The Arbornaut, page 18
6
HITTING THE GLASS CANOPY
How Strangler Figs and Tall Poppies Taught Me to Survive as a Woman in Science
I HAVE TWO BITS OF WISDOM to share with every young girl:
Don’t ever hesitate to be smart and strong.
Always nurture and support other women.
I was part of an emerging generation of women seeking equality, but afraid to admit we were leaving work for our child’s doctor appointment and never daring to say no when asked to make coffee at a faculty meeting. I used to believe that to succeed meant rushing home after teaching to do laundry, cook dinner, and help with homework, yet many male colleagues stayed late at work without guilt, headed to the pub with their old-boy network, or played golf to garner a promotion. My female peers and I may have been trailblazers in field biology, but we bruised ourselves on a glass ceiling every time we reached beyond what was expected, so much so that I came to anticipate—and even worse, tolerate—the bruises. As my colleagues reminded me, the term “bruises” was probably too gentle—they were actually major cuts. Although it was a breakthrough for some of us women in science to shatter that “glass canopy,” we bled out from those gashes inflicted by the broken glass, and our gender was trained to downplay the pain. Dredging up these bad memories of being a lone female tiptoeing through a male-dominated career path is still painful, but I share them in the hope that my mishaps will help readers of both genders become more informed than I was and avoid future workplace inequities.
I was never a girl who jumped into a puddle and laughed if I splashed someone; I was the one who hid behind a tree trunk when seeing a gang of boys walking home from high school. In fifth grade, the principal called me over the intercom one day in a big, booming voice. Still excruciatingly shy, I timidly raised a hand so the teacher could see. Both teacher and principal expressed great relief that I was sitting in class, devotedly finishing a math exercise. A deranged man had called my mom, claiming he had me tied up in the back seat of his car. She’d immediately hung up in tears and called the school. There I was, quietly doing division and multiplication. I had recently been featured in the local newspaper for composing a symphony called Hoffman Air, named for the school and performed by its orchestra. Although I loved nature, music was another passion. From my ordinary weekly piano lessons, I somehow conjured a tune in my head that I managed to translate into a musical score for the entire school orchestra. Even though I was too shy to ever perform in a piano recital, I learned how to write music, which reminded me of birdsong. It was a thrilling accomplishment for the class nature lover, but publicity obviously had its drawbacks. Mom came to school and hugged me—deliriously happy I had not been kidnapped. The local police asked me to carry a notebook for the next few weeks and record anything suspicious. That was crime-solving in the 1960s—no cell phone, text messages, photos on Facebook, or public lists of child molesters that could easily be checked, just a small notebook and pencil in a girl’s lunch box.
Fortunately, the threat never materialized. But it sure made Mom anxious, and it gave me the absolute creeps. I almost became afraid of my own shadow and retreated into the safe cocoon of my bedroom laboratory to gaze at dried flowers. Mom’s small-town wisdom considered it best to have your name in the news at birth and at death but never in between. During my childhood, the notions of modesty and small-town values were blindly mixed in with good old-fashioned gender bias, meaning that women were reminded not to brag, shout, or exclaim about their accomplishments. Mom gave me the only advice she ever knew, and it came back to haunt me several times as a grown-up. In contrast, as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich brilliantly said, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
Although I still get flashbacks about the childhood kidnapping episode, I could not stay surrounded forever by the innocence of dried collections and bird eggs. Looking back, I only wish I had become street-smart at a younger age. Later in life, conducting fieldwork in the Australian jungles, I learned to admire the fig trees that dominated many tropical forest canopies and dispersed their luscious fruits throughout the entire forest. Numbering over eight hundred species, the genus Ficus is part of the family Moraceae, and serves as the base of many tropical food chains. In addition to providing food and shelter to thousands (maybe millions?) of species, figs offer spiritual sanctuary for several billion people in India, Africa, and Asia. One of the best examples is the Bo tree (Ficus religiosa), native to India and Southeast Asia, thought to be the canopy under which Buddha received enlightenment. If I am ever reincarnated as a plant, I want to become a fig because they are not only strategic and successful, but also altruistic, feeding their fruits to an entire ecosystem. Of those eight hundred fig species, however, a few exhibit adult behaviors that are less benevolent. In Australia, one of those more insidious figs, and one I frequently climbed, was Watkins’ fig (Ficus watkinsiana), a member of the subgenus called Urostigma that includes strangler figs, or banyans. They have evolved the most extraordinary survival strategy of any tropical trees, bar none.
Stranglers begin life at the top and then grow down, similar to a vine in structure but then hardening as a successful tree, having already secured a space in the sunlight. Figbirds eat strangler fruits, then excrete the seeds on a branch, generally high in the canopy. With easy access to abundant light and water at that height, they germinate rapidly, faster than any counterpart seedlings on the dark forest floor struggling to grow upward into the overstory. Strangler cotyledons receive abundant sunlight, so the fast-growing seedling quickly extends aerial roots downward, reaching the soil. The fig is already actively photosynthesizing with its foliage strategically situated in the sunlight, offering a burst of energy so its roots can take in a generous share of water and nutrients, enabling rapid growth. In this unique top-down growth, stranglers encircle their host and often (but not always) suffocate them. This part of their life cycle is less admirable, and I would never advise women to strangle their competitors, but this initial strategy to secure a place in the sun before putting roots into the soil illustrates an admirable success story. And still, even the strangler’s deadly embrace has a silver lining. Research has shown that stranglers keep their host upright during storms, actually reducing treefall mortality. Figs can teach important lessons to women trying to overcome hurdles in the workplace—follow a ficulneus, or fig-like, strategy to be innovative, nurture others, tap wisely into resources, and rise above the rest.
My own personal growth resembled the life of a conventional tree seedling that germinates on the forest floor—I did not think about the importance of strategically seeking the essentials (light and water in the case of seedlings) to jump-start career advancement. I didn’t think about the absence of female mentors. Throughout high school and college, I was truly a wallflower and did not usually speak up. Over my eleven years in Australia, I experienced more sexual advances by male colleagues during fieldwork than can be counted on both hands (or at least that is all I am willing to acknowledge). It just seemed to be part of the landscape, in the absence of senior women to mentor young students like me and years before any of the #MeToo reporting structure. Fortunately, I got surprisingly good at wiggling out of such precarious propositions. Today, an astonishing majority of female scientists still report sexual harassment during fieldwork. From six hundred surveyed, the anthropologist Kate Clancy at the University of Illinois reported over 70 percent were victimized, sometimes thousands of miles away from their campuses that boasted strong harassment policies. Throughout a field biology career, I confronted a few detractors who may have deserved a strangler fig response from their female colleagues, in particular, several male bosses whose bullying seemed to be their nature. Like a frog placed in a pot as the water gradually heats up, I tolerated this behavior as part of the job. I really didn’t maximize available resources or strategize about how to succeed nearly as effectively as a strangler fig.
When I arrived back in America as a visiting professor, I felt pretty insecure. I saw myself as a farmer’s wife with two unruly sons, and naively accepted the salary offered without argument. It never occurred to me to negotiate, and as I later learned, women tend to be less effective than men in salary negotiations. Current studies show women end up with an average of 29 percent lower retirement income than men. Based on my starting salary, the boys were eligible for free lunch at school, which was both humbling and humiliating. I did not let them enroll in the program, for fear they would be targeted; after all, most of their classmates had prestigious professorial family pedigrees, not a rural outback heritage. So I faithfully made healthy lunches every day, which they often brought home untouched. When asked why, they admitted the other kids goaded them to talk nonstop during lunch, laughing at their kooky accents. But they soon lost those Australian accents and integrated well, except perhaps the rude shock of experiencing their first cold snow. Given the severity of western Massachusetts winters, our chilly rented apartment was a wake-up call to empathize with struggling families who weren’t so lucky. I had the good fortune to inherit a few gold coins from a great uncle, which paid our heating bills during the first year. Despite sparse furnishings, we had one infamous piece of furniture under the stairwell, called the “time-out chair.” When someone was naughty, he (or she) was relegated to that chair. The boys loved it when once (and only once!) I uttered a swear word and they assigned me to the time-out chair for thirty minutes.
As a visiting professor, I had many successes—grants, good teaching reviews, pioneering canopy discoveries made in temperate forests with my undergraduate students, lucrative graduate scholarships for all of them as a result, and great publicity for the college. Nonetheless, those previous eleven years in Australia had infected me with the notion that women were second-class citizens, which undermined all the self-worth I had built up over the years. What if the boys got sick and I missed teaching a lab? Could I juggle lesson plans with household chores? Could the children transition from their outback upbringing with its poisonous snakes and wildfires into an urban setting where different threats prevailed? I decided they both needed to get street-smart in a hurry so started by introducing them to the public playground with its sophisticated wooden play area of tunnels, swings, and slides. James got inside a wooden maze and started wailing because he had never before experienced such equipment. Both boys earned their peers’ respect soon enough, however, thanks to a knowledge of natural history. Eddie had a memorable first-grade birthday party in the college forest, where my biology students climbed into the treetops and candy magically rained down from above. James attended the college preschool and was dubbed a local hero when he alerted his teacher that the provost’s son had eaten deadly nightshade berries on the playground. I got a call from the day-care director asking if he was able to correctly identify plants. I answered, “Absolutely, yes,” and so they rushed the other child off to have his stomach pumped. Nightshade was immediately removed from the playground. On weekends, we enjoyed many hours of activities available for free in nature: birdwatching, counting spittle bugs, and carving forts in backyard bushes. What a change—no gum trees, no brown snakes, no blowflies, but lots of new wildlife such as birch and oaks, warblers, squirrels, and the roadside wildflowers of my childhood. Truly, it was a kids’ paradise to frolic in New England forests.
Despite the joys of motherhood, which included sharing lots of playtime with my young explorers, I felt vulnerable as a single parent with no tenure or other safety net. It was tough, but I was glad to be back in the science arena using knowledge gained from research half a world away, and relieved the boys were now in a place where both genders seemed to be respected more equally. I jumped out of bed each day relishing challenges that required brain cells, not just home economics, as was the case for a farmer’s wife. After the first semester, both teaching reviews by students and my publication rates were excellent, so the college renewed my visiting professor status. I gathered up a big dose of courage and shyly approached the dean of the faculty, explaining that I would love to renew the contract but could not survive on its current salary. He seemed aghast and admitted I had been severely underpaid, immediately doubling the amount. Oh joy! Now we could pay for heating, and our household budget exceeded the eligibility for free lunch!
The cultural transition from Australia to America was probably tougher on me than the boys. After suffering cruel rejection from that first job interview in Australia when the search committee claimed a farmer’s wife with toddlers couldn’t possibly qualify as a professor, I felt grateful that someone had thrown me a crumb. In my former part-time job for the EPA during my graduate year at Duke, I was happy to make the coffee for all the male engineers. On most field expeditions, I was invariably the organizer of food and logistics, having occupied a similar role on the farm despite the fact that I was never authorized to use the checkbook. I got surprisingly good at smiling, nodding, and acting gracious in the role of second fiddle to menfolk. As my career advanced, the school of hard knocks left me bruised, but I was slowly becoming wiser, bolder, and more strategic. However, with career success came another insidious danger faced by many females climbing a career ladder in the late twentieth-century workplace—“tall poppy” syndrome. In Australian English, “tall poppy” was a slang term originally aimed at celebrities, accomplished businessmen, and the wealthy elite to denigrate their success, but it subsequently permeated the workplace. This Aussie phrase reflected a cultural tendency to encourage mediocrity by cutting accomplished people down to smaller size. At the time I was building a career, men in the workplace were increasingly threatened by strong females seeking equality. There were a few wonderful examples of female peers who seamlessly worked their way to the top, but usually they had supportive spouses or that exceedingly rare species: an empathetic male boss who encouraged and promoted them. I greatly admired the successes of such women. But many of us simply stumbled haphazardly over gender hurdles. Field biology remained a male-dominated profession throughout much of my tumultuous career. I tried to ignore all the unbalanced ratios and published furiously, all the while minding the children and kitchen. I never dared speak up about workplace inequities, nor did most female peers. We considered ourselves lucky to have a desk and were terrified of losing it.
When I started my visiting professorship in Massachusetts, I reached out to someone I truly admired, sending a fan letter to Jill Ker Conway, the president of Smith College, and thanked her for a bestselling book she wrote called The Road from Coorain. Mom had mailed it to me while I lived in Australia. Jill grew up on a sheep farm close to ours, and her memoir of a girl trying to compete in a male-dominated academic world rang all too familiar. After reading the first two chapters, Andrew ridiculed the book, but my outback girlfriends loved it. I briefly explained to Jill how my career opportunities had been sidelined for seven years as an Australian farmer’s wife, but I was thrilled to be a visiting professor in America for a semester. Much to my amazement, Jill wrote me back with heartfelt advice. She stated to never return to Australia but seek intellectual asylum in the United States, and she followed up by sending the name of her lawyer, suggesting I file for divorce. This distinguished woman reached out to mentor a fellow female, and I am forever grateful for her personal advice.
Not surprisingly, the phone calls between Australia and Massachusetts were not amicable from the start. I can only guess the boys’ father had gambled on the notion we would return before the end of first semester, as his parents had predicted. Those loyal rural girlfriends reported my mother-in-law was scouring the countryside for a suitable replacement for her son’s unconventional scientist wife. I couldn’t blame her—I didn’t represent the ideal daughter-in-law she had so wished for. I had a consultation with Jill Conway’s attorney, who explained I needed to seek legal representation in Australia. It was bittersweet when a rural Australian neighbor called out of the blue and offered to represent me in a divorce filing because he and the entire outback community believed our marital situation was fueled by a mother-in-law’s interference. In a sense, Andrew and I were victims of a culture. As the wife of a grazier, I had the right to ask for half the farm in divorce proceedings—representing millions of dollars in land value and allowing me to live comfortably for a lifetime. Ethically, I did not wish to do so, because a working farm needs to remain whole, without fragmentation from family feuds. That was a contentious time, juggling both job and kids plus the anger exploding via long-distance telephone calls. It was a standoff: Andrew unwilling to come to America, and I not about to break the teaching contract. Our love for each other had been eroded by a culture. Despite the joy of teaching, I missed those morning kookaburra songs and kitchen-window vistas of sheep grazing in a landscape of eucalypts. But I was determined to try a hand at science after a lifetime of training, and even more resolute to provide the boys with an American education where both genders were more equally respected, even if it meant facing the uncertainty of single parenting. I figured a few years of American public school education would enable both boys to return someday and run the farm using new technologies. Without good schooling, their lives would be forever limited to sheep and more sheep.
