 Tonight's panel is about women and science. I'll let the panelists themselves get into the subject. I will introduce them briefly. Starting from my far left is Jessica Trancic, who is the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Assistant Professor of Energy Studies in Engineering Systems Division at MIT, and is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. There's an odd echo here. In Santa Fe, she received her BS in Material Science and Engineering from Cornell, and her PhD in Material Science from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before she arrived here, she spent several years at the Santa Fe Institute, I guess, as a non-external professor of internal. And at Columbia University as an Earth Institute fellowship fellow, where her research focused on energy systems modeling, and her research for peer studies, the dynamic costs, and environmental impacts of energy technologies, and how they inform technology design and policy. Next to Jessica is Parisa Bedi, who is an associate professor at the Center for Systems Biology at Harvard, and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard School of Public Health. She's also a senior associate member of the Broad Institute located across the street. She is a computational geneticist with expertise studying genetic diversity, developing algorithms to detect genetic signatures of natural selection, and carrying out genetic association studies. She went to MIT as an undergrad, and also was at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and got her medical degree from Harvard, her medical school as a Soros fellow. If you're interested in learning more about Parisa, there's an excellent profile of her in Smithsonian Magazine from a couple years ago that I wrote. Rosalind Williams, who is next to me, is the professor of history of science and technology at MIT. She went to Wellesley, and then also got a BA from Harvard, and an MA from the University of California at Berkeley. So despite going out to California and came back to Boston, which I'm sure this winter she's regretting, and also got a PhD in history from the UMass Amherst. Her first three books, Dream Worlds, Notes from the Underground and Returning, all examined the implications for human life, both individual and collective, of living in a predominantly self-constructed world. Her most recent book, The Triumph of Human Empire, surveys the overarching historical event of our time, the rise in triumph of human empire defined by the dominance of human presence on the planet. It is my utmost honor to welcome the three of these speakers here, one of the thrills of getting to do this job is that I can invite people that I want to hear from and then hear from them. So without further ado, good day. Thank you. Doesn't sound like it to me. OK, so thank you for coming. And so this is the order of business. So we'll start with Jessica, and then parties will both describe their background in a less formal way than Seth did. It will be a sort of short autobiography of interests and education, like why are they here? How'd they get here? What's going on? So after that, self-introduction, then I'll introduce myself a little bit and also refer to some of the history of women in science at MIT now 20 years ago, which is startling to realize. But I want to very briefly give some context for what we're talking about when we talk about women in science here. Then we will have a conversation among ourselves. This is one of these kind of talk show conversations. We're talking to each other, but there's an audience. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. And then around 6-ish, we'll open up for questions from you all. And when you ask questions, please come down to the mics so it can be recorded for the broadcasts or the program, the video, whatever. But also so I can see you. It's kind of, there's glare here. So if you want to ask a question, just stand up and get in line, please. OK, so we will kick things off. Jessica? Thanks so much. And we're all great to see all of you here. I look forward to this conversation. So I thought I'd start sort of thinking, how did I get to this point? And it's not always clear to me that there was a grand plan. But I think the story starts in high school where I actually had a lot of interests. My favorite topics were mathematics, English, and fine arts. And because I had some trouble deciding what to major in, I think my interest kind of can be boiled down to still today uncovering patterns in the human-built and natural world that can be explained with equations and with words, and then also using design to try to make the world a better place. So that was sort of broadly what I was interested in. I decided to study material science as an undergrad. And what drew me to material science is that it's a field that's really focusing on understanding the basic elements that we have here on Earth, the elements of the periodic table, how they can be combined into useful materials, how they are combined into natural materials, and then thinking of new ways to combine these elements to make new technologies and novel materials with new functionalities. So I studied material science as an undergrad and then went on to do my PhD also in material science, where I used advanced microscopy techniques to study the structure of natural polymers that have very high strength and are produced in nature through energy-efficient means. So I studied spider silk and silkworm silk and a number of other materials. And after finishing my PhD, I really felt the need to focus on that second interest that I mentioned, which was design and trying to contribute to making the world a better place. And specifically, I wanted to focus on the big picture and some of the global problems that are related to engineering and technology. And I went to work for the UN in Geneva for some time. And that's where my research shifted to a focus on energy technologies and understanding how we can use clean energy sources that we have here on Earth to provide useful forms of energy for transportation and electricity. A big part of that is thinking about how we can use materials and elements that we have on Earth to convert forms of energy in the sun, for example, to electricity and other useful forms. So then I began really the research that I do now, which focuses on the big picture and on the small picture at the same time. I'm interested in evaluating technologies for electricity, for transportation, and looking at how we can set design targets for technologies that can help accelerate their development in the lab. So for example, one of the projects I'm really excited about right now is one where we're looking at how people drive around the US the energy that they use to get from point A to point B. And we're using that to try to set energy density targets for batteries that are being developed in laboratories around the world. So that's one project. On another topic, I look at evaluating environmental impacts and by how much we need to cut down emissions of greenhouse gases from various energy technologies, looking at how to compare methane emissions to carbon dioxide emissions and setting targets for emissions per unit energy of a variety of energy technologies that we use today. And my group is rather diverse. I have a group of men and women coming from a variety of fields, including physics, environmental engineering, industrial engineering, mathematics, as well as economics. And I'm really looking forward to talking about this topic because I think I've noticed firsthand how diversity in the research group, gender diversity, other forms of diversity, really help to kind of improve our problem solving and help us generate really interesting and, I think, hopefully helpful, useful research results. So I look forward to this conversation. Sure. I'm Pardis Sabeti. So Jessica and I know each other for a very long time. We were at Oxford together the same year. So this is really fun to get a chance to do this together. And I was so thrilled when she came to MIT and was a professor. So she was one of my favorite people in the whole world. So it was a project. And I was an undergraduate. And she'd take care of me when I was an undergraduate here. So it's a long history. But I'll take you through that trajectory a little bit. So I was born in Tehran, Iran, just before the Iranian Revolution. With my sister and my parents and then my kind of larger collective family, we left right before the kind of everything escalated and traveled around for a long time, but then finally settled in Florida, where I grew up. So I grew up a very, I mean, I'm technically a child of a revolution. But I talk about that in a big way of that's not something that is in any way something you overcome. Because what you overcome is parents who don't love you or experiences that are sort of or other kinds of experiences sort of in your microcosm. But when you have some political thing that your family's overcome, it's actually only motivating. And I had an amazing mother and father who were always incredibly encouraging to my sister and I and who made us not even realize that we were in some sort of a terrible situation. And as a result of it, I grew up in a household with my grandparents and my uncles and aunts, and I shared a room with my grandmother and my aunt and my sister and my cousin at times. And so it's kind of an idealic life actually, because as a child, you like that. I don't know, kids all asleep by themselves these days. Anyway, so I and I grew up in Orlando, Florida for the most part and came to MIT as an undergraduate. For whatever reason, I was in a lot of math advanced classes and sort of in a woman context. My year was one of those years where at times I was the only girl in most of my classes. Then I was four of like 35, four girls of a class of 35. And then when I went to MIT, it was kind of that year where it dipped and there was like 20% women. So I've kind of always been in an environment where there are fewer women. But I never really experienced anything. It was still, I thought, an idealic experience in every way. I love math. I love science. I loved MIT. It was an amazing place to be a student. I saw the 270 competition, or now 2700, 6, 270 competition when I was in seventh grade and was like, that's where I'm going to school. And then went to Oxford with Jessica. And it was interesting. It's an interesting place to do research. Love it. Loved it as an experience. But it was a place where I started to see my first sort of challenges and thinking about what I was going to do in my life. I found there, I went to medical school. And then, while I was at Oxford, I ended up doing a PhD. And so now I have an MD and a PhD, or it's called a D-FIL, and do my research in sort of the interface of genetics and infectious disease. And so a lot of the stuff that Seth was talking about is my core. It's the work where I develop algorithms to mine genomic data. But the kind of work that I've been doing more sort of in a bigger way lately is work in infectious diseases, including Ebola and Lassa Fever. And one of the big things our project, our group worked on is releasing the sequences from the Ebola genomes when they became, when the outbreak first began. And we just actually just released another 96 and published a paper, a commentary saying we need to make outbreak data open access. And in case it's a little bit of background, and I've been on faculty at Harvard now for about seven years. As far as, so I'm really excited about this conversation. That's just a little bit of background about myself. Kind of other things that I didn't mention along the way is that all along the way, folks like Roz and others have been these amazing mentors for me. So I didn't go into the whole thing that we did together, which is develop actually a diversity program. The freshman leadership program was an undergraduate. We're ways of really kind of inspiring young students to take leadership, to take ownership of their communities. But I've had these amazing experiences along the way of great mentors, men and women who have mentored me. Eric Lander being another one. I've been his mentee for 21 years now. And obviously that's an incredibly important thing. And then great students as well. And I have a very diverse group of individuals from different backgrounds, a broad mix of men and women, and a broad mix of disciplines that they come from as well. So that's a little bit about me, but we'll kind of come back to that one too. Thank you. Thank you. I've got a lot of questions already. I'm sure you do too. I will say about myself very briefly that my own interests, well my family background is very varied, but the educated side of the family as opposed to the non-educated, they were all in science, engineering, especially my mother taught math in the community college for years. So for me it was more like, why are you interested in history and literature, not in these other topics? So I don't wanna, I'm overstating it because it was a very encouraging family, whatever you're interested in. But I felt on this fault line between my own interests in history and literature and the family doing engineering and science, especially engineering and math. So going into history of technology seemed like a way to have the best of all worlds, and I still feel that way. So I wanna show you though a little of the larger historical context for what we're talking about, because it struck me, by the way this is a slide that I got from Nancy Hopkins, who was kind of the leader of the pack in the 1990s when women in science were speaking up about their systemic discrimination in the School of Science here. So Nancy gave a talk in 2011 at the 150th anniversary of MIT. On this topic, there was a whole special meeting on women in science. And she had a bunch of slides, and these are her slides, or I'll show you some of them. But this is one of my favorite slides, because I use it when I teach history or often in other institutions I say, you wanna know what history looks like, that's history, that's change, just look at it. So this is, I'm sorry I don't have a pointer, but anyway, going back to 1901, we don't quite go back to the beginning of MIT, but just showing the flatness, and then whoops, all of a sudden things start happening, and they start happening around here in the 1960s. I graduated in 1966. I married an MIT class of 65. So my life is this uplift curve, all right? And your lives, now when did you get your PhDs? Well, I was in three, I think is what I got mine, but I'm in 2000. Early 2000s, two, yeah. Okay, so you're on this end of the graph. But most of this then, you're coming into science, at least with your PhD, you're also on a sort of rising curve, but it's a second wave. So what I'd like to do is show you more clearly the faculty numbers. Okay, so this is a little finer grade, and you see, you've got a blip around 1970. I would call that the Sheila Woodinall blip, but anyway. But then in 1995, 1996, then you have this really sharp upward curve. Now Nancy said, well, that's the version of curve. It was the deans of the School of Science who were the first that the faculty women went to with their complaints. And so it was the dean, really, that who went then to Chuck Best to say, what do I do, or not what do I do, but I'm informing you about these complaints. I'm informing you that I'm gonna have to respond to them and Chuck Best said, of course. And okay, but this is where things start. And then the second phase is when Mark Kastner becomes dean of science. So these are individual stories. It's not just institutional workings, okay? But the individuals, of course, I'm just gonna go through these, who really matter in the story. These are the 16 women who ended up in Bob Bershino's office in 1994. And this story is worth mentioning how that happened. Nancy Hopkins had a complaint about space primarily, but also committee assignments and teaching assignments, but space was a big deal. So this is Nancy, bottom right there. So this is communications forum. So the communication she chose was to write a letter to the dean, but she asked somebody else to read over the letter, another woman in science, which one it was. But she asked, just read it over, is this okay? Am I being too shrill? And the other faculty members said, not only is it a good letter, I wanna sign it too. And that started Nancy going around to the other women in the School of Science at that time. And then that led to a meeting in the dean's office, where they all sat around a table, all 16 of them, plus the dean. And he has said that he knew many of them were unhappy, he knew things were going on, but it was the collective narrative of 16 people telling the same story in the sense of, these are the problems I have, this is how I react, this is how I feel about it. Then he said, you couldn't dismiss it as that individual being a prank or that individual, yeah, it was the collective weight of the storytelling. So I just, I think this is really interesting for how history works. So I'm gonna leave these people up on the screen so they can all admire, they can all work. Discussing about where things went from here. And I mean, it went to a report and another report, and then a report that got published in 1999 publicly, which led to a lot of publicity for MIT. So, version was a count of all this, which was recently published in the MIT faculty newsletter, in the form of an obituary for Chuck Vest. He ends this narration about this whole episode by saying, academia has not been the same since. Now, he doesn't say we solved the problem. I know he chose his words carefully, but academia has not been the same since. So I'd like to hear from both of you, just is this any history that you ever heard or got, or was there any sense when you were coming on the scene with your PhD that you were on some kind of a, in a moment where women in science were on the verge of a new life, a better life? Did anybody ever talk to you about this? Did any of your mentors describe it? I mean, I guess I can, I had one mentor at Cornell, Mary Stanzoloni, who was really actually, until I got to MIT, one of the few senior colleagues I had that was a woman. So it really wasn't until, so from undergrad until MIT, I worked pretty much only with men, both below and above me. And because that was who was around at the various places I was. And then arriving at MIT, it was really interesting because it was the first time that I was interacting with these senior female professors, and that was really great. But yeah, so I had a mentor in College of Mary Stanzoloni, and she, I think, did talk about this transformation. Like parties, I really didn't have any negative, gender-related experiences kind of going through school as an undergrad, as a doctoral student. I mean, oftentimes I was the only woman in the room, but I didn't necessarily, and I think this has to do with how it was brought up and my parents and family and so forth. I didn't necessarily notice it or focus on it. I mean, I think where you start to notice it more is where the sort of basis on which you're being evaluated, the way in which you're being evaluated, is less quantitative, less clear, and a little bit more subjective, then you start to be more conscious of it. But it's, yeah, so I mean, I was certainly aware of this transformation that was taking place, and it has been great to see the changes and also the changes in the undergrad, graduate population and student population engineering and the growth in the number of female mentors that I now have. Vadis? Yeah, so first I guess I would like to just take a moment and talk about the report. And I was very well aware of that report when it came out. I had graduated at that point, but I had, obviously, as an alumni interested in what was happening. And I mean, I just love that report. It's this interesting thing, actually, that a lot of places think that by admitting you have a problem, you have a problem, right? And it's actually the opposite in my mind, right? That the fact that MIT released this report is what makes it probably the best place on are to be a faculty. And I think that's really important to note because somehow, some people try to give them a lot of flashback about, oh, like MIT is a place where they don't shoot well and well. I mean, they dug into their own problem, they publicly released it. And I tell you, I've been at other universities, I'm at another university. Their problems aren't any less because they don't talk about them. And in fact, I think they're more. So I mean, to me, that report was amazing. And it was just so nice. And I think that's also one of the reasons I love being a scientist. It's just like, there is a problem, now let's get some metrics on it, right? And let's really actually understand that. I think that's the only way you, transparency and metrics are the way we move forward. So I love that report. I love what Nancy did. I admire her greatly. It takes a lot of, you know, it's a bold move. It's to particularly be the first person to kind of talk about these issues and not seem like you're just somebody who's just complaining, right? To say, how do I articulate this in a way that's productive and it moves the field forward? And as far as who talks to me about it, I mean, I don't, I think it was, honestly, I think I was reading it myself and personally interested, but it wasn't that we had kind of discussions about it in that context, but you just sort of are always talking about it in some way. I mean, like I said, my greatest mentor is Eric Lander. He's a man, but man or woman, it's not, that's not what I focus on, it's what the strength of their character. And he himself has always been an incredible supporter of women. A lot of his top management are women and he is just an extraordinary sort of understander of the importance of diversity and I've been very lucky. I think one of the things you always realized, and I think Bill Clinton once said, every person who's successful has one person who believes in them and he was talking about his mother in that context and I think in your professional career as well, I do a lot of talks about mentorship and about being a good mentee and about finding a good mentor and both are important, but within that context that every person who's successful has somebody who is sort of looking out for them as well. And anyway, so that within that context and we can kind of go further. I think Jessica made a lot of really good comments about it. Yeah, I'd like to get that, because I mean, one just question is whether you think choosing your mentor by gender is, should that matter? Is that, I mean, I tend to agree with parties that it really doesn't matter. I've had wonderful male mentor so I had an undergrad, Stephen Sass was my main mentor and he really kind of set me on this path of research, got me into the lab kind of my first year there and yeah, I mean, I think men as well as women, they've sort of played an equally important role as a mentor and many sort of thoughtful individuals, whether they're men or women, understand these issues and kind of see what's happening in this transformation that's happening in the sciences and engineering and bringing more females in. Yeah, go ahead, I don't have to, you can talk to each other. Yeah, yeah, we're, yeah. And I would say that obviously I think there's a very importance that there are women, right? Whether your specific mentor is a very different, you know, personal experience and it's somebody who you work well with and it shouldn't be defined by gender or ethnicity or any of that, it's sort of someone who speaks to you, right? So I would say the way you choose your mentor is someone who you are inspired by, who you think is brilliant, who you trust, who you will kind of be guided by and who has the integrity that's sort of worthy of your loyalty and so I often say I made my career by trying to please my mentor in science, there's first author and last author papers so it works well that way and it's done very well by me and I think that that's a relationship each person should have. Obviously for some people, they really do gravitate and want it to be a woman and I think there needs to be an option for that and there needs to be people that you can speak to. Obviously I have a very deep bond with women and as men do with men, I think it's okay that that is the case. Peer-to-peer mentoring is also really important so then Jessica and I have gotten together at times and I think that's really important. I think it's very important that you see up and you see besides you and you see a lower down, you see all of that, you have a community of individuals that you can interrupt it. I hadn't thought about the sideways. Oh yeah, yeah. Well yeah, it's not, I mean, obviously maybe in a club where you're trying to meet people, maybe but having a skewed situation might be good but when you're looking at your life, you want to have that kind of richness of experience where you can interact with other people who get you. Do you want to say any more about mentoring, either doing it or receiving it? Well I mean I think, I mean, I've thought a fair amount about this in mentoring students in my group and I should say that I don't think we can put the genders into different buckets because there's personalities as well. So across both groups, there's sort of a spectrum of personalities but I do find that with oftentimes it is helpful to kind of work with female students in my group and beyond to really help build up sort of their confidence and sort of the way they're presenting their work. I do see that they're, maybe on average is a little bit of a difference in how women and men present their ideas and the confidence that they have in doing so. So I think that there is something there and some of the advice that I give to my students is to just focus on the content. That was always what helped me is to just focus on the content and I was always really interested in it, curious and I think when you do that, it speaks to everybody in the room and I'd like to hear from Pardis on this topic as well. And then also I think a few other pieces of advice, not to be too polite. Sometimes as women we're sort of, we're brought up to be polite, that's not a bad thing but you don't want to be too polite. If you're interrupted in an exam, you want to make sure you get back to your answer because you have to make sure that the professor knows that you know that answer. For example, you know. And so mentoring them in that way I think is important. And I think also, it goes both ways, having a diverse group I think is useful sort of from both sides, diversity of personalities, genders, backgrounds, et cetera. Because the students all pick up things from each other as well, instead of best practices and yeah. So I'd love to follow up on this, the word confidence came up and to me that's one of those key words that it's fuzzy but everybody's, there's something there, there when you're talking about women in science or women period. Pardis, do you want, I mean there's that and there's also the idea that the diversity of the group that's not just gender based is being important, I don't know, is that? Yeah, sure, I mean I can speak to all that, I mean I'm, I mean I, my mind's going in a lot of different directions and I could talk about my group all day long. So I love my group and I love, and so I have like a story about this and story about that but I mean the big thing is that for every member of my group, man or woman, I have a big line, I say that I want you all to be assertive. This is very important to me that you're assertive, I'm just like oh well you know I don't care about that authorship, I'm like you do, just say you do, like it's okay to, and so the idea is that I say I want every member of my group to be assertive so that they're never aggressive. You see a lot of, there's an opposite thing that happens where a lot of women just take it, they kind of get beaten down a lot and they keep pretending like they don't need things that they need and then later they kind of randomly grab out at something that they don't, you know, don't deserve or don't, because they don't know, they don't have an understanding of what do I need to be successful, how do I move through my career, so I really pushed my students a lot to develop confidence, to develop what I call their inner voice, to kind of understand what, and in that way it makes you stronger in your science, like you need, science is very difficult, there's a lot of failure no matter what else is going on in your career, and so you have to have an inner strength and an inner voice and you need environments that are gonna develop that. And there are other things with women that kind of make that difficult, they're not used to sort of standing out, Cheryl Sandberg makes a very important point about that idea of being bossy and how that is a negative connotation, so women don't understand how to assert their voice without kind of going over the top and seeming that kind of grating on people, and so I try to work with them to develop that, to really to do that in a smooth way, so I think that's a very important area. Another simple thing is just the timbre of a woman's voice, I went to this woman's form event in France where they brought in a speech therapist, and you know it's funny because they have all these big sessions with Condoleezza Rice and all sorts of world leaders and that was the most popular session, which is just get together and learn how to speak and women also need to learn how to get that voice deeper, just the simple logistics of being heard in a room is really important, and you have to actually do it, like I have a lot of advice I give for women but it's very important to do all those things so you don't end up becoming the woman that's bitter. That is the worst case scenario, right? I tell women a lot of things that make it about how difficult it is, so I said, I kind of told you that I didn't have bad experiences to a point, doesn't mean I haven't had a lot since. And the way I say it is I don't, and I tell a lot of stories to women that are frightening, and I say, I don't tell you these stories so you go around thinking that the world is unjust or that you'll never make it. I tell you so that you realize that there is a kind of not a mind field but a field you have to get through of complications and I want you to recognize they exist so you avoid them, right? So you assert yourself to get through them is that it's just really important to understand what are true obstacles and what are not obstacles so that you don't go around kind of assuming you'll always get beaten down. That is the worst case scenario. You know Nancy Hopkins always said that she felt that discrimination against women in science was very, very age-related. That up to a certain point, up to a certain point, you're a young student, you're coming along, this is fine, we love you. Forget this. Yeah, yeah. And then you begin to compete in a way or just get older. I don't sure whether she's getting older. Just get in a space you're not used to being in. Yeah, and become more, and so you both refer to kind of like up to a point. So is the point related to age and experience, is that, are you talking about a timeline of life or do you think it's more a professional point? Can I take that first? So I went through a really terrible experience that I don't necessarily want to get into but I'll just kind of reflect on it. What I say is, you know, maybe I'll refer to something kind of a popular, so it's something to have in the popular press or whatever, which is, I remember that election where both Hillary Clinton and why am I actually... Barack Obama? No, no, no, no, the woman. Oh, oh, Sarah Peele. What's that? Sarah Peele. Sarah Peele, there you go. Wow, that one. So yeah, so both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Peele were both going up for election. Couldn't ideologically be more different, but what I found was really interesting is the same people hated them and had the exact same high-pitched scream as to how they described how they hated them. And then you also see when a woman's something like a Martha Stewart situation when something goes wrong and you get the same kind of reaction. And I said, you know, it took a long time for people to get that high-pitched scream when they talked about George Bush, but boy can women, people, men and women go crazy at women who put themselves too far. And so, and I went through an experience where I was sort of down, I became a third-rate citizen for a little while and I saw the way everybody talked to me as like impertinent, reckless, careless. I mean, the way that they talked to me was just, and it started to use a lot of kind of gender-bias words about not being good. And the way I say is the way you judge the moral grade of your society is not based on what happens when a person's walking down the street or in a coffee shop getting a coffee. It's what happens the minute that coffee gets dropped, right? And what they say like stupid me and all this stuff, things changes, right? And so, we stepped into a place where suddenly we were being observed. When you're a student, you're cute, you're a little bunny, nobody really bothers about you. Once you're in a space where judgment is possible and judgment where people can have a snap reaction and not censor themselves, that's when you see like the true situation. And I think it's either when you get too high and then people start saying, well, they're not worthy of that high or low. It's like, if you try to go fly too close to the sun or kind of get beaten, then all of that comes out. And that's when you start to see it. So that would be my sense is it's not necessary, it's not the age or anything like that, it's just what are you trying to do and are you trying to step out of the bounds of what is normal and what we can, we all have to kind of accept. I'm sure we'll have some questions on this. Yeah, so do you want to, I'm sorry. I could add a little bit to that. I mean, I think that up to a point as a student, you're being evaluated in very clear terms, especially if you're taking courses where you're doing problem sets, you're turning in exams that are graded. It's pretty straightforward. You either got that right or you got it wrong. And so that is very, you're evaluated in these very objective terms. And then you get to a point where it's more about subjectivity, how good does that work? How are these people perceiving? Well, the perception, we don't have clear metrics where you start to notice these gender influences. Like until that point I didn't really notice it, but then it's like, oh, okay, how I'm speaking and the tone of my voice and what I'm wearing and all of that never even occurred to me that that was important. I mean, it occurred to me, but I never really experienced that personally until the subjectivity comes in and then you start to think, oh, okay, it's just a realization that you are being perceived through the lens of gender to some extent. And then there's another thing at play, which is you kind of go through your career and you're, like Party said, the cute little bunny and then at some point you're no longer pleasing, working to please your professors and this and that. You're sort of kind of emerging to where you're at the same level and you may disagree on certain points. So I think negotiating that transition without going too far and becoming the most loudmouth person in the room and also not being too timid. I think that sort of transition point is one that I certainly think it would be useful to offer mentorship to women scientists and sort of making that transition. So being prepared for it, not just mentally, but here are some things you can do to deal with the situation? Right, because oftentimes these are unconscious reactions that people are having and there are situations where it's really coming from a negative place, but there are other times where it's just, it's people are open-minded and but there are just certain things you can do to make sure that you're being evaluated in along the lines of what you want to be and sort of your message is really coming through. What do you wish you had known 15 years ago? I mean, one example of something I wish I had known or took me a few years in my time when I was at Oxford was, well, so something that happened where it was like an understanding that came to me midway through was actually that the people were still sexist. Then it did take me a little while to figure that out. So I often say that the one thing that was easier and there's a lot of things that were harder, so it's just the one thing that was easier about the time that we came in compared to the time that you came through is it was very clear what was going on to you, right? I mean, women weren't even allowed in the schools to begin with, right? So you understood that people just didn't expect women to do education and to do well, right? So like a generation before. And so when you came in, you recognized that there was like a very clear threat, right? That people did not expect you to achieve, did not expect you to go to someone. But for us, like basically we hadn't experienced sexism through our early time and we didn't think there was such a thing. So it took me about three years into my PhD experience to understand why I always felt that my ideas were not as good, why I always felt that I was just not good enough. It really took a long time to articulate because everybody's happy, happy. We get very, very frustrated at rhetoric where people walk around in political quackness, I think it's a dangerous thing because I don't wanna change behavior, I wanna change feelings. And so everyone's walking around being like, oh no, it's nothing. And then there's a roll of the eyes and you're just like, what just happened? And like every time you had an idea, it just wasn't quite good enough that then it suddenly comes from somebody else, it's much better. And I think that that actually took me a really long time. And then one day I saw it was like a day when I suddenly realized every woman in this, you know, in this like research center is depressed, right? And every woman in this research center thinks that they are no good as a scientist. So I was like, I get it. Like it's just an insidious thing and it seeps into, and if people don't tell you, I mean as soon as I actually, somebody said something to the fact of like you're a woman, you can't do better, it was very motivating. I was like, oh, I get this. Okay, now I'll prove you wrong. But when it happens in a way that it's not articulated, you actually internalize it and you think it's your problem. So again, and it's the same thing of why I tell women there is sexism is so that that never happens to them when they don't recognize that that might be what's going on. But you don't want it to get to the sole point where you think everything that doesn't happen for you is because of that reason. So the more we can get understanding of like, what is this bias and then what is what we need to, sometimes your idea is just bad and that also should be clear but you should begin to understand which is which. And I think, I wish I had recognized earlier on that this was just a thing and then I had to have my own internal clock. I had to assert my inner voice. I had to assert myself and speak my inner voice. It would have saved me a couple of years of my life, I think. Well, the thing of these women, it wasn't until a lot of them were quite senior that they sat down in the room together and discovered they all had the same experience. So at least you came to it a little earlier than they did. So the question is, what do you wish you had known 15 years ago? Yeah, I mean, I think this understanding when I was going through this transition between just feeling supported by everybody. The funny to the rabbit. Right, let's call it that. To the test, right, as I wrote in or something. Sort of feeling supported by everyone and then suddenly it's like, oh, that person isn't responding to what I'm saying and that person is shooting that down and sometimes, as Parties mentioned, it's just, you say something, it's not a good idea, but sometimes you say something and it is a good idea and I wish I had gotten to that realization sooner because you do waste a little bit of time kind of internalizing this and saying, oh, you know, what's going on and kind of learning also how to make that transition because I think there are ways and that's something that I do try to, I mean, I don't have sort of a ready made list right now but I sort of try over time to reflect on that so I can share those insights with my students and kind of making that transition and I think also having more senior women just present, as Parties mentioned a while back, just around, I think that's really important because I think that's a huge deal. I just have one more question before we open it up and that's about Oxford. Did you feel like it's the same there as here or was it a very different milieu for women in science just positive or negative? I'm just curious how much travels across the Atlantic in terms of culture. Yeah, well Oxford's an interesting place because if you're in one of the older colleges you go to have dinner and there's high table and it's literally a table up on a stage with everyone's dressed in their sub-fusk and up on the stage it's primary, it's really only men, there may be one woman and then every now and then you get invited as a grad student to sit at high table. You're the only woman in this sort of group. And there are so many traditions around retiring to the den after dinner and passing around glasses of port and various other drinks and rituals and so forth. So it is very, those rituals are very male dominated and so in that sense it's different. I mean it's different in a lot of ways. I had a great couple of mentors, Christopher Viny and David Cacain and they were, I don't know in my research I guess it wasn't until a little bit later that I went through this search transition to the rabbit as we talked about but I think it's just a very different environment. I don't know that these gender issues we're talking about would be better or worse there. It's in general I guess you have a little less exposure to faculty and I found, I don't know if you found that. I mean certainly you have more exposure to people outside of your field through your college and graduate students from other fields and so forth but in terms of the faculty at large I think you have a bit less exposure so in that sense it could be quite isolating so if you did run into a problem I would be really worried about sort of getting out of that. Yeah. I would actually say just I would speak, I think that it's hard to be a woman in any country in the world but I do still think that United States of America is the best place to be a woman that a lot of other places are way further behind and the gender roles are way less defined and having spent time internationally I recognize that actually in America it's not like they don't have the problems but you can say something and somebody will be like we'll pay attention so that's basically I mean there's, we still have corruption of our senators and that's a problem but if you're caught taking money there's a repercussion whereas in some places in Africa there's no repercussion and in that kind of context and the same thing of there is plenty of sexes in the United States as well but if it happens and someone catches it, it's kind of, it can be, if you can get attention for it you can, people know it's supposed to be wrong. I don't actually think that even in Europe those gender roles are that defined and I know a lot of women that are very unhappy I think. Particularly because women that are trying to be professional. I actually feel, I actually had a wonderful time in Oxford and I have a wonderful mentor there and all of that but I do think all of the female graduate students were depressed and felt bad about themselves and that's not great, all the ones I knew. We even had like, you know we had all the roads, there was a Rhodes women like knitting club that just sat around and talked about why they were depressed all the time so. There was issues and I think that they will also come forward and it's getting better and better but it's hard anywhere in the world to try to become a professional woman to be taken seriously in a culture that just for so many years it's like you said it's so embedded where we're, as a human community we're trying a very different experiment to have half of the population get into the workforce that wasn't there before and a lot of people are slow to it but I think America's moved the most quickly and it responds the most to these kinds of things. All right, that is an encouraging note to turn to everybody else who's here. Must have questions, comments, yeah just but if you would stand in front of the mic just so we get a recording, thank you and would you introduce yourself? Sure, my name is Esther Shelcrap, can you hear me okay? And I hate to be a note of discordance but I will be one anyway because I'm in computer science and there's no women in that either, there remain no women in that and I know at least two professors in this university who I would say were very sexist to me and impacted my career horribly. So then when I went to the student person who's supposed to help you she just said well you know that money's gone they spent the money they owed me, I mean that's an answer. So no, nobody cared, nobody cared and I did complain and I think those guys are back in the 70s. What I would really like to see happen is that what goes on in industry needs to go on in university. In industry they would haul everybody in and all these places like I know so-and-so made a big gaff with his comment about women, it was at Google or I forget already the company it was but Microsoft, you know he made a big gaff but they still, Microsoft and all those other people Oracle, Google, they haul everybody in and give them a talk about diversity. That doesn't happen here. So the gods who have their tenure and their chairs they can go on be whatever they want and just say oh my god she's just no good. We really in computer science have a long way to go. I absolutely agree so like I said in my own situation I think that I won't go into details but I know exactly what you mean and you feel like helpless and no one's gonna listen to you and this is the way it's gonna happen. In this situation I had a mentor, a single mentor who looked out for me and there's the only reason I left standing which is why I do think they're so important but I, no I agree, I'm not, I'm saying that probably it's a more of a general, in other places in the world it's like at least we can sit in the room and be horrified by your story like in some of these other countries nobody would be horrified by that at all they'd be like oh and what happened, right? So I do recognize and I do think academia in a lot of ways is the most backwards absolutely and it is because in general it wasn't designed and there was like a, there's no intelligent design I would say about how the academic structure was brought up and it is extraordinarily hierarchical and I do think the things like that gender report were really important because they actually shed light on while this is the issue and I think that for, like you said, the transparency that you can get are gonna be critically important. Yeah, there's a lot more I could talk about very specifically about your issue but I have heard that I've become, after my own like terrible experiences I've become a kind of unofficial ombuds person for a lot of people who know that they need to talk to me about something going wrong but I'll get incensed for you and I'll try to figure out how to help you and sometimes I can and sometimes we can only laugh about it and try to figure out how to get you out of a situation where you ever have to interact with those people again because often I also say this, I say there's no, there are truly terrible people out there in the world, many of them and I often tell you that they exist so that you can just avoid them and maybe I'm not saying that we should all just keep avoiding this person they should be taken to task but for your own personal good the best thing to do is kind of get out of that situation and get into a place where you can be appreciated. You know this is making me think that the title of the session is not quite precise because it's women in science we're talking about women in academic science and I know I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people who have gone into business and either racial minorities or women and they're much happier so there's a whole world out there beyond the university which is not nirvana, we know that too but still it is, things are done differently and it is an alternative. More questions? Yes. Hi, I'm Eric Staten, I'm a graduate student in comparative media studies and you've both talked a little bit about issues that you've experienced that seem to be in the lab and in research groups. One of the main complaints that I've heard from female faculty in the humanities not specifically here but in general is about things like course load and teaching load and having male faculty who actually get more time off to go write their books and continue their careers where they find as women they end up teaching more classes than it seems like they ought to be. And I'm wondering if that's also something that's happening in the sciences, if that's something that you've experienced. I know the credentialing mechanisms are different so books versus articles, I don't know if that actually has an effect on the time that you get to sort of do your own work and how those effects play out in your experience but I was just curious if you had something to share about that. Yeah, I mean I think, so before I took this faculty position I actually had a number of senior colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute that just told me time and again just say no to stuff, don't say, I think to the point, so when I came here I actually did say no to a lot of things and probably upset some people but yeah. So I, and I think MIT is pretty good about looking out for junior faculty in that way but I think what you're talking about, I mean I can totally, I totally think that that's happening on many campus and probably here as well. There is this, there was an article in The New York Times a while back, this is a slightly different issue but it was something like Madam CEO get, can you get me a coffee, something along those lines. There is a little bit of that so it's like, it's a little different from what you're talking about but I think it's related where I think as a woman sometimes you get asked to do things and it's not just getting a cup of coffee because now we kind of know okay that's off limits, we can't do that but it's like, what are you asked to do versus a male colleague where maybe they'd go to your assistant first before going to you to ask for that particular thing so I think these things are real and they do happen. I think to the extent we can collect data on teaching load and so forth, I guess there was a Yale report in 2012 that focused on salary among women faculty as compared to male faculty and found this like with the significantly lower salaries for female faculty but I think as universities we should be able to, we should keep track of what people are doing and review that and just make that part of the end of year review process for the department, look at who's doing what and who's caring, is anybody carrying too much of the load? Eric after the report that Parties was describing about women in science at MIT, the provost ordered all the other schools, all the other four schools to do a similar report to study just this kind of thing when space was less an issue in a non-lab environment but teaching low time off salaries and so forth so each school did a data analysis and where there were problems, again the idea was if you have the numbers and you can correct them. It's interesting we've had this conversation for an hour and we haven't mentioned motherhood and family time and that actually is where women often feel like I've had a baby, I have small children, whereas how does that fit in, especially in a day and age where fathers are doing a lot of work too with children, so again one of the results of the women's science study was to look at family leave policy and essentially to change it at MIT so that if a woman bears a child during the pre-tenure period, the tenure clock is extended by a year just and don't ask for it, you get it. It was very important not to be an option but to be a requirement for obvious reasons so that is another area where when you have a family, when you have babies, then all these questions come up yet again about what's fair, what's egalitarian? Yeah and I think one of the nice things about MIT's policy is that fathers also get that leave and I don't know if this is true, it's the stories that you hear that there were cases where fathers were taking the leave but they weren't the primary caregivers and so they were using that time to get tons of work done, meanwhile someone else was taking care of the kid so I think MIT's changed that now so you have to show that you're the primary caregiver. But you're not, yeah, no free writers here. So that, yeah, but. But I mean this is, I mean it's just relaxing because all these things, you know, they're bureaucratic, you want to regularize them, you really depend on the institution to have rules but people are people, you know, everybody's different, kids are kids and it's hard to tell. And it's actually not a laughing matter but it's sort of you can laugh or cry, you know, so it's a little laugh. Did you have another? Thank you. Yeah, thank you, thank you. Any more questions? Please. Yeah, I was actually just gonna. Do you want to introduce yourself? I'm Anna Novogradsky, I'm a master's candidate in the MIT science writing program and I worked in labs for eight years before coming here in plant biology mostly. So I was actually just gonna mention that it's interesting that you said that the US is one of the best places for women today when the US is one of the only, only a tiny handful of countries in the world that doesn't have any mandatory paid maternity leave and no mandatory paid parental leave at all. And it's interesting, I mean, I like to think about large structural things that we can do that will help women and I think that paid parental leave is the biggest one I can think of. I'm, first of all, very interested in if you have ideas of other large structural changes we can make rather than just relying on individual women to stand up for themselves, which of course is also necessary. But, and second, I'm wondering if you have any ideas because I'm ever hopeful of how we can actually get mandatory paid parental leave in the US. So that's a big one, and you're right about that. I mean, and I don't, I could be wrong, right? I mean, it might be that Germany's actually the best place to be a woman and I missed it. So yeah, that's probably, there's just a lot of cultures that are not great that I have seen. But I would say, so I came back very happy to be in the United States and to make a career here. And again, and like you said, there are many structural major problems, but at least you can spar about it. There's one funny thing in England, that just American women might be the most hated, right? Something about us are just, I mean, literally every single person in Oxford kind of hated me there in the academic system. And I think it's cause we, they all probably look at us and say impertinent, it's just kind of crossed the board. So you can't really show, you can't have like gumption and show, like it's just not proper or something like that. So it may also be a being an American woman in that kind of European context. Maybe I'm just not also not handling it the right way, right? So I just like that we can yell about it and say the CS professor is terrible. Like we can say those things and we actually have enough energy to say them. Whether we get anywhere is often not the case, but we can at least talk about it. But you speak to action and I think that that is actually a very important thing. So I don't have a child that's part of the issue of women in science. So who do I? I hope to one day, whether mine or adopted or I had a pet rat that I swear was my child. So I love things and I'd like to nurture something. But so I haven't thought about that specifically and I do think that that obviously is a major issue. And I'll let others speak to that if they're going to. But as far as other ideas that I have for structural changes, I think the biggest thing is that idea of metrics and accountability and transparency and the places where you see this idea, this academic environment in which crazy things happen. I think we need a real good structure and it shouldn't be, I think, I'll just talk about the academic stance. The problem with academia is the whole structure is not designed in a way that is, was in all intelligently designed. The fact of the matter is you have these students, they do undergraduate in science, they do graduate school in science, they do postdoc in science and suddenly they're a manager, which doesn't make any sense. Many of them may be like mildly on the Asperger spectrum. Many of them just may not be nice people but they're just good at what they do and suddenly they are caring for the lives of people underneath them. So that's already a problem. And to their credit, they've also got no training, no incentives and no kind of thing in order to become better people. So that's kind of a broken system to begin with. And then if they get really good at what they do, somehow they become the chair and then they kind of can move this through. We haven't, it's the same thing. I mean we've got bigger problems. Why is it that our president is someone we should have a beer with and why isn't it not somebody who runs a really good organization? I mean we make silly choices about who to put in charge of certain things. And I think that overall, if the entire system was overhauled, where we did actually say that these people, that people get training, that people get it, that you create a culture in which there's this transparency and open sea and mentorship to do the job you are doing, we would be better off. And then as that system kind of progresses. In my mind, there's a much bigger problem which is the culture of academic science is a little bit broken. I mean lots of graduate students are depressed. And lots of them are under mentors who abuse them or take away credit on their papers or just are neglectful. So I think that that's a bigger thing. I think sometimes if you solve the systemic problems for all people, you'll help women a lot too. And women have an own specific set of issues because there's also this sexism that goes with it. But that problem that you describe happens to plenty of men as well. It's somebody who for whatever reason doesn't like the cut of your jib and is going to make you feel bad about yourself or just doesn't have their head in the right place. So I think that that is a bigger thing. I mean another specific thing, sorry I can keep going, things like ad boards or misconduct investigations. That's another place where there's a black hole that people go into. Is like, and I've seen this with a lot of students where again, and you're reading a lot about the sort of sexual harassment on college campuses problem where it goes all wrong. Why are your professors running a legal case when they have no capacity? Why do we put people on committees that they have no competency for? I mean, and one place where women get overloaded is in committees because you always need a woman on a committee. But like also on those committees, those committees are just poorly structured. And if you, one more thing, if you look at the CV of a professor, their CVs do not make sense. They're on like 14 companies. They run a research lab. They teach five classes. They're on 25 committees. I mean, we're all exhausted because our CVs don't make sense and don't fit into the day of one person, let alone six people. Well, those people are on committees that run these kinds of things like thinking about quality of life. They have no quality of life themselves. What are they doing thinking about quality of life? We need to empower administrators who are extraordinary, who are altruistic enablers who make sure good things happen instead of putting one more famous person on a committee to think about the quality of life. So that's a structural problem that we need to think about. And I'll just add one thing to that. I mean, forums like this, having talks, as was mentioned by one of the earlier participants who asked a question, talking about some of these issues, whether it's the get me a coffee syndrome or kind of transitioning from student to peer, how to navigate that, what your supervisor should be at, like what's reasonable for your supervisor to ask you to do. I mean, to Pardis's point, when I was a grad student, I remember thinking, I mean, I really enjoyed my PhD advisors, but just kind of looking around, I remember thinking, when you're a grad student, your advisor is one of the most important people in your life, maybe the most important person. And I never want to forget that when I'm an advisor because you have the power to make somebody's life miserable or much more enjoyable. And you're also really influencing what they can then do beyond grad school. So I think really, and that's not just an issue for women. That actually got me right here. I'm thinking about my grad students, I'm like am I taking care of them? That's actually true, it's big responsibility. You know, it's not just, as Pardis mentioned, I think that's more for everybody, the whole system. I think those are conversations we need to be having. And I think sometimes just having a conversation about these issues, you know, articles in the press and conversations like this, it just, you know, then when you see it happen, you think, oh yeah, you know, maybe I shouldn't be asking that person to get me a coffee or you know, whatever it is you're, you know. And so I think that's a really important sort of action that universities can take. These are really two issues I have that I simply, they're not really questions, but I'd like your reaction to them. Comments. One is there's been a lot of both, you know, public media coverage and some research studies on the problem of unconscious bias. You know, the study at Yale where they sent out identical resumes with male and female and URM typical names and got the results that we all know about. The article in New York Times by a wonderful creative writing professor at Michigan who started in life as I think the first undergraduate get a BA in physics, undergraduate woman get a BA in physics at Yale. And the bias that persists in the Yale physics department unnoticed even by the then female head of that department, these kinds of things. So problem of course with unconscious bias is it's unconscious, which makes it difficult to fix. And I'm wondering if you have particular strategies and or thoughts for rendering the unconscious conscious and therefore addressable by explicit reaction, explicit action. And in my mind and maybe only there, the sort of next thing that I've been thinking about is connected to that which is there's an enormous amount of writing now and incredibly depressed graduate student in post doc blogs about the academic bottleneck, the fact that we're drastically overproducing quote unquote graduate students in the sciences as people in the humanities are used to this horrible overproduction of PhDs for whom there are no jobs and it's now being explicitly discussed in the sciences even though it's been a problem for a lot longer there. And that creates stresses that often play out in gender and race identifiable ways. And I wonder if again, if you've sort of as heads of labs, et cetera have addressed that in your own thinking. Yeah, well I could start. So yeah, I mean I think this unconscious bias question is an important one. And I think one of the ways it manifests itself is actually in women's self perception, the perception of themselves and their level of confidence, right? And that was, I mean that's something that a number of people writing on the topic have highlighted and I think it rings true. Because as was mentioned, I think if you're sort of getting a reaction from the outside world and it's not really explicit, it's not talked about, then you might internalize it and that can lead to less confidence and how you're presenting your ideas and so forth. So I think that's something that the more it's talked about, I think the better and we can recognize it in ourselves and our students support our students and it's something that you can work through. I think again, what I tell my students is really focus on the content, focus on what you're most interested in. What do you want, don't worry about what people are thinking of you, what do you want them to know? Like what are you most interested in? And kind of that's as a way to deal with some of these questions around that people have talked about the imposter syndrome and am I really worthy of this position? Do I deserve to be here? So I think that's important. And then I think the other thing that I guess touches on what you mentioned is this idea that, and this actually I think came up in the New York Times article you were referring to where this Yale professor was talking about kind of going through school and not doing so well and physics exams and so forth and eventually succeeding. As a professor, and I think that's something I can relate to is this idea, she attributed that to kind of trying to think about the problems that she was being given in the way that her male colleagues were thinking about them. When she kind of let go of that and decided to start solving the problems using her own method and her own thinking, then suddenly it all made sense and she really progressed. And that's something I can relate to personally. I think there were times kind of growing up where I thought, oh, I'm not thinking about things in the right way. I had this one math class, I came home and I told my mom I can't do it and she was like, what are you talking about? You can do it. So we went in, we met with the professor and then it became, or with the teacher and it became clear afterwards that the problem was that I wasn't thinking about things in my way, I was thinking about things the way the teacher was describing them and that didn't make sense to me. So I thought, well, I have to think about things like that, but it wasn't the case. So when I started to think about things in my own way, then it all made sense and I was able to progress. So I think that's something that, again, if we can highlight that, then more women and students in general I think will sort of feel more comfortable taking their own paths and sort of building up their own confidence and I think, by the way, and that's a kind of getting off topic, but this idea of really, you know, this idea of people thinking in different ways is one of the reasons why you see increased performance in diverse research groups and that's something I've observed firsthand in my own group. Okay, then I'll just, I'll go to the second then you can do the second. So for the first question about unconscious bias, I mean, I adore Mazurine Banerjee, I just think she's the coolest. She's actually was my mentor for a little while and what's awesome about her is not only she's just brilliant and insightful, but she's very open and she had said often that when she took the test herself she kind of was failed and was like sort of shocked by that and I think that the truth of the matter is that a lot of people, I mean, everyone has unconscious bias. Women are obviously very subject to that and often you see that women are, women on women kind of, sexism is really problematic and we see that all the time too. But even in that, in the case of Mazurine I know that it's just well-meaning people who have ever kind of caught off guard to realize that they were participating, this would be horrified, but don't realize these things have kind of gotten into their unconscious and I think that that speaks to the point that Jessica made earlier about the more we make this transparent the more we move the needle forward because more people can catch themselves and be like do you realize what you're doing or do you realize how that sounds or just checking people and it also just makes a difference about the thing is it's like basically there's a lag that happens, we are moving forward, we have moved forward, it isn't that we haven't, it just takes a while and unconscious is the thing that takes the longest to kind of clear up, right? But if we behave well our children will see something different and then maybe they will then just be different where we're not quite all there yet. So I'm hoping that it's a couple of generations we'll move forward a little bit. But I remember when I started having the most trouble where I was really, it was like said late in my career probably my 30s where I was like the world is not just and things are bad and I started recognizing all these things and there's a part of me that became a little bit of like a radical and I wanted to go out and just do this, I wanted to write a book about all the problems that happened and something I really wanted to do and in the end I realized that actually if I do that then I haven't really made a difference because I'm yet another woman who dropped out of a scientific track to go do something that wasn't scientific and so ultimately I ended up staying with it and I decided to be just the change yourself, right? And that fundamentally if we just stick with it and we show then the community changes and the culture changes and there's more women at the high levels and naturally even if we don't become advocates it just is different because we think differently. I mean my lab, I take them all to Florida every year and we do a ridiculous retreat. We have holiday cards, we create a different environment that is a clown show in some ways but it's an environment that probably would not have happened in the 70s. I don't think that my professors at Oxford were saying like everybody we're going to type in the goon but I just think differently and if more women go to the top then everybody, then the cultures around you think differently. To the second question that you have about the graduate student situation I think the graduate students have a lot of it's a hard thing being a graduate student worrying about your long term trajectory in my mind is the least of it, right? The worst of it is just is this environment nurturing and nurturing for you to really do something exceptional in science and to innovate something new and to not get lost on the path going through this ambiguity, right? There is, I mean I'm very kind of watching for my graduate students to achieve this thing which is an extraordinary complicated thing which is taking something that's very all over the place and then creating a unit of information into the world. That training to me when you do that thing when you actually take all of this noise and turn it into a beautiful signal or all this chaos and create something that's a book is an exceptional piece of training. I wish everybody had. I wish my president had. I wish my senators had. I wish people in industry had. I think that a PhD is an amazing degree to have. I had an MD, I had a PhD and I'd say yeah the MD feels like more work and obviously that track and the grades you have to get are really hard but it's very prescriptive. You just come to school and you do the assignment and you get through. Whereas a PhD is you have to take an ownership to it. So I think it's an exceptional training and I think we should just think differently about that problem. It's not like oh but why are we getting all these PhDs if there's no professorships? Professorships not that great of a gig. I've done it and frankly you may see me in industry soon and I think that we should just encourage more of our PhDs to take that training and build companies and go into policy and transform things. I wish more people had PhDs and that we took that and use that to change the world. Okay and I will just say for the undergraduates here there's also a senior thesis or any piece of work where you get it together. That's great. Yeah and I mean I was actually that was exactly my answer to your second question. I mean just to add a slight bit to it. Yeah I mean I think given the problems that governments face, industry faces, having the ability to think analytically, to create signal from noise, kind of to research something. Look into a problem in depth and come up with your own conclusions I think is useful beyond the university and I don't know how to get that message out there. Maybe it's something between, maybe it's both recognizing ourselves what the PhD is giving students and sort of what general skills that sort of gives them to be leaders in industry, in government, in academia. Sort of making that more explicit or maybe it's kind of more outreach. Working more closely with government and industry at earlier stages, introducing our students to, I think there are lots of ways we could move that situation forward. I think I will try to wrap this up by just saying that both of you are in areas of science where you really are trying to address big problems of the world, the biggest and it really helps to relate women in science to that goal and if nothing else I think talking about women in science reminds us what the big goals should be, why we're all in this business to start with and the system is broken in many ways as the parent of a postdoc for men or women it's, there's a lot that needs to be better. Because those big problems are there and we need a system that really encourages people to address them and not get so depressed along the way or drop out. So often the case, if you think about making the system better for everybody and women who benefit too, but not only. Thank you for coming, I really appreciate your time and especially our panelists time. Let's thank them. Thank you.