Episode 159: Science Evangelist
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…women don’t always feel welcome in the scientific community – some perhaps less than others.
“We all love science, and this construction of race is just false. If we could just focus on the fact we all love science, we’re all geeking out about the amazing things that atoms do, it would be fantastic.”
But this scientist found her niche and she says other women can too…
“Go and find environments where you feel valued. There’s no honor in fighting fights where you feel like you’re always going to be losing. There are plenty of other more conducive places to getting work done.”
Coming up on The Broad Experience.
Before I introduce my guest, I want you to hear a story. Before the pandemic she would travel a lot for work. And one day she was in an airport bathroom on the east coast…those bathrooms where the faucets come on automatically. She went to wash her hands…
“…and the faucet wouldn’t work. I said OK, no problem, so I went to the one nearby, that didn’t work. I went to another one, that didn’t work. And this woman came in – I’m African-American, this woman came in, she had a lighter complexion, she put her hand under the faucet and it worked immediately. I said aha! I’m a scientist so I said let me go back over to this faucet because it does work - so I outstretched my hand so the lighter part of my hand, my palm, was in front of the photo sensor. Boom, there goes the water. So when this water faucet was made there was an assumption made in its process – it was designed, it was tested, on people with lighter skin.”
This is Ainissa Ramirez.
“I’m a scientist, a science writer, and the author of the book The Alchemy of Us.”
When Ainissa was studying science and engineering at top universities like Brown and Stanford there weren’t many people like her. We know the same goes for many areas of science and technology today. So perhaps it’s not surprising that whoever designed these faucets thought about themselves in the design and testing phases.
I’d always assumed those faucets were operated by motion sensors. She says some are, but others work with a light sensor…
“There’s a light coming out, and it’s going to hit a surface, and bounce back to a sensor, and when it gets enough light it’ll say oh, somebody’s there, let me turn that on. So if someone has light skin that light will bounce off their skin and go to the detector. But darker skin, brown skin absorbs more light so that detector doesn’t register light being bounced back, so it doesn’t think anybody is in front of it, so it doesn’t turn on.”
These days, Ainissa explains how things work for a living. She calls herself a science communicator – even a science evangelist. She wants more people of all backgrounds to enjoy science and pursue it as career.
When she was an undergraduate she thought she might become an electrical engineer like her dad. But those courses didn’t really speak to her. She had to do this prerequisite course called ‘materials science’ – she’d never heard of it, assumed it would be really boring. But that professor said something that blew her away.
“What he said was, everything around us has to do with the interaction of atoms, and these little things you cannot see, that are hard to see even with microscope, are in charge of everything in our world. And if you can understand how they do what they do you can get them to do new things and make new materials. And this is the lens I’ve now adopted to understand the world.”
She went on to get a doctorate at Stanford, and became a materials scientist.
Her first job was at the famous Bell Labs in New Jersey, and then she taught at Yale.
Now, she’s out on her own. We’ll talk more about that decision to change direction – and her new book in a bit.
But first, I wanted her to go back in time.
“I’ve loved science since I was very, very young, so I was a geek for most of my life. I was one of those little girls who was very curious, always asking lots of questions, always taking things apart, not always putting things back together the exact same way.”
She had a loving family who always supported her interests. In fact when I opened her book I noticed it was dedicated to two women, her mother and grandmother. I wanted to know more about them.
“Well my grandmother was my superhero. Everybody deserves a superhero. And my grandmother was definitely mine. She was amazing…and my mom…she’s always been my number one fan…she believed in the book way more, and way more often than I did.”
Both women sacrificed a lot before Ainissa was even born. Ainissa’s grandmother immigrated from the Caribbean to the UK in the years after the Second World War, then from there to the US…with Ainissa’s mother in tow. Throughout her life she supported family members back home in Antigua – she sent food home, she sponsored people for green cards. She worked a lot – as a nurse’s aide and a cleaner of fancy houses, among other things. She had a lot of responsibilities.
“She was kind of on the hard side, she was a little gruff…but she always warmed up when I interacted with her. I was very fortunate. Sometimes I’d be working on science projects, and there was one science project where I had to identify leaves and I needed to go to Central Park, and she took me. She was very busy, but she was giving me the message that education is very, very important.”
Ainissa was raised in New Jersey and she went to Catholic schools. She got more and more obsessed with science and she credits her grandmother with being part of the reason she’s so good at communicating what she knows, making it accessible in her talks and lectures.
“I grew up in a working-class neighborhood and wanted to explain science to people around me, particularly my grandmother, and how do you do this in a way that it resonates…I wanted to make sure my grandmother understood what I was learning in school. I’m so excited, how do I explain this to her even if it’s a topic she may not be familiar with? So I’d compare things to things that were around her, or I’d make stories up to explain the things and she would get it, oh, OK, I get it…and I think that muscle which was exercised very early at 7, 8, 9 years old and also that perspective that science is for everyone…is something that was nurtured at a very, very early age.
So later on when I was a professor I knew I loved teaching, and my teaching scores were always off the chart because I took the approach that I am here to get you where I think you should be so, I’m gonna meet you where you are and explain it as a story, demonstration or what have you. And I think the reason why I make science approachable is the lessons I learned very, very young when I was trying to explain science to my grandmother.”
Throughout her school years Ainissa excelled – her family saw it, her teachers saw it…they recognized the budding scientist and they were thrilled when she headed off to Brown University in Rhode Island…she was on her way.
“And when I got to Brown the brakes are pumped.”
The subject she’d always loved…it was suddenly being taught in this very formal way – instead of being about the wonder of discovery…it was all about weeding people out…
“In fact I remember one class when a professor said this and he almost said this with pride, he said look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here next semester. And he was right. Next semester another professor said the same thing, and he was right…they would cut us in half every semester for at least four semesters…and this didn’t seem right to me. Everyone here loved science, this was a rare breed, and you’re taking the posture that we need to cut the numbers in half every time we had this huge array of talent.”
She says she almost fell through the cracks…she had been the best at her high school but now…she was surrounded by the best from everywhere, a lot of people from private schools…she was floundering. And she hated the way her beloved subject was being taught…
“It shouldn’t be that way. We need a world where people know about science and how to make decisions for themselves, that’s why we’re in this problem today with this anti science world because we’ve set up this kind of dynamic. So I was very heartbroken by the process of learning science in my undergraduate years, but fortunately I found a way to turn that around.”
AM-T: “Science isn’t known as an area that’s terribly friendly to women and particularly to women of color, I’m really curious…your experience both in the corporate world in academia…has that been borne out to you, have you had a lot of eye-rolling experiences?”
“Well, I mean it’s definitely difficult. When I was in graduate school, I can’t say I was the first, but I was the first African-American woman to get a PhD in materials science when I was at Stanford…so when you’re this unusual body they don’t really have high expectations for you. And I’ve witnessed it not only myself but with my colleagues, they’d treat us a certain way, where you don’t really belong here. It was said or you just got that impression, and so that’s something I had to deal with. And the thing that is so sad about it is we all love science, and this construction of race is just false, if we could just focus on the fact we all love science, we’re all geeking out about the amazing things that atoms do, it would be fantastic. But science is done in the context of us being humans so there’s this other layer that’s always kind of in the background murking things up a little bit.”
Still, through her academic career she had mentors who got her through, and encouraged her to stay the course – a German-born professor at Brown who coached her in chemistry…
“Mrs Morse who, I’m writing an essay about her too, she had a thick German accent, she was very stern, but when she smiled she lit up and she saved me…because if I failed Chemistry 21 I never would have become an engineer or a scientist.”
An African-American professor at Stanford…then, as a newly minted PhD …she landed a job at Bell Labs…
“When I got to Bell Labs it was like a moment of relief, phew, thank goodness, my boss’s boss’s boss Jim Mitchell was an African-American man, there were so many more women and black scientists and African-American scientists, and scientists of all hues there that I didn’t have to do the proof of principle, ‘I should be here,’ because there were so many here, and they were all excellent, members of the national academies, presidents of their societies. I was very new and unaccomplished compared to them, so it was great – I was like, of course I belong here, this is my tribe. When I went back into academia I went back into an environment which was male, pale, I went to Yale, so all that was lost. But at least I remembered…my Bell Labs memories kept me going when I was there.”
Ainissa taught mechanical engineering at Yale. As she said, the environment there was not as comfortable. Of her incoming cohort of younger professors she was the only Black professor…and then, when she and her colleagues came up for tenure years later…none of them got it. That would have been the opportunity for a permanent professorship – a job for life.
And when she found out, she thought, OK – this is a time to decide what to do next. Stay in academia, or try something new?
While she was at Yale her absolute favorite part of her time there was teaching something called Science Saturdays…a program for kids. She’d teach on Saturdays two months out of the year…
“I felt so alive during those two months. And then after the preparations and after the lectures were over my energy would get back to some baseline. And I did Science Saturdays for about 7 years and I’d just notice that October and April I was on fire, and afterwards I wasn’t.”
She thought about it, and she realized…this is what she loved. Communicating with young people, making them as curious and excited about science as she’d been as a kid.
“Trying something new was absolutely scary, but I told myself let’s try something new, if it doesn’t work out let’s go get a job. And I haven’t had to make that decision so it’s been good.”
In a minute we’re going to hear a few stories from Ainissa book, The Alchemy of Us – how Humans and Matter Transformed One Another…beginning with two areas I think a lot of us have a conflicted relationship with – time and sleep.
One of the best parts of Ainissa’s book for me was how she made me understand the way human beings used to relate to time. Because let’s face it – today, people – especially working women, dare I say, have a pretty stressful relationship with time.
But as Ainissa says, clocks are a relatively recent invention. We used to tell time by the position of the sun.
“We were more connected to nature and to our own bodies…my stomach growled, I knew it was time to go to lunch, now, when it ‘s noon or 11.30 we just go to lunch whether we’re hungry or not. So time dictates our lives more than it did with our ancestors – in fact so much so that it changed the way we sleep. Our ancestors before the industrial revolution used to sleep differently, they’d sleep in two intervals. They’d go to bed at nine, sleep for about three and a half hours, at most, wake up on purpose for about an hour or so, do things around the house, clean, read, do a puzzle, then go to bed for another three and a half hours.”
She says you can find mentions of this in literature, including Dickens and the Brontes…this so-called ‘first sleep’…
“But now we have a more consolidated version of sleep and the reason why is it was changed by two inventions – the clock and the light bulb. The lightbulb allowed us to go to bed later, so one of those segments of sleep was shortened, and the clock forced us to wake up earlier ‘cause we had to go to work or prepare people to go to school, things like that. So those two segments of sleep became consolidated and that’s what our sleep looks like today.
AM-T: “That’s so interesting…and I think another thing for my audience is…a lot of women just don’t feel they get enough sleep because time is closing in on them at both ends, kind of thing…”
“Well absolutely. We have a very strange relationship with sleep because we think of sleep as a form of weakness, if you take a nap it’s like, what’s wrong with that person. Well, I’m tired, that’s what’s wrong with me, and I should go to sleep, but we don’t do that, we’ll caffeinate or we’ll go to the gym to bolster ourselves. But a lot of other countries, if they’re tired, they go to sleep. Another thing I talk about in the Alchemy of Us is a lot of us suffer from sleep ailments, insomnia is off the charts and there are people who are willing to sell us all sorts of pillows and mattresses…stuff like that. It ends up that the way we sleep may not be ideal for our health, we used to sleep in 2 segments and people would wake on purpose in the middle of the night, some forms of insomnia might be hearkening back to our old form of segmented sleep. So when our ancestors woke up in the middle of the night they didn’t think they had a problem…this was just the natural way to sleep. So we need a better relationship to sleep, we need to have more of it, we need to see it not as a form of weakness if we actually do it, and if we wake in the middle of the night maybe this is part of our natural rhythm of sleeping.”
AM-T: “And you wrote about this, on this same topic of time, you wrote about this female entrepreneur from the 19th century who I’d never heard of because Ruth Belville, right?”
“Right, she’s the first person you meet when you open up the book The Alchemy of Us. And Ruth Belville had this unusual position. She worked in the 19th century and she sold time. She would wake up early, in her home 30 miles outside of London, make her way to London, go to Greenwich, and walk up a very steep hill to the Royal Observatory where the precise time was.
She would be carrying with her a watch she’d nicknamed Arnold, she’d give Arnold the watch to the attendant, the attendant would look at her watch and compare it to the scientific clock, give her a certificate noting the difference…and then she’d make her way back to London and she’d give the precise time to people who needed to know it. Lots of people had clocks and the clocks were great but sometimes they slipped and they didn’t know the exact time, so she would come once a week and say OK, here is the precise time, and people would re-set their clocks. So they could have it – lawyers, banks, train stations needed to know the precise time, so that was her business.”
Ruth Belville isn’t the only woman I’d never heard of who I read about in Ainissa’s book. Another one is called Caroline Hunter.
“Caroline Hunter is an American hero that most people don’t know about. Caroline Hunter was an African-American woman, who started a position as a chemist at Polaroid in the 1970s…and Polaroid was a much beloved company like Apple when Steve Jobs was still around. Everyone loved Polaroid, they were so excited to be there. And Polaroid made this fantastic technology that everyone wanted, which was a camera that generated a picture right away, an instant camera. Caroline worked in this technology. One day she’s going to lunch with her friend Ken Williams who worked in the art department. And they see on the bulletin board in his office a mock-up of an identification card – and it says department of the Mines, Republic of South Africa.”
They thought, what does Polaroid have to do with South Africa? American companies weren’t supposed to be doing business with South Africa because of its apartheid system, which kept the races apart and kept Black South Africans down.
“So they investigated and they found that all black South Africans had to carry with them a passbook. A passbook controlled and monitored where they could go because it told officials where they lived and where they could not visit. At the heart of the passbook was a picture generated by Polaroid.
Caroline and Ken didn’t think this was right…and so they went to their management to talk about this and their response was fairly lukewarm. Caroline and Ken – this is the 70s – they graduated into activists, they started the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement to get Polaroid to stop selling its camera film and camera system to South Africa, to stop buttressing this oppressive regime.”
It took seven years, Polaroid eventually did stop selling to South Africa, but Caroline and Ken were fired early on.
And staying on the topic of photography, Ainissa says in the 1960s Black families were getting fed up with the quality of their kids’ school photographs…
“One of the most precious memories you have as a child is the school photo – and African- American mothers were looking at the photo of their children and saying something’s not right. Here we have both black and white kids, and black kids are not turning out well in the film. It end up that the film had a bias – it was better designed for lighter colored skin. And it wasn’t until schools were integrated, which was in the 1950s, where this became noticeable. Before when white kids were altogether the film looked fine for them, and when black kids were together it looked fine for them, because they’d do things with lighting and things like that, but when kids were together both black and white, white kids turned out well and black kids did not.”
Kodak was the main producer of color film and it finally did change the formulation of its film - but not because of Black parents. It also got complaints from two business groups – chocolate makers, and furniture makers. Each of those manufacturers of brown things felt their products weren’t coming out well in their print ads – the delectable nature of a chocolate bar of the sheen of a wooden table just weren’t coming across in photos.
So Kodak came up with a new formulation in the late 70s.
And this story brings us back to the beginning – that story of the faucet in the bathroom that didn’t turn on for darker skin.
Ainissa tells these stories because she lives this stuff herself. But also because she’s a scientist who’s passionate about helping the rest of us understand how things work…and she wants to take science out of the academy and get kids and young adults excited about it. So some of them can turn science into their work. So there’ll be more Ainissas in the future.
AM-T: “Thank you so much for doing this. Is there anything else you’d like to say about…say there are some young, budding, or female scientists who area already into their careers, is there anything you’d like to convey before we go?”
“Well I would say that there are so many voices that are going to say that your voice is not important, and that voice may even sound like the one in your head. But your voice is precious, and you should protect it, and you should do everything in your power to make sure it gets heard. Go and find environments where you feel valued. There’s no honor in fighting fights where you feel like you’re always going to be losing. There are plenty of other more conducive places to getting work done. And the last thing I’d say is make sure you’re doing your work, whatever you feel you’re specially tailored to do, designed to do…there are so many things that tell you, you should be doing this, you should be doing that…but you should pause and listen to that inner small voice and figure out what you were designed to do that you surpass everyone else. Everyone gets one. So be brave enough to find it and I can assure you that when you do, you’re gonna be so happy when you pursue it.”
Ainissa Ramirez is the author of the book The Alchemy of Us.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You’ll find links to some of Ainissa’s work under this episode at The Broad Experience dot com.
You can find me in all the usual places – on the website, on Twitter…or on the Facebook page.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.