Scientiae topics seem to be homing in on my weaknesses lately! 'A voice in the crowd' is a theme with a lot of associations for me, not all of them positive.
I love to talk. LOVE to talk. Talk when I'm nervous (listen to me, don't look at me), talk when I'm excited, or tired, or bored. Talk to my cat, my plants, my experiments, my car and my fountain pen. Talk wildly back to the radio or TV. Living on my own, many of these behaviours are reasonably private, although sometimes in the lab I get some funny looks. But I was always in trouble as a child for being noisy, for talking too much, for being irritating. Even now when the family gets together it's apparently OK to tell me to just shut up. This at least partly explains why
not being heard is one of my particular sensitive points, my triggers. When I am criticised at (or after) departmental meetings for always wanting to make a point, for always having an opinion or something to say, for talking too much, I cringe inside and... do a good imitation of a shrill harridan, I expect, as I dig myself deeper into a 'gossiping/nagging female' corner [er... excuse the metaphors). It's OK apparently for colleagues (particularly male colleagues) to tell me to be quiet, to demand that they be allowed to speak without interruption but to interrupt me. It's NOT OK to be passionate, enthusiastic, verbal... to be in other words myself.
I belong to an international working group, a group of scientists with a common interest in a rather marginal, mathematical aspect of my field. We've been meeting 1-3 times a year in different for eight years now, in different European locations, for a mixture of presentations, discussion and excursions 'in the nature'. I now count many of the members as my friends, and we've achieved some quite impressive scientific progress. I love this group - they've supported me and enabled me to pursue my own interests even when that might not be the most "politically smart" thing to do, they've critiqued and requested and poked and prodded me and WierdBugMan into working in areas we probably wouldn't have considered without them, and they've been a cause of shopping in many European countries. Shopping? Yes... because this group has one very unusual property. It is led by a female professor and it is about two-thirds female. At all levels - from the senior, established profs to the post-docs and graduate students.
Discussion in this group has a very different shape and feel to discussion in other contexts such as my department meetings (a good comparison, since we meet formally
en masse 3-5 times a year and I've been here just over ten years, so a similar period of time). No one tells me to 'shut up'. It's wonderful. I feel much less need to talk! Debate has a fluid feel - sounds of agreement and query and confusion infuse and direct a speaker's statement, voices overlap and one sentence or idea might be spoken by two or three different voices. We look at each other. We wave our hands around, we draw scribbly pictures, we use emotive language. We draw quieter members into the conversation. We split into groups and reform. Some of the male members complain that it sounds like a hen house, that they feel oppressed by the way that no-one stops for them to speak, by the lack of a formal chair (we usually just have a 'recorder' who summarises and sometimes steps in to direct attention if we have some particular decisions to make or topics to cover), by the lack of formal recognition of hierarchy or of the relative status of the speaker (there are still European universities where, after a seminar, first the professors ask questions, then the other faculty, then the post-docs...).
I am sure that there are many groups of scientists and others who work together like this. But I hypothesise that it is the preponderance of females that increased the odds of this group having this particular dynamic, the combination of challenge and support, of lifting up and praising, of weaving ideas and voices into a common tapestry, richer and stronger for the many threads. Why? Well... because I've known groups where I've felt like this before. Where I've felt that we are on an exciting journey together, not constantly comparing and jostling for a limited number of places at the front. At my AncientInternationallyRenownedUniversity in England, I lived in a women's college, and sometimes in late night conversation I had this sense of taking flight as part of a company. I felt heard, and valued, and needed to have my say less urgently. The group where I did my PhD was predominantly female (though with a more usual bias: mainly female graduate students, post-docs slightly more men, PIs all male), and the supergroup we were part of was mostly male - again, moving between the two, there was a different feel to the conversation. The female-majority context felt a bit safer (less judgemental, less competitive) and the discussion was more fluid, not made up of statements and challenges delivered in a strict order but of speculation and exploration, with overlapping voices and use of sounds, gestures and expressions to support (or disagree with!) the direction of the discussion.
In recent years, I've begun to suffer from laryngitis. In one way this is a highly disempowering experience - I can't do my job (almost every aspect of academia turns out to require talking of some sort or physical stamina, which laryngitis steals away along with my ability to make vocal noise). I am also bereft of my protective smokescreen of words, and have to fairly passively accept the generally well-intentioned humorous delight of my friends and colleagues in my predicament. WierdBugMan is generally the kindest of people, very considerate, but a few years ago we both had to comment on student presentations, and I had lost my voice. I wrote my comments, and passed them to WierdBugMan to read out - he could not resist the urge to pretend not to be able to read my writing, to the hilarity of the assembled students... On the other hand, it can be empowering. I am forced to take time off, and to spend time with myself. Working with students one to one, I sometimes do a better job of teaching when I can't speak - I write comments and draw sketches, but they end up doing all the talking, and creating for themselves the words to answer their questions - it's informal, it's relaxed, we laugh, I wave my hands around, the student seems to feel liberated by my present, attentive silence.
The phrase "A voice in the crowd" touched off old anxieties about being annoying, about being ignored, about being belittled and told to shut up, and reminded me that they are still present in my current work place (see last post about concerns about meeting outcomes actually being followed up). That having many ideas and enthusiasms, and wanting to share them and bounce them off other people, is actually seen as a flaw by some - that speaking up in the crowd singles me out for criticism. And that having NO voice is not as simple as being invisible but can involve being defenseless and all too visible. But on the other hand it has made me recall the joys of being a voice in a crowd where the energy of exploring ideas and sharing in their development is emotionally satisfying and scientifically productive, and reminded me of the pleasures of helping my students develop their own voices by resting mine. Above all, it makes me think about how the composition of the crowd affects how I speak, how I feel about speaking, how I feel when and after speaking, and how I am heard - how a crowd can be a disorientating echo chamber or fellow artists bringing a glorious chorus to life (Handel, in the best of cases).
I need to learn to play my instrument with more subtlety, and to recognise, accept and use my emotional responses wisely - and to remember that sometimes it's good to rest my voice voluntarially rather than only when laryngial spasms force me to shut up!
A contribution to the Scientiae carnival for July hosted by PodBlack Cat - I can't add links at present, blogger's being daft, but will amend accordingly.
