Aren’t You Afraid? No, I’m a Scientist.

“Aren’t you afraid to drive across the country like that? Aren’t you afraid that if you go out in the field alone, you’ll be attacked/ your boat will capsize/ you’ll get lost? Aren’t you intimidated by being the only woman?”

These are just a few of the questions I have heard over my career in conservation and science, and I am sure they’re familiar to many other women as well. Expectations of women have been changing for centuries, and the 20^th century was a blockbuster in that regard.

During my childhood, and then throughout my education in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, the push-pull about women’s roles was acute. Burned into the memory of many people my age is the Enjoli perfume commercial that set the standard for womanhood: that a woman could “bring home the bacon,” fix dinner, go directly to reading children bedtime stories and then—with perfect hair and makeup—don a flowing gown for the evening. An impossible standard, certainly, but one that was designed to comfort society that things weren’t changing too fast; that women were still expected to fill their traditional roles, even while they took on new ones.

That uneasy transition meant that women who were interested in careers like science or conservation had to maintain an uncomfortable duality, in which their career was acceptable as long as they also exhibited traits that were considered “feminine.” That has manifested in my career in many ways; one notable effect was the expectation that to be a woman meant I should show fear and rely on men to help me through my nontraditional role.

Fortunately, I am blessed with a stubborn streak, and I insisted on doing things that were considered ill-advised or dangerous, such as driving across the country to take field jobs or hiking or camping alone. But at every step, I had to question whether I was doing the right thing. Was this actually dangerous? Would I be excluded from the ranks of femininity? Would I make the men in my world (or other women) uncomfortable, and suffer some kind of social consequence?

Now, of course, I am sure I made the right choice to pursue science, even when it made others uncomfortable. Science can often be like that—sometimes, to make a meaningful difference, a scientist has to buck the trend without knowing for sure how it will turn out. But for women, we took on both the professional risks and the gender risks simultaneously.

It is thrilling to see the progress that we continue to make as a society on the role of women in science. We are not yet at equality, of course, but now when a woman expresses her intent to pursue one of the sciences, the conversation quickly turns to her particular field of interest and how she might contribute, rather than the first remark being about how pioneering she is as a woman, and how she will have difficulties to overcome. In other words, that she should be afraid.

Especially in highly technical fields, like some kinds of engineering, we still have a long way to go, and success is far from certain. But progress is important, and worth celebrating. Those of us in science fields owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the women who fought for basic legal rights, and then kept pressing for changes to society’s informal, but incredibly powerful, expectations of acceptable behavior.