An interview with Professor Hazel Sive , Associate Dean of School of science in MIT ,by MarieClaire, includes a question in which she was asked whether female scientists in MIT are being stereotyped as being teva-wearing eggheads and need to down play their looks in order to be taken seriously.
The truth is, as Professor Sive also admits, female in hardcore scientific environments really need to forget about their feminine sides in order to be taken seriously. It is not a matter of "I don't care" , "I dress as I wish", "If I feel like wearing my dress in lab I do it and I don't give a damn to what others think"; in long term, in the course of a year or two, those people whom we don't care about their opinions , really decide for us based on the impression we make on them.
The sad thing is that, in the 21st century, the era of synthetic biology , robotics and post human genome projects, female scientists are still judged by what they wear in the lab sometimes even more than their intellect.
My question is that, should we accept this and down play our looks to be taken seriously for the rest of this century and the centuries to come, or stand up for ourselves and start a movement by which we can put an end to this unfair stereotyping truth....
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