A few weeks ago, the Raleigh News Observer reported that Dr. Margaret Lowman, known to many in the science communication field as Canopy Meg, was going to be “shifted” out of her position as Director of the Nature Research Center. Her new position as “ambassador” appears to carry no significant responsibilities, and no one reporting to her.

This seems to be a massive waste of talent.

I have been following Canopy Meg on Twitter since I met her at Science Online a few years ago. The same day as the announcement, I happened to see this tweet:

Just launched a new NSFgrant on canopy ecology & water bears w/mobility limited students! Treetops or bust! http://t.co/nC1voKjE9D

— Meg Lowman (@canopymeg) June 5, 2013

I remember telling my husband about it as we walked to lunch. I couldn’t get over what a thoughtful, integrated research program this was – increase representation of mobility limited scientists, increase awareness of mobility issues, do cool science. It was a win-win-win. It wasn’t until later that same day that I saw a few more tweets of local Raleigh folk posting news of Canopy Meg’s “reassignment.”

There has been no news since the original story. No answers for those of us who are great admirers of Canopy Meg as a scientist, a communicator, and a female leader. I have heard that there are many outstanding female scientists who are devastated by the restructuring of the Nature Research Center’s leadership, and especially the loss of Meg.

The Nature Research Center’s core mission according to its website is to “bring research scientists and their work into the public eye, help demystify what can be an intimidating field of study, better prepare science educators and students, and inspire a new generation of young scientists.” This seems inconsistent with the restructuring going on there, especially removing a woman who has done so much for science and underrepresented people in science.

If you’re as angry as me, there are three things you can do.

1. Letters of objection to the decisions and/or support for Meg could be e-mailed to one or more of the following major players:
   • Emlyn Koster, Ph.D. – Director, NC Museum of Natural Sciences
   • Brad Ives, J.D. – Assistant Secretary, NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources
   • John Skvarla, Ph.D. – Secretary, NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources
   • George House, J.D. – Chair, Advisory Council, NC Museum of Natural Sciences
   • Mike Murphy – Board Chairman, Friends of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences
   • Rob Christensen – News and Observer political reporter who broke the story
   • Lisa Sorg – Editor, INDY Week
   • To all of these I would recommend that you cc Mark D. Johnson – Director, External Affairs, NC Museum of Natural Sciences
2. Comment directly on the Raleigh News and Observer article announcing Meg’s “reassignment” – this thread is read far and wide across the capital and surrounding area: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/06/05/2941409/star-scientist-out-as-head-of.html
3. Share this blog post far and wide. Ask your friends to join you in asking what this restructuring will accomplish, and how the Nature Research Center could possibly fill the void without Canopy Meg.

I’m hoping the advisory board of the museum and/or the director of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences will have something to say about all of this, and soon. Women in leadership positions in the sciences are rarities, and Canopy Meg embodies all of the things I wish to be as a scientist: kind, thoughtful, engaged, ridiculously smart, and encouraging. She has done so much for women and other underrepresented groups. Now it’s time for us to do something for her.

*     *     *

No woman is immune.

*     *     *

“Don’t I know you from the gym?”

A trim, older man is smiling in line in front of me at the allergist’s office. He does look familiar.

I smile a little. I name my gym and he nods. “Yeah, you’re the one who’s always so serious. You work really hard. The rest of us are just there to socialize and be healthy.”

I explain that I play roller derby and need to keep up with my teammates.

“Oh yeah?” He’s standing a little closer to me now. It’s his turn in line and I motion him forward, away from me. He doesn’t move at first, though I saw he noticed my gesture. Then he reaches out to me. His hand clasps my bare upper arm from the inside – his right hand gripping my right arm – then he runs his thumb slowly over the muscle, feeling it. “Guess you need to get these strong to elbow the other guys, huh?”

I do nothing, just stare at his hand on my body, intimate, almost brushing my chest. He pulls his hand away slowly, his fingers remaining on my skin as long as possible. I make some sort of reply, smile frozen on my face. He touches me again, on my other arm this time, before smiling and moving to the next receptionist.

After I check in with a receptionist myself, I rush to the bathroom and stay there for a while so I don’t have to interact with the man in the waiting room. When I come out, he’s gone.

I spend the rest of the day thinking about this interaction and what I could have done differently. I feel like an idiot for doing nothing, then like an idiot for overthinking it. But it doesn’t feel harmless, and I feel the man’s unwelcome touch – the way he lingered on my skin – every time I think about it. I am sick with disappointment in myself and in this man.

*     *     *

The next day, I quit work a bit early. I’d been burning the candle at both ends for two months, working far too many hours, and I wanted to treat myself to a nice long workout. There’s a part of me that thinks about the man who goes to my gym, and how I probably won’t see him since I’m going on a different day and time than I usually go. I drive over, get changed, and warm up.

I love my gym. I have always felt respected by the men who work out there – they’re meatheads, but they’re my meatheads. I’ve received compliments from the men there several times about whatever workout I happen to be doing, but it’s always felt collegial, like they’re impressed with me rather than looking to sexualize me. They keep their physical distance and we have all sorts of conversations, about exercise, about the weather, about our jobs and of course about roller derby. To some extent, the men who work out at my gym are the reason I keep going back and keep pushing myself.

My heart sank when the man showed up, right as I was starting the first portion of my workout. I was trying to time only one minute of rest between exercises, and I had already gone long once because I wanted to congratulate one of the trainers, a non-traditional student who had just graduated from college.

So of course the man approached me between sets, standing far too close to me, smiling about my serious workout. “What are you doing today?”

“Just trying to fit in some plyo.”

“What’s that?”

“Plyometrics.” I was smiling in a forced way, trying not to be too friendly in the hope that he’d go away.

“Oh, I have a degree in exercise science from back in the day, I never heard of that.” I just nod. “Well, have a good workout.” His hand brushes my arm, then he turns and leaves. We interact a few more times as I head to various parts of the gym for interval training and stretching, and each time I’m careful to only meet his eyes for a second. My seriousness becomes a shield.

*     *     *

I tell my husband that night – I’m not sure why I kept it from him the day before, except maybe a fear I was overreacting. My husband is more upset than I had been expecting. He asks why I didn’t ask the man to not touch me when I saw him the second time (he asked not in an accusing way, but out of real curiosity).

“Here’s the thing,” I say. “I could be very careful and polite, and try to bring him in as an ally. I could explain why what he is doing is making me uncomfortable. And I could convert him. Or, he could become an enemy, and tell me I’m a bitch, and make my time at the gym hell.”

We talk about discussing the issue with the gym staff, but the worst offense didn’t happen at the gym. What can I really say to them? And would they support me or would they make me feel like I’m overreacting? There’s no code of conduct that I know of, no policy about how to treat others. I probably signed something when I joined a few years ago, but whatever it said is long gone from my memory.

It was only during this conversation with my husband last night, problem-solving, that the ridiculousness of the situation hit me:

I am the principal investigator on a research project on sexual harassment and assault. I am a physically strong, capable, smart woman. I play a full contact sport, and I don’t take crap from anybody. One might think I am one of the least likely targets for harassment or assault… except, of course, for the small matter of being gendered female.

The gendered role into which I’ve been acculturated rendered me completely helpless when that man ran his hand suggestively across my skin. My fear of making a scene in the waiting room, of upsetting who seemed to be an otherwise kind man, of somehow reacting excessively outweighed my physical and mental discomfort. Then, a lack of clear guidelines or reporting mechanism meant that I had nowhere to turn after the fact.

Though I have been harassed and worse before, until this week, there had been a small part of me that thought that working on this research project would render me invulnerable from further altercations. I don’t know if I thought I would just give off a vibe, or if I thought I would suddenly develop a witty repertoire of comebacks.

But none of these things happened. I was just as frozen as every other time.

I am not immune.

But despite a medical professional’s blessing and my own research, I’m staring at this hernia. I think it’s bigger. Or maybe I’m just bloated. Maybe I’m lactose intolerant. Or I ate something contaminated with gluten. Maybe I’m experiencing strangulation of my intestines, right now, and I should be calling the doctor or going to the ER. How long do I have? Could I pass out before getting there? Will my intestines rupture? What if they have to do surgery on me?

How many weeks will I have to stay off my skates?

My brain does this most premenstrual phases over the last year. For three to four days I become a semi-depressed hypochondriac. Because I now recognize that these thoughts increase premenstrually, I’m able to laugh about it a bit, and I’m able to set them aside by telling myself that if I feel the same way in a week, I’ll go to the doctor.

I haven’t needed to go to the doctor.

I don’t know why my premenstrual experience is like this, not exactly. It seems to be context-dependent, because it relates to one of my big fears – getting sick in a way that could derail my busy lifestyle, keep me from doing my job, make me neglect my child, or force me from my sport.

To me, being sick means letting other people down.

Culture- and experience-bound illness

Our illnesses, worries and feelings are all culture- and experience-bound. But alongside illnesses that appear only in certain contexts are very real, physiological phenomena that are influenced by both biology and culture. The two are not mutually exclusive.

I was motivated to write this post because Amanda Marcotte, someone I greatly admire, wrote a piece earlier this week about premenstrual syndrome (PMS) as a culture-bound syndrome. There, Marcotte points to work suggesting that the origin of PMS is in our culture, not our biology, even adding that PMS “panders” to the idea that women are overemotional. She quotes from researchers who discuss women who are “highly resistant” to evidence that PMS is culturally bound, who find PMS “convenient” as an excuse for bad behavior in order to hold on to notions of themselves as good women.

PMS is surely a culture-bound syndrome. However, Marcotte seems to imply that PMS’s cultural origin negates the possibility of there also being a biological or physiological component to PMS, and this is not the case. The definition of a culture-bound syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that appears different among different cultures. The symptoms being bounded by different cultural expectations of how they should manifest doesn’t mean there couldn’t, in some cases, be a biological component as well. There are many physical phenomena that we experience differently based on our culture, but that doesn’t mean the underlying issue isn’t real. Even the way a person responds to a stubbed toe is going to be highly dependent on that culture’s perception of pain, machismo, and a host of other culture- and gender-bound expectations.

We all still stub our toes.

PMS is not universal, but…

All people who have menstrual cycles have a premenstrual phase and thus premenstrual experiences. For some of those people, you can’t identify a difference between the experiences of the premenstrual phase from any other time in her cycle. For others, there is a cluster of symptoms linked to that time period. The biggest problem about the way in which PMS is embedded in our culture, to my mind, is the way it’s situated as a universal and universally negative. The only aspect of premenstrual experience that should be explicitly pathologized is anything that disrupts normal functioning. This is why we have the additional classification of premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. Using the criteria of PMDD only 8-10% of reproductively-aged women fall into this category.

As it turns out, there is an enormous literature on the hormonal factors that may explain PMDD. And some of it may even shed light on why there is cultural variation in premenstrual experiences that make it seem as though western women overexpress negative symptoms.

One of the main mechanisms of PMDD is related to progesterone withdrawal. Mouse study after mouse study has shown that if you give a mouse a ton of progesterone, then wait a little bit, that withdrawal period is a time when the mice become depressed. If you hold them up by their tail, they don’t struggle. If you try to get them to swim, they give up (don’t worry, that doesn’t mean they drown, only float). The mechanism is related to the way in which the withdrawal of progesterone (and thus its neuroactive metabolite allopregnanolone) influences GABA receptors in the brain.

Now, all ovulatory cycles should have a midluteal (that’s about three quarters of the way through a menstrual cycle) peak of progesterone, followed by progesterone withdrawal. But not all ovulatory cycles lead to those women experiencing PMDD. What is explaining this variation in experience?

There is growing evidence that women have varying sensitivity to the hormones they produce, such that two could have the same hormone concentrations but one could have a more acute experience from progesterone withdrawal. But the other important factor here, is that because we have a lifestyle that leads to eating more and being less active than most, western, industrialized women have the highest progesterone of all women globally.

So rather than seeing this cultural variation as entirely a product of the culture-bound syndrome, we can also see that it has to do with the ways in which western women are at the farthest end of the spectrum in terms of actual hormone concentrations. We have the highest hormones, so we have the furthest to fall. Our experience of progesterone withdrawal is more frequent and more extreme than probably any other human population on the planet.

Biocultural approaches to the premenstrual experience

Therefore, there is both a cultural and biological component to the premenstrual experience that makes western women more likely to experience clusters of negative symptoms during this phase. I think it’s worth noticing the many important feminist contributions to our understanding of PMS and premenstrual experiences. These critiques of cultural norms that limit women’s expression have done a good job making sure that medicine better bounds the definition of PMDD, rather than pathologize all women.

At the same time, these cultural constructions need to be viewed alongside the equally important evidence that the frequent cycles and steep progesterone withdrawal produced by our energy surplus environment, individual variation in sensitivity, and individual variation in other important contexts are going to lead to diverse experiences of the premenstrual phase. Because these symptoms (positive and negative) can manifest so differently for different women, it makes sense that meta-analyses like the one Marcotte cites did not find a relationship between the premenstrual phase and low mood.

Western women live in a culture that promotes overwork; Emily Martin has pointed out that experiences of PMS may be a result of women chafing against flaws in our culture, rather than PMS representing a flaw in our bodies (1980). And so again we can see not that culture and biology are disparate, but that they can influence each other: overwork can contribute to consumption of energy-dense food and low physical activity, which drives progesterone concentrations up, which makes that withdrawal curve so steep.

In the end, it doesn’t make sense to view the biology and culture of premenstrual experiences separately. Biology and culture aren’t two sides of a coin, but the two massive and overlapping components of the feedback loop that helps us understand human motivations, behaviors, and physiology.

References

Martin E. 1980. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press.

Addendum (6/1/13, 10pm CST)

I realized I should have provided some citations for the relationship between progesterone and mood. Here are a handful of papers that folks may find interesting:

Beckley, E. H. and D. A. Finn (2007). “Inhibition of progesterone metabolism mimics the effect of progesterone withdrawal on forced swim test immobility.” Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior 87: 412-419.

Brinton, R. D., R. F. Thompson, et al. (2008). “Progesterone receptors: Form and function in brain.” Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology 29(2): 313-339.

Dantzer, R. and K. W. Kelley (2007). “Twenty years of research on cytokine-induced sickness behavior.” Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 21(2): 153-160.

Espallergues, J., L. Givalois, et al. (2009). “The 3[beta]-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase inhibitor trilostane shows antidepressant properties in mice.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 34(5): 644-659.

Frye, C. A., A. A. Walf, et al. (2004). “Progesterone enhances motor, anxiolytic, analgesic, and antidepressive behavior of wild-type mice, but not those deficient in type 1 5[alpha]-reductase.” Brain Research 1004(1-2): 116-124.

Reed, S. C., F. R. Levin, et al. (2008). “Changes in mood, cognitive performance and appetite in the late luteal and follicular phases of the menstrual cycle in women with and without PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder).” Hormones and Behavior 54(1): 185-193.

Sulak, P. J., R. D. Scow, et al. (2000). “Hormone Withdrawal Symptoms in Oral Contraceptive Users.” Obstetrics & Gynecology 95(2): 261-266.

“Why do women try to get ahead by pulling men down?” On escalators, elevators, and running as hard as you can.

Why do men keep putting me in the girlfriend zone? A great piece playing around with the “why do girls put me in the friend zone” Nice Guy trope.

‘We have always fought:’ Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ narrative. On writing women and realizing the many spaces they occupy, and the stereotypes that limit our awareness of this.

Evolution, sexism and racism: why definitions matter. A succinct, thoughtful post.

24 Lies People Like to Tell Women. Because you should read it.

Women are bitches. Oh, this piece is just so lovely. On the way men talk about women, and what this reveals about what they think of them.

Cultural sexism: What if Amanda Knox had been Andrew Knox? Barbara King’s great piece on the way we think about sexuality and gender.

Exclusive: meet the woman who kicked off Anonymous’s anti-rape operations. Justice for Rehtaeh.

Elaine Morgan and the Aquatic Ape. I really enjoyed this. It’s important to remember the contributions Morgan made to try and subvert some of the sexism of her time, even though aquatic ape will never be supported by evidence. Margie Profet’s hypothesis on sperm-borne pathogens driving evolution of menstrual will also never be supported, and yet the way she pushed against the “women are dirty” cultural conditioning was important for the field. Sometimes scholarly contributions are less about whether their prime mover hypothesis is right, and more about what it forces us to confront about our biases.

That’s why it matters to us when you got your first period, or what your birth weight was, or how closely you decided to space your children, or if you had them at all. And we will delightedly explain the different selection pressures that push and pull on these events and traits, like how the travel soccer team you were so serious about as a kid might have delayed puberty for you just a little, but how that’s great because later puberty can lead to a lower lifetime hormone exposure and a lower risk for reproductive cancers.

We’re really fun at parties.

The broader importance of understanding all this variation, for the folks who aren’t nerding out on human evolution, is that it demonstrates that, well, we’re variable. And variable is normal, generally not worrisome or pathological. So studying variation directly contradicts a normative perspective that can make one feel like there’s only one way to be female, or one way to be male. I also think it can make us feel powerful, like we have strong, good bodies that are responsive to environmental variables and make smart somatic decisions.

One of the trade-offs I’ve grown increasingly interested in is the one between maintenance – that’s the effort you make keeping up the basic functions of your body, like digestion, circulation, but also immune function – and reproduction. Certain stressors can force the body to allocate more towards maintenance, which leaves fewer energetic resources for reproduction. For instance, if you are exposed to the cold virus, and you get a cold, your immune system is going to have to expend some additional energy fighting it off. This energy could have gone towards boosting your reproductive hormones just a little bit, or making your endometrium plush for the possibility of a baby.

Another way we’re fun at parties

Like many anthropologists in human biology, I have a freezer full of other people’s spit and pee from past projects. In my case the samples are from rural Polish women during the harvest season, over a menstrual cycle. In the past I’ve assayed all of it for reproductive hormones (estradiol and progesterone) and C-peptide (a biomarker of energy availability). But they have been waiting, preserved in the event a new laboratory methodology allows us to ask new questions.

My former student, Laura Klein (now a PhD student at Harvard) was able to use some old methodologies on measuring C-reactive protein in rat urine and tweak it to apply it to humans. C-reactive protein (CRP) is considered a measure of systemic inflammation, to some even a broad indicator of maintenance effort. So of course we decided to crack open the spit-and-pee freezer and pull out the Polish urine samples, because measuring CRP in these women alongside their reproductive hormones could tell us about maintenance versus reproduction trade-offs.

What we found

In this population of rural, agricultural women, CRP was negatively associated with progesterone – so the higher an individual’s CRP, the lower her progesterone (Figure 1). Progesterone is the hormone that is higher in the second half of the cycle. It is produced by the corpus luteum, which is what is left behind by the follicle that ovulates. Progesterone maintains the endometrium’s thickness and supports early pregnancy, and this latter-half functioning of the cycle tends to be the first that has energetic resources allocated away from it in the event some other part of the body needs it.

Figure 1. Women with high CRP (black squares) have lower progesterone through the luteal phase than women with low CRP (white squares).

There was a similar association with estradiol and CRP through the menstrual cycle, but it was not statistically significant, suggesting the relationship is not large or meaningful, at least in this sample. However, when we added age at menarche (first period) as a variable in our statistical models, age at menarche and CRP together seemed to influence estradiol. And the relationship between menarcheal age and CRP was interesting too: women who had gotten their first periods when younger had higher CRP.

We have some reason to suspect that this measure of CRP can tell us something about immune challenges. CRP breaks down into monomeric subunits when it gets to where it’s needed to help orchestrate the inflammatory process. Because we measured CRP from urine, only the monomeric subunits can be measured (the larger pentameric CRP, what’s normally measured in serum, can’t get through the kidneys). So we’re measuring the pro-inflammatory phenotype of what is left behind when a body needs to take care of inflammation.

Punchline

These associations are making us think that there is a lot more to adult ovarian hormones and fertility than we had first thought. Immune health and the childhood environment are both proving to be important to adult functioning. In future work, we really want to look at the immune environment during childhood to see if better measures of immune environment like microbial exposure from farm animals or history of illness and diarrheal episodes will help us understand what is driving this inflammation/reproduction relationship.

The paper: Clancy KBH, Klein LD, Ziomkiewicz A, Nenko I, Jasienska G, Bribiescas RG (2013). Relationships between biomarkers of inflammation, ovarian steroids, and age at menarche in a rural Polish sample. American Journal of Human Biology.25(3): 389-398.

Pedagogy

Cheating to Learn. A great way to engage students is put them in charge of the conditions for their exam. These students “cheated” by working together on an animal behavior final.

Math teacher explains math anxiety. Math and science anxiety is something that comes up quite a bit in my Anth 143 course, which is why over the years I’ve designed it to address critical thinking and basic science skills. I still don’t feel like I have a handle on how to help students who feel this way, even though I have my own personal experiences with this kind of anxiety that make me empathetic.

Higher ed

The Ever-Shrinking Role of Tenured College Professors (in 1 Chart). Yes, they really did use an old white greybeard for their image, as though those are the jobs in peril (they aren’t). But the fact that tenure-track positions now represent so few of the academic jobs out there has pretty dire consequences for how much a professor feels they can invest in their students. Adjuncts don’t know from semester to semester whether they get to keep their jobs, so they can’t easily advise undergraduates. And tenure-track professors are so panicked to keep their jobs that one has to fight to be truly well-rounded and not just be a research maniac who ignores undergrads and abuses grad students.

Colleges curb adjuncts’ hours to skirt Affordable Care Act rules. Jerks. Of course, if you have a tenure-track job like me, that gives you tons of privilege, but STILL doesn’t protect you from people who think your work is worthless. Exhibit A: the great state of Illinois is screwing us over on pensions. Which is why we should all be working together to protect our basic working conditions. (Give me a U! Give me an N! Give me an I! Give me an O! Give me an N!)

Universities Benefit From Their Faculties’ Unionization, Study Finds. Of course this is behind a paywall. Of course. But if you’re an academic and you’re on campus, you should be able to get this. Short version: unions aren’t just good for workers, they actually make their universities better. (This was a study of public universities, like the one where I work. Ahem.)

Why Professors at San Jose State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC. And here is an excellent example of organizing for change. I’m not totally against MOOCs, but I am certainly against using them in a way that implies that Ivy League courses are better than those at other universities (I love you guys, but we all know folks at universities and colleges where teaching is the priority are in fact the best teachers – if anyone should be making MOOCs it’s them), and in a way that leads to a bunch of poorer students of color looking on while a bunch of wealthier white kids on a video get to interact with the famous guy.

Discovery of sexual harassment by scientists attracts little attention. Paul Raeburn points a finger at the folks who decided not to cover our conference paper over at Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Though the good news is, the American Anthropological Association issued a Zero Tolerance statement in response to our presentation. If you are in a field-based science and want to share your experiences, you have until Friday May 10^th to be included in our final analyses: click on the survey now.

US academic speaks out about gang rape ordeal in PNG. Alas, soon after news of our research broke out, so did this devastating story.

Ladybusiness

Cesarean delivery rates vary tenfold among US hospitals; reducing variation may address quality and cost issues. This is a paper I haven’t gotten around to blogging about, so I thought I’d just share the abstract for now (though the link in the upper right corner suggests you should be able to get the full text). What this paper shows is that cesarean rates vary widely between hospitals, and that that variance is even greater in low-risk pregnancies, where you should expect the least variation and lowest rates.

Investing in Women in STEM: Because Girls Grow Up. A great perspective from AWIS on why investing just on getting more girls in STEM is not going to fix the leaky pipeline. There are already lots of girls in STEM in many subfields, but they aren’t staying.

‘Know your IX’ campaign to stop sexual violence. I’m sad to say I’ve had to learn about this aspect of Title IX for my students in the past. My university does fairly well reporting these things, actually, and so far I have had a very positive experience with the sensitivity and thoughtfulness of the folks who work on this and related issues at the University of Illinois. I think we can do more on prevention and awareness, but the policies that are in place are pretty good.

Nifty things

But I’m a nice guy. Imagine you are one of a lucky group of people who gets unlimited access to ice cream, pouring from a wonderful Infinity Fountain of Ice Cream Goodness. Then, someone from another group gets one scoop from that fountain, one measly scoop, and has the gall to enjoy it in front of you. Of course, you get to go back to enjoying your unlimited ice cream after that, but HOW DARE THAT PERSON GET ONE SCOOP TOO?!? It’s a pretty apt metaphor for Men’s Rights Activism, and the video has gone so viral that there is now a Feminazi Stole My Ice Cream tumblr. And while we’re on the topic of great tumblrs, check out Boys Clubs.

Fitness and attention span. At this point I doubt there is anyone I’ve ever met who isn’t aware of my obsession with exercise and sports. But maybe this enhances, rather than detracts from, my day job.

A Highly Effective Way to Avoid Wasting Your Time. I found this via LinkedIn, which mostly has articles on business stuff that doesn’t feel relevant to my day job. But I enjoyed this article and have been doing what it advises – writing out every hour of your day, then filling in those hours when you don’t use your time productively. And it really has made me more productive, because I don’t want to have to fill in a line with “used social media too much.”

In praise of Boston. Dave Munger writes a touching post on his experience running Boston this year. He really captured the feel of the marathon. I’ve been many years (even brought the kiddo a month after she was born), and we usually cheer at mile 16 or the finish line. Maybe we’ll be cheering on some friends next year. (I won’t be running – I have run one marathon and it was enough. I’m happier working out with wheels on my feet these days.)

NBA Player Jason Collins says he is gay. I know you all know it by now. I just love this story, it’s raw and honest and beautifully written.

Jammer Hurrycane Jackie shows her defensive stance at a Twin City Derby Girls intraleague bout. Photo by Tom Schaefges, used with permission.

A few weeks ago I was reading over page proofs for a now-published manuscript, and I must have had my science writer brain on. I started to read what I had written and, for one excruciating moment, was horrified at what I saw. The writing seemed so stiff, so lifeless! Who the heck was I even talking to, and who would care about this stuff?

In an act of self-preservation, my science writer brain switched off, and after a moment my academic scientist brain flickered on like a cold fluorescent light. My body relaxed in the artificial yellow glow. Ahh, ok. I recognize the moves I am making here. This wording is to adhere to the abstract word limit. This wording is to appease a reviewer. This wording is to make sure I don’t inadvertently insult other scholars working in my area. This whole paragraph? So I don’t forget to cite anybody. These several paragraphs of awkwardly described methods are so that people understand exactly what our data can and cannot say. And these conclusions are severely limited, because if we overstate our findings we will get blasted.

And so on. Writing academic manuscripts is best done in a defensive posture.

When an entire mode of communication rests on anonymous peer review, it leads to a very specific style of writing. I’m not saying that our way of talking to each other is all bad (though I think the fact that anonymous peer review is not only the foundation for publishing, but also for getting grants, jobs, and tenure is hugely problematic, but I’ll leave that for another day). Jargon creates opportunities for specificity, and for agreement on the meaning of certain terms. Being careful and making sure to give credit to those who have gone before you is a good part of scientific practice. And there are plenty of scientific papers out there that I love, in part, because of the great, and yes, precise and careful, writing.

But when I’m switching back and forth between my two writing identities – someone who tries to write for a broad audience, and someone who wants to share my findings with my colleagues and, to be honest, check the appropriate boxes to get tenure – I am struck at how the way we have learned to communicate with our colleagues so directly contradicts not only the way science is perceived, but consumed, by the public.

To be fair, I also write defensively for the blog, because I do try and anticipate the response I’m going to get. But for the most part, that defensiveness pushes me towards clarity, as opposed to satisfying reviewers. Somehow, my online writing process, even when I am thinking ahead to how you will love it or skewer it, is less fear-based than my academic writing process. I need the professor gig more than the SciAm gig (sorry, Bora), so it could be more of that old self-preservation kicking in.

So my main questions coming out of this random, meandering post, are:

• What would it look like to train scientists to be ethical, precise writers without the looming specter of anonymous peer review?
• What would it look like if we didn’t always assume simplicity and precision are opposed to one another?

When we think about science communication, we often think of the part about training people to speak to a broad audience. But what if part of the problem is in how narrowly our academic writing trains us to write in the first place? As more journals move to open access, and more universities make repositories for journal manuscripts, our audience is going to shift. Can we shift too?

My friend alluded to having a challenging field site. Her face, which was usually open and bright, with a smile so infectious and delighted and thoroughly optimistic you couldn’t help but love her, was subdued, careful. She talked around it for a while. Then she told me of her sexual assault in the field.

The table felt too big. I can’t remember if I actually reached across it to take her hand or not, because suddenly the distance between us seemed so great. I was at a loss to know how to help or support my friend.

Another day, another story. Again I’m out of town to give a talk, and an acquaintance and I are borrowing someone’s office for a meeting. This person is eager to meet, bright and interesting and motivated to do her research. There is a shift in her research trajectory, and I ask about it. Without skipping a beat, she explains the systematic sexual harassment she experienced at her field site, and the ways in which her lack of complicity led to her not being welcome there. There were obvious ways in which her departure from this field site has hurt her career. I was struck by her furious, fiery expression.

You know these women, because they have shared their stories on my blog. Since then, my blog comment thread, email inbox, my office and several conferences became spaces where I was bombarded with these stories. These women almost never named names, just rushed through their story as quickly as possible in a torrent of words, each story horrifying in its own way. Some were angry, some were devastated. Some were just numb, not meeting my eyes, telling the story in a monotone. These were fresh encounters from just the last field season, or had happened years ago. Each one felt like a new physical hurt when I heard them.

From there, Heather Shattuck-Heidorn and M. Elle Saine invited me to participate in an American Association of Physical Anthropology symposium on ethics. They wanted me to put together a talk on ethics in field site management, as my blog posts had opened a bit of a can of worms in the field. Yet I struggled to figure out how to speak to my colleagues about the chilly climate at field sites when all I had were confidential anecdotes and two blog posts.

Biological anthropology has a long, feminist tradition of women and men interrogating sexism in the workplace, as well as researching and prioritizing female behaviors and friendships and reproductive strategies in human evolution. If there is any field-based science that has the tools to look at the chilly climate at field sites, it is us.

Our project: “I never thought anyone would take this seriously”

This is where my great collaborators come in: Katie Hinde, Robin Nelson, and Julienne Rutherford. Their analytical expertise and passion for improving conditions for women in science, not to mention our deep friendship, made them the natural choices to make sure this project was done to the highest possible technical standard. It also meant none of us would have to hold on to these stories alone. Over the last few months we have supported each other and helped carry the burden of the horrible stories we now know, and made sure our preliminary analyses were performed with rigor.

The surveys we have done so far are quite simple: we collected personal and field demographics to tell us about the research participants and their field sites. We asked some questions about factors found in the literature that correlate with a chilly climate for women (e.g., gender segregation, differences in treatment between men and women, gender ratios), events that the literature characterizes as sexual harassment (e.g., comments about physical appearance, unwanted sexual jokes, comments about gender differences in aptitude), and events the literature characterizes as sexual assault (e.g., physical contact that was unwanted or where the victim felt she could not say no). Thinking leadership and personal relationships might be additional factors that explain the incidence of harassment, we asked about traits that exemplify good and bad field site directors, and in the cases of harassment or assault, the rank of the perpetrator.

The interviews are a chance for research participants to elaborate on their survey answers, share stories from the field, and connect for themselves the proximate and more cultural and structural factors that help explain the good or bad experiences they had in the field.

We have 124 participants so far for the survey, and 16 phone interviews. 79% of the sample is female, 86% white, 85% heterosexual, and 81% from the United States, though 15 countries are represented. Because of the small number of participants from underrepresented groups, we are not breaking down the demographics too much, as a way of protecting participants’ identities. Biological anthropology is, after all, a fairly small discipline.

What I’m sharing today are the very preliminary results from the first wave of recruitment. We have only begun to look at relationships between personal demographics and incidences of abuse for the quantitative work, and some core themes that unite the interviews in the qualitative work.

Quantitative analysis: “I had no way to say ‘that’s not okay’”

One of the first questions we had was whether there was a perception bias in the reporting of harassment in our sample – many people often assume women are more sensitive or even overreport harassment. So we looked at how many women and men observed sexual harassment at their field site.

We found no difference in the rate at which women and men reported sexual harassment in our sample.

So then we looked at the rate at which women and men experience sexual harassment and assault. 59% of our sample reported it, with women having a three times greater risk than men. 19% of our sample reported sexual assault, but while women did again have greater numbers, the male sample size in this group (n = 1) was too small to test this statistically.

Incidence of sexual harassment in our sample among women and men.

Who perpetrates sexual harassment according to our sample.

But we also wanted to know who perpetrated these acts. In academia, it is normal for there to be a hierarchy from undergraduate, to graduate student, to postdoc, faculty, and tenured faculty. And people above you in the hierarchy can have control over your success in your career. For both harassment and assault, we found most of the perpetrators were individuals superior in the hierarchy than the victims – so for instance, a faculty member harassing a graduate student.

Qualitative analysis: “And I just didn’t know what to do”

The purpose of the interviews was twofold: first, we wanted to give respondents a chance to share their stories, and second, we hoped to identify some themes that seemed to differentiate the good and bad field site experiences. What factors seemed to crop up again and again in the respondents that report harassment? Do respondents frame their experiences and observations in common ways? Are there cultural or structural issues impeding progress on these issues?

How the participant framed her experience. We found that many victims identified themselves as “young,” “naïve,” or “green,” and also questioned or blamed themselves at some point during or after their harassment. Both victims and witnesses to abuse, harassment and assault described themselves as paralyzed or scared. Several female respondents described feeling targeted or under scrutiny due to their gender. And sadly, many respondents expressed frustration that issues of abuse, harassment and assault interfered with their work, expressing different refrains of “I just wanted to do my science!”

One male participant detailed systemic, institutional abuse that happened at his site, with too many graphic, potentially identifying stories to impart here. But again and again, he came back to the awful helplessness he felt at having to bear witness to constant attacks on his colleagues, and his understandable fear of the consequences:

“As a man who was ambitious at the time and didn’t know how to intervene, it was a weird place to be because these are my friends. We spent time in the field so you can’t build friendships anywhere else and I was unable to, or paralyzed for fear that my dissertation would be shut down. I relied on the site and access would be shut down, my career would have been shut down, if I was going to stand up to this guy.”

In fact, fear of retribution, and in some cases, stories of retribution for speaking up, were common among witnesses and victims.

Characterization of interpersonal relationships. Many respondents observed that there were gender disparities in the assignment of tasks, like cooking, cleaning and shopping, but also that there were disparities in terms of access to resources. In some cases only men were allowed the more enjoyable or lucrative assignments, or only men had access to certain specimens.

Another observation that was common was that having women in power helped reduce inappropriate or sexist comments, unfair conditions, and harassment. This wasn’t a universal, because women were perpetrators too, but when men were the perpetrators, the presence of women in leadership positions changed their behavior.

Sometimes field site directors want to be supportive, but privilege the data being collected over the safety of their students. One female respondent described an assault and attempted rape by a fellow field site worker that she fought off and reported to her field site director.

“So I talked to the director that night and he was asking me what I should do… because he has known this guy for ten years… He was like, ‘in different cultures that’s not abnormal.’ But I was like this is a violation….

“He did talk to the guy he just said that he needed to stay away from me and… I don’t know how much it worked…. Because at night we’d have a fire… and he’d still find his way to come and sit next to me and sit there and try to pet my arm and I’d have to tell him to stop, but I think I put the director in a weird position… especially since this was sort of our liaison to this community… if you piss him off and he stopped cooperating, then we could have real problems with what we were doing.”

Even as this respondent identifies her assault and attempted rape as a “violation,” she places blame on herself for putting her director in the position of having to decide what to do and risk the research project.

Overall climate. This quote also identifies a broad issue that cuts across many field sites, related to how one adapts to or handles cultural differences. Male and female respondents noticed how men often benefitted from being at a field site in a culture more patriarchal than the one where they had grown up, and that some men gladly adopted those cultural norms while in the field. Others described the constant tension of dealing with these cultural differences in what they perceived was their professional space. Several respondents also noted explicit, sometimes constant, comments about different capabilities of women and men in the field.

Finally, a number of female respondents articulated a real sadness for the way they felt they were being, or in some cases had already been, pushed out of biological anthropology. Perhaps the most poignant response came from the interview of a current female graduate student:

“It’s not like someone specifically says, ‘You’re not welcome here anymore.’ It’s just a constant, subtle attitude that makes you feel like you don’t want to be there anymore. And that made me really mad, too, that the idea that someone could take something that I thought would be great, and sort of take it away from me and say, ‘Yeah, this isn’t for you. You’re not welcome here.’”

The question is: do we want to impoverish our discipline and push out bright, motivated young students, by continuing to allow abuse and harassment?

Conclusions: “It’s all about who’s watching”

We heard many reports of women not being allowed to do certain kinds of field work, being driven or warned away from particular field sites, and being denied access to research materials that were freely given to men (and men who were given access were the ones telling us these things). Ultimately, not being able to go to certain field sites, having to change field sites, or not being able to access research materials means women are denied the opportunity to ask certain research questions in our field. This has the potential to limit the CVs of women and given them permanently lesser research trajectories. This can lead to not getting jobs, or getting lower-tier jobs. It also means certain research questions may get primarily asked by one gender, and reducing the diversity of people doing research has been shown to reduce the diversity and quality of the work.

The culture at these problematic field sites isn’t going to change just because we will it. Those of us in power need to implement policies that will protect individuals most at risk, and help create field site conditions that minimize risk altogether. We need human subjects approval, animal research approval, data management plans, lab safety plans, postdoc mentoring plans in order to conduct research. It’s time to require some sort of code of conduct for researchers at field sites, with clear mechanisms to make it easy for people to report harassment.

Too many of us, the authors of this study included, have told ourselves and others that we just need to “suck it up,” just endure one more day, to keep our heads down and power through. Survival in field-based academic science can’t just be about who can put up with or witness abuse the longest – that is not an appropriate metric to measure who is the best at their science. From here on out, let’s commit to opening up conversations about these issues, rather than avoiding or talking around them. Let’s continue to be the progressive field that interrogates gender disparities, and lead the way for the rest of the field-based sciences.

Next steps

Fill out the survey, it doesn’t matter if you experiences were good or bad, we want them all! Share far and wide: http://bit.ly/fieldexp13

Follow #safe13 on Twitter!

A few quick answers for those with questions…

Q: How can you tell the prevalence of harassment and assault from these data?

A: We can’t. This survey wasn’t intended to assess prevalence, and we don’t believe there is a feasible study design that would make this possible. However we are renewing our recruitment efforts to try and get a more diverse, even larger sample over the next month for our more thorough analysis for the paper.

Q: Isn’t there selection bias in a study of this kind?

A: Probably yes. We are guessing that it is more likely that people with strong or especially notable experiences would take a survey like this. This is why we cannot say that our statistics match some kind of overall prevalence in the field of harassment or assault. Instead, this project allows us to get at least some sense of the scope of the problem.

And to our mind, one single case of harassment or assault is too many, because as a feminist science we think anthropology should be intolerant of that kind of behavior. It impoverishes the field because it reduces the diversity of the sample of people who could ask exciting questions and do groundbreaking research.

Q: Didn’t you hear about any good field experiences?

A: Absolutely! We heard many accounts of respectful, engaging, fun field experiences that made people happy and made them decide to be anthropologists. For the preliminary results and only a 15 minute talk, we focused on the bad experiences because these are the ones we urgently need to change. But in our paper we hope to more thoroughly analyze good and bad experiences to determine what factors seem to lead more to one type or the other at a given field site.

Q: What are your future directions with this research?

A: In addition to upping our sample and rerunning existing analyses, we have question types in our survey we were unable to analyze for our preliminary results. We still have a number of field site demographics that need to be analyzed: group size and composition, leadership gender, as well as participant-reported traits for good and bad field site directors. We also plan even more rigorous thematic analyses with non-anthropologist auditors for the existing and second-round interviews.

“…I have long wondered why a natural process, such as ovulation, is so painful and discomforting in a spectrum of ways to women across the board. Perhaps hormonal contraception modalities are not the ideal accommodation, but can you really blame the women who opt for it?

“I think perhaps it is our culture that is out of balance with our biology and needs a second review. Not only are women reaching ages of menarche earlier, experiencing higher levels of hormones, having fewer children to break the hormonal cycle, but our lifestyles just do not accommodate in alleviating this process. How are our stressful lifestyles adding to the premenstrual discomfort and feelings of inconvenience women have about their reproductive cycles?

“I understand that oral contraception stands in the way of natural ovulation and conception, but similarly, our culture stands in the way of our natural biological functioning. Should women have to live with discomfort and contemptuous feelings towards their bodies, supported by large cultural consensus that menses is ‘annoying so why not just stop it’? Is this ideology not also to be reproached?

“I only bring this up to suggest that perhaps the huge injustice to our bodies has been our cultural environment and not just the fix-its that we humans have come up with….”

You can check out the whole blog here.

But that’s not all! As part of their 20% projects, a few students have decided that the way they want to present their work is through writing a blog. First there’s The Daily Filling, a blog by a pre-dentistry student who is using her 20% time as a chance to integrate what we’re learning about evolutionary biology into a better understanding of dental health.

Here’s a neat passage from her post on sugar:

“I feel it is essential for readers to understand how humans have evolved to consume sugar more readily and how although it appears counter-intuitive that natural selection has not chosen against the side effects of sugar, it is not entirely Mother Nature’s fault. Sugar had historically been a rare substance for our ancestors to obtain–when it was ingested, it was readily stored and then used. New York Times states “humans evolved to crave sugar” and that apart from honey, there was rarely any food sweeter than carrots.

“If only they tried a Twinkie or two.

“Natural Selection has indirectly favored this genetic predisposition of craving sugar as a means of survival and reproductive success. What limits modern day humans is the excessive consumption of refined sugar spread throughout the day instead of at one sitting.

“From a dentition standpoint, it thus makes sense why our early Hominid ancestors lacked any cavities or tooth decay. When agriculture was discovered, the lactic-acid causing bacteria Streptococcus was found in more mouths across the world–found from eating all sorts of foods from carbohydrates to milk sugar (lactose) and sucrose. And, because brushing one’s teeth was a relatively novel idea at the time, the decay of teeth began.”

Another student blog you need to check out is A Little R&R: Read and Relax. In describing one of her first family case studies on stress and health, the student writes:

“So how does stress physiologically strain the cardiovascular system so much that it can give a perfectly healthy individual a heart attack?

“The obvious answer? – Stress. Though, it is far more complicated than that. From an evolutionary perspective, the stress response of our cardiovascular system is ideal. Say you are living 100,000 years ago. You and couple of your tribal peers go out hunting for a boar. You find one, have it in sight. You begin strategizing your method to catch it. But something unplanned happens – the boar starts charging you! Stress response activated: your digestive tract shuts down and your breathing rate surges. Your body inhibits the release of sex hormones, while others like epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine and glucocorticoids spill into your bloodstream, activating the sympathetic nervous system. Heart rate increase to pump oxygen quicker throughout the body, glucose energy reserves are released, attention and response centers in the brain are heightened, and blood flow to skeletal muscles are top priority. With all this in place, you have a pretty good chance of escaping that charging boar intact.

“This heightened blood flow is well and great when we have the metabolic demand to match. However, like family member ‘A’, if these physiologic responses are chronic, you are continually diverting as much blood flow to your limbs, straining the heart and overlooking other areas of the body. This is when we see damaging effects.”

Finally, one of my students wanted to learn more about variety in the human diet by trying a number of diets herself (not the weight loss kind) for her blog Cuisine for Comfort. She has recently finished a rice-based diet and a typical Western diet – check out some of her daily posts that she has written, with pictures of her meals and descriptions of her health!

So go give these students a little love. They’re trying to make the blogosphere a little more sciencey, and are doing great work incorporating evolutionary medicine into their own interests, which is perfectly in line with the 20% project.

The real reason, I think, is that I’ve been mentally and emotionally sapped from the interviews I have been conducting over the last few weeks as the follow up to the Biological Anthropology Field Experiences Survey (you can still participate in the survey, and you can still do an interview). I’ve figured out that it helps to have a posse of people I can go to when sensitive topics are covered, which is why I am so glad I have fantastic collaborators. I’ve also lucked out with truly brilliant, thoughtful participants. I’m not sharing the details just yet, or my preliminary observations since the first wave of interviews are ongoing.

But I will say one thing. Many of the stories I have heard are unacceptable. And it is my mission now, mine and many other strong allies, to figure out how to change the culture and structure of field experiences so that these unacceptable things do not happen to anyone else.

In the meantime, we need some puppies.

The Twin City Derby Girls 2012 Travel Team. Photo by Alex Wild.

My team does a lot together. We work out. We practice and scrimmage. We swap recipes and cook food together. We watch footage and we hold meetings. We try to listen and then talk all over each other. We squabble. We love.

Roller derby is the most brutal, yet most fun, sport I have ever played. The degree of contact between skaters is high, as we hold on to our teammates’ hips, shoulders, arms, sometimes whatever we can grab to provide stability, form a wall, or sometimes throw one of our players at an opponent. We need to trust and respect each other, to listen and communicate. Despite its violence, derby is my safe space: there are no anonymous peer reviews, no opaque promotion and tenure policies. My experience has been that the greater your effort, the greater your results, and compared to the stressful experience of academia where the uncontrollable factors are what can ruin your research trajectory, this is an exhilarating feeling. I love my team and I know they love me, warts and all.

I don’t know everything going on in my teammates’ lives outside of derby, but because of the camaraderie formed by doing something dangerous, competitive, and gloriously fun together, we are very close. We know our menstrual cycles aren’t synchronizing, despite occasional coincidences in timing. But perhaps there are other ways we are physiologically in sync.

Protect your jammer!

To my mind, the most important job a blocker can do is hold back the opposing jammer as long as possible to help their jammer get lead and make a scoring pass. Related goals include playing offense to help your jammer through, and protecting her from the worst hits. As someone who jams pretty often, I am most at ease when I know my blockers are keeping the other jammer from making it through the pack, because it frees me up from worrying about where she is, so I can do what I need to do to score.

A roller derby pack is not unlike a microbial community. Diversity of strategies and skills are key – some of our blockers are better at containment, some at big hits, others at offense, even if pack coordination is the primary goal. And a diverse microbiome tends to be correlated with better health outcomes, provided the main bacterial types are the “good” kind (think Lactobacillus, found in cultured food like yogurt, but also our guts and our vaginas). This diversity is what makes it possible for the “good” bacteria to outcompete the “bad.”

October 2012 bout against Old Capitol City. Notice that Punchy (#289) is offensively blocking for Houchebag (#M7) and defensively blocking against the opposing jammer at the same time. Also, someone’s getting a face smoosh. Photo by Alex Wild.

In a paper out today at the new open access journal PeerJ, Meadow et al (2013) explore the ways in which the contact sport of roller derby provides a great test scenario for understanding variation in and transmission of skin microbes. One of the authors is a former skater, and their materials and methods indicate they understand the sport well. My favorite quote:

“Flat track roller derby is a contact sport; blockers are allowed to initiate contact with another player tocompete for track position using any of the following body parts: upper arm (shoulder to elbow), torso, hips, “booty” (official WFTDA nomenclature), and mid to upper thigh” (Meadow et al 2013: 3, emphasis mine).

This blogger's arm. Note the faded numbers from a recent scrimmage, but also the healing scrapes from opponents’ Velcro.

The authors used a tournament happening at Eugene, Oregon with the Emerald City Roller Girls (the host, from Eugene), DC Roller Girls (Washington, DC) and Silicon Valley Roller Girls (San Jose, CA). They were able to test a few conditions: the teams’ microbial communities before playing, after playing one bout, and after playing two bouts, to see change over time and over contact with different team microbial communities. They sampled from the upper arm, because it’s probably the body part with the most universal exposure across players.

Meadow et al (2013) hypothesized that individual skin microbial communities would be similar within teams, but after bouts opposing teams would also bear some similarities, given the substantial skin contact involved in the sport.

Bacteria that skates together, stays together

The authors found that team membership predicted individuals’ skin microbial communities. They also found a significant difference in the composition of each team’s microbial communities, but also that their microbial communities of each individual within a team became more similar, after bouts.

Differences between individuals did not seem to be predicted by the amount of time each skater played in a bout. The way they measured time played was to assign each skater 2 minutes of playing time for every jam they were in. 2 minutes is the maximum amount of time a jam can take, and is by no means the average, so skating time, which can be anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes per jam, was not well represented. Further, they didn’t differentiate between jammer and blocker positions in each jam, which carry very different kinds of contact risk. This was perhaps the only methodological wrinkle for me, and the authors are careful to note it themselves as well. And unless the authors planned to take copious observational data and ask for post-bout stats, it would have been hard for them to do better than what they did. What this means though, is that their lack of a correlation is just as likely a false negative as it is accurate.

Finally, the Meadow et al (2013) found that Emerald City skaters’ microbial communities were similar to the track where the tournament was held, which also happens to be their practice track. The authors then point out (I may have LOLed):

“it is perhaps unsurprising that EC players share some of their microbiome with the track surface since they shed skin cells and frequently come into direct contact with the floor” (Meadow et al 2013: 12-13).

Bacterial hugs, on and off the track

There are a lot of reasons each of these roller derby teams have microbial community similarities. They are from the same geographic region, they probably practice and live in the same area, some skaters may even live together. There is a high amount of skin contact when they practice, scrimmage and bout together. And, as the authors also point out, exercise produces changes in microbial communities, and these are all pretty highly ranked teams, with elite athletes (Emerald City is ranked 58^th, DC Rollers are 48^th, and Silicon Valley is 74^th out of 161 teams as of this writing… <cough cough> my own Twin City Derby Girls are 72^nd).

The authors suggest direct contact is the most effective means of bacterial transmission, given the present evidence, which means the skin contact of roller derby is the best predictor for team and post-bout similarities. It would be interesting to test their hypotheses among other sports, or at different times of the year, and to compare hand microbial communities to upper arm communities. Or what about shifts along the menstrual cycle or with or without hormonal contraceptive use? I would also wonder about non-skating teammates and coaches: coaches get quite a lot of sweaty contact from their team, but not with their opponents. How much of a shift might happen to their microbial communities between bouts?

In any case, I like to think of the similarity I share with my teammates in terms of skin microbial communities to be like an all-day bacterial hug. Even when I’m not with them, they’re with me. As a jammer, I couldn’t ask for better protection from my pack.

Bonus footage!

Check out this video that lead author James Meadow shared with me from the tournament where they sampled skaters (a little hokey, but then, I did just talk about being hugged by my team via bacteria).

Reference

Meadow et al. (2013), Significant changes in the skin microbiome mediated by the sport of roller derby. PeerJ 1:e53; DOI 10.7717/peerj.53

Many biological anthropologists have begun to discuss the climate of their field sites, and how to create norms that are more welcoming, based on these two pseudonymous accounts of sexual harassment (here and here). While these private and public conversations have been productive, we want to open up the conversation more. We want to get a sense of the scope of the problem of the many different field experiences people have, in order to begin to move towards solutions.

We (Kate Clancy, Katie Hinde, Robin Nelson and Julienne Rutherford) invite you to participate in our Biological Anthropology Field Experiences Web Survey. The Biological Anthropology Field Experiences Web Survey is designed to solicit input on the ways in which fieldwork does or does not provide a safe scholarly and research environment for all. Rather than determining the total number of instances, or percentage risk of a negative experience, our interest is in gathering stories to inform Field Directors, faculty mentors, and other researchers and students on the scope of the problem, and identify some of the main contributory factors to a negative environment, both to encourage improvement and to identify future areas for research.

If you’re over 18 and have ever done research or been a student at a bio anthro field site, please take 20 minutes to fill out our survey.You can indicate interest at the end in participating in a follow-up phone interview. You can also enter the lottery at the end for a 1 in 10 chance of winning a $25 Amazon gift card.

We hope the results of this research will stimulate a broader conversation about mentoring, fieldwork, and support of students and peers. We believe this research has enormous benefit to the discipline, as creating a safer space for research will encourage more diverse people to pursue science, and more diverse perspectives.

Thank you so much and we look forward to hearing from you. Please make sure to share and distribute this among people you know who would benefit from sharing their experiences in the field.

This human subjects research has been approved by the University of Illinois Institutional Review Board.

Evolutionary psychology, the study of human psychological adaptations, does not have a popular or scientific reputation for being rigorous, even though there are rigorous, thoughtful scientists in the field. The field is trying to take on an incredibly challenging task: understand what of human behavior is adaptive and why. We can better circumvent the conditions that lead to violence, war, and hatred if we know as much as we can about why we are the way we are. What motivates us, excites us, angers us, and how can evolutionary theory help us understand it all?

Because of this, there are consequences to a bad evolutionary psychology interpretation of the world. The biggest problem, to my mind, is that so often the conclusions of the bad sort of evolutionary psychology match the stereotypes and cultural expectations we already hold about the world: more feminine women are more beautiful, more masculine men more handsome; appearance is important to men while wealth is important to women; women are prone to flighty changes in political and partner preference depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles. Rather than clue people in to problems with research design or interpretation, this alignment with stereotype further confirms the study. Variation gets erased: in bad evolutionary psychology, there are only straight people, and everyone wants the same things in life. Our brains are iPhones, each app designed for its own special adaptive purpose.

I once had a fellow from this field talk my ear off for fifteen minutes about his “one bad apple spoils the barrel” hypothesis (it was so long ago at this point that I’m not too worried about the story identifying him). He contended that an early-maturing boy was a “bad apple” that would drive other surrounding boys to early puberty. Whenever I politely inquired as to what the mechanism would be that would drive the other boys to mature, or why this would even be adaptive, he would move on feverishly to the next part of his metaphor. “But you see,” he said almost breathlessly, “it’s like the boys are all in a barrel, and when apples are in a barrel one rotten apple can make the others go rotten too.”

No one should ever love their idea so much that it becomes detached from reality, as much an issue for those testing hypotheses as those reading about them in blog posts and magazines. And I think I’ve come up with five exhortations to help any reader trying to tell the good ev psych from the bad.

1. You’re not measuring what you think you’re measuring.

Something we scientists like to do is to operationalize variables. That means that, since we cannot often measure what we want to measure, we come up with some sort of proxy that makes the best of a bad job.

For instance, let’s say what you’d really like to know is whether a trait affects reproductive success in Urbana, Illinois. There are a lot of barriers to being able to tell whether this trait – karaoke ability, for instance – affects the total number of children had by individuals in this population. Humans live a long time, so the project would have to span someone’s entire reproductive years. Many humans also plan their families and so use contraception from time to time, and many perfectly fertile humans make the perfectly rational decision to not have any babies at all. And so even if you could do this study as long as you needed to, you can’t with confidence say that the childfree person is less fertile than the one with seven children.

So, you use some sort of proxy for fertility, something necessary for reproductive success. In women, you may look at their ovarian hormone levels, their endometrial thickness, the length of their cycle or frequency of ovulatory cycles. In men, you could look at testosterone as well as sperm count and quality. Sometimes you have the resources to recruit a number of people trying to conceive, and then you can see how long it takes them to conceive, or whether they do at all. These are all considered pretty good proxies of fecundity, and thus also by extension fertility.

In some studies of evolutionary psychology, a never-before-used variable is often created to serve as a proxy for what they really want to know. Not too long ago I took issue with a “maternal tendencies” variable. Because they couldn’t assess maternal behavior in these young, childless undergraduate women, they asked them how many children they wanted to have. The more children these eighteen and nineteen year olds wanted, the more maternal they were.

Yet desired family size at eighteen, and maternal tendencies as a future mother, are very, very different things. As I pointed out in my post on this, there is too much context-dependence embedded in when you ask women how many kids they want for it to tell you anything with much biological meaning.

So, make sure you’re measuring what you think you’re measuring. And validate the heck out of any new proxy you come up with.

2. Undergrads only teach us about undergrads.

Much of the psychological research coming out of the US and other western countries are performed on the easiest to access sample population: undergraduates eager for cash or extra credit. Many of the major conclusions we make about humankind come out of this very specific group of individuals. Often, the undergrads sampled are mostly white and middle class. Undergraduate sampling is an extreme version of the challenge much human behavior research faces: the use of, and then extension from, WEIRD people.

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. This particular subset of humans, despite the experience of so many of us who work at universities, is actually not the majority worldwide. The lived experience of being WEIRD means a particular kind of access to resources in terms of money, vaccines, food, school, and government.

Have you ever had someone say they “speak for the moms” or some other subgroup and it made you feel uncomfortable? Have you ever been inadvertently put in the position of having to speak for a group of people, but felt that group was way too variable for your one experience to apply to everyone? This is why testing hypotheses and sampling populations from WEIRD places is such a bad idea, and not just from a cultural standpoint but a biological one. The daily lived experience of those resources, vaccines, schools, and other aspects of the WEIRD environment produce a person very different from one that grows up without a nearby hospital, running water or shoes. Even if your Institutional Review Board gave you permission to separate identical twins at birth and have them grow up in the city and the savanna, their height, weight, hormones, sensitivity to stressors, nearly every imaginable metric would show some interesting variation, much of it due to this lifetime of different experiences.

The two reasons oversampling from WEIRD people is bad is first that oversampling in general is bad, but second that being WEIRD puts you about as far removed from the conditions in which we evolved as you can get. WEIRD stressors are chronic and psychosocial (which makes them great if that’s your research interest, otherwise not so much). They have a lot of weird (ha ha) immune problems, possibly related to under-challenging their immune systems when young. They tend to survive the major childhood illnesses but then die of heart attacks, strokes or cancer. Many of them delay childbearing into well into their reproductive years and breastfeed for a short duration if at all, meaning they have eight to ten times as many menstrual cycles as the average forager. And they tend to have nuclear families, rather than breed cooperatively in large groups, sharing the parenting load among peers and across generations.

So the punchline here is: don’t speak for everyone until you’ve spoken to everyone. (My one exception: The Lorax gets to speak for the trees.)

3. It’s not true that everything happens for a reason.

One of my least favorite papers is on rape as an evolved sexual strategy among humans. The abstract begins,

“Psychological adaptation underlies all human behavior.”

I still remember the photocopied version I first read of this for a class in graduate school, because it was marked up by the professor who had read it first. Next to this line, the professor had written,

“NO!”

And I remember mulling over this, particularly because this professor was not exactly emotive, and so it was interesting to see him have a strong reaction to something. Sure, the whole paper was problematic, and the great thing about Thornhill and Thornhill (1992) is that because they published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences it came with a bunch of commentaries, most of them negative, some of them hilariously witty in their takedowns. Yes, we academics can be witty.

Years later, the first time I taught with this paper, I pulled out that same old photocopied version to make a pdf, and I saw that professor’s comment again. And it struck me how this was one of the fundamental problems with many disciplines that tend towards the adaptationist, including evolutionary psychology. We forget that natural selection and sexual selection are only two ways in which evolution – which is really just change over time – happens. There are also things like genetic drift and mutation, which can also have a direction and also produce change. While this may drive some adaptationists into an existential crisis, sometimes there is no reason at all for a given human behavior or trait. My decision to wear navy socks today, the route I walk from one campus building to another, making cupcakes instead of cookies for my daughter’s playdate, these are behaviors we can tell adaptive stories about.

But it may not be realistic or accurate to do so. And if you do want to tell an adaptive story about it, you have to make sure the argument is pretty airtight.

There are ways to be able to be more confident about whether a trait you’re interested in has been selected (or rather, not eliminated). You can see if it conforms to these three principles:

1. The trait is variable. The number of fingers on a human hand is not significantly variable since most everybody has five. Hair length is variable.
2. The trait is heritable. Hair length is not heritable since we cut it to suit our personal and cultural preferences. Freckles are variable and heritable.
3. The trait produces variation in reproductive success. As far as I know so far, freckles do not affect how many kids you have. Voice pitch, however, is a good example of a trait that is variable, heritable, and has been shown to be correlated with the number of children a man has – in a non-WEIRD environment, no less.

It’s tempting to see selection’s hand in everything people do. But doing so makes the same mistake as those who say that they see design in evolution. It is possible to be enchanted by the amazing things biology can tell us, while accepting the added randomness of existence.

4. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

When an evolutionary psychologist makes a claim about the effectiveness of a human male reproductive strategy like breadwinning, or dominating behavior, or large muscle mass, I cringe. They are usually described – in the press releases, yes, but also in the articles themselves – as a prime determinant for reproductive success. The best strategy. The only strategy.

Or sometimes you see two strategies proposed, which follows sexual selection theory a bit more closely, but then puts those individuals in two categories rather than along a spectrum: for instance, big strong males who show off their gene quality versus more nurturing males who demonstrate their parenting quality. The way many of these studies are designed end up eliciting responses that lead to stark categories.

As it turns out, reproductive strategies – most behavioral strategies, in fact – are widely variable, and you see a pretty stable constellation of them in any given population. Rather than try to promote the idea that one particular strategy is the only one any successful person would think of using, we should be identifying, appreciating, and understanding this variation.

Unsurprisingly, most of these one-size-fits-all assessments of human behavior conform to how we already think men and women should behave in our culture.

What saddens me the most about this particular problem is the way it makes people with non-straight identities invisible, or worse, implicitly pathological. The straighties are doing their adaptive darndest to make babies, but those homosexuals aren’t following the Darwinian directorate to seek opposite sex partners and spread their seed! No matter that many people who identify in one of the many non-straight identities have children of their own, and many of those children are in fact genetically related to them. In fact, to some extent it makes sense to parse out sexual identity and sexual activities from reproductive success.

Finally, for something to be an evolutionarily stable strategy it has to fit a few conditions:

1. You need clear evidence it is an adaption, which means it has to conform to the conditions from the previous section: being heritable, variable, and producing differential reproductive success.
2. You would also need evidence that what you’re seeing isn’t simply a correlated response from another, linked behavior being selected.
3. You would need to demonstrate that the behavior is at least equivalent to, if not resistant to, alternative strategies, in terms of its rate of success.

I laid out how hebephilia fails these tests in a post last year. The problem with demonstrating natural selection, and in particular evolutionarily stable strategies, is that the burden of evidence is incredibly high. Which means most stories that buttress bad evolutionary psychology work will ultimately lead to that study’s collapse, when we see the stories are made of thin air.

If you design your study really well, finding ways to anticipate and control for cultural bias, and still find a correlation, I’m quite happy for you! But chances are good you don’t have enough to contend what you’re seeing is an evolutionarily stable strategy. So hold the storytelling. Just for a little while.

5. Just because it works today, doesn’t mean it worked back in the day.

To illustrate my final point, I turn to a recent post from Scicurious on the supposed significance of wearing high heels. It’s a classic Sci takedown, and it’s worth a thorough read.

Sci details a paper that demonstrates a positive relationship between wearing high heels and perceived attractiveness. The researchers had women walk with and without high heels, then used point light displays to demonstrate walkers’ gait without revealing their appearance. The methods certainly seem carefully constructed to avoid some kinds of bias.

Where the researchers lost Sci – and me – was where they contended that walking in heels is sexier, and represents a “super-stimulus” (think red lipstick to emphasize feminine lips, breast implants to enhance boobs). Part of the reason they make this assertion is that they claim high heels have a long history of being used to emphasize women’s assets. And of course, this is where they’re very wrong, since high heels have a long history of being worn by men, and since in this study they had no way to parse out watchers’ expectations of what constitutes a sexy walk based on their cultural conditioning.

In any case, many of the things we do today are things we did not do in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness – itself a mythical construct where everyone lived happily in the savanna eating wild game and mongongo nuts (totally Paleo diet, man!!!).

A far more useful way to interpret modern behavior is not the specific behavior itself, but perhaps the temperament or aims of the actor. So, making tumblrs of animated gifs about roller derby is not an adaptive behavior, but the motivations that underlie it could be, depending on the circumstance. A sense of humor is likely heritable, variable and can lead to reproductive success. And those gifs are hilarious.

But I want to see someone test it first. And of course, it would be great if we could get to the point where we can do better than presume that many of these behaviors (or again, the motivations behind them) have a genetic underpinning.

Conclusion

The bad parts of evolutionary psychology confirm what we think we already know about the world. And confirming stereotypes and calling it science tends to keep women and GLBT folk as perpetual second class citizens in this world, rather than the amazing, vibrant contributors to society they are and can be.

Evolutionary theory has been developed and tested for quite a long time, and there is a strong, reliable set of conditions we have developed to help us determine adaptive significance for a given trait. All the field of evolutionary psychology really needs is to be put to the test.

“Pseudoscience and stereotyping won’t solve gender inequality in science.”

Many thanks to Ed Yong for hooking up Chris and me, and to Chris for graciously inviting me to write with him. Check it out!

If you feel the same way as me, you are already writing your first post-#scio13 blog posts. If you attended the identity session co-moderated by me (AKA Kate Kane) and Scicurious (AKA Batwoman), or attended a watch party or even just read the tweets, I imagine you have something thoughtful to contribute to this discussion. So please consider writing a post reacting to the session and submitting it to the carnival!

Alberto Roca of MinorityPostdoc.org has been running a fantastic Diversity in Science Carnival for some time now, and I’m pleased to say I finally get the privilege to host it here at Context and Variation. You can view past carnivals here for inspiration.

Feel free to have your post simply be a reaction or recap of the session, or a tangential discussion that was triggered by the session. But if you want a little guidance, here are a few questions to get you started on your post:

• Do you think about your online identity? Why or why not? And how has this changed for you (if it has) after the session?
• How do you want to use identity in an intentional way in your future writing or outreach? In what ways will you hold back or share more as a particular storytelling or explanatory tool?
• If you have privileged identities, what do you plan on doing with them? How can thinking about identity lead you to share more or less of yourself, do more ally work, find more like-minded people?
• If you have identities that are underserved or underrepresented in science, what do you plan on doing with them? How can thinking about identity lead you to share more or less of yourself, do more ally work, find more like-minded people?
• What are your goals for your science communication, writing or outreach, and how is thinking about identity going to help you achieve those goals?

The deadline for submission for this carnival is February 28th, 2013 at midnight wherever you live. The submission form is here. Please publicize and think about this topic. Perhaps the results of this carnival could lead to another moderated session for #scio14 the follows up on our shared thinking, and two of you could run the show.

I may not be a superhero, but my daughter is. The kiddo as Wordgirl for Halloween.

Sci and I have taken pretty different approaches to our online identities. Sci keeps things close to the vest – yet many of my identities are quite clear to you. My age, gender and ethnicity are known, or easily assumed, from my profile picture. You know what I do and where I work. You know the composition of my family and the sport that is dear to my heart. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook (or the C&V Facebook page), you know even more about my life.

You know just enough about me that whatever stereotypes you hold about my various identities, depending on who you are and where you’re from, come to rest on my shoulders. This is an understandable and normal aspect of online communication – your brain wants to fill out the rest of who I am, and we’ve never met. This can have positive consequences, as the more you feel you know me the more you may trust my perspective, particularly if you feel we have anything in common. We may develop a warm acquaintance, or even friendship. Many of my closest and most valuable relationships have started or grown online. And I am constantly humbled by how some people perceive me as a role model.

The negative consequences, of course, are that if you disagree with me or aren’t a lot like me, you know exactly who to pin your anger on, and how to get under my skin. For a thirtysomething female like me, that means undercutting my authority, questioning my expertise, making sexual jokes, having an opinion on my reproductive decisions, and sometimes worse.

As Bora has recently brought up, and as I wrote about last year, moderating comments on the blog has made it so that my community has to see very little of this behavior. I can’t stop what happens on Twitter or Facebook, though. Despite the fact that setting up comment moderation on this blog helped create a brief resurgence of comments, a clunky commenting system and broader sea changes in online commenting have meant that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites are where all the conversation has gone.

To be honest, the comments that used to destroy me hardly bother me anymore. You’d be surprised how much easier it is to shrug off someone joking about how you might look without clothes when you can delete the comment before anyone else sees it. More recently, what troubles me more about these attacks is that because readers feel they know me, they may do a less close reading of my posts and make assumptions about the content.

The other issue I’ve noticed is that because I now blog for a network, whatever assumptions people hold about Scientific American also carry over to what people read here. The positive side to this is that SciAm holds some prestige, which might elevate my standing or the impact of my words. But in some cases their expectations for what readers think they should be reading at SciAm do not match the kind of material I cover here, which leads to sputtering, indignant rage.

Overall, I have found that sharing a lot of myself has on the whole been good from blogging, role-modeling and community-building perspectives. But I think the degree to which you share of yourself, and which parts of your identity you share, should be deliberate and based on the particular goals for your online presence.

And that’s really the point of Sci’s and my session. What identities do you share, and how do they enable or hold back your goals for communicating science? What identities do you hide and why – how do you curate your image? What audiences do you reach? And how does the way we control our identity online affect the diversity of online voices? What careers do you make look possible?

Our session is session 9A Saturday at noon EST in room 3. Last year was a hit, and we moderate well together (it might have something to do with the mind-clearing, crazy workouts we do — go on and scroll down), so I’m looking forward to it. We’re one of the sessions that will be recorded, so you can watch us on your own, or attend one of the Science Online Watch Parties popping up all over the country. Also follow the story at hashtag #scio13ID, and in the diversity carnival that will be hosted here after Science Online.

Last night I was talking to a colleague who just heard he missed the funding cutoff for his NIH grant by a single point – a score of 19 and under was funded, and his grant was a 20 (Edited 1/27 8pm CST to fix incorrect wording – numbers weren’t percentiles but the actual NIH scores). He had applied to one of the many institutes that is trying to keep the R01 afloat by reducing funding to all the other funding mechanisms – which happen to be the mechanisms used more by early career faculty because they don’t have enough preliminary data for an R01 for several years. It was a proposal to one of those non-R01 mechanisms that just lost out. It was his last resubmission. Because it takes so long to actually get NIH money, even if he submitted a successful grant in the next round – March 2013 – he wouldn’t get approval for the funds until December 2014, and access to that money some time in 2015. In the meantime, that means he has no money to fund the personnel in his lab, let alone the supplies to do his research.

This colleague had just had a long talk with his program officer, and shared with that person that he thought it was unfortunate that the R01 is being privileged over other mechanisms, and that the NIH seems determined to sacrifice an entire generation of young scientists. This colleague does novel work, intentionally took a nontraditional approach to his doctorate and postdoc in order to try and so something awesome with his science. He’s encouraged by his senior colleagues all over the country who also think he’s awesome – it’s clear he is widely respected. But the few junior folks who get funded in his discipline are the ones who are doing something derivative of their postdoc or grad advisor, and they’re all out of the same three to five labs.

Here is what I had to say in that conversation (and the ensuing Twitter conversation): the NIH, and American science funding in general, is not just sacrificing a generation of scientists. They are sacrificing American science, period.

I don’t know who thinks things are going to get better, that somehow we’re just the one generation that is screwed. Funding lines are going to keep getting worse. Even in NIH grantwriting seminars, I’m getting told by people who sit on review panels that there is an increasingly high degree in subjectivity in who gets funded because once a grant is in the top 20%, how do you tell the difference between the top 10% and 20%? Poor reading, pettiness, cronyism – this is not what I’m hearing from sour grapes junior faculty, this is what I’m hearing from R01-funded faculty who sit on NIH review panels. And then they tell me my specific aims for my mock review are due a few days later. Wow, I’m so motivated to write now, thanks!

We need to fundamentally change the way science is funded. We need to change the way politicians and the public view science. We need to quadruple the federal budget’s allocation to science (right now if you add up NASA, NIH and NSF it’s 1.8% of the budget). We need to stop making it so freaking hard for great scientists to do science, stay in science, discover science in the first place.

Unless you guys really don’t want us doing world-changing research. I don’t want to say what my colleague would have done with his grant because I want to protect his anonymity. But let me tell you what I would be able to do with federal funding:

• I would be able to understand why it is that some women have an easier time getting pregnant than others.
• I would be able to determine what factors seem to prevent breast, ovarian and endometrial cancer.
• I would start to disentangle all the psychosocial factors that seem to lead to infertility even though we haven’t been able to figure out the mechanism.
• I would be able to understand the way in which the mother and fetus negotiate with each other can sometimes contribute to miscarriage.
• I would be able to provide resources and teach resilience to a whole generation of local girls who don’t have science in their schools, while doing research that helps me, and them, understand their bodies.
• I would be able to lay the foundation for hormonal contraceptives that are safe and effective for adolescents.
• I would be able to set up the undergraduate mentoring program I’ve been trying to implement for the last year.

Science captures the imagination of children, it helps us understand our world, it saves lives and protects the planet. We need to stop deluding ourselves that doing the same thing in academic science, but just tightening our belts a bit more, is going to solve the problem. We’ve done worse than sacrificed a generation of scientists, we’ve disgusted the generation below them and reduced our chances of renewal, growth and innovation.

Let me share a tiny bit of life history theory. There is this principle of trade-offs: time and energy used for one purpose cannot be used for another. So if you somatically allocate to growth, for instance, you have less to allocate towards maintenance and reproduction. If a body is very constrained, resource allocation goes haywire: there isn’t enough to support any particular function well, and even critical processes may shut down.

This is how people starve to death.

The cool thing about many aspects of human physiology, however, is that if you flood that system with resources, it’s flexible enough that it can recover. Shutting down does not have to be inevitable. Like the girls I want to study, we are all resilient.

But only if we get resources before we go far enough along the starvation path.

Please check out the storify that Scicurious wrote, and also follow the scientists who were participating, because the conversation continued overnight, into the morning, and is still happening now. And check out Michael Eisen’s blog, as he has some very specific ideas that he will be putting into a post shortly that he has shared about how to force the NIH into a place that creates opportunities for science, rather than contributing to the broken promises of a generation of eager, innovative, smart people.

And yet, I was frequently disappointed in the quality of the work.

The students at the University of Illinois are very bright, and those that have taken my evolutionary medicine course are no exception. So why did we have such a hard time matching our expectations?

The main pedagogical issue causing all of this was that last semester in particular I assigned way too much, without giving students a clear sense of the purpose of the assignments or how they integrated into a broader perspective on the topic. In my head, it made sense to assign two writing assignments a week, among other things, because writing is a thinking process and I wanted to get students to think. To them, the assignments were torture because they had to come up with things to say twice a week.

It was interesting to notice in the style of their assignments that this was the case – they weren’t taking on the assignments to process the material, but to fulfill the assignment and try to say things in the manner that would give them full credit. They thought I was looking to evaluate them on whether they were saying the right things, whereas I was looking to evaluate whether they were actually engaging.

Certain kinds of structures within school system and in the ways in which college students are prepared (or not) to take on what we faculty see as college-level work are part of the reason students write for performance (points or a grade) rather than mastery (engagement or understanding). But I can’t hop in a time machine and undo a minimum of eighteen years of priming for performance-oriented work.

So, even though it is usually wise to change only one major thing in a course per semester, I’m changing two.

Peer and public engagement

I want my students to engage more deeply and regularly with each other, and I find too much group work during class annoys students. I don’t recall how I ended up there last week, but I read this Profhacker post about blog assignments from the summer. The author, Profhacker regular and associate professor Mark Sample, is using the post to describe some of his weariness with blog assignments, and solicit thinking from his peers. However, since I have only used blog assignments a few other times, and in very different ways, my interest was piqued. What I love about the assignment Sample details is that he has given different roles to students in order to achieve his objective of getting them to engage with each other.

So, I’ve borrowed this assignment, with very little tinkering. My students’ reading responses this semester will be blog posts, and you can find them here. Most of their introductory posts are already up, and some of the reading responses too. My main objectives, which I’ve explained to my students, are that I want them to engage with each other, but also with the wider material out there on evolutionary medicine. There are many great anthropology, biology, and medical blogs that intersect with our course material, and having them integrate that into their understanding of the readings will make them better scholars.

I am also excited by the ways writing for a broad audience will change how they think about their assignments. I’ve warned them that I’ll be writing about and tweeting their posts from time to time, and I hope some of you will join me over there in engaging with them in the comments. We’ve discussed the loss of science sections from newspapers, and modern issues in science communication, and so these problems should be on their minds as they grapple with the readings.

The 80/20 rule

The other pedagogical goal I had for the class was to get them to become more internally motivated, and develop some interests and expertise in material relevant to our class. I’ve always liked the idea of incorporating the 80/20 rule into the classroom (80% assigned work, 20% relevant but self-directed work), but wasn’t sure how to do it in the classroom. What I finally decided was that, because this is a MWF class, I’d allocate half of most Fridays to 20% time. What this means is that 20% of their in and out of class time should be devoted to pursuing their own interests relevant to the course, as opposed to just doing the assignments I create and assign.

In order to keep students on track, I plan on having them submit some progress reports along the way, and do a final presentation of their work at the end of the semester. The presentation can capitalize on any expertise they had coming into the class – they can do a skit, write a blog, create a video or podcast, do a powerpoint or write an essay. Or they can do something I haven’t even thought of yet. I’ll be evaluating them on whether they’ve achieved their own goals that they outline in earlier progress reports, and how well they’ve advanced their knowledge.

I have reason to be excited about this crop of students. Already several have stayed after class to share with me their topic ideas, and I can tell they’re enthusiastic. Perhaps my favorite moment, however, was when I joked that playing World of Warcraft probably wouldn’t be an acceptable way to use one’s 20% time.

Not an hour after that class, I received an email from one of my students. It contained this link, and the words:

Challenge accepted.

Of course I had to tweet what he had found, which led to a number of other people getting excited, and my learning about another incidence of disease spread in gaming situations, which I emailed back to him.

Perhaps we’ll be learning more about epidemiological modeling of infectious disease via gaming? Or maybe this will get this student going in a completely different direction. Some of my other students are very interested in global health issues, health disparities, race and gender, and antibiotic resistance.

This assignment could totally flame out. Or it could lead to some amazing projects. I’m pretty sure we’re all going to learn a lot along the way, regardless of how these assignments end up looking from a traditional perspective. I know our chances for success are pretty good though, because I can tell these students are game for something a little different in the classroom this semester.

A list that can and should take precedence over my work list at times. Even if we got stymied at the nap.

I used to have a colleague who thought it was funny to yell “back to work!” whenever he saw me. He would regale me, a young, breastfeeding assistant professor with an infant in tow and a 750 student course, with tales of when he was an assistant professor and would work all day, come home to the kids, and then go back into the office to work after tucking them in. He reminded me that weekends were for research, and holidays were when to really kick into high gear. This advice and teasing came from a very good place, as he wanted to see me hit the ground running and succeed in my job.

I made myself very unhappy those first few years of my job trying to be like this professor: setting aside my life, working during breaks, pumping breastmilk and not getting a lot of sleep. I would go to the East Coast during breaks to see my family and try to get them to watch my child while I sat in front of my computer, miserable. Or if I didn’t get that childcare, I’d spend the day alternately stewing or freaking out about the work I was not doing.

I’m in my fifth year working as an assistant professor. Over three thousand students taught, close to twenty grant proposals rejected (and a few funded). Mistakes, failures, successes, and an increasing degree of frustration over the overwork narratives we construct about academic lives, and the underwork narratives perceived by those outside of higher education.

A few months ago, I was thinking on this colleague and it occurred to me that this person whose life I had modeled mine after was different from me in a few notable ways. He was male, of course. He had gotten tenure years ago, in a different funding climate and with different expectations for tenure. But most importantly, he had a stay at home wife who cared for their children, which freed him to set his schedule almost however he wanted and to work many more hours than is possible for me, as I am one member of a two-professor household.

From there, I realized two things: not only was it unreasonable for me to try and live my life this way, but if he was working that many hours when funding and tenure were easier to obtain, then today’s professors are well and truly screwed.

A raw deal

Many people have been disappointed in Susan Adams’s Forbes column that described being a professor as the least stressful job. David Kroll, Emily Willingham and Scicurious, themselves major players in academia (Kroll has gotten tenure twice as a science professor and is currently a writing professor, Willingham is also a former science professor, Sci is a brilliant and hardworking neuroscience postdoc), have written important responses to her piece on structural and personal levels. Go read them first, you won’t be disappointed. Adams herself has written an addendum and responded to many comments to her post. (Edited to add: Missed one and probably many others! Here is a response by Dr. Isis).

To be honest, I have had a hard time writing this post because I am feeling rather ambivalent about academia these days. I have seen a lot of bad behavior lately, and most of that bad behavior comes from everybody freaking out about how few resources there are to go around.

There is a zero sum attitude that is wearing me out – if you have something, then it means I don’t have that thing, and now suddenly I want that thing so I will do whatever necessary to keep you from having it. Some examples:

• Departments are so strapped for money that they are competing with each other for students, because most universities allocate department funds by how many students they teach. I’ve heard of some departments ending all cross-listed courses to force their majors to only take their classes, of faculty without expertise in an area of high student interest being forced to create classes in these topics, even when faculty with this expertise exist in other departments. Class sizes are growing, and relief from high teaching loads is harder to get than ever.
• Service obligations are increasing. Some of this growth is not happening in a thoughtful way as part of a long-range plan, but as a result of a system that is struggling to breathe. If you are drowning, you will grab on to any possible financial or status-increasing opportunity in the hope that one of them will be the piece of driftwood that will help you get just a few more gulps of air.
• States are behind in payments to public universities, and have been for years. Out of a sense of survival, tuition has increased quite a bit at my university, which has led to more than one student reminding me that they pay my salary and they deserve some particular grade (strangely, it’s always higher than the one they are getting). But don’t we all do this? The more we pay for a service, the more we expect in return.
• Many public universities are also increasing international admissions. These students are admitted because they can pay a lot of money. The increase in these students is rarely met with an adequate increase in resources to help them thrive at college.
• Finally, this funding climate affects our research. We are all trying to make do with less money – that means a reduced animal model, or fewer participants recruited. The statistical power of our research is worsened, and sometimes we can’t actually perform enough of our research to determine, for instance, if null results are true or false negatives. We can’t hire as many undergrads or pay for grad students to attend conferences, which worsens their academic preparation. And we are applying to more grants than ever in the hope that one of them hits, which overloads review panels and thus, again, increases service obligations.

We professors got a raw deal. Everyone and everything – students, taxpayers, politicians, science and technology, the advancement of knowledge, saving patients’ lives – that is affected by higher education is also getting a raw deal. It is insane to continue to operate under ever-worsening conditions, doing the same kind of policing and simply increasing our stress and workload.

Unless politicians and taxpayers understand that pushing more kids than ever into college without an equal rise in higher education funding leads to an education with less meaning, unless they understand that laboratories are closing and only certain kinds of scientists willing to put up with the harsh realities of this environment, unless they realize we are giving young people very little to aspire to and dream about when we don’t put money into science and education, whatever it is that higher education is going to morph into in the coming years is not going to be rich, engaging, meaningful or produce research or students that change the world.

So we need to change the minds of folks outside of academia (those like Susan Adams with the half-knowledge that Sci describes). And we need to stop drinking our own Kool Aid.

Unless…

You all will have to forgive me. Over winter break, my daughter watched The Lorax. A lot. And while the film adaptation leaves a lot to be desired (and adds a hefty dose of sexism absent from the book), it does contain one of my favorite lines ever:

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,

Nothing is going to get better.

It’s not.

I care a whole awful lot. If you’re reading this, you likely do too. I care about my field site, I miss my friends and colleagues and research participants in Poland that I haven’t seen for years because I don’t have the money. I care about the research questions I want to ask in my new local project despite the considerable, maddening obstacles in my way. I care about my students actually having a different experience that is less disappointing than college turned out to be for them. I care about faculty having fuller lives than ones where giving up everything we love is romanticized or enforced.

Maybe, like me, you don’t have tenure or some major administrative position at your institution that can influence policy. Maybe you don’t have a faculty job, but want one someday. I don’t think any of us should wait for some magical moment when we have more power to try and affect change. If we can’t have these jobs and remain human and true to the things that are important to us, I’m not sure the point of these jobs.

I think that is the single, major luxury afforded us, the one way in which Susan Adams was right. We have autonomy, no matter how much the funding climate may make us feel otherwise. We can decide to be different. That doesn’t mean that doing so doesn’t have consequences, but when is doing the right thing a risk-free endeavor?

Figure out how you want this job to look, recognizing whatever constraints you feel you need to recognize (say, a certain number of publications before tenure), and negotiating the others (maybe a certain amount of funding achieved, or a particular class size). Most of the things important to you should be negotiable. If they’re not, you can put together a thoughtful plan, choose to live your life the way you think is right anyway, and see how it goes.

It might not work. Or it might not be sustainable. Or you might be encouraged to do things differently. But if we don’t model something different, not only will we not be the people we want to be as we age, we won’t provide models for all those younger, cooler, motivated, curious, bright, innovative people who are looking to us to figure out what to do with their lives. We can encourage them to be academics, but also writers, entrepreneurs, coaches, novelists, creators, artists, independent scientists.

Just by being exactly who we want to be.

So just who, exactly, are you?

Imagine you are a single, heterosexual woman. You meet a nice man at the driving range, or on a blind date. You like him and he likes you. You date, you get engaged, you get married. You decide to have a child together, so you go off the pill. One morning you wake up and look at your husband, and it’s like seeing him through new eyes. Who is this stranger you married, and what did you ever see in him?

After an article made the news when it suggested mate preferences change on hormonal contraception, this seemed to be the scenario in the heads of many women. Is my pill deceiving me? What if my birth control is making me date the wrong man?

Several articles over the years have demonstrated that women prefer men with more masculine features at midcycle, or ovulation, and more feminine features in less fertile periods. Based on body odor, women and men also often prefer individuals with MHC (major histocompatibility complex) that are different from theirs, which may be a way for them to select mates that will give their offspring an immunological advantage. These findings have been replicated a few times, looking at a few different gendered traits. And as I suggested above, other work has suggested that the birth control pill, which in some ways mimics pregnancy, may mask our natural tendency to make these distinctions and preferences, regarding both masculinity and MHC (Little et al. 2002; Roberts et al. 2008; Wedekind et al. 1995).

On the one hand, I think it’s both interesting and important to consider the implications of the birth control pill beyond just contraception. Hormones are messages, so any cells that have receptors for these messages, like specialized mailboxes, can receive them. The pill is made of synthetic versions of estradiol and progesterone, and there are estradiol and progesterone receptors in your brain. And yes, these hormones do change your brain, both during the natural cycle and on hormonal contraception; Scicurious has written well on this in the past.

On the other hand, I have a lot of questions: First and most important to me, how does any of this translate to non-straight women? I find the constant focus on mate choice between men and women a bit exhausting, and am not sure we can assume non-straight relationships to work the same way. Next, how well do preferences over the cycle map on to actual choices for mates, short term or long term? If we happen to find Brad Pitt more attractive than Justin Bieber at midcycle, does that mean no one will do but Brad Pitt? And finally, what are all the factors that we need to consider in mate choice besides a deep voice or square jawline (again, especially if you try to expand your thinking beyond straight relationships)?

I’ll start with the last two questions that deal with mate preference versus ultimate mate selection. As you all might expect, women and men choose mates for lots of reasons, not just masculinity or complementary immune systems. Bereczkei et al (1997) looked at singles ads and found women often sought mates with high parental care. In a separate singles ad evaluation, Pawlowski and Dunbar (1999) found that women mostly selected men of high resource potential who were interested in long-term relationships (either unlikely to divorce or unlikely to die within twenty years), where men selected women by markers of fecundity (ability to have babies). In a sample of 18-24 year old straight people in the US, Buston and Emlen (2003) found that most people selected mates who had similar characteristics to themselves. And a speed dating sample showed that people under those conditions selected dates based on easily observable traits, like physical attractiveness (Kurzban and Weeden 2005).

Now on to the fact that all of this research is on straight people. I found very little on lesbian women and the menstrual cycle… but what I found was very cool! Brinsmead-Stockham et al (2008) found that, like heterosexual women, lesbian women are quicker to identify unknown faces at midcycle, as long as they were the faces of the sex they preferred. So straight women were good at identifying male faces, lesbian women good at identifying female faces. Burleson et al (2002) found that sexual behavior in lesbian and straight women was mostly similar through the menstrual cycle, with both peaking at midcycle.

So, mate preference may be about telling a research assistant who is the hottest to you at a particular point in your cycle. And it is a fairly robust and consistent finding. However, when it comes to ultimate mate selection the most important thing to consider is a great point made by Pawlowski and Dunbar: finding a mate is about advertising what you have to offer while making known what you want in a mate. Then it’s all about finding some kind of compromise through a series of trade-offs based on what the individual wants, what they can offer, and what’s available in the dating pool. (So, since neither Brad Pitt nor Justin Bieber are currently in the dating pool, my previous comparison was pointless.)

Those of you who met your mate while on the pill: not to fear. I don’t think that the possibility that you may have some suppression of masculinized preferences at one point in your cycle means you’ve chosen the wrong person.

Who knows, it could have opened you up to the Mr. or Ms. Right.

References

Bereczkei T, Voros S, Gal A, and Bernath L. 1997. Resources, Attractiveness, Family Commitment; Reproductive Decisions in Human Mate Choice. Ethology 103(8):681-699.

Brinsmead-Stockham K, Johnston L, Miles L, and Neil Macrae C. 2008. Female sexual orientation and menstrual influences on person perception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44(3):729-734.

Burleson MH, Trevathan WR, and Gregory WL. 2002. Sexual behavior in lesbian and heterosexual women: relations with menstrual cycle phase and partner availability. Psychoneuroendocrinology 27(4):489-503.

Buston PM, and Emlen ST. 2003. Cognitive processes underlying human mate choice: The relationship between self-perception and mate preference in Western society. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100(15):8805-8810.

Kurzban R, and Weeden J. 2005. HurryDate: Mate preferences in action. Evolution and Human Behavior 26(3):227-244.

Little AC, Jones BC, Penton-Voak IS, Burt DM, and Perrett DI. 2002. Partnership status and the temporal context of relationships influence human female preferences for sexual dimorphism in male face shape. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences 269(1496):1095-1100.

Pawlowski B, and Dunbar RIM. 1999. Impact of market value on human mate choice decisions. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences 266(1416):281.

Roberts SC, Gosling LM, Carter V, and Petrie M. 2008. MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 275(1652):2715-2722.

Wedekind C, Seebeck T, Bettens F, and Paepke AJ. 1995. MHC-Dependent Mate Preferences in Humans. Proceedings: Biological Sciences 260(1359):245-249.

Also, everybody else is doing it.

Ladybusiness anthropology

Here is some legitimate science on pregnancy and rape. On Todd Akin’s brilliant words about the science of conception. This was the most difficult post I have written from an emotional perspective.

When a beginning is not a beginning. My post on the causes of miscarriage. I wrote it for a friend, and, I think, I wrote it for myself.

Don’t sweat it: premenopausal women, reproductive state, and night sweats. My most recent in-depth science blog post, and it was all about ME. While there weren’t too many men interested in this one, this is a post where I got a surprising number of private messages from other women, relieved I had written about night sweats because they got them too. It also opened up a lot of conversations with friends. This is why it can be hard to measure impact or define metrics for this kind of stuff.

Interrupting claims about natural sexual behavior. I probably should just lay this whole kerfuffle to rest, but I was pleased with my final blog post on Deep Thinking Hebephile at the beginning of the year. Whenever anyone evaluates claims about behavior, in evolutionary psych or in other fields, I do hope they remember to keep these tenets of evolutionary theory in mind and test hypotheses against them.

Nutty science

Llama, llama, get with mama: the magical semen ingredient that makes the ladies swoon (then ovulate). I wasn’t debunking anything in this post, which is often the case when I write funnier stuff (well, funnier to me). I just thought it was a great topic, and led to a lot of puns that nauseated adults who either are about my age and therefore saw the same Sesame Street episodes, or have children of their own and are familiar with a current children’s book series. I never said this blog was for everyone!

Hot for Obama, but only when this smug married is not ovulating. On that unfortunate study on voting behavior and ovulation that didn’t measure ovulation.

An academic life

Impostors, the culture of science, and fulfilling our potential. My follow-up post to Sci Foo on the impostor syndrome I and others felt. I was glad to hear that it resonated with a lot of people. I hope we all hold a picture of reality in our heads whenever those ugly feelings come up.

Which came first, rewarding outreach or doing it? On chickens, eggs, and overworked scientists. This was my contribution to a broader conversation on the impact of outreach, and whether it does or should “count” in an academic career.

I can out interdiscipline you: anthropology and the biocultural approach. I was intentionally a bit snarky in this post, to try and get at what it is about some of anthropology’s interdisciplinary work that irks me. Since this post, I have been the reviewer for some amazing interdisciplinary work between biological and cultural anthro. Could it be because of this very post??? Correlation equals causation, yes? Or not.

Finally, a big thank you

Thanks readers, for being here, for supporting me, for being brilliant, interesting people in your own right, and being the kind of people who are eager to learn new things and make the world a better place. Thanks to my allies and friends online and off. Thanks to all those academics who tell me they secretly read me even if it’s not cool for academics to read blogs.

And of course, thanks to my family who have the patience to give me the space to write. Every time I tell my husband something good about my science writing (from “someone with lots more followers retweeted me!” to “I got an honorarium for that speaking gig about the blog!” to “an agent wants to represent me!”), he is delighted. And convinced that some day I am going to write a best seller that allows us to retire to Hawaii.

We can keep him in the dark about what it means to be kinda a little semi-known within a small sub-circle of the science blogosphere, though, because the delight never gets old.

The DSM-V is out

I’m not a psychologist, but the DSM, or Diagnostic Systems Manual, is still important to my research, but as someone who teaches evolutionary medicine, most especially my teaching. I have been teaching the shift from the DSM-IV to DSM-V (excuse me, I guess it’s DSM-5 now)  for the past several years, with students doing a close reading of the proposed changes, or projects on some of the new diagnoses. It will be interesting this year to have a finalized document to talk about — as well as the reactions. Two of the main ones I’ll be assigning:

The DSM-5 has been finalized by Vaughan Bell. Bell summarizes the major changes — mostly I can’t believe they took out the bereavement clause for depression.

The New Tamper Tantrum Disorder by David Dobbs. A smart perspective on the pathologizing of normal behavior.

Grumble grumble

Why Do Women Leave Biology? This is the page for the press release of an article in BioScience, but it links to the pdf of the manuscript. Shelley Adamo takes a smart look at the factors that drive attrition of female scientists. She suggests that the factors that are blamed for fewer female scientists exist in medicine, but the same gender differences in attrition don’t exist. Adamo claims policy issues drive differences instead (for instance, mandated parental leave seems to reduce attrition in Canada but doesn’t exist in the US). I agree.

A week of a student’s electrodermal activity. Teachers, check out the activity during classes and when sleeping. Decide you’d probably be better napping during your own lecture after all.

How to Email a Professor over at WikiHow. Overall not bad advice. I find it interesting that in the how to address professors section, they tell you how bad it is to call a professor “Mr.,” but only say it’s bad to call a female professor (note professors are default-male) “Mrs.” Personally, I take issue with anything that isn’t Dr. or Prof. if I don’t know the student. Once I know the student, particularly if I advise them, Kate is fine.

Stop Saying That. A great blog post that points out the error of complaining that women should “put as much time and effort into researching their birth as they do researching their next smartphone.”

Sexist humor… leads to more sexism. In the same vein as “stop saying that,” stop permitting sexist humor in your workspace, your home, among your friends. Don’t be a silent witness, and be the guy who interrupts sexism. You don’t have to be obnoxious about it, but if you let it go, you’re telling your friends that being sexist is ok.

I Am the Woman in Your Department Who Does All the Committee Work at McSweeney’s. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about this one.

Re-emerge from a tough week

Mouse research saves a little girl with leukemia. Because my husband is a two-time cancer survivor, with many of his treatments first being tested in animals, I am grateful to animal researchers every single day.

Your Holiday Mom. A blog that posts letters from parents who love and support LGBTQ kiddos. Have a tissue handy. Also, make it abundantly clear to anyone around you who needs to know it that you are a holiday mom, too, but with actions over words.

How do you pack your bag for a 7 year, 22,000 mile international reporting assignment? Journalist Salopek will walk the “out of Africa” route to South America. I highly recommend a few pairs of Ex Officio underwear — they last for years and you can wash and hang dry them overnight.

The flipped academic: turning higher education on its head. This article describes academics who are doing outreach or making their results available to the public before putting them in academic jargon-speak and up for peer review. Certainly an article that supports those of us that blog, but I didn’t see a clear way the flipped academic was going to push her university to consider her for tenure under that model. Also, why are we into “flipping” so much in academia right now (I’ve also read a few articles on “flipping” the classroom)? Why not call it “inverted” or “transparent” or “outreach-focused?”

And now my favorite post: Michael Eisen puts Darwin’s Tangled Bank in verse. Eisen wrote this poem because his daughter needed to recite a poem for school, and he wanted to give her something scientific and beautiful. He totally wins at parenting. Some day my daughter will learn this, too.

Figure 1. Image of a sweat gland from Gray's Anatomy, 18th edition

I tend to go to bed freezing, especially so in the winter, so I pile our flannel sheet, blanket, and down comforter over me when I settle in to sleep. A few times each menstrual cycle, clustered together in the luteal phase between ovulation and menses, I wake up from sleep completely soaked in my own sweat – not a delightful sight or experience. Usually I get up, change pajamas, and try to find a dry spot on the bed to go back to sleep (I promise the sheets eventually get washed, but I’m not about to wake my husband – and sometimes daughter – to change the bed at 3am).

These night sweats started when I was still intensively breastfeeding my daughter and was marathon training, when she was under a year old. At first, I thought it was because we were co-sleeping and we slept next to each other. But I never experienced them next to my husband before that point, and he is a six foot four heat generating machine.

When the marathon was over and I returned to less strenuous activity, breastfeeding frequency was also starting to decline. I didn’t get any night sweats again for quite some time.

Then there was roller derby.

At first, roller derby was a pastime, a recreational activity where I got to learn something totally new and hang out with women I respected. But of course, being the competitive person I am, it became an obsession, and in addition to roller derby practices I was working out quite a lot on my own time. Over the last year I’ve made additional nutritional adjustments to further improve my performance, and I’ve increased the intensity of my off-skates workouts. I work out a minimum of five hours a week, but in the middle of the season it is usually a minimum of nine hours per week.

At about the same time as this increase in physical activity and nutritional improvement, and changes in my body composition, the night sweats came back. With a vengeance.

My advisor once joked that anthropology is a rather navel-gazing discipline, but reproductive ecology, our subfield, is gonad-gazing. There are many times that I have been driven to ask questions in my own research because of physiological phenomena occurring in me, my family, or my friends. My interest in the relationship between reproductive and immune function stemmed from my sister and I both being diagnosed as gluten intolerant almost six years ago. My interest in puberty and adolescence stemmed from me looking ahead to what my preschooler daughter will be dealing with in the next decade. I know many people who have had personal interests in their research, research that might not otherwise have happened if someone hadn’t said, I want to understand why this is happening to me or someone I love. It makes a real case for the importance of diversity among scientists.

Because, guess what? There is almost nothing in the literature on the prevalence of night sweats among healthy premenopausal women. And this sweaty lady wants to get to the bottom of it.

This ain’t my mama’s hot flash

The vast majority of the literature on night sweats is related to the general study of vasomotor symptoms associated with menopause – that is, hot flashes as well as night sweats. Vasomotor symptoms appear to have a pretty similar mechanism and it is a response to the body sensing it is overheated. Blood vessels near the skin’s surface dilate, and sweating can also ensue, to cool it back down again.

Anyone remember when The Cosby Show talked about menopause? That was my introduction to what a hot flash was.

(embed not working for you? video here)

These kinds of symptoms are said to increase in frequency in early menopause. Several studies have shown a negative association between hot flashes and estradiol concentrations, meaning that as estradiol goes down hot flashes go up (Deecher and Dorries 2007; Miller and Duckles 2008). Estradiol naturally declines as a woman gets older, until she reaches menopause when it remains quite low for the rest of her life, and comes from places other than the ovaries. Similar relationships have been found between progesterone and vasomotor symptoms among menopausal women (Hitchcock and Prior 2012; Spark and Willis 2012). Vasomotor symptoms are also associated with depression, panic attacks, and sleep disturbances (Mold et al. 2002). This is likely because vasomotor symptoms can signal some sort of dysregulation in the autonomic nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system that regulates visceral functions like heart rate and, you guessed it, sweating.

The relationship between vasomotor symptoms and exercise, however, is complicated. While I found a few studies that found improvement in menopausal women’s vasomotor symptoms with exercise (Elavsky and McAuley 2005), there were also studies that found no relationship between exercise and vasomotor symptoms (Sternfeld et al. 1999), and still others that found that exercise worsened symptoms (Aiello et al. 2004). The Sternfeld et al (1999) article even found that body mass index was negatively associated with vasomotor symptoms, so the heavier a woman was, the fewer hot flashes she had.

The effects of exercise operate at cross purposes when it comes to vasomotor symptoms. While exercise can improve circulation and be great for your general health, sustained exercise generally leads to at least slight reproductive suppression, and therefore a reduction in progesterone if not also estradiol. The primary way a postmenopausal woman gets endogenous estrogens is from her fat cells, and of course exercise can decrease fat mass. Finally, exercise raises core body temperature, so in some women this could actually trigger vasomotor symptoms.

So if circulatory health is protective, but so are progesterone and estradiol, exercise isn’t going to have the same relationship to vasomotor symptoms in every woman.

Night sweats are about as common in reproductive as perimenopausal women

Here’s the next interesting thing. Hot flashes occur in a slightly higher frequency among menopausal women (32 versus 19%, Mold et al. 2002), which explains why research has tended to focus on them as a menopausal phenomenon. But night sweats occur at a more similar frequency in menopausal and premenopausal women (29 versus 22%, Mold et al. 2002). Check out this figure I made from Table 1 of Mold et al (2002):

Figure 2. Percentage of night sweats reported in women across different age groups from a research-based sample. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals – alas, no standard deviation or standard error provided in the manuscript.

The frequencies were statistically significantly different here (p < 0.001). But the practical difference is quite small – I mean, night sweats are occurring in almost a quarter of premenopausal women in this sample! To me, this suggests that the idea that night sweats are part of a suite of vasomotor symptoms that appear almost exclusively at menopause is very likely wrong. The question is whether the things that drive all vasomotor symptoms, particularly hot flashes, in menopausal women are also the things that drive night sweats in premenopausal women.

Premenopausal women aren’t all the same

The evidence I mentioned above regarding exercise and vasomotor symptoms certainly corresponds to my experience of night sweats resuming when I changed my diet and increased the duration and intensity of my workouts. Are the ways in which variation in estradiol and progesterone influence menopausal vasomotor symptoms similar in premenopausal women?

To figure this out, I turned to a family planning method. The Fertility Awareness Method uses a combination of basal body temperature and cervical mucus consistency to determine ovulation. It also tends to do a good job delineating the follicular (menses to ovulation) and luteal (ovulation to menses) phases, because many (but not all) ovulatory cycles have a biphasic body temperature pattern, with temperature higher in the luteal phase.

Figure 3. Sample basal body temperature chart, made by me.

While it was difficult to find evidence linking hormone concentrations and body temperature, one study did seem to suggest a dose-response relationship, with higher temperature positively correlated with progesterone (Biller et al. 1999). There is also some indication that this change is driven by luteinizing hormone at ovulation, which is certainly correlated with estradiol and progesterone.

In addition to the fact that body temperature is higher in the luteal phase for many women, skin conductance may be higher at this time. Skin conductance measures electrical conductance, which gives one an idea of the moisture of the skin, and thus the activity of the sweat glands (Little and Zahn 1974). Both melatonin and temperature circadian rhythms are a bit different in the luteal phase: the nighttime increase in melatonin, and concurrent temperature increase, are delayed by 90 minutes in women in the luteal phase (Cagnacci et al. 1996). These changes in the timing of melatonin and body temperature could influence the sleep cycle and nighttime vasomotor symptoms.

Women in the luteal phase may also sweat more during exercise (Garcia et al. 2006). In this study, participants were allowed to have water during exercise, which may be why they sweat more, where in other studies where water is restricted core temperature increased in luteal phase women instead. Study authors did not find increased sweating in the luteal phase among women who likely did not ovulate, based on low serum progesterone concentrations.

It makes sense, then, that in some premenopausal women the increase in basal body temperature in the luteal phase could lead to night sweats, particularly if there are other factors that increase their chances. One I found almost by accident is that antihistamine use can increase the incidence of night sweats – I take loratadine almost every day to quell my allergy-induced asthma.

When are we going to pay more attention to reproductive state?

My field works pretty hard to measure global variation in reproductive function, but one understudied group is lactating women. There are some great papers about variation in resumption of ovarian activity with weaning and supplemental feeding  – but what about continued ovarian or endometrial activity during lactation? Since breastfeeding is usually part of our exclusion criteria, we know little of the effect of lactation on reproductive function except in the most basic ways, and even less on vasomotor symptoms. I did find a single letter to the editor in American Family Physicians from a physician saying that he found many of his breastfeeding patients report night sweats (Taylor 2003).

Two factors drive the resumption of reproductive function in lactating women: prolactin levels and energy balance(Valeggia and Ellison 2001). Each breastfeeding bout brings on a spike in prolactin, which suppresses ovarian function. Closely spaced breastfeeding bouts can then impact ovarian function. However, the factor that seems to multiply the prolactin effect is whether the lactating woman is also in any kind of energetic deficit – either because she is exercising or doing physical work, or not getting enough food to replace her work and the 400-600 calories she burns a day making milk. Prolactin, then, was where I wanted to look next.

Prolactin concentrations vary through the ovulatory menstrual cycle, where it decreases from the late follicular into the midluteal phase (Bäckström et al. 2008), meaning prolactin is lower in the luteal phase. High prolactin concentrations, or hyperprolactinemia, are a signal of infertility. Hyperprolactinemia is most often caused by a small mass on the pituitary gland, and there are therapeutic interventions that resolve it easily. But it is possible to have higher prolactin concentrations within the range of normal just by performing a lot of physical activity (Rojas Vega et al. 2012). Similar to a breastfeeding bout, prolactin increases with physical activity, stays high for a short period during recovery, and then declines again.

My weekday roller derby practices are late at night, one not ending until 10:30pm. Further, normal body temperature gets set a little higher after exercise (Haight and Keatinge 1973). The post-exercise drop in prolactin that is occurring while I’m asleep, along with my elevated exercise and luteal basal body temperature while I’m huddled under all my blankets, could trigger night sweats.

Conclusion

Changes in body temperature and prolactin from late night exercise, combined with higher basal body temperature in the luteal phase and antihistamine administration, could all contribute to the hot mess that has led to my night sweats. What I enjoyed about this foray into blatant navel/gonad/sweat gland-gazing was that it got me thinking about the ways in which the menstrual cycle affects the autonomic nervous system, and that I ended up learning a lot more about prolactin than I’d known before. I may need to measure prolactin and basal body temperature in future research projects, now that I know the kinds of factors that affect their variation, and their downstream effects.

Knowing the factors that may be contributing to my night sweats doesn’t necessarily mean I can prevent them, since I won’t be quitting roller derby night practices or allergy meds any time soon. But I can play around with ways to lower my body temperature on nights when I know it’s most likely – which may mean giving up my beloved down comforter.

References

Aiello EJ, Yasui Y, Tworoger SS, Ulrich CM, Irwin ML, Bowen D, Schwartz RS, Kumai C, Potter JD, and McTiernan A. 2004. Effect of a yearlong, moderate-intensity exercise intervention on the occurrence and severity of menopause symptoms in postmenopausal women. Menopause 11(4):382-388.

Bäckström C, McNeilly A, Leask R, and Baird D. 2008. Pulsatile secretion of LH, FSH, prolactin, oestradiol and progesterone during the human menstrual cycle. Clinical Endocrinology 17(1):29-42.

Biller B, Luciano A, Crosignani P, Molitch M, Olive D, Rebar R, Sanfilippo J, Webster J, and Zacur H. 1999. Guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of hyperprolactinemia. The Journal of reproductive medicine 44(12 Suppl):1075.

Cagnacci A, Soldani R, Laughlin GA, and Yen S. 1996. Modification of circadian body temperature rhythm during the luteal menstrual phase: role of melatonin. Journal of Applied Physiology 80(1):25-29.

Deecher D, and Dorries K. 2007. Understanding the pathophysiology of vasomotor symptoms (hot flushes and night sweats) that occur in perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause life stages. Archives of Women’s Mental Health 10(6):247-257.

Elavsky S, and McAuley E. 2005. Physical activity, symptoms, esteem, and life satisfaction during menopause. Maturitas 52(3–4):374-385.

Garcia A, Lacerda M, Fonseca I, Reis F, Rodrigues L, and Silami-Garcia E. 2006. Luteal phase of the menstrual cycle increases sweating rate during exercise. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research 39:1255-1261.

Haight JSJ, and Keatinge WR. 1973. Elevation in set point for body temperature regulation after prolonged exercise. The Journal of Physiology 229(1):77-85.

Hitchcock CL, and Prior JC. 2012. Oral micronized progesterone for vasomotor symptoms—a placebo-controlled randomized trial in healthy postmenopausal women. Menopause 19(8):886-893.

Little BC, and Zahn TP. 1974. Changes in mood and autonomic functioning during the menstrual cycle. Psychophysiology 11(5):579-590.

Miller VM, and Duckles SP. 2008. Vascular actions of estrogens: functional implications. Pharmacological reviews 60(2):210-241.

Mold JW, Mathew MK, Belgore S, and Dehaven M. 2002. Prevalence of night sweats in primary care patients. J Fam Pract 51:452-456.

Rojas Vega S, Hollmann W, and Strüder HK. 2012. Influences of Exercise and Training on the Circulating Concentration of Prolactin in Humans. Journal of Neuroendocrinology 24(3):395-402.

Spark MJ, and Willis J. 2012. Systematic review of progesterone use by midlife and menopausal women. Maturitas 72(3):192-202.

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There were a few things that I found interesting about our varying responses as panelists to the questions we were asked. That variation seemed to map onto the kind of social media we used, and the audience we sought to reach. I am guessing Melanie and I reach the most educated audience, and that the vast majority are adults. Joanne and Bill both have a significant cadre of younger fans – I liked Bill’s analysis that those who watch his great YouTube videos are young gamers… and old gamers. I have a feeling that despite variation in age or education, we are all reaching a highly intelligent, motivated audience.

Anyway, the rest of my comments are interspersed through a Storify I’ve made, where you’ll find more links, pictures, and (almost) full video of the panel. Enjoy! (I cannot seem to get the Storify to embed, so just follow this link for now.)