A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman Read online

  All of us women were told at one point or another that we were at MIT on sufferance, that we were not really good enough. I was told that first by my high school math teacher when I was applying, and I was told it both explicitly and by implication many times along the way. But feeling desired for my physical body, feeling in demand for a date, that was easy and everyday. When we were freshmen, a male friend confided in me that they had joked behind my back about the “Lindy Lottery,” that is, the competition among the undergrad men to go out with me. Please understand, this had nothing to do with my being attractive, brilliant, or vivacious; it had to do with how few women there were and how many men. What was my value? Was it as a girlfriend, or as a scientist? Around this time, a female graduate student visited the home of one of our faculty, whose small child told her, “But you can’t be a scientist! You’re a girl!”

  There was much conversation on campus about the gender ratio at the school. Many men and many women believed, and said out loud, that women were there because of a kind of affirmative action, and were not as accomplished or ready as the men. The admissions office even went so far as to publish SAT scores and other metrics to show that women deserved to be there. Still, the emotional response often felt more compelling than the data.

  I needed to know if more of us felt as I did. I approached Professor Lotte Bailyn of the MIT Sloan School of Management about advising me while I created a survey of my fellow undergraduates about their attitudes around women in science, in general, and women at MIT, in particular. Professor Bailyn agreed to advise me, and with the help of Shirley McBay, dean of student affairs, and Lynn Roberson, from MIT’s Programs and Support for Women Students, I wrote and distributed a survey, and during my junior year, I learned how to process data in the statistical data program SPSS, analyzed the results, and I wrote a report.

  The survey results showed that 46 percent of the women and 53 percent of the men felt that women were preferentially admitted. Though the Advisory Committee on Women Students’ Interests had shown in repeated studies that men and women performed equally well in their academics, only 55 percent of the women and 32 percent of the men were aware that this was so. Thus, a feeling pervaded campus that women did not belong at MIT. I felt the resulting “imposter syndrome” as acutely as anyone; even the all-male statues and bas-reliefs around campus seemed to be frowning. Another tedious stereotype my survey confirmed: 79 percent of women and 71 percent of men agreed that there was a strongly negative stereotype about MIT women, who were most often described with the adjectives “ugly” and “boring.”

  The few ultra-confident aside, I quickly found that both men and women at MIT often felt like imposters. In the mid-eighties, nerds were not yet cool. In my coed dorm (at MIT dorms act as living groups and support systems for the duration of your undergraduate experience), we had an intense network of friendships and a wild round of activities. We did our homework together, writing on the chalkboards in empty classrooms at night; we brought crates of fruit from the Haymarket home on the T and had daiquiri parties; we muscled through impossible problem sets by working together in groups, often powered by raw chocolate-chip cookie dough.

  I lived on Third East in the parallel dorms known as East Campus. My freshman year, the first building for MIT’s media lab was going up across the street. Pile-driving the foundations deep into the mud of the Charles River Basin caused coffee mugs to hop across their shelf in my room and smash on the old linoleum floor. The din of construction made sleeping late impossible and drove us away from the dorm for daytime studying. And so, of course, we had our revenge.

  The media lab building’s famous architect, I. M. Pei, had added three squares of color—black, red, and yellow—to its otherwise white-tiled street face. Our floor had a trademark color, mint green. We started sneaking across the street at night and painting a fourth, matching square, in mint green. During the day, the construction team would take it off. We’d put it back. And then, the night before the grand opening and unveiling of the building, in 1985, we executed an MIT-level hack by painting it back on, under the noses of the guards placed specially for that night. Pei was startled but responded graciously when the mint square was unveiled with the rest the next day.

  Meanwhile, the feldspar data was adding up to a beautiful story. Tim invited me to make it a master’s thesis and I discovered I had sufficient credits to complete my bachelor’s in geology and concentration in women’s studies in seven semesters. I finished my graduate coursework and thesis in an eighth semester, and thus received the bachelor’s and master’s, respectively, in geology and geochemistry together at spring graduation 1987. At the end of the year, Tim submitted our work to a scientific conference, and invited me to be there and present it. My instant reaction was no. I was so terrified by the idea I did not even attend.

  Asking questions, in fact, had become fraught. If I asked too many questions, I’d be viewed as weak. Asking questions implied ignorance, unacceptable at MIT. You were expected to have learned it already, or to figure it out on the fly. Asking a question risked revealing to others that you had missed something obvious, and that was a significant risk to run. The one exception to this rule occurred during the weekly seminars given by visiting scientists. The faculty, grad students, and some undergrads would gather in the big room on the ninth floor of the Green Building to listen to some eminent researcher and then prove their intellectual worth afterward, on the battleground of questions and stinging comments.

  One elder statesman was famous for waking from his nap, shouting, “That’s just poetry!” (a kind of über-insult implying flowery language with no substance), and then going on to eviscerate the speaker with a particularly insightful pseudo-question, that is, a statement phrased as a question but formulated to point out a fatal weakness. Questions were swords, not magnifying glasses.

  What I needed was a magnifying-glass question. If I wanted to be a scientist but was not yet ready, what was I ready for?

  Chapter 2

  In Fragments

  With my stomach alternately buzzing with nerves and sinking with despair, I drove into a dusty parking lot off a long country road in Great Mills, Maryland. Inside a low brown building I found a small waiting room with a few soft chairs, a radio playing, and the ubiquitous piles of magazines, but no receptionist. The door out of the waiting room and into the rest of the office suite was shut. I checked my watch, and saw that I was a little early. Should I knock on one of the closed doors? That seemed wrong. I decided to wait. I sat down and picked up a magazine, trying to breathe calmly. I wanted to appear normal, while at the same time trying to imagine how I could describe my anxiety and despair vividly enough to get the help I needed. I was placing all my hopes on this therapy, on this person I had never met.

  A few minutes later the door to the offices opened, and a woman about my own age stuck her head through. “Lindy?”

  “Yes,” I said as I rose and walked through the door into Mary’s office. Her long hair pulled neatly back, and her round figure dressed casually, she gestured for me to sit on a couch. The room was filled with books and pictures and had a pile of toys in the corner for kids. She sat in her chair at one side of the room and I sat on the couch facing her. I had no idea what was supposed to come next.

  She said hello, and she asked me what made me want to come to therapy. I took a breath, looked down at the floor, and then began to tell her my story. I talked about my recent history: the death of my marriage, the beginning of a new relationship, and being plagued by depression. I explained that I didn’t know why the depression had returned, since my life seemed to be fixed now, and there hadn’t been anything so terrible in my life, nothing that fitted the magnitude of the depression I felt. There wasn’t any reason for it.

  Mary’s first response was, “You seem to have come here to remember, maybe to remember why you are angry?”

  While at first this seemed excessively abstract, it also struck something in me and seemed real, or at least
, startling and important.

  Then she said, “I think you have a fear of the unknown. We have to think about what is unknown.”

  And that little statement gave me a stab of panic. It stirred something I immediately pushed away.

  When I was eighteen and home in Ithaca for the summer after my freshman year of college, I went with my friend Sara to a party. She’d been invited to it by a friend of her roommate’s, and I’d been invited by her. We followed the directions to drive along a dark country road, park on the side, and then walk down a dirt road through a dark forest to a stream, Fall Creek. Telling it this way brings up visions of true crime stories, but in Ithaca in 1984 this was just a normal adventure on a gorgeous summer night.

  By the stream were a couple of dozen Cornell college students hanging out talking. Some people made up a sweat lodge, a semi-traditional version of a sauna, with their addition of some marijuana, but I didn’t do any kind of drugs and declined. So did tall graduate student Curtis, and we sat together and talked. He was getting his Ph.D. in wetlands ecology. We talked about sports. He had been in training for consideration for the Olympic cross-country skiing team, and he was a fencer, and practicing aikido. He also knew something about horses; hunt-seat equitation and jumping was the sport I was most expert in. And he was strikingly handsome, strong, six feet tall, pale blond. He could have been Norwegian. We talked about science. I fell in love that night.

  During the fall Curt came to visit me at MIT and we drove up into the White Mountains to go backpacking. Curt tried to identify all the plants around us, a part of his discipline as an ecologist. He excitedly gave me a little leaf to chew, but alas, it was partridgeberry and not wintergreen. The night was cold and our water bottles froze. We loved every minute of the trip. I loved being able to show him I was competent in the outdoors, and tough in bad weather. Everything was easy, everything was fun.

  Curtis came from a highly accomplished and prominent family with deep connections: secretaries of commerce, ambassadors, assistant secretaries of state, centuries of investors in American industry, major philanthropists. I came with only a few strong floor beams in my personal house: my academics at MIT, my accomplishments in horse riding and flute playing, and some fairly prominent relatives on my mother’s side of the family. For a couple of weeks the following summer Curtis and I visited his family up and down the coast of Maine, taking ferries out to some islands, being picked up in sailboats. On a sail one long glittering afternoon, I was questioned intensely by several men of Curt’s father’s age as we cruised around Casco Bay. I was a horseback rider. So was one of their granddaughters; very good. I was studying science at MIT. The other man’s grandson was at Harvard. His family always went to St. Paul’s School. Where had I gone to high school? I went to public school in Ithaca. Ohhhh, he intoned, with raised eyebrows.

  Curt had no problem with these seeming failings of my lineage and upbringing. But my own greatest feeling was yearning. How I wanted a presentable pair of parents, and a clean beautiful family house to return to, and predictable, pleasant holidays, and good behavior. I wanted it with every part of myself. That wanting, though, felt far away and irrelevant when Curt and I were together. We hiked, backpacked, canoed. We hosted dinner parties, built things, were happy. The following year, we got engaged.

  That summer, we were visiting his parents at their place on the Chesapeake Bay. We were sitting around the table having another of the delicious, healthy meals from scratch his mother produced three times a day without fail; the Brittany spaniel was sleeping under the table, the halyards on the sailboat masts clinked in the wind, and the horses snorted from time to time as they grazed in the pasture out back. We had some savory soup with sherry, and salad from her garden, and make-your-own sandwiches with roast beef, turkey, cheese, various breads and sauces. When we told them our news, Curt’s mother, Janet, shrieked with pleasure, and then took the family diamond ring right off her finger and handed it to Curtis, who put it on my hand. There I was, a kid studying science at MIT, wearing jeans and anoraks, with a giant shining heirloom diamond on a big platinum band on my finger. I might be all right after all.

  For reasons still unclear to me, when I was twenty-one and I finished my master’s at MIT, I was not confident enough to go ahead into a Ph.D. program. Several of my uncles were in business, and I was so interested in what they were doing. What was “business,” anyway? I interviewed through the MIT career office and got a job with Touche Ross (now Deloitte) management consulting in Philadelphia.

  No one was happy about this except me. My parents thought I had sold out. Tim Grove might have been frustrated with me, or thought my going into business was a waste of time. I’m not really sure what he thought, actually, because we didn’t talk a lot in the months after I told him. I, however, was eager to learn what this business world was about, and also to make a little money. Still, I was a bit jangly because of the people around me who had wanted something different for me. Were they right? Or was I?

  After a training period with Braxton Associates in Boston, where I learned to use Excel, mastered the market-share bubble chart, and got used to wearing suits, I moved into a little apartment in Narberth, Pennsylvania, and started taking the train in to Center City, Philadelphia, each day, to work in a high-rise. I felt so professional, so in the real world. In the train I’d see other people—people who seemed somehow adults—reading the pink Financial Times and I felt I was part of something. In the Center City train station I’d buy crisp toasted cornbread slathered with melted butter, which I’d eat as I walked to our high-rise offices. The other research associate in the office, a beautiful, friendly, stylish young woman who drove a BMW and had a boyfriend at Wharton, and I were assigned to project teams and helped on consulting projects in all the ways we could. Our work included making charts and presentations, getting reports bound, taking data, and even helping to strategize on projects. We were included, and invited to stretch.

  One of my first big projects was with Boeing Helicopters. Rather than taking the train in to Center City I drove my beloved tan 1979 Volvo sedan with a sunroof, or moon port, as my brothers and I called it, back and forth to the big Boeing plant south of Philadelphia, down I-95 past the giant oil refinery with its perpetual flames, especially eerie in the dark. This plant was remanufacturing the Chinook CH-47A, B, and C helicopter models into D models. The factory line for giant helicopters was an impressive sight: a huge building filled with stations through which the helicopters moved, surrounded by giant machines; carts of tools; periodic tall fences protecting parts control areas with shelves up to the remote heights of the ceiling; desks; golf carts; and people, people, people. The echoing space was filled with the clang of metal and the smell of machine oil.

  Helicopters would be disassembled, and parts would either be scrapped, remanufactured, or cleaned and saved. Every part had to be tracked, and the computer inventory had to match the number in the parts control areas. We were helping Boeing improve their inventories. My job was to track the paperwork. I started with, say, a particular bracket that stabilizes the transmission, and then I interviewed everyone who touched that bracket. What form do you fill out? What do you put in the computer? What are the options for your next decision? Where does the bracket go, where does the paperwork go, and who do you talk with next? I built a giant spreadsheet of all this information, and then I drew an even more gigantic flowchart of all the possible paths for parts and paperwork. The flowchart looked like a platter of spaghetti and made obvious the room for improvement. My team loved it, and the client loved it, too. In the meeting where my manager presented these results to the client, the client asked, “Could I keep this printout?” That was my printout, my flowchart. I had created information that hadn’t existed before and that the client valued. I felt a burst of pride.

  I learned that if someone on the line worked fast enough to make his coworkers look bad, he’d get his tires slashed. I learned that it was important to go out and eat wings and drin
k with your team after a long day. I learned I got drunk easily. I learned to drink less. And then I learned the lesson that changed the way I look at the world.

  The managers of our project had taken all the information we had gathered, and they had come up with a solution for Boeing. They had an idea about how the people and the paperwork and the computers could be organized differently, so that the parts would be tracked better. We all worked on how to explain this idea, how to sell it, and then we presented to the Boeing management. They liked the idea. That was it.

  Remember that I had just come from four years of intensive undergraduate and master’s-level scientific training at MIT, and three of those years I had spent doing some hard experiments: gathering data, analyzing, and interpreting the results. I had come from a world where you painstakingly produce data that measures something, and then you work for weeks or months trying to understand exactly what that data is telling you, to extract the elusive but absolute and immutable truth of the natural world from it. Here, at Boeing, our team had analyzed our data in the same painstaking way, but then we had made up the answer in our heads. We invented a process that would fix the problems.

  When it comes to altering a team’s behavior, or organizing a group of people in any way, there’s no absolute universal truth, no physical law. Whatever you make up, if you can convince the people around you that it’s right, becomes real. That is not how science works. But it is how teams of people work. It felt like magic then, and it still feels like magic to me now. This lesson would stay with me through the years ahead of building and working with research teams.