The kiddo at about five months with my sister.

Once a week I get four allergy shots and then sit in a small waiting room for thirty minutes to make sure I don’t have any adverse reactions. Today, my husband came along to spend some time with me and make use of the free wi-fi. We chatted quietly while he did some service work and I finished up my grading.

I noticed an older white woman, fifty or sixtysomething, balancing her checkbook while sitting at the kids table a few feet from us. She couldn’t seem to resist commenting on each patient as they came in to sit down (To one man: “Are you Egyptian? You’re dark!” To a probably male newborn: “What a strong boy you’ll be!” To my husband: “You must be smart, I don’t know all the words you are saying!”).

Eventually, a young woman enters with a little boy in tow. She starts to read to her child in a singsong voice. “Now can you find the TREE?!?!?” she almost screams. “How about the bird? DO YOU SEE THE BIRD?!?!?”

The older woman interrupts the book. “That’s so good that you read to him. How old is your boy?”

“Two.”

“And he already likes to read! That’s amazing. You must stay at home with him.”

“I sure do. I have three boys.”

“Oh, wonderful!”

“Yes, I quit medical school to be with them.”

“Oh well, yes, that is good. You know, God blesses mothers who stay at home.”

My jaw tenses, but I continue to grade.

“Yes, it’s where I should be. My husband is studying to get his MD/PhD, so it makes more sense for me to stay at home with the boys.”

My teeth begin to grind, but I continue to grade.

“That’s good, dear. School can always wait but your children cannot. I wish more mothers knew that. The children always turn out better when the mother stays at home. I used to be a teacher so I know.”

The mother nods and goes back to reading to her child. “Is that Oscar the Grouch? What COLOR is OSCAR?!?”

I try not to fantasize roller derby hip checks, and continue to grade.

The older woman’s time is up before mine and she leaves, which I regret. Because when it’s my turn to have my injections checked, I turn to my husband, calling him loudly. “Come on, FELLOW WORKING PARENT, it’s time to go!”

And I storm out.

* * *

Last week, the kiddo decided to draw a picture of her family. From top, clockwise: my sister, the kiddo, my husband, me.

In the car on the way to work, my husband and I talked about how often I come across this perspective, that there is a higher value in mothers who stay at home, and how he never hears from colleagues or friends that he would have higher value if he were to stay at home. But rather than enter into some debate that tries to place a working or non-working mother on the higher pedestal, I think it’s worth noticing that all mothers have help. All of them. Childcare and babysitting, school, camp, government support, a partner with a paycheck, family members’ time or money, all of these things support a mother as she raises a child. No mother does it alone, which means a mother who stays at home is not automatically more blessed or noble than one who does not.

Perhaps more importantly, our ancestral mothers did not stay at home and watch their children alone, the TV or radio the closest thing to adult company. My last post discussed the concept of pooled energy budgets, which requires cooperative breeding and transfers of labor and energy to maximize reproductive success. Our ancestral mothers likely got help from fathers (Marlowe, 2004), other mothers , lovers, friends, community members (Hill and Hurtado, 2009), grandmothers (Hawkes et al., 1997), even younger siblings (Kramer et al., 2009). Entire books have been written on this topic (Hrdy, 2009; Kramer, 2005), and conversations have bridged across genetics, anthropology, psychology and biology (Burkart and Van Schaik, 2010; Fox et al., 2010; Kramer, 2010; van Schaik and Burkart, 2010).

There is substantial evidence to support the idea that in our evolutionary history, mothers who had helpers did far better than those who did not, and that the social and cognitive skills needed to give and receive help are part of what make us uniquely human and intelligent (Burkart and Van Schaik, 2010; Kramer, 2010; van Schaik and Burkart, 2010). When children receive allocare it helps their development of social coordination and tolerance as well as positive social behaviors, and when those allomothers (which I’m trying to use in a gender neutral way) learn to care for children it helps them build attentional biases and responsiveness to others. Allomothering, to some researchers, is the foundational mechanism for what has made us a socially intelligent species.

So today, soon after Mother’s Day, I want to celebrate Allomother’s Day and thank all of my allomothers.

• Thank you to my husband, who brings home a salary, shares equally in housework and childcare, loves our child tenderly and fiercely, and is my staunchest supporter.
• Thank you to my salary as well, for helping us to afford food, shelter, care, and fun stuff for our daughter.
• Thank you to my sister, who lived in Illinois with us for a year and a half when our daughter was younger, and watched the kiddo many an afternoon or evening.
• Thank you to my parents, who shower the kiddo with gifts, hugs and kisses and who help with pick ups and drop offs when they visit.
• Thank you to my husband’s parents, who introduced the kiddo to Fancy Nancy and Angry Birds, and who cook up many inventive games when they visit.
• Thank you to my roller derby leaguemates, who keep my kid out of danger, out of seeing when I get hurt on the rink, who take her to the potty, and who help to tire her out so she sleeps well. They have done this without being asked, out of sheer kindness and love, over and over again.
• Thank you to our many babysitters who have loved our kiddo, taken her to the park, fed her dinner and tucked her into bed.
• Thank you to the kiddo’s amazing, progressive, loving preschool teachers, who have taught her more social and emotional skills in two semesters than I ever thought possible, all while keeping her safe, building her motivation, and getting her to stick up for herself.
• Thank you to our daycare provider, who loves the kiddo like her own and teachers all the children she watches to love and nurture one another.
• Thank you to my friends and neighbors, who have taken the kiddo on play dates to their house when they see the haunted look in my eyes that I am behind at work, and who have said they will be my family and my backup because I live so far from my parents and in laws.
• And finally, thank you to my internet posse, who provides emotional support even though I’ve met so few of you in person.

These kindnesses bring me to tears whenever I stop and think about it. It’s hard for someone like me who, though a potent swirl of genes and environment, has become a very, very independent person who does not like to rely on anyone. I have learned a lot about building a network and trusting others because of the cooperative breeding in my life.

References

Burkart JM, Van Schaik CP. 2010. Cognitive consequences of cooperative breeding in primates? Animal cognition 13(1):1-19.

Fox M, Sear R, Beise J, Ragsdale G, Voland E, Knapp LA. 2010. Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277(1681):567-573.

Hawkes K, O’Connell JF, Blurton Jones NG. 1997. Hadza women’s time allocation, offspring provisioning, and the evolution of long postmenopausal life spans. Current Anthropology 38(4):551-577.

Hill K, Hurtado AM. 2009. Cooperative breeding in South American hunter–gatherers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276(1674):3863-3870.

Hrdy SB. 2009. Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding: Belknap Press.

Kramer K. 2005. Maya children: helpers at the farm: Harvard Univ Pr.

Kramer KL. 2010. Cooperative breeding and its significance to the demographic success of humans. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:417-436.

Kramer KL, Greaves RD, Ellison PT. 2009. Early reproductive maturity among Pumé foragers: implications of a pooled energy model to fast life histories. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY 21(4):430-437.

Marlowe FW. 2004. What explains Hadza food sharing. Research in economic Anthropology 23:69-88.

van Schaik CP, Burkart JM. 2010. Mind the gap: cooperative breeding and the evolution of our unique features. Mind the gap: tracing the origins of human universals:477-497.

Humans share both food and labor. To some extent, we allocate food based on status (“The Big Piece of Chicken” from Chris Rock’s Bigger and Blacker – warning, profanity (and a splash of sexism) ahead!):

Maybe you’re the parent who always gets the big piece of chicken, or maybe you’re the roommate who always seems to have his leftovers stolen. The question is, why? What implications does this have for your own stress and energy stores, and ultimately your reproductive success?

The concept of pooled energy budgets

A series of papers over the last few years by Karen Kramer, Meredith Reiches, Peter Ellison and others raises exactly this question. In particular, they take on the paradox of slow human life histories – the fact that we take a long time to grow up, mature, be fully independent and have our own offspring – with fast reproduction – once we can have kids we are capable of having many overlapping, dependent offspring (Kramer and Ellison, 2010).

Consider that the age at first birth among many hunter-gatherer populations is in the late teens (Kramer et al., 2009), yet individuals in these populations often aren’t fully competent hunters and foragers until their thirties (Gurven et al., 2006; Kramer et al., 2009; Walker et al., 2002). Among industrialized populations, our average age at first birth is in the mid to late twenties (and here are CDC stats for the US only), but our average full financial independence equally late (that’s not to say there aren’t many teens and young adults fully independent from parents, but also many folks into their twenties and thirties are still getting loans, help with down payments, or gifts that help financially).

Kramer et al 2009 Figure 4 showing age at menarche and first birth among South American forager populations.

Gurven et al 2006 Fig 3b Age-dependency and hunting skill.

This gap would not do among non-human primates: most primates become independent foragers very early in their lives, and so what they collect, they eat. If they can’t get enough food to survive, they certainly won’t be allocating any of that energy towards reproduction, and so their reproductive success will be low or zero.

How do we handle the years between age at first birth and full independence? How do we take so long to mature, using up parental resources all the while, yet still manage to have a decent number of babies? Humans manage to circumvent our very slow and dependent juvenile period, and therefore have plenty of energy for reproduction, through transfers of energy (food, or in industrial societies money for food) and labor (especially childcare) between individuals.

When individuals hunt or forage, many are able to bring in more than they themselves will eat, and this gets shared among their family or community. Individuals in different reproductive states may even contribute more to their households to increase their indirect fitness, as has been found with grandmothers in Hadza foragers (Hawkes et al., 1997), and in suitors (Hawkes et al., 1997) or fathers (Marlowe, 2001), perhaps to offset potentially lower foraging capabilities of a pregnant or breastfeeding mother. And many increasingly agree that humans are a cooperatively breeding species (Hrdy, 2008), meaning that labor transfers of childcare can happen pretty often.

Hawkes et al 1997 Table 1. Time allocated to work among different age groups in Hadza men and women.

It’s great that we share, and that foraging and childcare behavior is responsive to one’s context and in the context of one’s family. This means that one’s social environment may play a significant role in the amount of energy and time you have for survival and reproduction (Reiches et al., 2009).

Why pooled energy budgets are cool

Understanding where our energy comes from – who has it easy and who has it hard in the daily labor of food acquisition – can help us understand a number of interesting things that vary among human populations. For instance, lighter juvenile workloads can contribute to faster juvenile growth. I’ve talked about the Pumé foragers before as an example of a population with relatively early reproduction. Kramer et al (2009) have shown that Pumé girls reach menarche and first birth earlier than most foragers (check out the first image in this post). These girls tend to have lower foraging expectations placed on them, which indirectly increases their energy budgets, as what would have gone towards foraging effort can now go towards maintenance and reproduction. This contributes to how they achieve faster growth and earlier reproductive maturity.

Understanding the nature of energy transfers can also help us understand cooperative breeding. In populations where pregnant and breastfeeding mothers’ foraging workloads are still high, are they getting respite from childcare to offset these costs? Who helps more: peers, fathers, maternal grandmothers or paternal grandmothers? What factors drive variation in allocare between populations? I wonder how varied these behaviors are even within a population: perhaps some mothers prefer foraging to childcare, or vice versa, and so find themselves doing more of one or the other. And I wonder if any of this could have an ultimate effect on reproductive success, depending on the environment and difficulty foraging.

But what I find really interesting is that some individuals may get more or less food through these energy transfers based on status, kinship, and friendship. That is, who you know, who your mother or father is, the kind of culture you come from and whether it treats some kinds of people better or worse, this may all have an ultimate impact on an individual’s energy budget. This is on top of the already documented impact of social environment on stress and health (e.g., Albert et al., 2008; Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2010; Miller et al., 2002). So there are at least two very significant ways in which our social environment affects wellness and reproductive success: an energy-based mechanism and a stress-based mechanism, and they are not mutually exclusive paths.

Starting from the pooled energy budgets model resolves a lot of the bickering that can occur about which ecological factor is “most” important to reproduction. The reality is, no matter how much I and others love to talk about inflammation, stress, immune function and other stuff, all of these factors ultimately impact the body through allocation of resources – through energy. The pooled energy budget concept gives a space for all these factors, and a useful framework to understand them.

References

Albert MA, Ravenell J, Glynn RJ, Khera A, Halevy N, de Lemos JA. 2008. Cardiovascular risk indicators and perceived race/ethnic discrimination in the Dallas Heart Study. American heart journal 156(6):1103-1109.

Gurven M, Kaplan H, Gutierrez M. 2006. How long does it take to become a proficient hunter? Implications for the evolution of extended development and long life span. Journal of Human Evolution 51(5):454-470.

Hawkes K, O’Connell JF, Blurton Jones NG. 1997. Hadza women’s time allocation, offspring provisioning, and the evolution of long postmenopausal life spans. Current Anthropology 38(4):551-577.

Hrdy S. 2008. Evolutionary context of human development: the cooperative breeding model. In: Salmon C, Shackelford T, editors. Family relationships: an evolutionary perspective: Oxford University Press.

Kiecolt-Glaser JK, Gouin J-P, Hantsoo L. 2010. Close relationships, inflammation, and health. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 35(1):33-38.

Kramer KL, Ellison PT. 2010. Pooled Energy Budgets: Resituating Human Energy Allocation Trade-offs. Evolutionary Anthropology 19:136-147.

Kramer KL, Greaves RD, Ellison PT. 2009. Early reproductive maturity among Pumé foragers: implications of a pooled energy model to fast life histories. American Journal of Human Biology 21(4):430-437.

Marlowe F. 2001. Male contribution to diet and female reproductive success among foragers. Current Anthropology 42(5):755-760.

Miller GE, Stetler CA, Carney RM, Freedland KE, Banks WA. 2002. Clinical depression and inflammatory risk markers for coronary heart disease. The American Journal of Cardiology 90(12):1279-1283.

Reiches MW, Ellison PT, Lipson SF, Sharrock KC, Gardiner E, Duncan LG. 2009. Pooled energy budget and human life history. American Journal of Human Biology 21(4):421-429.

Walker R, Hill K, Kaplan H, McMillan G. 2002. Age-dependency in hunting ability among the Ache of Eastern Paraguay. Journal of Human Evolution 42(6):639-657.

So it’s interesting to me that within anthropology we have four fields: biological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. Then within those four fields we have further subfields: within bio we have human biology, primatology, paleoecology, morphology, genetics to name a few, and even within those are sub-sub-fields. Some of the subfields collaborate, and some never read each other. Part of the reason I was so excited to collaborate with Katie Hinde and Julienne Rutherford on Building Babies was that I would get more of a chance to read the non-human primate literature, something we human biologists are sometimes known to ignore more than is good for us.

Then there’s biocultural anthropology. Biocultural anthropology is not actually that new, and there are some truly excellent practitioners. But more recently there has been a spate of work in anthropology claiming to take a “biocultural approach” that does not appear to be derived from these folks. I had the chance recently to chat with some colleagues about recent work on the biocultural approach, and found I was not the only one stymied, perhaps even frustrated, by this work.

Some work that claims to be biocultural doesn’t really appear to be biological, nor is it cultural, because it is atheoretical and happens to use biological and cultural methods. Some of it leans in some sort of theoretical direction, but then the methods are inscrutable.

How is it that a field that is so good at being interdisciplinary cannot do a good job interdisciplinary-ing itself?

What Does It Mean to Be Interdisciplinary?

A few of these venting sessions with colleagues just happened to be followed by a talk by Dr. Liam Heneghan, co-director of the DePaul Institute for Nature and Culture, environmental science professor, and philosophy PhD student (also, a blogger!). Heneghan’s talk was sponsored by the University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology, where some of us are trying to be all interdisciplinary ourselves. The talk was titled: “Interdisciplinarity: is it necessary, possible, or useful – a discussion.” In addition to several interesting books that I am going to have to dig through this summer, Heneghan offered a very hopeful picture for interdisciplinarity. Here are a few of my takeaways, as applied to the problem of the biocultural approach.

Being interdisciplinary isn’t the same as being a little good at everything, consistent with the saying “jack of all trades, master of none.” Heneghan analyzed the footnotes of one of the most popular interdisciplinary works, The Ecological Thought by Timothy Morton, and found it represents typical biodiversity quite well: the strongest influences by a few fields with, as he says, “a trailing edge of rarer species.” At least one model of being interdisciplinary, then, is to be very good in one field, pretty good in a few more, and then conversant across others. Some of the work I’ve been reading never masters that first field. And so there is something less than ideal in how we are training our students.

Students who want to become good biocultural anthropologists must first become experts in biological or cultural anthropology. Scholars need a base from which to reach out to other disciplines. If you are not thoroughly trained as one or the other, you will have a lot of trouble bridging them, or using your critical thinking skills to help ease you into a new field. This also suggests being thoughtful about undergraduate and graduate curriculum: while initial coursework should make someone an expert in their first field, learning a mixed methods approach for research probably wouldn’t hurt.

We also need to identify the essential reading for biocultural anthropology. What is the canon? What do biological anthropologists need to read to become conversant in cultural anthro? What do cultural anthropologists need to read to become conversant in bio anthro? I can probably identify most of the biological readings, but certainly not the cultural, and hope my readers do.

Next, identify the core questions that a biocultural approach can tackle better than any other. If a bio or cultural approach would satisfy the question, but you are tacking on the other field because it seems sexy, your grant proposal or manuscript submission is unlikely to make it through. But if you can recognize a problem that only this approach can solve you will be able to better develop the theory.

Finally, be ambitious. When I suggest we should make sure students and junior colleagues develop high competency in one discipline first and then thoroughly read one if not several others, I am not trying to deter people away from a biocultural approach. It’s just that the field will be better served by rigorous, developed, thoughtful research. Be ambitious in your projects, your goals, your research trajectories, and encourage ambition in those you mentor. But the lesson I have learned the hard way over and over is that ambition, excitement yet not thorough training will get you burned. I want my students, and any other budding biocultural anthropologists, to be kicking my ass in five to ten years because they know the literature and methods better than me.

What am I missing? Am I being too hard on the field? What biocultural curricula are you a part of, and what is or isn’t working? This is really just the most preliminary version of my thoughts on this, and so I welcome your comments.

Variation in adolescent menstrual cycles, doctor-patient relationships, and why we shouldn’t prescribe hormonal contraceptives to twelve year olds

The United States has the highest rate of unintended teen pregnancy among industrialized nations. So I can understand why there are so many papers, and such a great effort, to get young girls on hormonal contraception (Clark et al. 2004; Clark 2001; Gerschultz et al. 2007; Gupta et al. 2008; Krishnamoorthy et al. 2008; Ott et al. 2002; Roye 1998; Roye and Seals 2001; Sayegh et al. 2006; Zibners et al. 1999).

But I’ve noticed two things: first, that hormonal contraception is used imperfectly in this population, with some estimates that 10-15% of adolescents on hormonal contraception still get pregnant (Gupta et al. 2008). Second, discontinuation rates for hormonal contraception in young girls are high, with many girls complaining about side effects, particularly breakthrough bleeding (Clark et al. 2004; Gupta et al. 2008; Zibners et al. 1999). I have to admit some concern over the fact that many of the papers I read that mentioned these discontinuation rates and side effects were almost condescending in their tone. The implication was that the side effects weren’t a big deal.

One of the ways clinicians and sexual health educators are trying to improve hormonal contraceptive use in adolescents is to emphasize their off-label use as a “regulator” – that is, the pill can regulate your cycle, regulate your mood, regulate your skin. The idea is to emphasize the positive effects of hormonal contraception to combat the side effects young girls both worry about, and actually experience. This also tends to produce campaigns and commercials with images of idealized young women that young girls would want to model themselves after – skinny, confident, and of course very feminine.

This is not my favorite idea. The pill should not regulate the cycles of adolescent girls who experience moderate variation in their cycles, which, as it turns out, is what characterizes the normal adolescent menstrual cycle. (This is independent from debilitating, pathological experiences of the menstrual cycle or menstrual bleeding, which occur in a very small percentage of women.)

Allow me to explain.

From Vihko and Apter (1984). These are from old site so you can click to embiggen.

Vihko and Apter (1984) showed that there is variation in age at menarche, and that that variation tells us something about how long it should take an adolescent to start to achieve regular ovulatory cycles. The later your age at menarche, the longer you will experience irregular cycles. However, even in girls with ages at menarche twelve and under, it still took on average five years to achieve regular cycles. This indicates that, in adolescents, irregularity is in fact regular.

Lipson and Ellison (1992) have also looked at age-related variation in progesterone concentrations. Progesterone is the sex steroid hormone secreted by the ovary after ovulation, which is in the luteal phase. Luteal phase function is the one that seems to be the most variable within and between populations, and so progesterone is a great way to understand how female bodies vary. They found that those with the lowest hormone concentrations were on the extreme ends of their sample – 18-19 year olds, and 40-44 year olds and, as you might expect, hormone concentrations were higher as you moved towards the middle of that age range. So both younger and older women have low hormone concentrations relative to women in their reproductive prime, which is 25-35 years of age. But of course, this means that low hormone concentrations when you are in those early or late age ranges means that you are normal for your age.

From Lipson and Ellison (1992). These are from old site so you can click to embiggen.

Despite these issues, there are substantial benefits to hormonal contraception in adult women. When women take hormonal contraception in adulthood, particularly in the 25-35 year range, they are very effective contraception. The pill also may reduce risk of reproductive cancers, though results are mixed (Collaborative Group 1996; Collaborative Group 2008; Kahlenborn et al. 2006; Marchbanks et al. 2002; Modan et al. 2001; Narod et al. 1998; Smith et al. 2003). And of course, off-label use to treat painful periods or premenstrual syndrome can be beneficial for many (Fraser and Kovacs 2003).

However, the benefits of hormonal contraception in adults seems to be limited to more industrialized populations. Bentley (1994; 1996) first raised these concerns. She discussed the possible genetic, ethnic and developmental differences between women that could produce variation in pharmacokinetics, which could in turn vastly change the experience and efficacy of hormonal contraception in a global context. Virginia Vitzthum and others have also shown that there are high discontinuation rates and complaints of breakthrough bleeding in rural Bolivian women on hormonal contraception (Vitzthum and Ringheim 2005; Vitzthum et al. 2001). Other studies have shown similar discontinuation rates and side effects in other non-industrial populations (de Oliveira D’Antona et al. 2009; Gubhaju 2009).

You might notice that the issues in non-industrial populations mirror what has been seen in industrial adolescent girls. This isn’t surprising, given that they also have in common fewer ovulatory cycles and lower hormone concentrations.

So, I worry about whether the clear benefits of hormonal contraception in adulthood can be applied to adolescent girls, some as young as eleven or twelve years old. With the imperfect administration and high discontinuation rates, they aren’t that great as contraception. But there are additional, physiological concerns. What are the effects of giving doses of hormones to young girls with newly developing hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axes? The variation I mentioned before, where irregularity is regular in adolescence, is because the feedback loop between the brain and the gonads is priming and developing in this period, and this takes time. The sensitivity of the feedback loop is being set. If we flood this feedback loop with extra hormone, does this alter its sensitivity? It is a question worth testing.

Further, if we flood this immature system that normally has irregular cycles and low hormones, are we increasing lifetime estrogen exposure? High lifetime estrogen exposure is a risk factor for breast cancer and other reproductive cancers. Is it possible that hormonal contraception in adolescence could have the opposite effect of hormonal contraception in adulthood? Again, we need to test this hypothesis.

Future work on this topic includes asking whether adolescent menstrual cycle variation is any different today than twenty to thirty years ago. The only data we have (at least that I know of) are from the aforementioned 1984 and 1992 papers, and maybe some derivative papers using the same datasets. But we all know there have been massive changes in body composition, diet and health in the last few decades that deserve consideration. So, this work needs to be re-done on a current population.

We also need to ask how adolescent reproductive functioning varies within and between populations. While this has been studied extensively in adult women, we don’t have a sense of adolescent population variation. This will give us a sense of what ecological variables produce variation not only in age at menarche, but in how long cycle irregularity persists and reproductive hormone concentrations.

Some additional, provocative thoughts
In this symposium where I gave this talk, Karen Kramer delivered a beautiful paper just before mine on teen pregnancy, and I had some great conversations with session participants and attendees, that has further evolved my own thinking on this issue. I want to say something just a little provocative:

While I think teen pregnancy should be avoided, culturally we overstate its dangers and consequences because we have a real problem with young people reproducing. This can lead young girls to overlook potentially more serious issues like sexually transmitted infections, HIV, and cervical cancer, all of which girls and women are at risk for if they use only hormonal contraception and have otherwise unprotected sex.

Let me explain two important points here. First, in most industrialized nations we are not set up well to support young mothers because of the way families are isolated, yet social support is a strong predictor of birth weight, postpartum depression, and labor progression (Collins et al. 1993; Feldman et al. 2000; Turner et al. 1990). So there are very strong and obvious reasons why teen pregnancy and motherhood can be incredibly challenging in industrialized environments. I wonder sometimes if that lack of cultural support is related to a fear that more young girls will get pregnant if they feel they have permission to procreate. This is similar to the argument in favor of abstinence-only sex ed: if they don’t know their options, or are shamed into believing this option is the worst possible one, then of course they won’t make them. But adults aren’t rational. I’m unsure why we expect adolescents to be.

Birthday gift for a Northwestern student. Image by vxla on Flickr, Creative Commons license.

We also need to consider population variation in adolescence and pregnancy. Variation in age at first birth in traditional populations is quite wide, from sixteen to almost twenty six years of age (Walker et al. 2006). In more traditional populations you see a lot of allomothering and grandmothering to support first time mothers, who are often teenagers (Hawkes 2003; Hrdy 2009; Kramer 2005; Kramer 2008). So, support systems are built in, and it does not alter the trajectory of your life in the same way teen pregnancy does in an industrialized population.

This range of variation in age at first birth, and the fact that most of those young mothers do just fine, perhaps even end up with higher reproductive success, leads me to my second point: the physiological evidence against teen pregnancy might be overstated. In her talk, Karen discussed a paper of hers in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that described the negative health outcomes of teen pregnancy (Kramer 2008). In it, she reviewed literature that suggests that when you control for lack of prenatal care, first pregnancy, and low socioeconomic status, the common assumption that pregnancy is harmful to teens is significantly weakened.

Further, in her own work with Pumé foragers in Venezuela, mothers under the age of fourteen were the only group to have greater infant mortality than the referent group of late reproducers (Kramer 2008). Yet when we teach young girls about their bodies, we tell them that their bodies are not equipped to have babies in their teens and that there are extreme consequences (in fact, I have said exactly this in the past). The reality is that those consequences are worst for very young teens, and may not be as significant in older teens.

Am I advocating teenagers get pregnant? Absolutely and unequivocally no. But I think they need access to correct information, not skewed information. This means telling them the truth about our uncertainties about the health implications for hormonal contraception in adolescence, it means educating them about the importance of barrier methods, and it means making sure they understand the health risks associated with unprotected sex.

This is a nuanced issue that requires nuanced thinking. Despite my concerns about adolescent hormone contraceptive use, there are problems with barrier methods as well, particularly when there may be a cultural bias against their use, or in situations when women cannot safely use contraception in an obvious way with their partner (Gupta et al. 2008). Again, what is important here is conveying correct information, so that each individual can weigh the pros and cons as they relate to her own context. This means it could be an excellent idea for some twelve year olds to be on hormonal contraception, and a terrible one for other girls through the age of twenty. It is going to have to be up to them.

I hope this post generates some thinking and some conversation, and I welcome people who might push me in a different direction than where I’m currently thinking. I am sharing this now, before putting it together as a manuscript, to provoke thoughts and comments.

References (watch out! Ref list almost as long as post!)

Bentley GR (1994). Ranging hormones: do hormonal contraceptives ignore human biological variation and evolution? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 709, 201-3 PMID: 8154705

Bentley GR. 1996. Evidence for interpopulation variation in normal ovarian function and consequences for hormonal contraception. In: Rosetta LaM-T, C.G.N., editor. Variability in human fertility. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p 46-65.

Clark, L. (2004). Menstrual irregularity from hormonal contraception triggers significant reproductive health fears in adolescent girls Journal of Adolescent Health, 34 (2), 123-124 DOI: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2003.11.091

Clark, L. (2001). Will the Pill Make Me Sterile? Addressing Reproductive Health Concerns and Strategies to Improve Adherence to Hormonal Contraceptive Regimens in Adolescent Girls Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, 14 (4), 153-162 DOI: 10.1016/S1083-3188(01)00123-1

Collaborative group (1996). Breast cancer and hormonal contraceptives: collaborative reanalysis of individual data on 53 297 women with breast cancer and 100 239 women without breast cancer from 54 epidemiological studies The Lancet, 347 (9017), 1713-1727 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(96)90806-5

Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies of Ovarian Cancer, Beral V, Doll R, Hermon C, Peto R, & Reeves G (2008). Ovarian cancer and oral contraceptives: collaborative reanalysis of data from 45 epidemiological studies including 23,257 women with ovarian cancer and 87,303 controls. Lancet, 371 (9609), 303-14 PMID: 18294997

Collins, N., Dunkel-Schetter, C., Lobel, M., & Scrimshaw, S. (1993). Social support in pregnancy: Psychosocial correlates of birth outcomes and postpartum depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65 (6), 1243-1258 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.65.6.1243

D’Antona Ade O, Chelekis JA, D’Antona MF, & Siqueira AD (2009). Contraceptive discontinuation and non-use in Santarém, Brazilian Amazon. Cadernos de saude publica / Ministerio da Saude, Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz, Escola Nacional de Saude Publica, 25 (9), 2021-32 PMID: 19750389

Feldman PJ, Dunkel-Schetter C, Sandman CA, & Wadhwa PD (2000). Maternal social support predicts birth weight and fetal growth in human pregnancy. Psychosomatic medicine, 62 (5), 715-25 PMID: 11020102

Fraser IS, & Kovacs GT (2003). The efficacy of non-contraceptive uses for hormonal contraceptives. The Medical journal of Australia, 178 (12), 621-3 PMID: 12797849

Gerschultz KL, Sucato GS, Hennon TR, Murray PJ, & Gold MA (2007). Extended cycling of combined hormonal contraceptives in adolescents: physician views and prescribing practices. The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, 40 (2), 151-7 PMID: 17259055

Gubhaju, B. (2009). Barriers to Sustained Use of Contraception in Nepal: Quality of Care, Socioeconomic Status, and Method-Related Factors Biodemography and Social Biology, 55 (1), 52-70 DOI: 10.1080/19485560903054671

Gupta, N., Corrado, S., & Goldstein, M. (2008). Hormonal Contraception for the Adolescent Pediatrics in Review, 29 (11), 386-397 DOI: 10.1542/pir.29-11-386

Hawkes, K. (2003). Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity American Journal of Human Biology, 15 (3), 380-400 DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.10156

Hrdy SB. 2009. Mothers and others: the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding: Belknap Press.

Kahlenborn, C., Modugno, F., Potter, D., & Severs, W. (2006). Oral Contraceptive Use as a Risk Factor for Premenopausal Breast Cancer: A Meta-analysis Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 81 (10), 1290-1302 DOI: 10.4065/81.10.1290

Kramer, K. (2005). Children’s Help and the Pace of Reproduction: Cooperative Breeding in Humans Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 14 (6), 224-237 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20082

Kramer KL (2008). Early sexual maturity among Pumé foragers of Venezuela: fitness implications of teen motherhood. American journal of physical anthropology, 136 (3), 338-50 PMID: 18386795

KRISHNAMOORTHY, N., SIMPSON, C., TOWNEND, J., HELMS, P., & MCLAY, J. (2008). Adolescent Females and Hormonal Contraception: A Retrospective Study in Primary Care Journal of Adolescent Health, 42 (1), 97-101 DOI: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2007.06.016

Lipson, S., & Ellison, P. (2008). Normative study of age variation in salivary progesterone profiles Journal of Biosocial Science, 24 (02) DOI: 10.1017/S0021932000019751

Marchbanks, P., McDonald, J., Wilson, H., Folger, S., Mandel, M., Daling, J., Bernstein, L., Malone, K., Ursin, G., Strom, B., Norman, S., Wingo, P., Burkman, R., Berlin, J., Simon, M., Spirtas, R., & Weiss, L. (2002). Oral Contraceptives and the Risk of Breast Cancer New England Journal of Medicine, 346 (26), 2025-2032 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa013202

Modan B, Hartge P, Hirsh-Yechezkel G, Chetrit A, Lubin F, Beller U, Ben-Baruch G, Fishman A, Menczer J, Struewing JP, Tucker MA, Wacholder S, & National Israel Ovarian Cancer Study Group (2001). Parity, oral contraceptives, and the risk of ovarian cancer among carriers and noncarriers of a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. The New England journal of medicine, 345 (4), 235-40 PMID: 11474660

Narod, S., Risch, H., Moslehi, R., Dørum, A., Neuhausen, S., Olsson, H., Provencher, D., Radice, P., Evans, G., Bishop, S., Brunet, J., Ponder, B., & Klijn, J. (1998). Oral Contraceptives and the Risk of Hereditary Ovarian Cancer New England Journal of Medicine, 339 (7), 424-428 DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199808133390702

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ROYE, C. (1998). Condom use by hispanic and african-american adolescent girls who use hormonal contraception Journal of Adolescent Health, 23 (4), 205-211 DOI: 10.1016/S1054-139X(97)00264-4

Roye CF, & Seals B (2001). A qualitative assessment of condom use decisions by female adolescents who use hormonal contraception. The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care : JANAC, 12 (6), 78-87 PMID: 11723916

SAYEGH, M., FORTENBERRY, J., SHEW, M., & ORR, D. (2005). The developmental association of relationship quality, hormonal contraceptive choice and condom non-use among adolescent women Journal of Adolescent Health, 36 (2), 97-97 DOI: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2004.11.009

SMITH, J., GREEN, J., DEGONZALEZ, A., APPLEBY, P., PETO, J., PLUMMER, M., FRANCESCHI, S., & BERAL, V. (2003). Cervical cancer and use of hormonal contraceptives: a systematic review The Lancet, 361 (9364), 1159-1167 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(03)12949-2

Turner, R., Grindstaff, C., & Phillips, N. (1990). Social Support and Outcome in Teenage Pregnancy Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 31 (1) DOI: 10.2307/2137044

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Vitzthum, V., & Ringheim, K. (2005). Hormonal Contraception and Physiology: A Research-based Theory of Discontinuation Due to Side Effects Studies in Family Planning, 36 (1), 13-32 DOI: 10.1111/j.1728-4465.2005.00038.x

Vitzthum, V. (2001). Vaginal bleeding patterns among rural highland Bolivian women: relationship to fecundity and fetal loss Contraception, 64 (5), 319-325 DOI: 10.1016/S0010-7824(01)00260-8

Walker, R., Gurven, M., Hill, K., Migliano, A., Chagnon, N., De Souza, R., Djurovic, G., Hames, R., Hurtado, A., Kaplan, H., Kramer, K., Oliver, W., Valeggia, C., & Yamauchi, T. (2006). Growth rates and life histories in twenty-two small-scale societies American Journal of Human Biology, 18 (3), 295-311 DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.20510

ZIBNERS, A., CROMER, B., & HAYES, J. (1999). Comparison of continuation rates for hormonal contraception among adolescents Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, 12 (2), 90-94 DOI: 10.1016/S1083-3188(00)86633-4

The kinds of factors that produce variation in behavior include things like resource availability, group composition, and mating strategies. How much food does the individual have access to, but also what kind? What do they need to do to acquire it and do they need to compete to do so? Who else is in the group and are they related to her? Is she a seasonal breeder or spontaneous ovulator, a promiscuous, monogamous, or polygynous primate?

So there are certainly good reasons to expect many behaviors to have adaptive significance, and for them to improve reproductive success. Yet when it comes to studying humans, too often this evolutionary buttressing collapses, only to be replaced with pop evolution interpretations. These interpretations tend to forget that things we find sexy today may or may not have been preferred in ancestral environments, and that if we cannot understand relationships between behavior and reproductive success without some sort of mechanism, it is little more than storytelling.

Hormones are one surefire way to begin to build a mechanistic link between behavior and reproductive success. Yet I am usually rather ornery about those manuscripts as well. When I complain about articles about hormones and behavior, they usually are based on the following issues:

So it’s nice to come across a paper* on hormones and behavior that not only manages not to fall into any of the above traps, but surpasses my expectations in terms of the quality of hypothesis testing, statistical analyses, and conclusions.

What they found
Ziomkiewicz et al (2012) found that urban, Polish women with a particular temperament profile – those with high activity and endurance traits but low emotional reactivity – had higher estradiol concentrations and a progesterone profile that rose earlier in the luteal phase compared to women with the opposite profile (low activity and endurance, high reactivity). They used the Formal Characteristics of Behavior – Temperament Inventory developed by Strelau and Zawadzki, and focused on activity, endurance and emotional reactivity because they correlate with personalities that indicate high reproductive success. In their supplementary materials, Ziomkiewicz et al more clearly define these traits:

Therefore women with high activity and endurance, but low emotional reactivity – and thus are emotionally stable and extraverted – are called High Ability to Process Stimulation (HAPS) individuals. Those with low activity and endurance but high emotional reactivity – so neurotic and introverted – are called Low Ability to Process Stimulation (LAPS) individuals.

The participants of this study were healthy, urban women from Wrocław, Poland, and they collected urine daily for one menstrual cycle. While there were 116 total participants, the main analyses of the paper compare HAPS and LAPS women, of which there were 26 participants each. This is still a great sample size for a study that has so much analytical richness per participant – for comparison, my own dissertation has half the number of participants (n = 25), and my only other major dataset 46 participants.

Behavior is context-dependent
Ziomkiewicz et al took a life history perspective on the question of whether ovarian hormones play a role in women’s personality. Women who are better at processing stimuli probably have more resources available to them, which makes them better equipped to handle the high resource demands of pregnancy, lactation and childcare. Women who are better at processing stimuli in their environment tend to be more extroverted and sociable, and extraversion and sociability are both highly preferred traits in potential mates, as well as correlated with reproductive success.

So, the authors hypothesized that HAPS women would have hormone profiles that indicate higher fertility compared to LAPS women. This is a far more thoughtful way to develop hypotheses about behavior and ovarian hormones because it comes from a basic principle of understanding that behavior is dependent on context and resource availability. That is, behavior is influenced by underlying genetic variation, and also environmental variation.

Ultimately, what Ziomkiewicz et al are arguing is that the mechanisms that underlie the relationship between extraversion and reproductive success reflect a relationship between these more basic temperamental traits of how well one handles one’s environment and ovarian hormones. So they are developing a model for how behavior is correlated with ovarian hormones in a way that is functionally, biologically significant. I think this is really cool!

Within a given population, if you have higher estradiol concentrations than the norm, you likely are able to allocate more energy both to ovulating a high-quality egg and getting your endometrium to grow nice and thick. If you also have high progesterone concentrations, it means you have a nice, big corpus luteum (that’s the yellow body left behind by the ovulated egg, again indicating it was probably high quality). Further, high progesterone indicates you can not only decidualize your endometrium, which means give it all the nooks and crannies and growth factors that make it a nice place to implant, but you can maintain the endometrium and a potential trophoblast until the placenta can make its own progesterone. This increases the chance for implantation and pregnancy but may also reduce the risk of early pregnancy loss.

The reason I make the point that all of this matters in terms of intrapopulation variation, is that different lifestyles and subsistence behaviors help produce populational norms for hormone concentrations. What is high for a rural Polish woman, for instance, is not the same as high for an urban Polish woman, and is probably not the same as high for an urban American woman. Not only that, but since these behaviors are context and resource-dependent, then the contexts and resources available to a given population, and how much they vary based on socioeconomic status and many other factors, are also important.

Physiology is context-dependent
This paper is cool for behavior people, but it’s also cool for reproductive physiology nerds like me. I mean, look at these graphs!

Profiles of urinary estrogen (a) and progesterone (b) during the menstrual cycle in HAPS (black circle) and LAPS (white square) women.

These are very likely biologically significant differences, at least in the estradiol curves. The authors did find that the day dependency of progesterone was different in the two groups, and you can see that while the overall values aren’t that different, that the HAPS women have higher values in the early part of the luteal phase. I would like to see these values aligned by ovulation so we can better see them up against the implantation window, which is 6-12 days after ovulation. Aligning there rather than menses might give us some better insight into whether this difference is biologically meaningful. If progesterone is higher in HAPS women in the early part of the window, that would definitely be interesting. And of course, it would be interesting to one day also run these analyses alongside other physiological variables like follicle waves or endometrial thickness.

Meeting the criteria for a good behavior paper
As I mentioned before, the following issues make me cranky:

Ziomkiewicz et al sampled daily throughout the menstrual cycle, provided a clear and coherent mechanistic link between hormones and behavior, and provided an interesting life history perspective on why temperament and ovarian hormones would be linked. The only criterion they don’t quite meet is in the use of an urban, Polish population, yet I still think this is different enough from the American and UK populations that are more often sampled that they pass here as well. From having done fieldwork in Poland over three summers, the activity patterns and diet composition is still pretty different in urban areas there versus in the US.

One final issue that Ziomkiewicz et al handle well is in discussing limitations and alternative hypotheses. They mention that energy availability can impact temperament, and so the relationship they found between temperament and ovarian hormones might only be the association between energy availability and ovarian hormones that has already been found countless times. However, they controlled for body fat, which partially addresses energy availability and the authors have previously shown influences estradiol.

From Ziomkiewicz et al 2008. Women with very low and high body fat have lower estradiol in this sample.

From Jasienska and Ellison 1998, demonstrating that higher energy expenditure is correlated with lower progesterone concentrations in this sample of rural, Polish women.

At the same time, differences in energy availability using other measures like energy expenditure and intake tend to affect progesterone and luteal activity first, as you can see in the figure above, yet that was definitely the lesser finding in this study. So I really think the authors have something here.

Of course I am biased (remember to see*), but I do think Ziomkiewicz and colleagues have put together a thoughtful and important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which behavior and hormones influence each other.

*Full disclosure: I know several of the authors on this paper and two (Ziomkiewicz and Jasienska) are collaborators. However I knew nothing of this project or manuscript until I saw the final, published form.

References
Jasienska G, Ellison PT. 1998. Physical work causes suppression of ovarian function in women. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 265(1408):1847-1851.

Ziomkiewicz A, Ellison PT, Lipson SF, Thune I, Jasienska G. 2008. Body fat, energy balance and estradiol levels: a study based on hormonal profiles from complete menstrual cycles. Hum Reprod 23(11):2555-2563.

Ziomkiewicz A, Wichary S, Bochenek D, Pawlowski B, Jasienska G. 2012. Temperament and ovarian reproductive hormones in women: Evidence from a study during the entire menstrual cycle. Hormones and Behavior 61(4):535-540.

A few highlights from the AAPAs this year include:

• A Building Babies get-together on Wednesday night (look for Julienne Rutherford and some obvious signage at the reception that evening)
• A Physical Anthropology Women’s Mentoring Network Happy Hour Thursday at 5:15pm in the Alexander’s Room on the 23rd floor of the Hilton
• A Biological Anthropology Developing Investigators Troop Happy Hour from 6-7pm on Friday, also in the Alexander’s Room on the 23rd floor of the Hilton.

So if you were involved with our book, are looking to give or receive some lady mentoring, and/or are a junior bio anthro colleague, there are chances for you to meet up with others.

Then there are, you know, the talks. The stuff you do between the schmoozing and the drinking. The Building Babies Lady Editors are all in the same, late Friday session (Session 24 in the Galleria North, 2-6pm). Guess who has the 5:45 talk?

This girl.

The relationship between strenuous physical activity and C-reactive protein is cycle-phase dependent: results from rural Poland

Energetic and inflammatory variables impact ovarian functioning, but their mechanistic links to each other and the ovaries remain unclear. We hypothesize that inflammatory biomarker C-reactive protein (CRP) is negatively correlated with strenuous physical activity in a population of rural Polish women. Because progesterone is suppressed by physical activity, yet progesterone administration can increase physical activity, we further hypothesized that their activity patterns would vary between the follicular and luteal phases, periods of low and high progesterone. Using standard epidemiological methods to collect daily records of minutes and exertion of physical activity over one menstrual cycle, we distinguished between light and strenuous activity, and activity variation through the cycle. Saliva was collected daily (progesterone), and urine seven times over the cycle (CRP).

Midluteal progesterone concentrations were inversely correlated with luteal CRP (p = 0.02), median CRP (p = 0.05), and were positively associated with strenuous activity in the luteal phase (p = 0.09). Median, luteal and follicular CRP were all negatively correlated with strenuous activity in the luteal phase (p = 0.03 for all three measures). And when women were grouped into those with high and low CRP concentrations, those with low CRP performed significantly more strenuous physical activity through the luteal phase. None of these associations were found with follicular phase physical activity. These results suggest physical activity influences systemic inflammation, which may additionally influence ovarian functioning. Therefore continued attention on systemic inflammation is crucial to determine mechanistic links between it and reproductive success in women.

Since writing this abstract my thinking on the topic has matured a bit (this is part of the problem with having an abstract deadline in September for a conference in April). We’ve also played around with the data a bit more, and have some more to report. I hope my presentation will get us thinking about subsistence versus recreational physical activity, as well as variation in strenuousness. I expect some of this will turn out to be pretty relevant to variation in reproductive function.

I shared an interview with Lady Editor Katie on Wednesday, and today I share one with Lady Editor Julienne to describe how we developed this book, and why books like this are still important in academia (even if we could and should discuss issues in cost structures and accessibility). I also have printed the second half of the Building Babies table of contents, so that you can see the breadth of topics covered and our excellent chapter authors.

Building Babies Table of Contents (Part 2)

IV. MOTHERS AND INFANTS: THE FIRST SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP

12. Maternal influences on social and neural development in rhesus monkeys: Christopher J. Machado

13. Maternal Condition: Infant Compensation, Resilience, and Adaptive Response: Lynn A. Fairbanks and Katie Hinde

14. Tentative title: The role of mothers in the development of complex skills in chimpanzees: Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf

V. THE EXPANDING SOCIAL NETWORK

15. Reproductive Strategies and Infant Care in the Malagasy Primates: Stacey R. Tecot, Andrea L. Baden, Natalie Romine, Jason M. Kamilar

16. When dads help: infant development of owl monkeys and other primates with allo-maternal care: Maren Huck & Eduardo Fernandez Duque

17. Ontogeny of Social Behavior in the Genus Cebus and the Application of an Integrative Framework for Examining Plasticity and Complexity in Evolution: Katherine C. MacKinnon

VI. TRANSITIONS TO JUVENILITY AND REPRODUCTIVE MATURITY

18. Identifying proximate and ultimate causation in the development of primate sex-typed social behavior: Stephanie Meredith

19. Future adults or old children? Integrating life-history frameworks for understanding primate locomotor patterns: Michelle Bezanson and Mary Ellen Morbeck

20. Quantitative genetic perspectives female macaque life histories: heritability, plasticity, and trade-offs: Gregory Blomquist

21. Cultural evolution and human reproductive behavior: Lesley Newson

CONCLUSION (Robert Martin)

Interview with Julienne Rutherford, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Oral Biology, College of Dentistry, University of Illinois, Chicago

Julienne Rutherford hard at work, doing awesome science.

What was the experience like editing this book?
I had never done anything like this. I’ve done some co-writing and I’ve reviewed papers before, but the teamwork and choreography that go into an edited volume took those skills to a new level. I think it’s hilarious that Katie thought maybe I’d be smart enough to say no to editing a book as an as-yet untenured assistant professor. HAHAHAhahahaha. Um, no. But I have to say that even though I was warned and even strongly advised against doing this, it has turned out to be a real joy and so far one of my proudest professional achievements. I learned so much about editing (cutting extraneous prose, cleaning up narratives, tightening arguments, retaining an author’s voice through it all) and this in turn has already had a really positive impact on my own writing. And ultimately, it was just so fun to work with you and Katie and our incredibly talented cast of contributors.

What were some of the reasons you chose these chapter authors?
Their science is good, you know? We were just super jazzed about what is happening right now in the complex world of primate development. That said, I don’t want to shy away from the fact that it was very important to me personally to highlight new avenues of research into primate development being defined and pursued by junior scholars in our field, and especially women. We certainly did not include or exclude anyone just because of their gender – it really just turned out that the work we were most drawn to as exciting, interdisciplinary, innovative, and visionary was being done predominantly female scholars early in their careers. And I think that’s great.  If we can inspire each other, support each other’s scholarship, and really stand up for an inclusive intellectual culture, I hope our book makes a contribution to keeping women in the pipeline.

What is the value of an edited volume in this era of academic publishing?
The value to me is that it allowed us to craft a specific kind of narrative in a specific time in the history of the field of primate development. The chapters bring to the forefront complementary themes like epigenetics and evo-devo, inflammation and stress, developmental transitions.  Certainly some of the avenues outlined in the book are in their infancy – hee, I made a Building Babies pun! – and we will see how they bear out over time. But an edited volume is sort of like staking a flag, a grand gesture because we are saying that this is for posterity, in a way that a special journal issue or meeting proceedings doesn’t achieve, in my view. I also want to point out that our review process was unusually rigorous for an edited volume (I’m sure many of our contributors would agree with that!) but that meant that everyone really had to make a concerted effort to be intelligible to each other. So the book in many ways forms a conversation, a really nerdtastic conversation.

What contribution do you think this book makes to anthropology? To evolutionary biology?
We take an explicitly comparative approach to primate development. By that I mean that we don’t divide this book along taxonomic lines. Since our organizing frame is the developmental trajectory, we are talking about humans, baboons, lemurs, chimpanzees, et cetera, all in the same breath. I think it’s enormously important that the study of human biology and human biomedicine is integrated into a comparative primatology. I can’t help find it odd that we train human biologists in some anthropology programs with nothing but the barest bones of a primatology background. Many human biologists are really well-versed in the rodent literature that pertains to their particular phenomena of interest, and are really well-versed in human physiology, but are not aware of the amazing work their primatological colleagues are doing. I anticipate this book helping to foster a cross-pollination that I think will be tremendously beneficial to the future of biological anthropology. See, I have a dream of a world in which a biological anthropologist who works on both human and nonhuman primate projects makes sense to hiring committees and funding agencies, and if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.

I also think it’s worth noting that this book was edited by three anthropologists at the assistant professor level, all three of whom write science blogs.

Building Babies Table of Contents (Part 1)

PREFACE (Hinde, Clancy, & Rutherford)

I. CONCEPTION & PREGNANCY

1. Inflammation, reproduction, and the Goldilocks Principle: Kathryn B. H. Clancy
2. The primate placenta as an agent of developmental and health trajectories across the lifecourse: Julienne N. Rutherford
3. Placental development, evolution, and epigenetics of primate pregnancies: Kirstin N Sterner, Natalie M. Jameson, and Derek E Wildman
4. Nutritional ecology and reproductive output in female chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): variation among and within populations: Kevin B. Potts

II. FROM PRE- TO POST-NATAL LIFE

1. Prenatal steroids affect development and behavior in primates: Adam Smith, Andrew Birnie, Jeff French
2. Navigating transitions in HPA function from pregnancy through lactation: implications for maternal health and infant brain development: Colleen Nyberg
3. Genome-environment coordination in neurobehavioral development: Erin Kinnally
4. Building Marmoset Babies: Trade-offs and Cutting Bait: Suzette Tardif, Corinna Ross, Darlene Smucny

III. MILK: COMPLETE NUTRITION FOR THE INFANT

1. Lactational programming: mother’s milk predicts infant behavior and temperament: Katie Hinde
2. Do bigger brains mean better milk? Lauren A. Milligan
3. Infant gut microbiota: developmental influences and health outcomes: Melanie Martin & David Sela

Interview with Katie Hinde, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

Katie Hinde, giving her exit seminar at UC Davis

What was the inspiration for this volume?

I had been interested in doing an edited volume that showcased the state of the art in terms of understanding primate development. Maternal effects and infant development was a target of substantial research effort in the 80’s and 90’s and was now experiencing a major interdisciplinary resurgence. It also dovetailed nicely with my “Russian nesting doll” academic strategy; little doll- write empirical papers; medium doll- write the review paper that puts those empirical papers in context within that domain of research; large doll- edit the book volume that puts that domain of research into a broad intellectual context. Of course there is the X-large doll- write a text book, but no effing way am I tackling that jazz. Of course, I was well aware of the conventional wisdom to “never edit a book before tenure” so I set the idea on the back burner and focused on little and medium-sized nesting dolls.

But in May of 2010 Janet Slobodien from Springer sent me an email inquiring if I would be interested in editing a book for the Developments in Primatology series on maternal nutrition. I was kicking it around when two weeks later Julienne invites me to participate in your symposium at the AAPA meeting in MPLS “Eating for two: maternal ecology and nutrition in human and non-human primates.” Hmmmm… The conventional wisdom wasn’t “never CO-EDIT…” So I pitched the idea of editing a book to Julienne. I can still remember how nervous I felt on the phone because I was really hoping she would say “Yes” but expected that she would be smarter than me and say “No.” But she was in, and proposed inviting you to join us since at that time I still didn’t know you. And then, well, the actual work started.

What was the experience like editing this book?

Without question it was a major learning experience. I am very pleased that I did this so early in my career because I think I learned some skills that will serve me very well moving forward. I learned a lot about writing; from evaluating earlier drafts of contributed chapters, to assessing the comments of the many external reviewers, and by always reading through the eyes of the intended audience. While writing my dissertation, the goal of my writing was very much about representing my thoughts on paper. But as an editor, I shifted my perspective to “how can the thoughts be communicated most effectively to the reader.” I loved your earlier post about terrible first drafts and how revising is “killing your darlings” because we are so attached to our words. Cutting them up and throwing some away can be devastating. As an editor, they aren’t my darlings, so I could be more objective about the reader’s perspective, instead of predominantly my own. And now I am working to translate that perspective to my own writing efforts.

And although it may seem minor, I learned how to ask for help when I needed it, offer help when I suspected it was needed, and accept help when it was offered to me. I am so proud to have been part of such an excellent team that we were able to escort a 600 page volume from concept to publication in two years.

What is the main contribution this book makes to anthropology? To evolutionary biology?

This book’s contribution is in showcasing the multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to studying primate development. Everyone will learn something new reading this book, no matter if you are studying the development of capuchin play behavior in Costa Rica or glucocorticoid receptor density in the hippocampus in infant rhesus. By integrating information from complementary approaches we can build a more comprehensive understanding of primate development. Unfortunately there is sometimes a dearth of cross-talk among anthropologists, psychobiologists, neuroscientists, ethologists, immunologists, microbiologists, and biologists. Here we bring those perspectives together.

How does this book intersect with your own research and pedagogical interests?

Um. I am totes interested in primate development, duh. I am also hoping that this book motivates others to become interested in integrating developmental investigations into their own research programs. I hope that with more minds trying to understand how infants are shaped by the placenta, mother’s milk, and behavioral care, we will have exponential progress in untangling the processes of ontogeny. Beyond informing us about the elegance of the natural world, such research can have major translational potential for human health, longevity, and social relationships.

Why should someone buy this book?

Because they are studying for their qualifying exams. I know I used that excuse to justify the purchase of several ludicrously expensive books.

Seriously though, the hardback copy version of this book is expensive. Part of that is the length of the book- if it was less informative it would be less expensive. However, if you study primate infant development you will unquestionably find it a valuable and up to date resource. Moreover the chapters here present novel and unique syntheses not found elsewhere in the literature. Best of all, if your institution subscribes to the Springer Book Series, you can order a free e-book version or a paperback version in the US for $25. Details can be found here. As we approach the publication date we will compile a list of institutions that have access to the “MyCopy” mechanism.

It is unambiguous to me that supporting junior scientists and protecting them from mental, physical and emotional harm, not to mention providing them the resources to flourish, should be the main goal of every academic department. There is never, ever an instance in which our science, or a collaboration, should be privileged over this. And yet, that is what happened here.

Let us think together on what administrative, bureaucratic and cultural practices need to shift to put attention and effort towards the most valuable, yet often most vulnerable, resources in science: junior scientists, which includes undergrads, grad students, postdocs and junior faculty.

* * *

It was happening again.

I looked around the seminar table to see if anyone else had noticed. The other graduate students and the professor remained engrossed in debate over an article—no one, it seemed, had registered the panic mounting in my corner of the room. Quietly, I slipped notebook and papers into my backpack and made for the door, offering the apologetic “I have an embarrassing doctor’s appointment—trust me, you don’t want to know” smile.

I walked home, head cloudy, eyes fixed to the ground. When the crossing-guard teased me for returning early—he usually saw me in the morning, as students arrived at the local school, but never in the middle of the afternoon—I nearly burst into tears. Why could I not shake the feeling that everything I did—in fact, everything I thought—was fundamentally bad, that it invited the wrong sort of attention, that I shouldn’t, by all rights, be taking up space in the universe at all? And why did this terrifying train of thought become more persistent with each passing day?

Several miles of pavement under running shoes, a hot shower, dinner, and a frantic journal entry later, the demons receded. I looked at my watch: eight hours had passed since the onset of the episode, and this had been a short one. In its grip, I could not focus; now, released, I was wrung out and hollowed, the way you feel when a fever breaks. No more work would get done tonight.

***

This sort of episode—beginning with the feeling of being “triggered” by some one’s unknowing remark or gesture, progressing into full-blown anxiety and self-loathing, and resolving, finally, in a feeling of mysterious reprieve and exhaustion—had begun to occur after a senior colleague at the remote field site where I did dissertation research spoke to and touched me in an inappropriate and nonconsensual way.

For several weeks following The Incident—like a 1950s TV police detective, I soon began calling it The Incident—I scrutinized my behavior in the days leading up to it, sifting furiously for the thing I had done wrong. Had I been too open with information about myself, made too many off-color jokes? I was wearing a pink shirt at the time of The Incident—did that mean that I was unconsciously soliciting sexual attention? The colleague, Z., had a history of crossing boundaries with graduate students, a history that the administration ignored because of his professional importance. Knowing this, I had tried to be careful around him, but would anyone believe me? The best thing to do, I resolved, would be to deal with The Incident when I returned to the safety of my home community. Several weeks later, though, I learned that I would be required to interact with Z. again at the field site. The prospect of seeing him left me shaking with nerves. I realized that I needed to let the authorities know what had happened.

My graduate advisor, the field station manager, and Z.’s ultimate supervisor, F., all took my concern seriously. I appreciated their acknowledgment that the issue could not be ignored, and I was grateful that F. asked my permission to speak to Z. When F. did speak to Z., however, the process broke down: Z. denied that anything had happened, claiming that any untoward interaction had to be the product of my fantasy or of my instigation. F. and the other supervisors withdrew, refusing to adjudicate. I was left with the fear that my personal and professional credibility had been damaged, without allies at the field station, and, to my distress, in the company of Z., while the other supervisors attended to obligations outside the country.

The Incident was not repeated—with me, at any rate—either then or in subsequent field seasons. The role of Z. on our joint project, however, had to be settled, and F. was determined to reconcile us to one another. The way to do this, F. decided, was to impel me to back down from my position: namely, that something inappropriate had happened, an apology was in order, and ombud-style mechanisms of arbitration needed to be created to handle future concerns. F. explained to me why these requests were wrong-headed: Z. had suffered enough without apologizing, he said. I had willfully and unjustifiably damaged his reputation. My American feminist radicalism (by the way, was I a lesbian? or had I already been sleeping with Z.?) disqualified me from making rational statements about protections for students, and saucy male behavior was the norm at the field station—no other young woman needed help rebuffing unwanted attention, so why should I? The sort of disturbed emotional state I was manifesting, not to mention my insistence on being overly analytical, were sure to cause me intimacy problems of the kind that plagued his relationship with his wife. Finally, while my professional persona was too subservient—this was obvious from the way I acknowledged the contributions of peers to my work—my recalcitrance radiated “threat,” and that was not to be tolerated.

My graduate advisor agreed with me that F.’s reactions were retrograde. He valued the collaboration with F., however, and pointed out that my taking formal action would effectively terminate that collaboration. As a student dependent on my advisor for research funds, supervision, and credentialing, I chose not to pursue formal action.

The internal contradictions in testimony from Z. and from F. suggest that they were guarding not so much a perception of the facts—what did or did not happen—but a set of limitations on their responsibility in the world. I believe that reluctance or refusal on the part of supervisors to take recuperative or preventive action came from a place of fear: What would it mean for their careers if they were to upset the system? They did not know how to operate differently, and they did not and do not understand why making academic science safe for people with limited power is important. I believe, too, that they are ignorant of the costs imposed by the current system on students and on others with limited leverage.

***

Many months later, as I stalked around my house, wracked by intractable irritation and jumpiness, a sardonic voice in my head remarked, “Dude, you’re not in ‘Nam anymore.” Political incorrectness aside—and appropriation of the experience of a veteran, an experience I certainly cannot claim, aside, too—it was then that I realized that my body and the deepest parts of my mind had, in effect, not come home from the field. These parts of me were on the lookout for Z.—and, more to the point, for F.—everywhere: in mentors, colleagues, and friends; in well-meaning compliments and casual generalizations; in the social tics of status-seeking that characterize our sapient primate species. A trusted therapist helped identify that the symptoms, which included fury, nightmares, vigilance, and paralyzing self-doubt, were similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder. With her help and the financial support of the university, I was able to get effective treatment.

For several months, I marveled at every day that dawned and closed trauma-free. That I no longer need to marvel suggests that freedom from trauma has become normal for me, and I’m profoundly grateful. That I needed trauma treatment to complete my PhD is a sign not of a flaw in my character but of a problem in the system that produces scholars. So, to recap:

• It is in everyone’s interest to maximize safety in working and learning environments. Coping with abuses of power drains time, energy, and other resources from productive activities, like scholarship.
• It is particularly important for people in positions of power to understand themselves as stakeholders in the welfare of students. We need to be able to distinguish between our intent and the effects of our actions. Intent is insufficient. Listening and collaborative action are required.
• Students need contracts and institutional protective mechanisms to ensure that their concerns can be safely expressed and addressed without conflicts of interest or unwarranted repercussions. These are necessary, even if challenging to design and implement, when the student is working with multiple institutions and in multiple locations.

E. coli image by Nathan Reading via Flickr Creative Commons pool. E. coli is bacteria often present in the vaginal microbial community of individuals with bacterial vaginosis.

In parts 1 and 2 of the vaginal pH redux, I have of course spent the majority of my time discussing vaginal acidity. You might have noticed a layer of the conversation beginning to assert itself, though, concerning vaginal microbial communities, or vaginal flora. The interplay between the composition of the vaginal microbial community and vaginal pH is a pretty interesting one – which state drives the other? How much variation do you find among healthy women? What are the conditions under which these communities evolved or asserted themselves?

Dr. Angel Rivera is a microbiologist who is the lead author of a study on baboon and human vaginal microbial communities (he’s lead author on this one too, also worth a read). As it turns out, he also works down the street from me, and his collaborators are anthropology colleagues of mine, Profs. Rebecca Stumpf and Steven Leigh. So for the third and final part of this series, I decided to interview him to learn more about research into the vaginal environment to understand what questions need to be answered, and how research in this field helps us improve human health.

What is your name and title? What is your research about?

My name is Angel J. Rivera. I am postdoctoral associate for the Energy Biosciences Institute at the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and my doctorate is in microbiology.

Until recently I was part of the Host Microbe System theme at IGB were I’ve done research on bacterial communities structure of the vaginal tract in primates (specifically baboon and mangabeys) the differences and similarities between each primate hosts and the relationships, if any, to that of humans.

We examined different aspects of the bacterial communities present in this niche, (1) Community structure in a troop of baboons where conditions where consider homogeneous. (2) The differences between humans and baboons and (3) the presence of antibiotic resistant genes in host that have never been expose to antibiotics before.

Your paper demonstrates very different vaginal microbial communities in baboons and humans. How much of this is due to endogenous variation in pH, and how much to environmental differences?

For some time now changes in the acidity and/or alkalinity of the vaginal tract has been a point of contention when considering “normal” community structures and changes within it as a consequence of pH. You see, this can be considered a classic “chicken or the egg” case. In the case of humans, is the pH low because of the dominant bacteria living there or are the bacteria living there causing the pH to be low? The answer is a little more elusive than we would like to admit. Vaginal tissue cells can produce metabolites (acidic compounds) that can lower pH, however no study has been done where one can see if the tissue produces enough for certain bacteria to colonize and further acidify the environment with their own metabolic byproducts. I believe there are researchers investigating this.

How does variation in pH impact vaginal microbial communities and bacterial infections? What are other health implications?

Vaginal pH represents the first line of defense against undesired bacterial or yeast species. The acidic nature of the vaginal environment prevents the organism from surviving or simply proliferating. Also, the bacterial species that seems to colonize harmoniously in the female tract (Lactobacillus sp.) prefers and maintains such and environment. The added bonus, if you choose to see it that way, is that these same bacteria can provide other mechanism to defend its environment (competition, antimicrobial compounds, etc.) ultimately protecting the host from an unwanted infection.

Conversely, researchers have found that changes in pH may set the stage for a community shift or imbalance that appear to be a precursor for disease states in the vaginal tract. One of the most common diseases in women is bacterial vaginosis. This condition is said to be the result of an imbalance that displaces lactobacilli form the dominance position and allow others, mainly anaerobic bacteria to take over.

One of the consequences of this happening is the danger it presents to pregnant women exhibiting preterm birth complications. As the undesirable bacteria become dominant some of those species can migrate up through the uterus and colonize the amniotic fluid. The precise reasons why this happens are not yet elucidated but researchers are putting special attention on the mechanisms. Treatment, however, is available.

In short, women would be wise to follow healthy practices and try to avoid unnecessary perturbations (douching, fragrant hygiene products, or other irritating chemicals) that may increase their possibility of developing infection.

Tell me one exciting new thing you’re working on right now.

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a manuscript that reports microbial communities comparison between baboons and mangabeys. In our previous studies we found substantial differences in the microbiota of baboons and humans. We reason this could be a result of the evolutionary distance between humans and baboons as they diverged approximately 25 million years ago. If phylogenetic distance explains differences in the vaginal microbiota, then primates with more recent shared ancestry should have bacterial communities that are more similar. We found that although mangabeys and baboons are evolutionarily closely related their vaginal microbiota differ considerably. Even though there are remarkable differences between the vaginal microbial communities in the mangabey and the baboon, these two monkeys still have more similar vaginal flora than either of them do compared to humans.

I consider it fun to do this thought experiment. If we step away and trace the hominid lineage and then try to characterize each or some steps of the lineage perhaps we can see trends that may provide a picture of the microbial-human coevolution.

What else do you think people should know about vaginal pH and microbial communities?

As I mentioned before the cell lining in the vaginal tract epithelium does produce compounds that are of acidic nature setting the stage for those bacteria that prefer this setting and that further acidify the environment. It has been suggested that low pH prevents undesirable microorganisms from establishing dominance and causing adverse effect. There are even some reports that claim viral infections (HIV) could be deterred if conditions are maintained at low pH and certain species of bacteria (lactobacilli) dominate vaginal tract communities. We still have very little understanding on specifics about vaginal tract pH and its relation to “normal” or “healthy” states in women.

As for microbial communities, well these have profound effects in human development, function and health. From the moment we are born to the moment we cease to exist microbes accompany us. I think it is important that people understand this and even consider that our microbes can be personal physiology indicators. Another set of fingerprints, if you may. Let me provide some examples:

• Recent studies tell us that microbial structures can vary within different ethnicities. Women of white ethnic background have communities dominated by lactobacilli species. However, black and in particular Hispanic women can have a completely different structure where lactobacilli are NOT the dominant organisms yet they are considered to have a “healthy” vaginal tract.
• In our own studies with baboons we have found that even when environments, diet and life style are very similar (captive troop) their vaginal communities exhibit differences. This has been also observed in humans. The truth is, these observations have been reported since the sixties and seventies but it is now that we have the technologies to more accurately confirm the findings. Interestingly, most if not all of these studies are snap shots of the microbial communities at the moment samples were taken leading us to believe that these communities are comparatively invariant. What I’m trying to point out is that bacterial communities in any environment are fairly dynamic. This is especially true in a niche like the vaginal tract where a significant amount of perturbation (menstruation, hormonal patterns, sexual activity, douching, etc.) occurs over any woman lifetime.
• Longitudinal studies are underway and preliminary results tell us that vaginal communities of nearly all women are dynamic and exhibit marked changes in the relative abundance of species over time.

Thanks to Dr. Rivera for his time!

Image of cut limes by Smabs Sputzer found via Flickr Creative Commons.

In my last post I covered the safety and efficacy of acid-promoting tampons. Marc Abrahams, of Annals of Improbable Research and Ig Nobel fame, sent me an article about the intravaginal use of lime juice to prevent HIV by Nigerian women. The particular paper he sent me (Mauck et al. 2008) provided a fairly rigorous assessment of whether douching with 25%, 50% or full strength lime juice could be safely tolerated while reducing vaginal pH. But this paper opened up an entire world to me around broader issues of HIV/AIDS in Africa, about race, and the context-dependence of the way science is perceived.

Pucker up?

An important cultural practice among Nigerian female sex workers involves the use of lime and lemon juice douches (Imade et al. 2005; Mairiga et al. 2010; Sagay et al. 2009). Women report that douching with lemon and lime juice increases vaginal dryness and tightness (Mairiga et al. 2010), which makes me wonder for whom lime juice is improving sexual pleasure. In a survey of Nigerian sex workers, a majority of participants used lime juice douches, and those sex workers who douched had more sexual partners. The majority of these participants douched for sexual pleasure and hygiene first, and a slight majority also used it as contraception and to reduce infection (Mairiga et al. 2010). Most women used a 50% or 25% concentration of lime juice, diluting it with water. Further, participants who douched with lime juice actually had higher infection rates, including gonorrhea and bacterial vaginosis (Mairiga et al. 2010). The confounding effects of the greater number of sexual partners in the lime juice user group means there is no way from these data to tell if the lime juice is the cause for the increased incidence.

Other studies are more troubling. Unlike the acidic tampon folks, Sagay et al (2009) used colposcopy and Pap smears to assess the vaginal epithelium in women who used lemon or lime douches. Sagay et al (2009) found an association between lemon and lime juice douching with cervical dysplasias (abnormal changes in the cell wall), which puts one at increased risk for cervical cancer.

Then there is the study I was first sent by Marc (Mauck et al. 2008). The study authors grouped participants into groups that would douche or soak a tampon with water or lime juice dilutions of 25%, 50% and 100%. Of the 47 women enrolled in the study, 40 completed the full douching protocol. Two women from the 100% group and one woman from the 50% group discontinued due to severe vaginal epithelial disruption or irritation. But even among the women who completed, it’s not a pretty picture:

For instance, while plain water didn’t produce significant symptoms in the tampon or douche group, a majority of these participants had vaginal epithelial disruption based on colposcopy findings. Water is pH neutral, which is more alkaline than even a vagina with abnormal flora (women with bacterial vaginosis, for instance, often have a pH around 5.5). So any kind of water insertion from a soaked tampon or douching negatively alters the normal vaginal environment.

It’s clear, though, that the 100% and 50% lime juice concentrations were the worst for women. In addition to the epithelial disruptions noted above, women using concentrated lime juice via the tampon method had significantly raised local inflammatory markers including interleukin (IL)-8 (Mauck et al. 2008). Why is lime juice so harmful to vaginal health? It probably has something to do with all that citric acid, since lemon and lime juice have the highest citric acid content of all commercially available citrus juices (Penniston et al. 2008). Perhaps it reduces pH, but it is also an irritant that increases permeability of the cell wall and thus likely promotes, rather than reduces, infection.

To give you a sense of how awful inserting lime juice into your vagina is, here are the types of epithelial disruptions the study authors observed (Mauck et al. 2008):

• Disrupted blood vessels
• Peeling
• Erythema (redness)
• Discharge
• Tenderness

So not only does lime juice not appreciably or consistently lower pH, it can hurt you and increase your risk of disease. You are practically shredding your vagina if you do this.

Broader sociocultural issues of puckering up

Given how much discomfort the women in the Mauck et al (2008) study experienced, I am sure that women who do douche with lime juice are well aware that it is not the most comfortable experience in the world. So, why do they do it?

As I mentioned earlier, most of the women surveyed about their lime juice douching practices are sex workers; surveys of family planning clients showed a far lower incidence (only 4 out of 100) compared to sex workers (163 out of 200) (Imade et al. 2005). Most of the women surveyed used diluted preparations of lime juice, at 25% or 50%, so it’s possible they had fewer symptoms than participants at the full concentration in the Mauck et al (2008). And remember, part of the allure of lime juice douching is that it supposedly increases sexual pleasure (Imade et al. 2005; Menard et al. 2010).

Dr. Rubidium happened to point me to an ethnographic study of douching practices in Haitian immigrant women that, while obviously about a different population, provides some context. I want to share a particularly useful quote:

“The reasons underlying feminine hygiene practices are multifaceted and are related to broader sociocultural norms defining what is expected of women, by men and by other women: to be pròp, or clean, with one’s body, inside and out; to be free of any vaginal secretions, which are often construed as infectious or otherwise dirty; and to be sere, or tight, to increase sexual pleasure for male partners. The practices have been adapted and reconstituted over time to fit the needs of women in particular historical and cultural contexts, although women commonly engage in feminine hygiene practices for prevention and treatment of infections and as part of routine personal hygiene” (Menard et al 2010: 264).

Here, you can see the ways in which both women and men may police women’s bodies, and unfortunately see normal, healthy vaginal activity (like discharge or secretions) as signs of uncleanliness. The authors later point out that a wet vagina may be seen as a sign of promiscuity and infection in this sample; this could further reinforce the idea that sex with a woman with a dry vagina is more enjoyable.

In this context, it’s hard to not place lime juice douching within the spectrum of cultural practices enforced to control women, from female genital cutting, to diets, to cosmetics, to scores of other ways women alter their bodies to fit a culturally-sanctioned norm. And just as we can demonstrate the ways in which women may choose these practices, or find empowerment in some of them, I don’t know that it is really possible to parse out a woman’s agency from the institutional inequities that increase her chances of making certain choices. That is, a woman may choose any of these actions and be well aware of the benefits and consequences, but she is still aware of, and sometimes constrained by, a culture that dictates both.

In a population where only about 2% of women have access to modern contraception practices but maternal mortality is 1,549 deaths per 100,000 births (Mairiga et al. 2010) (for comparison, maternal mortality in the US, while high for a developed country, is around 13.3 deaths per 100,000), I imagine women, particularly sex workers, are going to try just about anything to increase their economic output and decrease their chances of pregnancy and disease.

I found one website that tries to provide a balanced perspective on the usefulness of lime juice douching in preventing HIV. One contributor explains (without citations, so I couldn’t follow up) that lime juice can kill HIV, but that the concentrations needed to do so harm the vagina and actually increase the risk of HIV transmission. I appreciated the perspective of another contributor who tried to separate out the call to not douche with lime from other white culture-prescribed practices:

“As discussion continues about the ‘sensibility’ of using lime or lemon as a douching agent and its efficacy as an HIV preventive measure, I think it is an opportunity for us to look at this practice critically especially as it has taken deep roots in our society. It goes beyond Jos and I hope we all know.

It will do us no good to look at it as ‘the white guys are here again’. Can we deny the reality that our women use lime to douche?”

Here, the author is reminding the reader of the ways in which other science and health recommendations come from white folks which, given the historical context of colonization, racism, slavery, genocide and oppression, is understandably met with suspicion. The author also seems to be pointing out that Nigerians are perfectly capable of interrogating this issue and figuring out a solution. And in fact, most of the papers I found on the topic had Nigerian lead authors, suggesting this isn’t just an issue where white folks are sweeping in and telling Nigerian women how to handle their bodies.

Douching of any kind, and lime juice douching in particular, does not provide contraception, does not reduce infection risk (it may even increase it), and causes significant vaginal irritation. Educating women about these issues is certainly important. But perhaps more important is to resolve the major economic and health inequities that drive women to make these decisions, and to create mechanisms to produce more scientists in developing countries. When women have more control over financial resources they are more likely to reject patriarchal or problematic cultural practices that cause physical harm. And when scientists have training and resources to ask the questions they find important or interesting, they can tackle the major problems facing their society.

This issue is a complicated one, and not one where I pretend to have the final word or any particularly strong expertise. So as always I welcome your thoughts and comments, including any places where any reader sees a need for me to think better on privilege, race, or gendered cultural practices.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Dr. Rubidium for the suggestion on the Menard et al paper, and for sharing her perspective on an earlier draft of this post.

References

Imade GE, Sagay AS, Onwuliri VA, Egah DZ, Potts M, and Short RV. 2005. Use of lemon or lime juice douches in women in Jos, Nigeria. Sexual Health 2(4):237-239.

Mairiga A, Kullima A, and Kawuwa M. 2010. Social and health reasons for lime juice vaginal douching among female sex workers in Borno State, Nigeria. Afr J Prm Health Care Fam Med 2(1):Art #125, 124 pages.

Mauck C, Ballagh S, Creinin M, Weiner D, Doncel G, Fichorova R, Schwartz J, Chandra N, and Callahanm M. 2008. Six-day randomized safety trial of intravaginal lime juice. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr 49:243-250.

Menard J, Kobetz E, Diem J, Lifleur M, Blanco J, and Barton B. 2010. The sociocultural context of gynecological health among Haitian immigrant women in Florida: applying ethnographic methods to public health inquiry. Ethnicity & Health 15(3):253-267.

Penniston K, Nakada S, Holmes R, and Assimos D. 2008. Quantitative assessment of citric acid in lemon juice, lime juice, and commercially-available fruit juice products. J Endourol 22(3):567-570.

Sagay A, Imade G, Onwuliri V, Egah D, Grigg M, Musa J, Thacher T, Adisa J, Potts M, and Short R. 2009. Genital tract abnormalities among female sex workers who douche with lemon/lime juice in Nigeria. Afr J Reprod Health 13(1):37-45.

A woman's purse contents, including the ubiquitous emergency tampon. Image by Helga Weber, protected by a Creative Commons license.

Readers of this blog are already aware that their vaginas are at their best when they are on the acidic side. Vaginal flora is healthy, bacterial overgrowth is at a minimum, and any foreign bodies that want to pass through are firmly discouraged. Semen and douching can increase pH, douching especially so since the liquid used to douche not only has a relatively high pH but flushes out normal, good bacteria.

If there are substances that increase vaginal pH, might other substances decrease vaginal pH and thus encourage the growth of normal flora?

RepHresh thinks so. RepHresh is a company that makes pH-balancing gels and cleansers for your ladyparts. Recently, they started carrying a new product, RepHresh Brilliant, which is a pH-balancing tampon (hat tip to my undergraduate Sophia Bodnar for being the first to tell me about it). They claim that menses increases pH, and thus a tampon that decreases pH will keep bacterial overgrowth in check. The RepHresh Brilliant tampon contains strips of material that slowly release lactic acid and citric acid as they are saturated with menstrual fluid.

It certainly sounds like a good idea. Women in industrial and post-industrial environments menstruate far more often than we probably did under ancestral conditions, due in part to an energy surfeit (you know, eating too much chocolate while sitting at a desk, which is exactly what I was doing while drafting this post) and in part due to modern reproductive decisions (you don’t menstruate so much if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding all the time) (Strassmann 1997). So about 400 times in our lives, for several days at a time, we have a higher pH (somewhere between a 5.3-6.6 depending on the day according to Wagner and Ottesen 1982) than is ideal for housing beneficial vaginal flora.

But I want to know if this fancy tampon works. 1) Does it reduce pH, 2) does it do so without side effects, and 3) does it have an effect on vaginal flora?

Tl;dr version:1)  yes, 2) probably, and 3) not sure.

RepHresh’s own research on the topic

A single paper tests the efficacy and safety of the RepHresh Brilliant tampon, and you can find a copy on the RepHresh site (Brzezinski et al. 2004). The authors found that participants who used the test-tampon (the one with strips that release lactic and citric acid) did not have significantly higher vaginal pH during menses (p = 0.0518), while participants who used a regular tampon did (p = 0.0011). Saying that first result isn’t statistically significant is adhering to the 0.05 alpha without honoring the spirit of the 0.05 alpha – it is not statistically significant but in a way that makes one question the meaning of statistical significance. (If you are new to statistics, usually a p-value that falls below 0.05 is considered significant, so a p-value of 0.0518 is pretty darn close, and in fact most people would drop those last two places and round to the hundredth, rendering that analysis p = 0.05, or statistically significant.) All that said, the difference between groups in intra-menstrual pH is statistically significant (p = 0.0025). And lowering menstrual pH by 0.5 isn’t bad.

Brzezinski et al 2004 Table 1

Further, according to Brzezinski et al (2004), no participants complained of vaginal irritation, which would be my big worry about an acid-producing tampon. And no participants in either group had abnormal vaginal flora during the study.

So, yay! Acid-increasing tampons for everyone! Kinda.

Nits to pick

First, the authors of this study did not use the gold standard method for assessing vaginal irritation or endothelial disruption, which is a colposcopy, or visual assessment of the vaginal tissue. Instead, the authors relied on self-report. Minor issues, or ones that could develop with repeated use over many cycles, would be caught in a longitudinal study that used this method. But this study only assessed side effects and pH reduction in a single cycle. And as far as I can tell, it is the only published study on the topic.

The second issue to consider is that all twenty eight participants had normal vaginal flora. The coincidence of all participants being perfectly healthy makes me wonder if a small sample size caught an abnormal number of normal women, or if they needed more rigorous testing of the bacterial swabs. But the study authors provide no detail about how they determined this or whether they assessed absolute and relative quantities of different bacteria that comprise normal flora. So, the normal flora in every single subject could just be that all twenty eight women were very healthy, but in every other study I read in preparing for this post, there were always a significant minority of participants who had or developed abnormal flora. I just wish the authors had provided more detail here.

Finally, this research was funded by Rostam Ltd Israel, a corporation that makes tampons. I did a little digging to try and figure out the relationship between Rostam and RepHresh. Rostam was bought by Albaad Massuot Yitzhak Ltd in 2010. Yet RepHresh has an article about the Rostam Ela tampon in the Wall Street Journal on the website from 2004. So my best guess (and someone with more business savvy than me could probably figure this out) is that RepHresh bought the Ela tampon from Rostam some time between 2004 and 2010, and is now marketing it as RepHresh Brilliant. Either way, part of the funding for the research was from a corporation invested in seeing the tampon gain FDA approval in the US. The 2004 article that RepHresh has on its site (scroll to the “Articles” and click the link for the pdf) explains that the testing for this tampon was simply to demonstrate it is as safe as effective as any regular tampon, since it is being categorized as a medical device.

I’m not worried about the lactic acid, since that is a product of Lactobacilli, which is not only present in normal vaginal flora but particularly good for the ladyparts (McLean and Rosenstein 2000; Onderdonk et al. 1986; Valore et al. 2002). But I am worried about the citric acid, since it produces moderate irritation and damage to the epithelium, and increases permeability and absorption rates when used to enhance drug delivery (Richardson et al. 1989). Maybe it’s shouldn’t be concerning in the particular way it is released in the RepHresh Brilliant tampon. I honestly don’t know.

I certainly am happy to see a company taking a woman’s actual vaginal pH into account in the making of their products. Give the tampon a try if you are so inclined, and let me know how it goes. I think I’m going to just let my vagina regulate itself, since vaginal flora repopulates naturally and quickly after menses on its own (Keane et al. 1997; Onderdonk et al. 1986; Wagner and Ottesen 1982).

References

Brzezinski A, Stern T, Arbel R, Rahav G, and Benita S. 2004. Efficacy of a novel pH-buffering tampon in preserving the acidic vaginal pH during menstruation. International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics 85(3):298-300.

Keane F, Ison C, and Taylor-Robinson D. 1997. A longitudinal study of the vaginal flora over a menstrual cycle. International Journal of STD and AIDS 8(8):489-494.

McLean N, and Rosenstein I. 2000. Characterisation and selection of a Lactobacillus species to re-colonise the vagina of women with recurrent bacterial vaginosis. J Med Microbiol 49:543-552.

Onderdonk A, Zamarchi G, Walsh J, Mellor R, Munoz A, and Kass E. 1986. Methods for quantitative and qualitative evaluation of vaginal microflora during menstruation. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 51(2):333-339.

Richardson JL, Minhas PS, Thomas NW, and Illum L. 1989. Vaginal administration of gentamicin to rats. Pharmaceutical and morphological studies using absorption enhancers. International Journal of Pharmaceutics 56(1):29-35.

Strassmann BI. 1997. The biology of menstruation in Homo sapiens: Total lifetime menses, fecundity, and nonsynchrony in a natural-fertility population. Current Anthropology 38(1):123-129.

Valore E, Park C, Igreti S, and Ganz T. 2002. Antimicrobial components of vaginal fluid. Am J Obstet Gynecol 187:561-568.

Wagner G, and Ottesen B. 1982. Vaginal physiology during menstruation. Annals of Internal Medicine 96(Part 2):921-923.

Thirteen kickass rollers who also happen to be kickass scientists. Photo by Laura Fitch.

Thirteen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign scientists, all of whom skate for the Twin City Derby Girls.

Top row, left to right: Therafist, clinical psychologist; Anthrobrawlogist, biological anthropologist; Snarker Posey, legal information scientist; Doc Dementer, educational psychologist; Oh No Bobo, veterinarian; Killy Love-less, social scientist; MRSA, microbiologist.

Bottom row, left to right: Jo Holley, evolutionary ecologist; Gaya Jenda, family scientist; Mrs. T, educational psychologist; F1, developmental psychologist; Punchwrap Supreme, reproductive toxicologist; Polly Nator, evolutionary biologist.

Are we science? You better believe we are science. If you don’t…

Thirteen scientists who could seriously mess you up.

We will come for you.

Keeper and Diva cups. And yes, I recommend you try them! Image by Greencolander on flickr.

As many of you have already heard, I was a guest on Skeptically Speaking a few weeks ago, on the topic of why women menstruate. PZ Myers tackled the evolutionary perspective first, and then I got to answer audience questions and talk a little about my own research.

Because I think it’s important for listeners and readers to see where the evidence came from to support my claims, I am sharing references (and in several cases, past posts of mine that themselves contain references). That way you can look up these articles to learn more about each topic – using Google Scholar usually turns up whatever pdfs aren’t behind a paywall.

I want to thank Desirée Schell and K.O. Myers for their great work on the show. I had a great time and think that Skeptically Speaking is a truly fantastic way to share science. Schell was a wonderful host and I hope to be fortunate enough to be asked on again.

The history of the study of menstruation

Much of what I discussed in this section of the radio show can be found on my blog post “Menstruation is Just Blood and Tissue You Ended Up Not Using.”

I also think it’s important to point out that many hypotheses developed about menstruation often forget that the monthly cycle is a very modern occurrence. Not only are modern cycles in women in industrialized populations not necessarily 28 days in the first place (in fact, see my Guest Blog post about this from December 2010), but our ancestors very likely menstruated 50-100 times rather than the 400 or so that is our norm. The reason for this is first that they probably had neutral or negative energy balances (because they moved around so much more, and likely ate less), but also because they were pregnant and breastfeeding through most of their reproductive years. This also came up in the menstrual synchrony part of the conversation later.

Additional reading:

Strassmann, B. (1997). The Biology of Menstruation in Homo Sapiens: Total Lifetime Menses, Fecundity, and Nonsynchrony in a Natural-Fertility Population Current Anthropology, 38 (1) DOI: 10.1086/204592

Birth control pills (hormonal contraception)

This topic is always very popular, and women understandably have a lot of questions about hormonal contraception. It is ubiquitous and almost expected for most reproductively aged women in many industrial, western cultures. Yet women are poorly educated on how they work and their broader effects. This leads to a lot of ambivalence about something that a huge proportion of women take every single day for decades. Two posts over at my old blog that I will eventually migrate here have some good information: “Summer of the Pill: Why Do We Menstruate?” and “Summer of the Pill: The latest fashion accessory to hit your uterus: the IUD!”

Additional reading on the history of the pill:

Gladwell, M (2000). John Rock’s error. The New Yorker. March 13: 52-63. http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/johnrock.pdf

Additional reading on the biology behind the pill:

Bentley, GR. (1996) “Evidence for interpopulation variation in normal ovarian function and consequences for hormonal contraception” in Variability in human fertility, eds L. a. M.-T. Rosetta, C.G.N. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK), pp 46-65.

Vitzthum VJ, Spielvogel H, Caceres E, & Miller A (2001). Vaginal bleeding patterns among rural highland Bolivian women: relationship to fecundity and fetal loss. Contraception, 64 (5), 319-25 PMID: 11777494

Vitzthum VJ, & Ringheim K (2005). Hormonal contraception and physiology: a research-based theory of discontinuation due to side effects. Studies in family planning, 36 (1), 13-32 PMID: 15828522

Additional reading on adolescents and hormonal contraception:

My blog post, “Why We Shouldn’t Prescribe Hormonal Contraception to Twelve Year Olds.”

Deligeoroglou (2000). Dysmenorrhea. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 900(1): 237-244.

Vihko R, & Apter D (1984). Endocrine characteristics of adolescent menstrual cycles: impact of early menarche. Journal of steroid biochemistry, 20 (1), 231-6 PMID: 6231419

Additional reading on endometrial waves:

IJland M, Evers J, Dunselman G, van Katwijk C, Lo C, Hoogland H. 1996. Endometrial wavelike movements during the menstrual cycle. Fertil Steril 65(4):746-749.

IJland MM, Evers JLH, Dunselman GAJ, Volovics L, Hoogland HJ. 1997. Relation between endometrial wavelike activity and fecundability in spontaneous cycles. Fertility and Sterility 67(3):492-496.

Menstrual synchrony

Much of what I discussed on synchrony can be found on my blog post “Do Women in Groups Bleed Together? On Menstrual Synchrony.”

Effect of diet and activity on menstruation

Strangely enough, even though this is my own field of study, I don’t have any blog posts that discuss this!

Additional readings:

Clancy KBH, Ellison PT, Jasienska G, Bribiescas RG. 2009. Endometrial thickness is not independent of luteal phase day in a rural Polish population. Anthro Sci.117(3): 157-163.

Ellison PT. 2001. On Fertile Ground. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Iron-deficiency anemia

This material comes from some of my own research on iron-deficiency anemia. I discuss it in the blog post “Iron-deficiency is Not Something You Get Just for Being a Lady.”

Menstruation and… camping?

One audience member asked if it was true that menstruating women should avoid going camping because of the risk that the smell of their menstrual blood would attract bears. I found a pretty fun study in the Journal of Wildlife Management that suggests that black bears, at least, couldn’t care less if exposed to tampons, menses-soaked tampons, or women during menstruation. Scicurious was inspired enough to discuss this topic for her Friday Weird Science.

I also am planning a separate post on the idea that menstruation makes wild game run away. As it turns out, there is a very interesting anthropological history to this idea, so stay tuned!

Toxic Shock Syndrome

Additional readings:

Davis JP, Chesney PJ, Wand PJ, LaVenture, M (1980). Toxic-Shock Syndrome. New England Journal of Medicine 303(25): 1429-1435. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198012183032501

McCormick JK, Yarwood JM, Schlievert PM (2001). Toxic shock syndrome and bacterial superantigens: an update. Annual Reviews in Microbiology 55(1): 77-104.

Schlievert PM, Blomster DA, Kelly JA (1984). Toxic shock syndrome Staphylococcus aureus: effect of tampons on toxic shock syndrome toxin 1 production. Obstetrics and Gynecology 64(5): 666-671. http://ukpmc.ac.uk/abstract/MED/6436761

Shands KN, Schmid GP, Dan BB, Blum D, Guidotti RJ, Hargrett NT, Anderson RL, Hill DL, Broome CV, Band JD, Fraser DW (1980). Toxic-Shock Syndrome in Menstruating Women. New England Journal of Medicine 303(25): 1436-1442. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198012183032502

Reproductive cancer

Additional readings:

Jasienska G, Thune I. 2001. Lifestyle, hormones, and risk of breast cancer. British Medical Journal 322:586-587.

Kahlenborn C, Modugno F, Potter DM, Severs WB. Oral contraceptive use as a risk factor for premenopausal breast cancer: a meta-analysis; 2006. Mayo Clinic. p 1290.

Strassmann BI. 1999. Menstrual cycling and breast cancer: an evolutionary perspective. Journal of women’s health 8(2):193-202.

Detecting menses in the voice

Additional readings:

HuffPo article on women’s voices through the menstrual cycle

And for any of you who would like to see the talk, it’s open to the public. I would love to see you there, and I think there is a reception planned afterwards so there will be opportunities to chat. Here are the details:

“Sex, gender and controversy: writing science as a woman”*
Wednesday February 8th at 4:30pm
French Family Science Center Room 2237
West Campus, Duke University
124 Science Drive
Durham, NC 27708

One of the things I intend to cover is my experiences as a public, female scientist, and how that identity shapes my writing. I’ll also talk about broader academic tensions between research and public engagement, and how I negotiate that with a few current research projects. Finally, I’ll ask for my audience to engage with me to think about their identities and what it is about their own perspectives that they should share with the world, to get them started as public intellectuals.

*Yes, I borrowed part of the title from my #scio12 session with Scicurious. But I decided this title was a better fit than the other I suggested to the organizer, which was “Building an evil feminist empire, one blog post at a time.”

Deciding to share one’s story is a brave, and in some cases dangerous act. Therefore, in the story you are about to read, the author and I decided to change a few details to protect her anonymity.

* * *

When I began to experience sexual harassment as a graduate student, I felt I was being hazed. As one of few female students in a male-dominated field, I assumed my professor wanted to see how tough I was.  I must say, I rose to the challenge.  I laughed off his and other male students’ sexualized banter and came back with insults of my own in an attempt to fit in.  I was a young, enthusiastic researcher and I wanted to be accepted. I interacted with my professor and male colleagues informally, not realizing how badly it could backfire. As time passed I became a target, rather than a participant in the joking.

In moments of discomfort, I kept my feelings to myself.  At our research site in a foreign country, my professor and the male students often made lewd comments about the local women.  One day early in my training, my professor took us on a tour of a rural town.  We came across a friendly young pregnant woman and her husband.  My professor chatted with the couple in their language then turned to me. In English, he commented approvingly upon the woman’s breasts.  Her husband realized what he was saying and ordered his wife to cover up.  The young woman quickly drew her shawl across her chest, eyes cast to the ground. My professor seemed unconcerned about the humiliation he caused them. I was put off by his lack of respect, but I said nothing.  The incident has nagged at me for years.

My professor often joked that only pretty women were allowed to work for him, which led me to wonder if my intellect and skills had ever mattered. He asked very personal questions about my romantic life, often in the presence of the male students. His inappropriate behavior was a model for them, making it not only acceptable, but the norm. My body and my sexuality were openly discussed by my professor and the male students. Comments ensued about the large size of my breasts and there was speculation about my sexual history. There were jokes about selling me as a prostitute on the local market. Once I mentioned that I admired a senior female scientist and they began describing scenarios in which she and I would have sex. Pornographic photos appeared daily in my private workspace. What started out as seemingly harmless joking spiraled out of control. I felt marginalized and under attack, and my work performance suffered as a result.

Often, I was left with a pile of work at night while my professor and his male students went out to bars.  They enjoyed the attention of local women, who were attracted to their wealth and prestige as foreigners. Many of my co-workers engaged in affairs with local women. On the other hand, I received unwanted attention if I went out unaccompanied. Local men would follow me down the street, making catcalls, sometimes groping me.  Foreign women were often treated that way.  Because of this, I became increasingly reliant on the men I worked with, though I felt nearly as unsafe at work as I did in the streets.

By the time the harassment got out of control, it was too late for me to back out. I had spent too many years immersed in the research to walk away and start over.  So I modified my own behavior, hoping things might change. I dressed as modestly as possible to avoid drawing attention to my body, but the sexual comments continued. I tried dating one of the male students, thinking that if I had a boyfriend I would be protected. But the romance fizzled, leaving me more vulnerable to humiliation than before. I also tried working twice as hard as everyone else, but my professor never noticed.

I finally confronted my professor, out of desperation rather than courage. It didn’t go very well. He told me that I was oversensitive and that I kept talking like that he’d fire me. And for many reasons, mainly shattered self-esteem, I stayed. The most blatant sexual jokes and comments stopped.  My professor curbed his comments out of fear of the consequences. But our relationship deteriorated so much after that conversation that he eventually revoked his promise to fund me through graduate school.

In the early days of my research I knew nothing of academic life. I didn’t realize that many research projects are run like pyramid schemes, with rigid status hierarchies, ruthless competition, the exploitation of students and objectification of women.  I realized too late the extent of the strings attached to the funding my professor had promised. My education was compromised for no reason other than my femaleness.

When a professor makes the commitment to mentor a student, the student’s professional future is in their hands. This should never be taken lightly, and in the case of male professors and female students, it is crucial to maintain ethical boundaries. Women students at foreign research sites are particularly disempowered, being far from family and other support networks. This is the kind of setting in which the power imbalance between student and professor can be exploited.

I have read about sexual harassment lawsuits underway at Yale University.  Some of the stories are eerily similar to mine. We start with a young, enthusiastic, intelligent woman.  A male professor takes an intellectual interest in her, takes her under his wing, gives her a job and training.  When the inappropriate comments start, she feels uncomfortable, but says nothing. She feels indebted to the professor, and he has promised to guide her to a successful career.  She becomes deeply engaged in and committed to the research, but the professor continues to pester and demean her.  She feels increasingly insecure, and she must decide whether to confront her harasser or leave the research she loves. She has to pay a price, simply for being a woman.

Someone always asks, “Why didn’t she just leave?” Well, she might not leave because she is funded, and there aren’t many other opportunities. She may be too committed to the research.  She could be years into a graduate program, and changing professors would slow her progress to graduation substantially.  Potential new professors will want to know why she left, and it will be difficult to answer.  Others in her field will think she is an unreliable scholar for switching horses midstream. Her professor may refuse to give her a recommendation, limiting her options. She knows her life and her choices will become subject to public scrutiny. She knows that some would say that she was “asking for it.”  Finally, she knows that there is a lot to be lost from standing up to an abusive professor.

What can we do about this? Individual responsibility is fundamental, and many women do set boundaries and investigate potential graduate programs for any history of sexual harassment.  I wish I had thought of that. But it is not enough to place all responsibility on the would-be victims.  Women students deserve to have the same learning options that male students do. In this day and age women should not have to forego certain educational opportunities out of fear of being demoralized, harassed or abused. Universities must hold their professors accountable for their actions.  There must be a safe place for women to present their concerns about harassment without having to risk their futures. I also believe that professors with a record of harassment should be ineligible for research funding until they demonstrate a commitment to professional conduct.

I managed to graduate and have a great job doing research I love, but I bet a lot of women in these situations don’t.  Fortunately I have discovered a community of brilliant, outspoken and supportive female scientists.  If I’d had role models like them as a graduate student, things would have been very different.

To the women who have had experiences similar to mine, I hope you are healing, and I hope you consider sharing your story. And to any women who are currently in such a situation, you are not alone. Don’t be afraid to reach out for support.  As I’ve learned the hard way, women in academia really need to look out for each other.

The women in scienceblogging session at Science Online this year was very different from last year. More people were venting, and what they were venting was scary: stalkers, rape jokes, physical threats. It has not been a good year to be blogging while female: Elevatorgate was one of the more frightening events I’ve ever observed, because it exposed a level of hatred, of vicious, violent sexism that before that point I would have said was only believed by the tiniest fraction of men. Elevatorgate ramped up the defensiveness and sharpened the fears of women who speak their mind in the skeptical and science blogospheres.

Even when the threats aren’t physical, the antagonism towards women has been nasty. I have been called a sexist, someone who plays victim, told I should be fired, and worse, personal things that I will not relay here. I have had my writing challenged by brash claims regarding my character or intent without any attempt to build a case with evidence.

And even though I can look at the evidence and my writing, at what I do and what I stand for, and know these claims are ridiculous, each one of these attacks shatters me.

Back at my old blog, these attacks would have had little effect on me. At my old blog my posse would have crowded them out, shrugged their way past them until the attackers were shouting uselessly at the periphery. My old blog was a warm, inviting space where I could take risks because people were willing to take them with me.

I could blame the loss of my posse on the commenting system or the more heavily-male readership here at Scientific American and throw up my hands. But I also know I have not been modeling the appropriate behavior to encourage you to get comfortable in my new place. I have left almost all attack comments up rather than delete them because I worried that getting rid of them would open me up to more attacks, or make it look as though I was silencing my opposition. And so I left them, and waited, hoping someone would come and back me up. Sometimes someone would.

Supporting a female blogger under attack in a comment thread is a very risky endeavor. If you are a male ally, you may be afraid of making things worse. If you are a woman, you may be afraid of drawing some of the attack on to you. The attack may also just feel like it’s not your business. It takes a very brave person who doesn’t mind sticking their nose in to put together a reasoned response and handle the blowback.

By letting the oppressive and rude behavior in my comment threads get out of control, I have put my posse in an impossible position. I have silenced potential commenters, and lost the most valuable part of my blogging.

* * *

Science Online was fun, just like last year. But I also felt raw, and exposed, and put on a pedestal. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me that so many of you admire my writing and perspective, that you told me you have started to write, or stood up to an adversary, or followed your dream in part due to me. But I do not write well on this pedestal. It wobbles with my every move and there are spikes lining the fall below.

Blogging is a selfish endeavor, a desire to be heard. Blogging is insisting you have something to say. Blogging is saying come here, come here and respond and tell me that at least some of what I am saying means something to you.

And so I am going to be selfish right now. I am asking you to register on this network. You can register as a pseudonym or Anon371 or under your name and only I see your email address. But I want you to register so that you are more likely to comment and participate in this community, because that’s the only way I can get back down.

* * *

In order for you to have the support you need to come back and rebuild our posse, I am enacting a new comment policy here at Context and Variation. The policy is as follows:

1. Be decent. Decent people don’t attack character and they appreciate genuine attempts to engage, push boundaries or be allies. They avoid rather than embrace belligerence.
2. Be responsible. Be intolerant of wrongdoing and oppression. Model the kind of behavior that enriches this community.
3. Provide evidence. Show, don’t tell. Comments that only tell me you hate my conclusions get deleted. Comments that explain what you disagree with and why it is incorrect get to stay.

The science blogging community – and you don’t need to be a blogger to be in this community – is one that has been held together by the decency and strength of Bora Zivkovic. This community operates more like a meritocracy and democracy than many other areas of science because that is what Bora has modeled and what he has demanded of us. But this community grows larger, and one man cannot be expected to hold together the hundreds of thousands of us who engage with science and science writing every day. With scientific literacy more important to economic and political success than ever, yet fewer newspapers with science sections, readers are coming to us. And it’s on all of us to honor the model produced by Bora, Anton Zuiker, Karyn Traphagen and so many others by being responsible and supporting each other.

We all have different ways of supporting community, and different ideas of civility. I’ve only articulated what I expect on my blog. Clearer articulation and enforcement of these policies in our own spaces will create the spaces we need to maximize our impact and honor our communities.

This post is another way of thinking about Sci and my #scio12 session on “Sex, gender and controversy” (see our other session posts here and here). When do we use evidence? When do we interrogate claims? When should we rile people up and when do we calm them down? Maybe unpacking the good and the bad from our follow-up posts (because Sci has an excellent one up as well) will provide more fodder for conversation Thursday.

As Scicurious has done in her own post, I am pasting Deep Thinking Hebephile’s original letter in the beginning as a reference:

“I am a non-practicing heterosexual hebephile—and I think most men are—and find living in this society particularly difficult given puritanical, feminist, and parental forces against the normal male sex drive. If sex is generally good for both the body and the brain, then how is a teen having sex with an adult (versus another teen) bad for their mind? I feel like the psychological arguments surrounding the present age of consent laws need to be challenged. My focus is on consensual activity being considered always harmful in the first place. Since the legal notions of consent are based on findings from the soft sciences, shouldn’t we be a little more careful about ruining an adult life in these cases?

—Deep-thinking Hebephile”

“— and I think most men are —”

Deep Thinking Hebephile (DTH) makes the point that “most men are” heterosexual hebephiles. But is this consistent with what we know are the most common preferences and actions of heterosexual men? Further, is this behavior within the range of natural sexual preferences, or is it pathological?

Let’s first be clear on definitions: hebephilia is the sexual preference for pubescent children. Not teenagers, but pubescent children. In industrial and post-industrial populations, that means a sexual preference for ten to twelve year olds, in agricultural populations eleven to fourteen year olds, and in forager populations maybe closer to thirteen to fifteen year olds. Scicurious has already alerted us to studies that negate DTH’s claim that most men are hebephiles. Others that assess sexual preference through a measurable penile response (though in some ways a problematic assessment) show not only high agreement between men’s stated preference for pubescent children and their response to images of them, but that these men are quite small in number (Blanchard et al. 2009).

“…the normal male sex drive.”

Embedded within this idea that “most men” practice hebephilia is the assumption that it is a part of the “normal male sex drive.” If DTH is contending that hebephilia is the normal male sex drive, that implies he thinks it is the natural state for men to prefer pubescent girls.

For something to be naturally occurring, it does not have to be practiced by everybody in a population, so the earlier evidence that hebephilia is uncommon doesn’t necessarily negate this next claim. But for that behavior to continue in some frequency in future generations, it needs to be an evolutionarily stable strategy. So let’s go over the main conditions that would convince me hebephilia is an evolutionarily stable strategy:

1. Hebephilia is an adaptation: sexual preferences would have to be variable and heritable, and hebephilia itself would need to promote reproductive success under plausible conditions. Further, we would need evidence selection is acting on the sexual preference for pubescent children, rather than a correlated response to a different trait.
2. Hebephilia is at least equivalent and ideally resistant to alternative reproductive strategies – it needs to be successful enough to beat out most other strategies.

Condition 1: Is hebephilia is naturally selected?

I think the claim could be made that sexual preferences are both variable and heritable – these are the first two conditions necessary for a trait to be naturally selected. For instance, despite very poor support for a “gay gene,” there is strong support that sexual preferences are both heritable and influenced by environment (Jeremy Yoder’s SciAm Guest Blog post on the topic explains this very well). So I am okay with extending this claim to hebephilia, that it very well may be part of sexual preference variation and that it may be heritable. Just keep in mind that hebephilia being part of the range of variation of sexual preferences doesn’t necessarily keep it within the range of normal, appropriate, healthy or socially acceptable.

The third part of natural selection – that the trait must promote reproductive success relative to other strategies – is where the claim breaks down. DTH’s first point, that he thinks most men are heterosexual hebephiles, suggests it is an evolutionarily stable strategy that results in enough reproductive success to continue to succeed among other existing strategies (like, say, a sexual preference for adult women). Perhaps hebephilia couldn’t beat out a preference for adult women (though I am being very generous here, since in a way this is exactly what DTH is trying to argue), but can it at least beat out the other sexual preferences?

I’ve talked about this before, but girls just past menarche (that’s her first period) are usually what’s called “subfecund” – this means that fewer of her cycles, when she does cycle, are ovulatory, compared to an adult woman. In fact, the most consistent ovulatory cycles and highest hormone concentrations are found in women 25-35 years old, shattering the myth that younger women are actually the most fertile (Ellison et al. 1993).*

So it is harder to get pregnant if you are just past menarche. And since the definition of hebephilia is attraction to a pubescent child, this includes attraction to and sex with girls who haven’t necessarily even had a period yet – girls who are completely infertile. If you are going to bet your reproductive success on one partner age, pubescent girls are probably the wrong one.

The second issue is that very young teen pregnancies have pretty negative health outcomes. Girls who give birth over sixteen or seventeen don’t experience any more negative birth outcomes than those over eighteen, but girls under fourteen – which, again, fits the hebephilia preference for pubescence – have increased risk of maternal and infant mortality (Kramer 2008). Further, the higher rates of infant mortality in those girls who first give birth under fourteen years of age can therefore expect a lower number of surviving children out of the total number they bear (Kramer 2008, Figure 1).

Kramer 2008 Fig 4. Graph demonstrating that girls who begin giving birth as young adolescents have lower reproductive success in relation to total parity

Now remember, these data come not from the “puritanical, feminist” American culture, but from a rural, traditional Mayan culture. But these data do support those found in industrialized populations found in a simple Google Scholar search. This search revealed a wealth of data showing that very young girls having babies doesn’t happen much, and when it happens it doesn’t often end well (Chen et al. 2007, Duenhoelter et al. 1975, Felice et al. 1981, Fraser et al. 1995, Haiek and Lederman 1989, Merritt et al. 1980, Olausson et al. 1999).

Condition 2: Is hebephilia resistant to alternative strategies?

For hebephilia to be an evolutionarily stable strategy, it needs to beat out other strategies. Already we are in danger of this strategy losing out because young teen pregnancies are far less successful than older teen and adult pregnancies. But let’s put a few more nails in the coffin.

We know of past and current cultures where older men marry pubescent, even pre-pubescent girls. However, hebephilia is defined as an adult who wants to have sex with pubescent children. This is not the same as an adult man who wants to marry a twelve year old girl and not have sex with her until she is older, for the purpose of securing a dowry or piece of land or better relationship with her family. That is common throughout human history. We cannot use as justification the few marriages in the Middle Ages (or partnerships in traditional forager societies) that happen to involve pubescent girls, because they rarely, if ever, involve sex with the child until she is older.

The example I know best is from the classic !Kung ethnography Nisa by Marjorie Shostak (1983). In this book, Nisa narrates how she is forced to marry an older man before she hits menarche. She runs away to her family several times, and her family is very permissive of this behavior. After a while, they demand she grow up and live with him. And she more or less does. Nisa eventually gets her first period and the menstrual celebration commences. It is only after this point that she is pressured to have sex with her husband. And eventually, she does.

Sex with pubescent girls appears to be highly infrequent. In Kramer’s paper on birth outcomes in teen pregnancies in traditional Mayan population, she reviews this exactly literature (2008). She finds:

“In natural fertility populations, the lapse between menarche and exposure to conception is highly variable, and may last one to two years up to over a decade (Whiting et al., 1986; Schlegel, 1995)” (Kramer 2008: 346).

And yes, she’s being nice about it, but by “exposure to conception” Kramer is talking about straight sexual activity. So in traditional, natural fertility populations (where natural fertility generally means non-contracepting) girls tend not to have sex, on the lower end of the spectrum, until a few years after menarche. That is post-pubertal, which means non-hebephilic.

Finally, there are definitely strategies that beat out hebephilia. There are two main mating strategies to secure a high chance for reproductive success if you’re male: to control the fertility of a female starting early, or to find a female who already has demonstrable reproductive success – a mother. Our closest primate relatives generally choose the latter: male chimpanzees don’t salivate over adolescent female chimps, and in fact reject them as sexual partners quite frequently. Instead, male primates and other animals fight over sex with the older females who’ve already borne a kid or two (Anderson 1986, Muller et al. 2006, Nichols et al. 2010, Proctor et al. 2011, Robbins 1999).

In humans we see plenty of individuals choose between either strategy and both can be quite successful. The former strategy is not unlike the one Nisa’s husband employed: marry the girl he wants, but don’t actually have sex with her until she comes of age. Of course, DTH will be sad to know that many consider this strategy to control female fertility part of a suite of behaviors that helps us understand the evolution of patriarchy (Smuts 1995).

At the end of the day, neither condition is supported. Hebephilia is not a direct product of natural selection, nor is it a successful strategy compared to other existing ones. DTH cannot get the satisfaction and validation he so desperately wants, because no matter how much he wants to justify it to himself, it cannot be justified in the context of the scientific evidence. Even if somehow this evidence were overturned by a wealth of opposing data, hebephilia is still not a permissible behavior, and it’s important to remember to make the distinction between what we can observe within human behavior, and what is right.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Scicurious and Charles Roseman for their comments on an earlier draft of this post.

Notes

*Subfecund is still fecund, and age-based probabilities are still probabilities. Don’t let these data fool any individual into ever thinking unprotected straight sex when a woman is postmenarcheal and premenopausal has few or no babymaking strings attached!

References

Anderson, C. 1986. Female age: Male preference and reproductive success in primates. International Journal of Primatology 7:305-326.

Blanchard, R., A. D. Lykins, D. Wherrett, M. E. Kuban, J. M. Cantor, T. Blak, R. Dickey and P. E. Klassen. 2009. Pedophilia, hebephilia, and the DSM-V. Archives of Sexual Behavior 38:335-350.

Chen, X.-K., S. W. Wen, N. Fleming, K. Demissie, G. G. Rhoads and M. Walker. 2007. Teenage pregnancy and adverse birth outcomes: a large population based retrospective cohort study. International Journal of Epidemiology 36:368-373.

Duenhoelter, J. H., J. M. Jimenez and G. BAUMANN. 1975. Pregnancy performance of patients under fifteen years of age. Obstetrics & Gynecology 46:49.

Ellison, P. T., C. Panter-Brick, S. F. Lipson and M. T. O’Rourke. 1993. The ecological context of human ovarian function. Human Reproduction 8:2248-2258.

Felice, M. E., J. L. Granados, I. G. Ances, R. Hebel, L. M. Roeder and F. P. Heald. 1981. The young pregnant teenager*,**:: Impact of comprehensive prenatal care. Journal of Adolescent Health Care 1:193-197.

Fraser, A. M., J. E. Brockert and R. H. Ward. 1995. Association of young maternal age with adverse reproductive outcomes. New England Journal of Medicine 332:1113-1118.

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Kramer, K. L. 2008. Early sexual maturity among Pume foragers of Venezuela: Fitness implications of teen motherhood. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 136:338-350.

Merritt, T. A., R. A. Lawrence and R. L. Naeye. 1980. The infants of adolescent mothers. Pediatric annals 9:100.

Muller, M. N., M. E. Thompson and R. W. Wrangham. 2006. Male chimpanzees prefer mating with old females. Current Biology 16:2234-2238.

Nichols, H. J., W. Amos, M. A. Cant, M. B. V. Bell and S. J. Hodge. 2010. Top males gain high reproductive success by guarding more successful females in a cooperatively breeding mongoose. Animal Behaviour 80:649-657.

Olausson, P. O., S. Cnattingius and B. Haglund. 1999. Teenage pregnancies and risk of late fetal death and infant mortality. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology 106:116-121.

Proctor, D. P., S. P. Lambeth, S. J. Schapiro and S. F. Brosnan. 2011. Male chimpanzees’ grooming rates vary by female age, parity, and fertility status. American Journal of Primatology

Robbins, M. M. 1999. Male mating patterns in wild multimale mountain gorilla groups. Animal Behaviour 57:1013-1020.

Smuts, B. 1995. The Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy. Human Nature-an Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective 6:1-32.

Agency and Institution in Three Acts. Act I: Within yourself

This is not a session on the science of sex, on being sexy while doing science, or on being sciency while having sex. Sci and I aren’t particularly excited by the idea of talking about any of those things, at least in a #scio12 session. What we want to talk about is the tension writing about this topic creates between the two major systems of our lives: our agency as individuals, and the institutions we operate around and within. Writing within this tension is where real risk-taking, exciting writing happens, and we want to help our fellow discussants figure out what this means for their own blogging.

For me, it’s the juxtaposition of my inherent agency as a tenure-track professor with academic freedom who can do whatever she wants for a research program* with institutional pressures of the various contexts in which I work: American culture, Polish culture (since I do my fieldwork in Poland), my university, my discipline. I have one of the most amazing, agency-filled jobs, where I get to decide where and when I work more than many other people I know. Yet I continually bump up against institutional oppressions, and observe the same in many of my peers.

As someone who is gendered female, people have long assumed that my academic interests must naturally tend toward ladybusiness: is that lifelong pressure why I study women’s reproductive ecology, or is it that I just don’t find the dudes that interesting since they aren’t the ones who make the babies? I imagine it’s a hefty portion of both. As a woman, I choose to study women and I understand the drives and assumptions that underlie this, that I didn’t make this choice in a vacuum but in the context of my personal agency and the world I’ve grown up in. I know I may be taken less seriously to do research on something gendered female, and that I may be taken more seriously as a female academic if I did research on something more obviously gendered male. But I also know the safety of women, and the risks where they are fewer of them.

This is a conversation I’ve had among other academics countless times: that this push by others towards particular topics, their own natural tendencies which may agree or disagree with that push, and their desires to subvert assumptions all influenced their topic of study. I know women who don’t study anything to do with women to be taken more seriously, and I know women who study women because it’s the only thing anyone would believe they wanted to study so, of their several projects, it’s all they could get funding for. Queer folk are often assumed to have interests only in queer topics. Several grad student friends of mine over the years have been directly told by their advisors that they should study their own ethnicity. Our agency as scientists is continually subverted by broader assumptions that who we are as people dictate our scientific interests.

Act II: Within your science

This, I think, is why I find the idea of bias in women’s health so interesting. Agency and institutional pressures are constantly at war within me, and so I seek out this tension in my own discipline. On the one hand, you have the scientific method, a nearly perfect form of agency that allows one to ask and test questions about the world in which we live. On the other hand, you have the oppressions and biases that permeate those who conduct science. Sometimes the outcome is pretty bad.

Writing about this tension is risky, but it also has the potential for an enormous payoff in terms of the quality of the final product. What were some of the most popular blog posts after #scio11? The ones that came out of the women in scienceblogging panel. These posts exposed many to the roiling mix of fear and courage many women and people from other underrepresented groups feel in the pit of our bellies every single day. Other posts that I’ve seen really hit a nerve involve tensions between different hypotheses, different interpretations of evidence, or the testing of a long-held assumption.

We are drawn to tension, to controversy, to provocation. Some want to engage, some to pitch a fit, and some to eat popcorn and watch. And a lot more people come when the science we write about is about the intersection or opposition of agency and institution because of that natural tension. The more people who come, the more people with a little more science in their day.

Act III: Within your writing

Here is a final way to think about these two concepts. As science bloggers, we have ultimate agency: even when we write for a network we usually have full editorial control. We can be whoever we want online, write about whatever we want.

But here is a place where institution – as culture, biology, our training or our relationships – can bring a healthy kind of unease to our writing. The kinds of people we choose to be are, as a whole, decent people. And decent people can be provocative, but they don’t lie on purpose. Decent people may spin wild theories, but not without qualifiers and evidence. Decent people find the controversy, but the controversy doesn’t define them.

And that is the core of the conversation Sci and I had the other day: with great power comes great responsibility. I credit Sci the most for first pointing out, understanding and personifying this last point. If we are the ones who have decided to communicate science, to break it down for our audience, to share it, or to push its boundaries, we need to be responsible. Our posts may be passed around on Facebook or Twitter, show up on Boing Boing or Reddit, and as a result be the only post someone reads on a given topic. Do we fan the flames of someone’s prejudice? Indulge our worst ideas? Write purely for pageviews?

So on Thursday, this is what we will talk about in our session: finding the tension in ourselves, our science and our writing. Delighting in the controversy, thrilling from the risk, but never forgetting our responsibility to the readers on the other side of our screen.

*This is of course within the confines of what it takes to get tenure and given the horrible funding situation which makes it hard to get any science done in the first place. Of course my job isn’t perfect. But that’s a topic for another post.

Note: I want to thank Alice Pawley and Scicurious for the ways in which conversations with them helped coalesce a lot of things I was thinking about around this topic.

A few years ago, I was standing outside the building where I taught, unlocking my bike. It was one of the first days of the semester, and I had just finished teaching. I was wearing one of my teaching uniforms: wideleg trouser jeans, a black boatneck sweater, and beautiful forest green heels. Except in really bad weather, I wear heels when I teach because it helps me feel older, like I have some authority. Being sometimes several decades younger than my colleagues, but usually less than a decade older than my students, meant my gender and age made me a sort of sexualized second class citizen.

An older faculty member approached me to unlock his own bike. He complained about where some students had locked their bikes because they obstructed the bike lane. He mentioned that he had told the police but that they never did anything about it. I nodded sympathetically.

“Of course,” he then said, “if I had been dressed like you, maybe they would have listened!”

And just like that, I was no longer a colleague. I was a woman.

* * *

Dr. Clelia Mosher, by valleyviolet on flickr. Click through to read her story to figure out why I chose her as the featured image for this post.

The perils women sciencebloggers face are not that different than those we face in the real world… though the exposure of the internet can occasionally make it less safe. And the risks that women avoid out in the world, are not unlike those we avoid in the blogosphere. That was one of many important conclusions made in the panel Sheril Kirshenbaum, Anne Jefferson, Joanne Manaster and I ran for the Sunday midday panel entitled “Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name.” I believe Sheril was the one who first suggested the topic.

This panel ended up being a great experience, for several reasons. First, leading up to the session, I had the opportunity to meet with other women at the conference and discuss the topic. I found myself in large, women-only groups on a number of occasions (though I just realized, this happens to me a lot at academic conferences too: I think I avoid schmoozing with men more than I realize, a point I will return to later). Each time, I brought up the panel to hear what they had to say, and they made beautiful points, expressed legitimate frustrations, shared both good stories and horrible ones, and in general kicked ass. There were some seriously smart and savvy women at Science Online 2011.

“Even when we want something, we feel the need to hide it”
Because I’m not sure whether these women want to be identified by the points they made or stories they shared, I’m not naming names here. But after each impromptu mini-panel, I took copious notes. Here is what the women I spoke to had to say:

• There is serious friend bias in who gets promoted in the science blogosphere, and it ends up that men promote other men quite a lot (in order to avoid potential defensiveness, I will say that we did also discuss several notable exceptions). We need to share the empirical evidence about the fact that people like to read people who are a lot like them, as a kind of sensitivity training for men, to help them train their brains to appreciate many different voices.
• We are all very, very tired of making a point on a blog, on twitter, or in a meeting, being ignored, having a man make the same point, then having that man get all the credit. Very tired.
• We still can’t be ambitious without being considered a bitch. People will always fall back on that term if they think you are too aggressive, but the same behavior is not criticized in men. One woman brought up an article she read by a journalist who said, of all the famous women she had ever interviewed (including leading political figures like Hillary Clinton), only Catherine Zeta Jones had ever admitted to being ambitious: the others had denied it. Even when we want something, we often feel we need to hide it.
• Women already have to be two and a half times better than a man to get the same job in science (referring here to the Wenneras and Wold article), women who blog using their real names have to be even better than that if she doesn’t want her blog counted against her when going up for promotion.
• Both the attacks and appreciations are different for women bloggers. We get unwanted attentions and compliments on our appearance, surprise that we are an authority on certain topics or have an interest in male-dominated topics, or are bullied in a way that feels gendered when a man decides we are wrong on the internet.
• The risk-aversion women bloggers display only hurts us. If we continue to be risk-averse women will never occupy positions where they can influence the community of bloggers — we need to take on editorships, we need to manage networks, run carnivals, so that we can then involve and promote more women. The blogosphere, like academia, is not a pure meritocracy.
• There are differences in the pros and cons of blogging depending on whether you are pseud or use your real name, and different ways you find support in the community.
• If we think we have it bad, look at other underrepresented groups: the situation is in some ways even worse. We need to avoid the Oppression Olympics and think about how to pull everyone up the ladder with us.

And remember… this is what was covered before we even started the panel!

“I want to puke on their shoes”
The panel itself was great, because the four of us panelists had different backgrounds and stories to share. Anne and I are both academics who spent some time in the science blogosphere with pseudonyms before engaging with our real names. However Anne is in a more male-dominated discipline and co-blogs with a man; mine is a bit more equal, but also I study women’s reproductive physiology, which leads to more reflective, sometimes more personal writing. Joanne makes science videos for a broader audience and has a great mind for visuals, humor, and for a really engaging style. Sheril has co-blogged with a man as well, in a high profile website, and has published two books (I must admit, I am frantically trying to finish two books right now so that I can finally start her book The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us!). But again, while I think all my co-panelists had some very important things to say, and some great stories (and awful stalker stories), the audience is what made the panel. Here are a few things they had to say (I wasn’t able to take notes as readily during the panel, but I will link to the video of the panel when it’s up):

• We need to be clear about how bad it really is to write under your own name — some women have had no problems at all where others have been driven out. Depending on the topic you write about and the kind of audience you write for, you will have different experiences, and many women will have only good experiences. We shouldn’t be too negative.
• Some people think writing for a female audience is lame. Apparently there is a listserv of science writers, and about once a year a conversation starts up about whether science writers should write for women’s magazines — apparently many people come down on the side of not thinking science writers should write for them. (My take? Any time anyone says there is anything wrong with writing for women, it is sexist.)
• One fantastic young woman talked about how she avoids discussing her blog with her peers for fear of becoming the “soft skills chick.” Doing anything other than the hottest science seems to delegitimize women very quickly; however in some cases men get rewarded for doing the same thing (examples that come to my mind are picking up extra teaching and service, or having offspring, the latter being empirically supported).
• Robin Lloyd already mentioned this in her article, but Ed Yong attended our panel (one of, I think, only three men). He mentioned that he gets DMed on Twitter regularly by men who want him to Tweet or promote their posts. He said he had never been DMed for promotional reasons by a woman. I was completely flabbergasted by this comment (and I don’t think I was the only one), because it had never occurred to me that I could even do that sort of a thing.
• The brilliant Zuska made several great comments (as Sheril pointed out, she really should have been on the panel!). One that really struck me is that we need to interrogate assumptions about women and provide empirical evidence against them. The reason this came up was that we were discussing where attacks can come from, and how sometimes the attacks come from women as well as men. I believe someone made the comment that women can be worse, and alluded to the idea that women make bad bosses for women. Zuska pointed out that when you look at the evidence male bosses are still worse to women than women are to women. And of course, towards the end of the panel Zuska also used what is likely her most famous and beloved line, “I want to puke on their shoes.”

Building an old girls’ club
At the end of the day, being female is a risk factor for unwanted attention if you choose to put yourself out there in any aspect of your life, from your job to your blog. But a risk factor is not the same thing as a foregone conclusion. We can choose not to engage and participate, not to take on positions of power (like, say researchblogging editorships) or attention (blogging on a network). But we’re holding ourselves, and women younger than us, back. We aren’t directing or shaping the debate. We aren’t holding people accountable when they ignore or forget issues relevant to women and other underrepresented groups.

Women need to connect with each other in private spaces, like email and private forums, and we need to continue to write “life of science” posts that mentor other women. Anne and I have been writing each other every week for a few years now, sharing the work we need to get done, the work we are going to let go and not feel guilty about, the happy and sad happening in our lives. Those emails help me structure my week and make action plans for my big academic projects. What’s more, Anne and I probably know more about each other than many people who see each other every day. And that relationship has given me the confidence to write this blog, to engage with sciencebloggers, to be a mommy and a scientist and a professor.

Be bold. Be ambitious. Be a little bit of a bitch. Plan your life in such a way that it gets bigger, not smaller. I plan my life so that my daughter, now almost three, will feel as though anything is possible; I want to be her example that a woman can occupy space and be pleased with herself.

I hope more of you blog, I hope more of you who already blog promote your blog and get your name out there, I hope you email me or someone you feel you could connect to when you need a reminder that you’re not alone. Because, why be small when you can be big?

A New Path by jurvetson on flickr

It’s the end of 2011, and I have a number of reasons to celebrate: a wonderful family, a wonderful job, a fun gig at SciAm, a roller derby season about to start back up again, and Science Online 2012 in a few short weeks. It’s the time of year to reflect on what we have done, and how to grow.

I have some fun ideas planned for this blog in the new year. You’ll see some pieces that are collaborations with academic and bloggy colleagues, others that give space to voices that need to be heard. I’ll also be writing soon about my upcoming Science Online 2012 panel with Scicurious, which, I promise, will be quite awesome.

And of course, it’s that time of year when we make a lot of lists. This list is, true to the blog, a Ladybusiness Anthropology edition, so one that focuses on scienceblogging on gender issues. As with many “best of” lists, it is somewhat arbitrary: this is one set of posts I’ve compiled that I think is exceptional, but I could have easily created several more. In fact, help me expand this list in the comments!

So, without further ado, here is my list of 10 great blog posts of 2011:

Is it cold in here? One of many moving posts to come out of Elevatorgate, and my very favorite. At Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette opens with one woman’s account of working at CERN where she endured footsie under the table at meetings and a regular, healthy dose of condescension. She demonstrates how the chilly climate in science isn’t just about work/life balance and spending more time with family, the excuse trotted out most frequently to explain why more women aren’t in science (and she does this with, you know, science). Then Ouellette uses this and the history of the term “chilly climate” to segue into a conversation about Elevatorgate, one of probably dozens, hundreds, thousands of experiences women have in male-dominated groups that remind them that they are women first, serious participants second. She dissects the way in which Rebecca Watson’s simple comment about her encounter with a man in an elevator polarized an entire community. And she offers a thoughtful and important manifesto to produce change in our environment.

Learning to Speak Like a Woman. This interview by Emily Anthes at Wonderland is a great example of what blogging has to offer traditional journalists. Anthes, a freelance science writer herself, interviews another journalist to get deeper into the story of speech therapy for transgender people. The whole interview is fantastic, but this is my favorite question and answer:

“EA: Could you see people who are not transitioning going through similar speech therapy? I’m imagining, say, a woman in the corporate world who thinks that perhaps making her speech less “feminine” will help her advance.

“EG: I know, in the context of the transgender world, some male-to-female transgender people have complained that in corporate settings, they tend to want their voices to go lower. They find themselves counteracting their therapy a little bit to keep their voices low and more gender neutral. A lot of people like the idea of having a more feminized voice, but then when it comes to the working world, they find that people don’t respond to them as well if their voice is too high.”

Are Women Really Less Funny Than Men? Elizabeth Preston at Inkfish deconstructs a recent paper on gender differences in humor. I love that Preston points out problems in this paper from several angles – the fact that the kind of humor they use is inherently male (New Yorker cartoons), and that their bracket methodology was potentially flawed. Preston’s blog is one more people should be reading.

Women Know Something You Don’t. In a truly beautiful post, Emily Willingham of The Biology Files writes about the history and importance of abortifacents in the context of recent attempts to define life as beginning at conception. A law that does this would criminalize not only miscarriage, but all forms of hormonal birth control and IUDs, since they can at times block implantation if fertilization somehow occurs. Willingham shares the relevance and importance of understanding family planning from a scientific and political perspective.

The Miracle of Birth is That Most of Us Figure Out How to Mother – More or Less. Ingrid Wickelgren at Streams of Consciousness writes a fantastic post that covers the neuroscience of motherhood. She describes research on working memory and executive function in mothers of six month olds, and shows how those mothers with higher scores seemed to be more attentive to their children. She says:

“Gonzalez and Fleming found that the mothers who did well on the executive function tests—those who have better working memories and are flexible thinkers—were also more sensitive to their babies’ needs than those who got lower cognitive scores.… Mothering tests your attention span, ability to plan, prioritize, organize and reason as much as does a day at the office. And if you are a good planner, you can cope better when interacting with your child.”

An adaptive fairytale with no happy ending. Jeremy Yoder of Denim and Tweed offers an intelligent rebuttal to a post by Bering on the evolution of homosexuality that goes back to the original Gallup citations. He demonstrates that the original data is unable to support the hypothesis that homophobia is adaptive, because it cannot address whether it is heritable or confers a fitness benefit. This is only one of many, many lovely posts by Yoder – in fact, also check out this post of his at the SciAm Guest Blog called The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, With a Key to Many Complicating Factors.

Getting “Mean Girled” in the Baboon world: the price of being sexy. Ashlee, also known as Serious Monkey Business of Serious Monkey Business blog, wrote a great post using Mean Girls as a way to frame a paper by Huchard and Cowlishaw (2011). Her post describes how baboon females receive more aggression from other females when they are in estrus, as opposed to non-estrus or when they are lactating. A fun, informative post.

Evidence on the Hebephilia question. I love this post by Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds because she compiles an impressive array of evidence to support her point about the nature of consent and power between children and adults. I’ve already linked to a number of other posts I like on the topic here, but this, more recent one lays out the evidence.

Maternal obesity from all sides. Science & Sensibility is one of my favorite blogs, and not only because its name is a spin on my favorite Jane Austen novel. This is the last in a series on maternal obesity that tries to understand situations and outcomes for women of size in a way that is respectful and thoughtful.

Menstrual Synchrony: Do Girls Who Go Together Flow Together? This is a post I missed the first time around; a reader brought it to my attention after I wrote on the same topic myself. This post, by Harriet Hall at Science Based Medicine, offers a thoughtful and critical perspective on the pervasive idea of menstrual synchrony. And no, it is not likely that it is real.

I also want to give a nod to the following mainstream media stories of 2011. I like when journalists cover sex and gender issues with sensitivity and thoroughness.

Led by the child who simply knew. A beautiful story in the Boston Globe about an amazing transgender girl and her amazing family. A multi-tissue story. May I raise my child to have the same grace and strength as these kids.

Contraceptive Comeback: The Maligned IUD Gets a Second Chance. At Wired, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel describes a study where, when women are properly educated about their contraception choices, overwhelmingly choose the IUD. The IUD is making a real comeback, is more effective and easier to use than hormonal contraception, and while it has its own set of side effects (discomfort with insertion, spotting for anywhere from a day to a few months after insertion) they are far lower than what some women experience on the pill. I have a post on IUDs at my old blog covering similar material.

Teens turn a blind eye to sex information on the web. This is from the Montreal Gazette, and actually, the title poorly describes the story. What this story does is report on a study that showed that teens are skeptical of sex information they get on the web, and, as it turns out, appreciative of what they get from their parents. Good thing for me to remember, as my three year old just my husband where babies come from this week.

I am an evolutionary psychologist, which, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing and society largely accepts the need for people like me. However, our evil, feminist, not-patriarchal-enough culture fundamentally doesn’t get me in particular, a special snowflake among evolutionary psycholgoists. You see, I am an Evidence Free Science Provocateur. I am quite sure all evolutionary psychologists are Evidence Free Science Provocateurs just like me, even though they are too chicken to speak the Evidence Free Truth. I have long suffered under this mantle, and derive some pride for my role in upsetting people with abject misogyny; I enjoy dabbling in the justifications of many oppressions and noxious human behaviors.

I’m also writing to you about a separate matter. You see, I’m not getting all the credit for my provocations! Where I write my blog, at, um, Schmientific Schamerican, I have complete editorial control, and have been here longer than the young upstarts at the new network. But people are mad at the manager of the blog network, who didn’t hire me, and the magazine. But my situation is entirely different than that other thing that happened in my publishing group! In the other case, someone submitted something provocative, where provocative = misogynist and not based in evidence (hooray! A kindred spirit!) and then an editor approved it (another one! I told you, we are everywhere). So someone other than the original author had to decide it was appropriate to publish. With my blog, it’s all me, baby.

So Kate, I’m writing for your advice on two matters: how can I devise an appropriate justification for my Evidence Free Science Provocations (people are already trying to copy me, I need an idea I can claim ASAP), and how can I make sure everyone understands that I OWN my hateful and problematic words?

Unberable

Dear Unberable,

I must first gently tell you that not all evolutionary psychologists are Evidence Free Science Provocateurs. But like you, I am sure there are many more of them than admit it, and there are very good evolutionary reasons to be an Evidence Free Science Provocateur, which I will now make up.

For instance, as evolutionary psychologists age their mate value diminishes significantly. In order to compensate for their increasing obsolescence, it becomes necessary to draw attention to themselves by upping the ante with ever-more evidence free theorizing. Further, the internet age makes the dominance rank of science bloggers in constant flux. Evolutionary psychologists who are also science bloggers, which it sounds like you are, need to beat their virtual chests like a silverback gorilla every now and again to fight off the younger males who want to oust them. Finally, Darwin’s finches that best survive periods of drought have an increased beak hardness and a taste for finches much younger than them (a little known fact I just made up, whee!). Like Darwin’s finches, evolutionary psychologist science bloggers respond to their environments adaptively, so it must be adaptive to be an Evidence Free Science Provocateur. Or something.

As for your second question, all I can tell you is that in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, or Back in the Day, it was adaptive to be entrenched in one’s own opinions and be unwilling to entertain the possibility that being provocative isn’t useful in the absence of evidence. I know this not because I can identify any traits that would support this being adaptive, or any heritability of this behavior, or any other suggestion of a mechanism, but because it is what I want to believe. In fact, I think I’ll give this hypothesis a name: the Honey Badger Don’t Care Hypothesis.

Honey badger can get bitten by bees, and ingest the venom of a snake, and have its food stolen by scavengers. Honey Badger Don’t Care. In the absence of evidence, of editorial control, of any real constraints on your behavior, you will do whatever you want and you don’t care.

And that’s great, because evolution says so.

With warm, evidence free wishes for a happy and healthy new year,
Kate

If you’re in a supportive department as I am, then your third year committee’s job is to make the best possible case for you for when your case goes before the college. They pore over your curriculum vitae (academic resume), your papers, your teaching evaluations and research program. They observe your teaching, read your grants, and try to figure out how to articulate just how important you are to the department.

However, the job of an academic, and our expectations, are largely increasing. More papers are expected, more grants, even while teaching and service loads are increasing. And what it means to be an academic is changing. More online instruction actually means that teaching is more time-intensive – it takes a lot longer to build a week of good online material than it does to write a few lectures. Students no longer wait to talk to you after class, they email you at all hours – and will resend their email repeatedly if you don’t answer within 8-12 hours. Being slightly removed from our students but supposedly available 24 hours a day makes for a demoralizing, full inbox each and every morning.

But there are many wonderful things about how our jobs are changing, too. As depressed as end of semester emails make me, I am thrilled the other fourteen weeks of the semester because I can identify the ways in which my students have grasped basic skills and concepts better in my current blended teaching style, compared to the passive lectures they once received. For some academics, blogs and social media serve as both public outreach and scholarly work; for others they are an important place to give and receive mentorship. And the shrinking of many PhD programs mean undergraduate research experiences are on the rise as some of us look for other students to mentor, and I find these experiences especially rewarding.

So that third year review committee has a tough job ahead of itself in a case like mine. I don’t look like most of the people who have gotten tenure before me, at least in terms of how I allocate my time. They can figure out how to talk about my educational activities, because they can recognize components even if the medium or students look different. The research part should be a breeze too. But what they really want to know is, how do they talk about my blog?

It doesn’t help that “blog” doesn’t sound very academic (oh, if only I had thought to call this the Context and Variation Monograph). And it doesn’t help that this writing isn’t just for scholars, but for everybody. That’s not because non-blogging academics don’t see the point of interacting with the public, but because this particular way of doing it is so strange to them. This isn’t a radio interview, or a book, or a talk at the local library, but a style of writing where the jargon is not academic but from the internet. We talk in ALL CAPS, we use emoticons and use extra exclamation points!!1!!1 We use the word “fail” in a way totally different from its traditional meaning, which led to members of the American Anthropological Association getting angry and hurt when online anthropologists referred to the removal of science from its mission statement last year as #aaafail.

Then there are the takedowns.  Blog posts can be a number of things, but within science blogging two of the more common are explainers and takedowns. Explainers are when you provide background information or context for a particular topic – this may be timely, as when there is a new primate fossil discovery and several anthropologists then explain its meaning in the context of the fossil record or modern primates, depending on their expertise. Or it may just be interesting or timely to them, as with my piece on inducing labor last month.

Takedowns, though, are critical and controversial. They are intentionally provocative. They do not write behind a veil of careful academic prose that weighs and measures each sentence. They take the criticisms that many academics privately share at the nearest coffee shop (because we so rarely have a watercooler) into the public sphere. And so these are particularly unsettling to read and categorize, if you are trying to understand a blog’s place in academia.

At Science Online last year, John Hawks said that “blogging is at best a tertiary activity.” And I would agree. But that still puts it on the radar for those of us blogging pre-tenure today. I have no desire to alter my writing style or choice of topics on my blog to help me get tenure. At the same time, I would like to be able to articulate the ways in which the process of blogging, the networking from blogging, and scholarly blog posts are a meaningful part of my identity and production as a tenure-track professor. ETA: I’m embarrassed that I missed this important and delightful post by Greg Downey on this topic, just last month. Read it! Thanks to Kristina Killgrove for pointing it out in the comments!

* * *

Blogging to build a network

One part of blogging that is easy for most academics to understand is that it helps you network. Blogging has given me connections to anthropologists I might otherwise have never met (to name just a few). It exposes me to potential students, potential employers, potential external letter writers (those are the people who write letters on your behalf when you go up for tenure, and can make or break your case). When graduate students and junior faculty become fans of my blog, they tell senior faculty, and recently several of those senior faculty have told me. Now those senior faculty also read my blog.

This increased exposure also means that more journalists know who you are. When a journalist needs an anthropologist or scholar of ladybusiness, they are more likely to call me. And while academics have for a long time feared talking to journalists because journalists will “get it wrong” or fellow academics will think they are grubbing for fame, times are changing. For one, you can certainly say no if a journalist’s time table is too short for you to give the considered response you want to give, or you don’t feel she or he is from a reputable organization. But you can also set some ground rules that allow you to see your quotes ahead of time. If you are in the blogging community and the journalist also blogs, there will likely be a mutual trust that will allow you to answer honestly and without fear.

I would also add that the stigma of interacting with journalists is decreasing in a climate where universities are competing for the best students and looking for ways to set them above their rivals. My university LOVES that I write for Scientific American, because every time you read one of my blog posts you likely note that I am an assistant professor at the University of Illinois. Now you won’t just associate that university with having had a terrible football coach (our bowl game sure will be interesting), but as a place that appreciates public service. Public engagement is a priority that is growing in Illinois’s mission, which is a good thing since many other people from here do amazing online science writing and outreach.

Finally, and this may be the most exciting part of how blogging improves networks, is that it can lead to giving talks at other institutions. This demonstrates our impact on the field, and how much respect we have from our colleagues. Every talk I have been invited to give so far this semester (and upcoming next semester) has been a direct result of this blog. Every single one. Yet many of them have been research talks or hybrid research/blog talks, which has allowed me to put my own work out there in front of another set of anthropologists. These have an enormous benefit for me, because I get to test out my ideas and receive constructive criticism from my colleagues. And, if the talk goes well, I’ve gained their respect as a scholar.

Blogging as scholarly writing

Blogging is scholarly writing in that it is writing as thinking. I put ideas out here, or explain basic concepts like life history theory, in a way that has enormous benefit to me, because the writing secures it in my brain. I am a more broadly knowledgeable anthropologist because of this blog; I read and write more than I would without it. Some of my posts are drafts of actual papers I hope to write. And other posts are ways to help me get through something about my job that is keeping me from fulfilling my potential as a scholar.

Blogging has improved my writing and analytical skills. For instance, while many aspects of evolutionary psychology have been unsettling to me for over a decade, it is only in writing about it on my blog that I have been able to better articulate why. And while I have been critical of the clinical study of women’s health for some time, I rarely get the opportunity to discuss the historical or cultural context except for in this space.

But blogging is not just a writing exercise. Blogging is a different way of having an academic conversation. I have had many important interactions with other scholars about evolutionary theory, the biocultural approach in anthropology, women’s health and other topics that have helped us each develop our own thinking. It’s just that the conversation is more public.

Finally, writing a blog can lead to peer-reviewed manuscripts. I’ve now been selected to be in the Open Lab anthology twice – last year and this year. This is a peer-reviewed process, and I do list my contributions to these anthologies on my CV.

Examples of posts as scholarly writing:

• From Open Lab 2010: My IVF story: Part I and Part II
• From Open Lab 2011: Menstruation is just blood and tissue you ended up not using
• Why we shouldn’t prescribe hormonal contraception to twelve year olds
• The Duggars demonstrate life history trade-offs around quality versus quantity of offspring
• Do women in groups bleed together? On menstrual synchrony

Blogging as service

Finally, my blog provides three kinds of service: mentoring to junior colleagues, outreach to the public, and post-publication peer review. I’ve met with undergraduates and graduate students from other institutions as part of invited talks to discuss issues for women in science and academia as well as my research. I do a fair bit of email correspondence with young female students. I also write honestly about the “work/life balance,” one of the dumber terms for a near-permanent state of sleep deprivation. In fact, I’ve discussed my third year review in the context of my attending the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women, and that post led to emails from novelists, doctors, and academics in all disciplines all over the country.

Other posts are intended for a more general audience, in order to raise awareness of the disconnect between women’s knowledge from peers and doctors and the often different information gleaned from anthropological science research. I have written on iron-deficiency anemia, labor induction, homebirth, and hormonal contraception, often contrasting medical assumptions with evidence-based reality.

A third kind of post serves as public outreach and a new form of scholarly writing: post-publication peer review. The peer review process is imperfect, and a growing number of blogs are devoting a significant portion of their space to analyzing published papers. This takes private academic conversations public, which is useful for layreaders and fellow academics. In addition to many solo efforts, I have collaborated twice with Scicurious, a pseudonymous postdoc in neuroscience and all-around kickass person. Our most recent tag-team, on a paper about maternal tendencies and facial femininity, resulted in an exchange with the lead author of the paper on the Scientific American Guest Blog, on its comment thread, and even spawned a separate post by another psychologist.

Post-publication peer review makes the scientific process more transparent to the layreader and, I hope, demonstrates the ways in which science is not straightforward but requires creativity and thoughtfulness alongside objectivity. This may prove increasingly important for young people, who see scientists as smart and good at taking tests, linear thinkers, and people who don’t need help understanding anything (Shanahan 2011). This scientist archetype prevails in graduate school and beyond, manifesting itself as “impostor syndrome” if the scientist doesn’t feel they have these attributes or otherwise occupy an othered space in their field.

Finally, the main reason this type of scholarly writing is important is that it makes critiques public among fellow scholars. By airing our grievances, we may arrive at new ideas, or at least achieve a grudging respect for our differences. And this type of post-publication peer review can happen more quickly than letters to the editor in a journal, allowing for faster transmission of ideas. So far, daring to be critical at times has made me a more bold scholar, allowed me to articulate for myself and others why an anthropological lens is so important in understanding human physiology and behavior, and given me space to engage not only with people who agree with me, but with those who don’t.

Examples of posts as service:

• Even when we something, we need to hide it and the video of the Science Online 2011 talk
• Underrepresentation hurts us all
• On bad first drafts
• On being a radical scholar
• Menstruation is just blood and tissue you ended up not using
• Mate magnet madness: when the range of possible explanations exceeds your own hypothesis
• Framing and definitions: are you maternal enough to be a woman?

An ultrasound of my daughter during her #occupyuterus movement

Summer 2001. I had just graduated from college with a joint degree in biological anthropology and women’s studies which, as my father pointed out, was not a degree with an obvious vocational angle. I was headed to graduate school in anthropology that fall, an experience for which I was woefully underprepared. I spent the summer loafing. It was the last summer I would ever have to just loaf around, so I was going to loaf, dammit.

But I did have one job. A dear friend was pregnant and asked me to attend her birth. I prepared like a champ: I watched A Baby Story twice a day while lounging on my boyfriend’s couch (I squeezed these in between yoga, George R. R. Martin novels, and trips to Whole Foods). I also read through some of my old textbooks, including books recommended to me by a few professors, The Woman in the Body, Birth as an American Rite of Passage and Immaculate Deception II.

One early morning in July, my friend called. “We’re on our way to the hospital. I’m in labor. It will be a while, so don’t hurry,” she said. I hurried. When I got there, conditions couldn’t have been worse: as it turns out, the nurses at the hospital were on strike, the doctor my friend hated the most was the one on call, and the epidural she got once active labor commenced slowed down her contractions. The doctor broke my friend’s water without her consent then began pressuring her and her husband to have Pitocin. Pitocin was the one intervention my friend had been adamant she wanted to avoid, but the doctor kept pulling the husband to the side telling him they were risking the baby.

The nurses were not familiar with the hospital or the doctor and so could offer little support. The husband was beside himself with worry. The doctor had the bedside manner of cardboard. I thought, This is my moment. My college degree will be useful for something!

“How about nipple stimulation?” I asked.

My friend and her husband looked at me blankly. The doctor had already left the room to attend to another patient.

“Pitocin is synthetic oxytocin. Oxytocin is produced by nipple stimulation, like when you breastfeed a baby. Maybe making your own oxytocin will bring back your contractions.”

My friend and her husband continued to stare at me.

“Well, some people do use nipple stim…” one nurse said, sounding unconvinced.

That was all the endorsement the husband needed. Eyes wild, he reached across his wife’s body… and, er, stimulated her nipples. Aggressively.

My friend’s contractions started back up again, and didn’t let up for the remainder of labor. A few hours later she gave birth to a gorgeous, big baby boy.

* * *

Ten years later, I’m in the same position. My sister has asked that I attend her birth along with her husband. Her official due date was Sunday, so we’re within the window when he will be born and are playing a waiting game. Culturally, we consider the due date as a sort of deadline; if you are still pregnant after that deadline your baby is “overdue,” and you may feel you have failed as a mother (you haven’t). You may also just be sick of being pregnant, or eager to meet your new kid. Maybe your favorite midwife or obstetrician is about to go on vacation and you won’t be able to deliver with her.

Two issues contradict the notion that inducing labor when “overdue” is a good idea. First, due dates are notoriously inaccurate, as they are calculated by date of last period instead of by ovulation or implantation. This makes sense, of course, because women rarely know their ovulation or implantation days. The first half of the cycle, or follicular phase, is even more variable than the second half (Lenton et al., 1984), meaning the assumption built into calculating a due date – that the follicular phase is fourteen days long – introduces a lot of error.

Second, if you are past your due date but your baby is happy inside of you, that means you have produced a healthy, hospitable environment for her or him. More hospitals are creating 39-week cutoffs before which doctors cannot schedule inductions; this is because birth before that point carries increased risks for the baby. Further, many researchers support the maternal crossover hypothesis, which suggests a fetal trigger for the onset of labor: once the fetus begins to starve, it sends a stress signal to the mother, which commences labor (Ellison, 2001; Wildman et al., 2011). The idea is that the mother has “crossed over” some point after which she cannot provide adequate nutrition for the growing fetus through the umbilical cord. If she or he wants to keep growing, then it makes more sense to be born and receive more energy dense food, and fat, through the nipple in the form of breastmilk.

This means a baby usually should be born when it wants to be born, rather than when you, your mother in law, your boss or *cough* your sister want him to be born.

However, the cervix of a woman who hasn’t had any children yet does take longer to ripen, and so first pregnancies can be longer than the second or third (Mittendorf et al., 1993). And so the question is whether there is anything the mother can do safely to encourage the fetus to consider starting things up, or to help the cervical ripening so that any signal the fetus is sending will be more effective. Some of the most common interventions mothers try on their own include exercise, sex, and eating spicy foods (Chaudhry et al., 2011).

I am about to share some of the literature on these and other interventions. I do not explicitly recommend any particular course of action, as I’m not a licensed midwife or obstetrician. As I learned when I had my own daughter, having book knowledge is not the same as practical knowledge.

Exercise certainly makes sense as a mechanism to induce labor: bouts of physical activity temporarily increase systemic inflammation biomarkers (Kasapis and Thompson, 2005), which are associated with labor onset. Exercise also increases energy expenditure, which might increase fetal stress and cause it to decide it can get more calories out than in.

However, the evidence doesn’t seem to support exercise inducing labor or shortening pregnancy. Many studies support a role for exercise in supporting normal-weight babies (Bell et al., 1995; Campbell and Mottola, 2001; Klebanoff et al., 1990; Leiferman and Evenson, 2003), which is a great thing: have a too-big baby and birth complications can arise, and a small baby can have health issues. Exercise may also reduce the risk of cesarean deliveries in nulliparous women (that’s women who haven’t had any prior kids) (Bungum et al., 2000). And, exercise reduces the incidence of pre-term birth (Hatch et al., 1998; Hegaard et al., 2008; Jukic et al., 2011), though work-related and potentially stressful forms of physical activity may slightly increase the risk (Misra et al., 1998). So it seems as though habitual physical activity has a very beneficial effect on mother and baby. But it doesn’t make the baby come out any faster.

Unprotected sex with a man can be fun if you’re straight or bi and it’s consensual, and its role in triggering labor has mixed support. Semen contains prostaglandins, and prostaglandins can bring on uterine contractions. Further, oxytocin is produced at orgasm, which ripens the cervix (and of course, you don’t need a consenting male partner for this one). I found one study that showed that women who were scheduled for an induction but had sex at term to avoid it had a shortened gestation length (Tan et al., 2006). The same author also found, however, that both sex and orgasm were inversely correlated with spontaneous labor (Tan et al., 2009).

Spicy foods? So far, no one has systematically looked at it, though intestinal distress may trigger contractions (Chaudhry et al., 2011). And while a few herbal preparations may increase your chances, the side effects and lack of FDA regulation dictate caution without a licensed midwife or physician overseeing the process.

But there is one more intervention worth further study. Remember when my friend’s husband semi-publicly twiddled my friend’s breasts? Nipple stimulation is effective not only at helping contractions along once labor has started, but possibly also inducing labor. One paper I read reviewed the varying recommendations by midwives for inducing labor, and their nipple stimulation protocol included massaging with oil by hand until one feels contractions, or using an electronic breast pump for fifteen minutes on, fifteen off (Knoche et al., 2008). One study demonstrated that nipple stimulation leads to greater cervical ripening than a control group (Adewole et al., 1993). So the mechanism is there, the link between nipple stimulation and cervical ripening pretty well established, and cervical ripening is one of the major first steps to labor.

That said, think of late pregnancy as an #occupyuterus movement. If current events are any indicator, no good comes of forcing peaceful protestors to leave by violent means.

References

Adewole I, Franklin O, Matiluko A. 1993. Cervical ripening and induction of labour by breast stimulation. African journal of medicine and medical sciences 22(4):81.

Bell RJ, Palma SM, Lumley JM. 1995. The Effect of Vigorous Exercise During Pregnancy on Birth‐Weight. Australian and New Zealand journal of obstetrics and gynaecology 35(1):46-51.

Bungum TJ, Peaslee DL, Jackson AW, Perez MA. 2000. Exercise during pregnancy and type of delivery in nulliparae. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing 29(3):258-264.

Campbell MK, Mottola MF. 2001. Recreational exercise and occupational activity during pregnancy and birth weight: a case-control study. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 184(3):403-408.

Chaudhry Z, Fischer J, Schaffir J. 2011. Women’s Use of Nonprescribed Methods to Induce Labor: A Brief Report. Birth.

Ellison PT. 2001. On Fertile Ground. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hatch M, Levin B, Shu XO, Susser M. 1998. Maternal leisure-time exercise and timely delivery. American Journal of Public Health 88(10):1528.

Hegaard HK, Hedegaard M, Damm P, Ottesen B, Petersson K, Henriksen TB. 2008. Leisure time physical activity is associated with a reduced risk of preterm delivery. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 198(2):180. e181-180. e185.

Jukic AMZ, Evenson KR, Daniels JL, Herring AH, Wilcox AJ, Hartmann KE. 2011. A Prospective Study of the Association Between Vigorous Physical Activity During Pregnancy and Length of Gestation and Birthweight. Maternal and Child Health Journal:1-14.

Kasapis C, Thompson PD. 2005. The Effects of Physical Activity on Serum C-Reactive Protein and Inflammatory Markers: A Systematic Review. Journal of the American College of Cardiology 45(10):1563-1569.

Klebanoff M, Shiono P, Carey J. 1990. The effect of physical activity during pregnancy on preterm delivery and birth weight. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 163(5 Pt 1):1450.

Knoche A, Selzer C, Smolley K. 2008. Methods of Stimulating the Onset of Labor: An Exploration of Maternal Satisfaction. The Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health 53(4):381-387.

Leiferman JA, Evenson KR. 2003. The effect of regular leisure physical activity on birth outcomes. Maternal and Child Health Journal 7(1):59-64.

Lenton EA, Landgren B-M, Sexton L, Harper R. 1984. Normal variation in the length of the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle: effect of chronological age. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology 91(7):681-684.

Misra DP, Strobino DM, Stashinko EE, Nagey DA, Nanda J. 1998. Effects of physical activity on preterm birth. American Journal of Epidemiology 147(7):628-635.

Mittendorf R, Williams MA, Berkey CS, Lieberman E, Monson RR. 1993. Predictors of human gestational length. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 168(2):480-484.

Tan P, Yow C, Omar S. 2009. Coitus and orgasm at term: effect on spontaneous labour and pregnancy outcome. Singapore medical journal 50(11):1062-1067.

Tan PC, Andi A, Azmi N, Noraihan MN. 2006. Effect of coitus at term on length of gestation, induction of labor, and mode of delivery. Obstetrics & Gynecology 108(1):134.

Wildman DE, Uddin M, Romero R, Gonzalez JM, Than NG, Murphy J, Hou ZC, Fritz J. 2011. Spontaneous Abortion and Preterm Labor and Delivery in Nonhuman Primates: Evidence from a Captive Colony of Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). PLoS One 6(9):e24509.

Some of the anthropologists you would have found at the 2005 Yale strike.

I have spent a lot of time in my life being employed or educated by an organization that I find problematic in some way. At Harvard, my main gripe involved the way in which the dissolution of Radcliffe College and the women’s spaces there occurred with little engagement with undergraduates: two deans met with me and two other women who were on the board of the Radcliffe Union of Students. That’s it. In response, we created a tent Women’s Center outside of the Science Center and a list of demands of what we would want out of a real Women’s Center; years later when they finally did form a real Women’s Center they did so in the basement of Canaday, which happens to be only a hundred feet or so from our temporary structure. (I say this without taking any actual credit, as I doubt our action had much of an effect.)

At Yale, my issues centered around the condescending attitude that characterized labor relations with both graduate students and the largely African-American population surrounding the gentrified center of New Haven. I committed and was arrested for civil disobedience two times in my six years there. I also went on strike twice. The graduate students do have a union, but it is still unrecognized by Yale.

At the University of Illinois where I now work, I cancelled my 750-student class during a GEO strike, despite a phone call to my home to dissuade me from such a decision. I walked the picket lines instead, and as it happens an agreement was reached when my class would have been taught, and we celebrated on the steps of Foellinger Auditorium, where I taught my class. (Again, I doubt my own decision made a difference, but you wouldn’t have known it from the tears streaming down my face as grad students sang and danced because they got the raises and benefits they needed to support themselves and their family.)

My actions had impact for me and many other people: I radicalized many female friends in college, many more colleagues in grad school, and know I served as an example for other faculty when I decided not to cross picket lines here at Illinois. These were moving, important experiences in my development as a scholar and activist. But in each of these cases, my actions as an individual had little impact in a way the institution would understand. If anything, these actions were derided by those in power, except, and this is important, when our numbers were great. If there were thousands of us picketing, that had meaning. If 700 of us got arrested, that had meaning (this happened long enough ago that I can’t find any of the longer pieces on it online). And I will return to this later in this post.

This time, my anger is with Nature Publishing Group (NPG), who owns Scientific American. My experience at Scientific American suggests that most folks here understand social media and blogs, and are respectful, thoughtful and kind. These are people who want to make the world a better place through science and science communication. And so I do my best to forgive the fact that some improvements to our network (*cough* commenting) have been under-resourced.

But NPG is a totally different lot. We’ve seen how their blog network stalled, how archaic and ridiculous their commenting policy is. We’ve seen who they employ. To be honest, I don’t read Nature unless someone pushes something to me. Instead, I enjoy my SciAm bubble and network of bright, fun thinkers.

I can’t do that now, because Henry Gee has seen fit to publish a rather limp attempt at humor that relies on fundamental stereotypes about male and female interests, desire and behavior. You can read the intelligent commentary by countless others: Anne Jefferson, who first brought this post to my attention, Emily Willingham, Christie Wilcox, Janet Stemwedel, Dr. Isis, Alex Wild, Drugmonkey, and I am probably missing several others. The only reason this article even turned up on anyone’s radar is because Nature just published two pieces of correspondence against the piece, by Ylaine Gerardin & Tami Lieberman, and Pieter van Dokkum.

I will not add to that commentary here, because frankly they said it better than I could. Instead, I want to talk about what the right thing to do is, and how to have impact, because I am struggling with answers to this myself.

When I read Womanspace, my first reaction was nausea. I felt completely sick to my stomach because I couldn’t believe that NPG would knowingly publish overt sexism. I felt completely alienated and abandoned by a journal that is supposed to publish science, not fiction that represents offensive cultural biases. Further, I am employed, however marginally or distantly, by NPG. What does this say about me and my blog? What does it mean that NPG employs someone like me who writes on feminism and science if they also publish that? Is my blog just a joke then, or a way to improve their appearance without actually changing who they are or how they think about science and scientists?

So then my next reaction was to consider the steps I needed to take to leave SciAm, since it meant being associated with NPG. I discussed it on our backforums and asked for advice. I talked a few friends about it. Would leaving have an impact? What would have an impact?

Leaving would diminish my impact, as my readership would probably not stay quite as high were I to return to my old blog. Yet, leaving would make a statement that I am not complicit with NPG and their actions. I’m not sure I know the correct choice.

Here is what I do know: leaving would allow me to feel better about myself and save face. It would allow me to walk away from the problem, back to my safe corner of the blogosphere where all my commenters were women and they were always kind and encouraging. I desperately want to do this because I am so tired of sexism and bothered by the uptick in sexist comments since moving to SciAm. There have been a lot of public attacks on women lately and calls to discuss those attacks. I haven’t contributed anything yet, first because the attacks I’ve received have been so mild compared to the death and rape threats experienced by others, and second because writing personally takes so much out of me. Being a leader, even an imperfect one alongside many other fantastic women and men, is exhausting. And every now and then even the bringer of Ladybusiness Justice needs to nap and cuddle while her daughter watches Sesame Street.

I didn’t get that nap yesterday, but I did go to bed early. And seven hours of sleep made it easier to think than five.

Maybe I would feel better if I left, at least at first. But my impact would not be the same. For now, I am not leaving, but instead am using this space to speak up against NPG policies when necessary, an #occupynpg movement, if you will. That means that, in essence, NPG is paying me to criticize them. And I can live with that, because this isn’t going to be the first time I do it. In fact, if you spot racism, sexism, heteronormativity, homophobia, or any other oppressive behavior happening at anything associated with NPG, I would like you to tell me, dear readers, so that I may write about it. If NPG doesn’t like it, they can shut down my blog or they can stop hiring and enabling sexists.

Remember when I mentioned that institutions listen when there are enough people shouting? In grad school when I spoke I reached one person at a time, across the table in a coffee shop, at the door of their home, beside them at the lab bench. Here, I can reach thousands, maybe more, and if you have a blog you can too. Write about why you find Womanspace, or anything else about NPG oppressive, and share it with a link in the comments.* Tell me about existing posts I’ve missed. Tweet about it with the hashtag #occupynpg. And share with me what you think it will take to produce a scientific community that holds itself more accountable around issues of inclusivity and scientific rigor (and yes, this might mean you disagree with my decision, and yes, I want you to be able to express that too).

*Comments that contain links often get held for moderation, so don’t double post; just give me a little time to approve it.