Jack & Jackie - an opinion in progress

Being a woman in the sciences can be difficult. While my particular field has a decent sized female population, I’ve had many classes where I’m the only girl. I’ve also been left out of group lunches or social events, excluded from casual conversations that shift to academic discussions and lead to valuable collaborations.

There are people who expect you to do poorly because you’re female and others who expect you to be extraordinary to prove stereotypes wrong. Most of the time, I feel completely normal – as productive, talented and with as many opportunities as a man might have. But sometimes, especially when I’m having a bad day, it’s just hard.

I think having positive role models are important. Women who take responsibility for their choices, foster healthy relationships with collaborators, encourage younger scientists. And I’ve known many of these women. But there are some people, male and female, who I’m still trying to figure out.

When I started grad school, I met Jackie. She was in her mid-30s, was finishing up a post-doc of her own, had been married for a couple years and was expecting her first child. Jackie was lovely – smart, friendly, helpful, pretty, and had developed a very nice CV. I thought, what a lovely role model – she seems to really have everything together.

I didn’t see Jackie much in my first semester. I’d pass her in the hall and ask how she was feeling, but then returned to my obsession over labs and reports. I happened to see her on the bus as I rode across campus and weaved my way through the crowd until I could reach her. There must have been construction or snow since the ride took an abnormally long time. I quickly determined that her pregnancy had progressed to the constantly uncomfortable stage, and that her professional life wasn’t much cozier.

Post-docs offer many advantages, but a stable medical plan sometimes isn’t one of them. Her boss didn’t have money to pay her while she was on maternity leave – she was funded from grants and her time was up. That sometimes happens – money runs out, grants don’t get renewed, new applications are slow to be processed and someone loses because there’s no way to pay them. Jackie seemed to be in that situation. Her husband was also in the academic world, so he wasn’t exactly setting records with his earning potential, and she worried over their ability to support a family.

I wasn’t too concerned. I was looking at 2 bright, extremely educated people and what good is learning a whole bunch of stuff if you can’t make good decisions? They’ll be fine, I assured myself, and didn’t really think about them again.

The year before I left graduate school, I was sitting a cubicle wall away from Jackie’s husband, Jack. He had taken what I believe was his 4th post-doc position in the lab that she had left when they started having children. Interestingly, she was pregnant with her 4th child at the time. He would startle me with muttered curses throughout the day. It’s not often that you’re working on a figure for your talk and disturbed by explicit phrases you’ve never heard before. But it became normal, albeit irritating, for me.

He would stop by occasionally to talk – I’d inquire after Jackie and the children, then he’d start in on how the world was out to get him. What a paranoid freak. I’d think, trying to formulate some plan of how I could politely look busy so he’d leave. People were taking credit for his work, he wasn’t allowed to write the grants he needed to get funding, professors didn’t like his attitude. I nodded, but more in agreement with the “evil-doers” in our lab.

Jack was a jerk – telling me soon after I’d joined the group that I was taking up funding that could be going to him to support his ever-growing family. How white males were discriminated against as they searched for employment in higher education. How his intellect intimidated his superiors, and they sought to find ways to make him look stupid. At some point, when everyone is unified in their distaste for your antics, I thought as I blocked out the continuing list of complaints, it starts to seem like you’re the problem, not the victim.

John would correct me though. He was a few years ahead of me in his program, but taking his time finishing up. Well-versed in the history of the department and the people therein, he told me that Jack had once been a great guy. Easy-going, bright, convinced that he’d get his break after he put in a bit more time. But as he moved throughout the different departments in the university, never catching a break, he became increasingly bitter and unable to contain his displeasure with the system behind a pleasant façade.

I thought of the couple on and off today. The last I heard, they were planning to move back in with her parents on the west coast. The public aid that I’d heard stories about from Jack before I could escape was evidently not enough to support a 6-person family on a post-doc income. The feeling of being inadequate despite extensive education and subsequent training must have been overwhelmingly difficult.

I watched the little one today. Running around after her, naming objects ad nauseum (Ball? Door? Dog? Blanket? Juice? Cup? Baby? Presents? Tree?), helping her up and down the stairs, spooning up applesauce and yogurt (she doesn’t eat meat), trying to keep her away from Nick (she can hit keys to screw him up that I don't even comprehend), figuring out how to make her nap so I could catch some sleep as well, changing diapers, watching The Brave Little Toaster (NOT a good children’s movie! I was angry and upset several times during my viewing). It’s hard to watch her for a day – let alone be responsible for her full time.

So I imagine Jack and Jackie had a rough time of it. Four children is a lot. When they're all born within my four years of grad school, that's ... well, I don't know what that is. I only saw that their bitter paranoia was hurting them – people didn’t want to hire Jack because all he would speak of is a flawed system. People didn’t want to help Jackie because her life became a litany of how nobody was able to handle Jack’s brilliance and how, though she adored being a mother and had no plans to return to work outside the home, the financial difficulty was overwhelming. They had alienated most of the people they knew personally and professionally, and continued to dig themselves a hole they became increasingly unlikely to escape from.

I probably was, and continue to be, too hard on them. Too convinced that success in the graduate field must lead to great things afterward to believe that sometimes it just falls apart. I wasn’t sorry when the department let Jack go – I was sick of the constant swearing, complaining and printing of 200 freaking resumes when I just wanted my single journal article to get some time on the printer! They became annoying – casualties of a competitive system that can devour the weak. What’s the lesson here? I’m still not sure – perhaps I continue to lack the maturity and perspective to figure it out.

But as I chased the little one today, loving her dearly but desperate for a nap, I decided Jack and Jackie’s situation probably wasn’t as simple as I’d construed it. I’ll let you know when I figure it out. But for now, I’m guarding against my own bitterness – advising myself that I’m never too experienced or educated to learn from someone, that students are a vital piece of this academic puzzle and therefore deserve a great deal of my respect, that faculty members, tenured or not, are stressed and fallible in addition to being innovative and wise. I’m still looking for my place, and that option of turning my back on academia at some future point is an appealing one. But I’m glad I didn’t do it yet. There’s still a lot for me to learn here.