The Last Word On Nothing

Oh jeez I should not write about this. I don’t even want to. I’m doing it anyway. It’s this professional tension between senior women astronomers and junior women astronomers which I hear about it from the juniors, not a lot and never loudly, but intensely. I think — I think — I see both sides and I want these sides to see each other; because as the late Madeleine Albright said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

Let me start with an obvious fact that junior women astronomers thoroughly and completely understand: that they owe their relatively relatively (I said RELATIVELY) unsuppressed, un-sat-upon professional lives to the senior women astronomers who didn’t leave the field and didn’t quit reminding and arguing and legislating and didn’t give up, never gave up.

But here’s the tension. Senior women fought it out in one world and the juniors’ world is entirely different. Senior women, speaking from their world, tell the juniors things like, dress to not be noticed; be careful about taking a job offered as a spousal hire; have two things in your life, science and family, and don’t talk about the family; and if some guy makes a pass at you, shine it on, get over it. The juniors think they can dress professionally and still be noticeable; can be spousal hires; can talk about family and have lives and friends and hobbies; and if the guy doesn’t back off or even if he does, they can tell everybody about him, including his name. So far, so good; I wrote about this difference in the worlds a while ago.

That’s a reporter’s view from outside the two worlds. But I’ve lived in some of the same world as the senior women and see some of it, anyway, from the inside. Best to explain this with an anecdote.

Repeat, this anecdote is the view from INSIDE the seniors’ world. As I experienced it. Those are some caveats right there.

Anyway, several years ago ago, an older male science writer was accused by one, then a number of young female science writers of sexual come-on’s in circumstances that were supposed to be professional. The science writing community got in an uproar, the writers all wrote about it on social media, in blog posts, on a listserve, everywhere; and I read everything. My first thought, senior as I am, was that first young woman maybe was over-reacting or looking for attention or a little crazy — crazy does happen. Then I thought, but several women? probably not, probably the guy was a creeper. I thought, I know goddam good and well that creepers are out there; that the majority of women get hit on at times and in places where everybody’s supposed to be doing their jobs. I know that if you interview woman astronomers you don’t ask, “have you ever been sexually harassed?”; you ask, “how have you handled sexual harassment?” Reading the social media, blog posts, and listserv, I thought, well, good for these young women, not putting up with this crap. I read again and thought, wowee, they’re naming him, they’re saying his name in public, they’re putting his name in the same sentence with the creeper things he did. I was getting surprised.

I reread what the women said he’d done to see what I’d have done in the same situation. I thought, I’d have smiled and not reacted and gotten outa there fast. I thought, no, wait, I wouldn’t have let it happen in the first place. I would have seen it coming: I would have interrupted his complaints about the wife, I would have noticed the slippage into the personal, would have seen a different shade of interest; I would have not have gone for drinks alone, would not have had a conversation alone, would not have asked him in. In short, I would have been friendly but never trusting; I would have politely, kindly managed the situation; I would have been the one responsible, I would have been the one in charge.

I write this and immediately I’m furious. Why should a young woman not be open and relaxed? Why shouldn’t a man, especially a senior man, be the one to keep the relationship trusting and professional? And now I think about the young women and I wonder if they even know that they’re supposed to be in charge, that they’re the managers even if the creeper is a boss, or admired and influential, or old enough to have fathered them.

I knew to be a manager the way I knew to breathe — not that I knew not to be prey, but that like a parent or teacher or queen, I was the one to decide how this would go. And I think when the senior women are telling the juniors to get over it, what they’re saying is, “Didn’t you know what was going to happen? How can you be surprised and outraged? It’s just what has been coming at you all along.”

And I, a senior, don’t even know whether the junior women expect to live in a world without casual sexual predators and so aren’t forewarned and fore-armed.* I just know they didn’t seem to expect it, they didn’t know the managerial maneuvers, and I did. And I’m not even sure what’s making me furious — probably that I think young women should not need to know managerial maneuvers. I, a reporter, think the junior women are fun to watch; I think we should take care of them, keep an eye on them, and see where their sparkiness takes them.

Anecdote over. Sexual predation is only one of the issues causing tension between junior and senior women. A similar dynamic plays out with their different reactions, for instance, to being professionally underestimated, overlooked, undervalued. Just ignore it, say the older women, that’s what it’s like, just put your head down and do your work. Naturally we’ll do our work, say the younger women, but it shouldn’t be like that, it’s factually wrong, and we shouldn’t have to deal with it because we really are very good. And after this conversation everybody feels bad.

The usual relationship between junior and senior women astronomers is not like this, and the seniors usually have the juniors’ backs. One young astronomer said she’d told an older woman astronomer about an older man astronomer saying she had no business being an astronomer. The older woman astronomer said, “I understand exactly what happened there,” and you can almost see the older woman firing up her flaming sword.

But of course some senior women really are stupidly mean enough to dismiss or undermine their inheritors; and of course tension between generations is as old as generations. A young women astronomer told me she just wants the senior women to acknowledge that she’s different. Another young woman astronomer told me that the senior women did the work and just want to be acknowledged for it.

I think mutual acknowledgment is a situation we can work with, right? All these people do such good science and care so much, why shouldn’t they all be seen? All God’s children should be seen.

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*Another important caveat:

An awful lot of senior men astronomers don’t, REPEAT, DO NOT require women to be fore-warned and fore-armed and can manage their own behavior, thank you very much. But at the moment, I’m not concerned with the men.

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Stunning drawing by our Sarah G., used once by Christie already, and always in my heart.