, or make a virtual sticky note for your desktop. Maybe get a tattoo on the inside of your forearm.) The next time the tendrils of stereotype threat curl around your ankles, read that note, and they should withdraw. Give them a good stomp, and maybe also the finger, and they’ll think twice about messing with you again.

So here’s the thing. Now that you are being made aware of the possibility of those feelings manifesting, and the uselessness of always being vigilant for danger, I am going to tell you a little about some of the particulars of being a woman science blogger. As much as possible, it’s important to try and absorb this information neutrally. It’s just information, things you should know, but they don’t need to rule you. If any of this starts to worry you or make you feel bad, look at your sticky note.

Breaking in to science blogging is easy—you just need to figure out fairly idiot-proof, free blogging apps. In the beginning, you’ll find that no one particularly cares about you. The chances of any of your early work going viral or being widely shared are small. This means that many people who are underrepresented in science blogging can develop their voices with minimal trolling. But when you are ready, getting exposure might take some time. It might take more time, in fact, to have people retweet you, share your material, follow you on Facebook, or read you regularly, if you identify as female. It may be harder to get gigs, or you may be expected to cover a particular beat. Once you figure out one successful hook in your writing, it may be harder for people to see you as being able to develop many different hooks. Over the course of history, as well as in widely read stories ranging from folktales to modern fiction, white, straight men have been able to be all things. Every step a person takes away from the identity that culturally we see as fundamental narrows how we societally conceive of that individual.

You may deal with more trolls, and more challenges to your authority, if you are female and/or have other intersectional identities. Perhaps you know a topic really well; maybe you even have a Ph.D. in it. You are still more likely to get called on your material, more likely to get questioned, frequently by those with less expertise than you. You may get harassed, stalked, or threatened. Some of these troubling comments may be by people you know, some by people just looking for someone to terrorize for a few seconds. If you express your gender in a way that is very normative, or non-normative, or if you have any other intersecting identities underrepresented in science, these things could happen to you more often.

Here is where I have to tread a very fine line, because this is where you expect me to tell you how to handle these things. For me to even attempt to do so in a general way presumes a certain universality of experience, and a certain amount of privilege. Advising you on how to deal with a reader who questions whether you got your math right would mean that I think that you just need better tools to deal with jerks. It would presume, too, that all of the men and women who make you feel bad are intentional in their behavior. But no number of tools—no amount of agency—is going to get at the dominant cultural paradigm that is uncomfortable with women who do science and math. So there are many ways a person can handle someone problematic—you can delete and ignore, you can mock, you can shame, you can answer seriously. The success you have at these different styles is highly dependent on your intersecting identities. If you are a woman of color, or young, or queer, or working class, or not able-bodied, you will have different experiences as you push against oppression.

Therefore, I want to think about the other side of agency, and that is institution. Institution is defined as both the broad cultural practices that set up the many assumptions we make about how the world is supposed to work, and the people who benefit from the setup being the way it is. Agency, by contrast, is the amount of power we ourselves have to enact change. So what are the policies governing appropriate conduct on Blogspot, WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook? How about the ones that are put forth by the American Association for Advancement in Science or the National Association for Science Writers? What responsibilities do participants in these groups have, and how can you gather and organize like-minded people to make these policies better in terms of addressing unspoken social norms and cultural conditioning? All of this is important, meaningful work because it is all of our responsibility to make our lives better and, I’d like to think, our responsibility to leave this planet a little better than when we got here.

So what will happen to you if you openly identify as female on the Internet? Although some frustrating things may occur, here are just some of the positively awesome things I’m pretty confident will happen if you identify as female. You will very likely develop a posse. We women science bloggers stick together, so find us online. We will support you, and viciously attack your trolls, and empathize with your struggles, in our common desire to say delightful things about science. You will learn to express yourself about topics that you find interesting. You will hone your craft. You will try a few different things on your blog, and some will become regular features. You will win the admiration of others. Someone, probably several someones, will enjoy what you have written.

You will find role models. You’ll meet your role models, and that will be a little bit of a letdown but mostly really cool. You will be a role model. Someone will read a science book because of you. Someone will major in science because of you. Someone will teach science to their children because of you. Someone will feel a little less alone because of you. Someone will find a new love because of you. The possibilities for what you can do as a science blogger who identifies as female transcend that identity. So read the rest of this book for the how, re-read that sticky note for why you’re the one to do it, and write something.

Kate Clancy is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has conducted high-profile research that highlights some of the issues that women face in academic research environments. She has previously written for the Scientific American Blog Network and now blogs for her own site.

Kate is based in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Find her on her site at http://kateclancy.com, or follow her on Twitter, @KateClancy.

Notes

1. Sarah J. Gervais et al., “Seeing Women as Objects: The Sexual Body Part Recognition Bias,” European Journal of Social Psychology 42, no. 6 (2012): 743—753.

2. Jevin D. West et al., “The Role of Gender in Scholarly Authorship,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 7 (2013): e66212; Daniel Maliniak, Ryan M. Powers, and Barbara R. Walter, “The Gender Citation Gap in International Relations,” International Organization 67, no. 4 (2013): 889—922; Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Samantha Lange, and Holly Brus, “Gendered Citation Patterns in International Relations Journals,” International Studies Perspectives 14, no. 4 (2013): 485—492.

3. Lynne A. Isbell, Truman P. Young, and Alexander H. Harcourt, “Stag Parties Linger: Continued Gender Bias in a Female-Rich Scientific Discipline,” PLoS ONE 7, no. 11 (2012): e49682.

4. Corinee A. Moss-Racusin et al., “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 41 (2012): 16474—16479.

5. Steven J. Spencer, Claude M. Steele, and Diane M. Quinn, “Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35 (1999): 4—28.

6. Shannon E. Holleran et al., “Talking Shop and Shooting the Breeze: A Study of Workplace Conversation and Job Disengagement among STEM Faculty,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 2, no. 1 (2011): 65—71.

7. Spencer, Steele, and Quinn, “Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance,” 4—28.

8. Jenessa R. Shapiro and Amy M. Williams, “The Role of Stereotype Threats in Undermining Girls’ and Women’s Performance and Interest in STEM Fields,” Sex Roles 66, no. 3 (2012): 175—183.

9. Claude M. Steele, “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance,” American Psychologist 5, no. 6 (1997): 613—629; B. Seibt and J. Förster, “Stereotype Threat and Performance: How Self-Stereotypes Influence Processing by Inducing Regulatory Foci,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, no. 1 (2004): 38—56.

10. Toni Schmader, Michael Johns, and Chad Forbes, “An Integrated Process Model of Stereotype Threat Effects on Performance,” Psychology Review 115, no. 2 (2008): 336—356.

11. Jennifer Henderlong Corpus and Mark R. Lepper, “The Effects of Person versus Performance Praise on Children’s Motivation: Gender and Age as Moderating Factors,” Educational Psychology 27, no. 4 (2007): 487—450.