(music) Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.
Chris: Hi, I’m Chris Hofstader.
Francis: Hi, I’m Francis DiDonato.
Chris: And this is Episode 17 of Making Better Podcast, featuring Professor Lisa Willis from the University of Alberta.
Francis: It’s a pleasure for me to have Lisa Willis on, because, like myself, she also has a PhD in Immunology.
Chris: Lisa Willis focuses on helping women achieve their goals in STEM fields: Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics, and she describes something that she calls “the glass obstacle course” which is a lot more complicated than a glass ceiling, and she provides a number of good examples as to the things a woman needs to navigate in academia.
Francis: It’s really important that academia opens up to demographics that it seems to have really hindered, historically.
Chris: Ok, with that, let’s get on with the episode.
Chris: Dr. Lisa Willis, welcome to Making Better!
Lisa: Thank you for having me.
Francis: Yes, thank you very much for coming on, very excited to have you today.
Chris: We first became aware of you on the CBC podcast, “Quirks and Quarks.” How did you come to become a spokesperson for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, also known as STEM?
Lisa: Well, I am a female, in STEM, and I have come up—did my undergrad degree at UVIC, my graduate degree at the University of Guelph, and then my post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto; and so I have lived this Canadian experience of being a woman in STEM. I always saw things happen, and I wasn’t really sure why they were happening, or what they meant. So, for example, when I was a student one of the faculty members told some very sexist jokes in class, in front of 300 immunology students—and that kind of bothered me, but it was the status quo, nobody wanted to say anything about it. And then when I was a PhD student, I saw a lot of things happen that really should not have happened, and that bothered me too, and there’s always this sort of idea that women are somehow not as good at science, or not quite as deserving of awards. And I always had questions, you know, why is it that the longer I am in science, the harder it is to get ahead, the more obstacles I seem to face—is it me? Or is there something else going on? And one of the issues is that the places that I was working and doing my schooling were predominantly men, so when I did my PhD at Guelph, my department had only 12% female faculty members, even though the student population was almost 50%. So that’s an issue, I wasn’t seeing role models, I wasn’t seeing people that I could talk to about these experiences. And eventually, I just got fed up with having these questions and these doubts about whether I belonged in science, and I happened to see someone give a talk—Dr Imogene Coe from Ryerson University—give a talk on women in science, and she talked about how there were systemic biases, and there was research about this. That just lit a fire under me, so I went to the literature—I’m a scientist, all of my information, all what I deal with on a daily basis, is literature and what other people have found with nice studies. So I went to the literature, and spent probably about two weeks searching through every single paper I could find, not just on women in science, but also on racialized people in science, on people with disabilities, on LGBTQ individuals, indigenous peoples, and what I found was shocking to me. I had always thought, growing up, that sexism wasn’t a thing anymore, and now there was really, really good data that shows that simply having a woman’s name at the top of a CV, even if the CV is identical to the man’s, just having that name be female means that the people, professors, reading that CV or that resume, think that woman is less competent and less hireable. And that’s just not OK to me. So I saw the data, it really transformed how I thought about my place in science but I also recognized that there was a gap in the education about equity, diversity and inclusion, about women in science. Most of the training was focused on telling people that there was an issue, but from an anecdotal point of view: people tell lots of stories about issues, they try to appeal to the morality, that it’s morally wrong to discriminate against women, and what I saw was that with researchers, that wasn’t coming through, the message was not making it through to researchers because they’re used to being analytical. If you spent 30 years training your brain to think a certain way about the world, to be analytical and to question everything, well then the information about EDI has to be presented to you in that way, so that you can understand it. And no one was doing that, and so that’s when I started Inclusive STEM: it’s talks and workshops, seminars, that are designed to teach scientists, at every level, about equity, diversity and inclusion using what the data says.
Chris: I was Vice President of Engineering at a company here in Florida that makes software and hardware for people with vision impairment. When I took that job, I had a team of just eight people in software engineering, and all of them were white men, a couple of them were blind. When I left that company six years later, I had fifty people on my staff and twenty-three were women, which I did have to go well out of my way to try to come up with gender equity on the team, because 90% of my applicants were men. But when you were discussing on Quirks and Quarks the notion of the “glass obstacle course,” a lot of those were issues I was aware of and went out of my way to try to avoid. So if you could speak to some of those particular issues that women face…
Lisa: Yeah. So, the thing is, this is a cultural problem. This is not something that white men are doing to women, this is something that every single one of us does, it’s a cultural bias that men are better. We see it in our TV, in our movies, in our books, in our casual conversation. What happens, because we have this systemic belief that men are better than women, every single one of us perpetuates that at every single interaction in every single day. So there is not one glaring place where women are discriminated against, it happens everywhere. So in university, women are graded more harshly on their assignments than men are. They are less likely to get scholarships and fellowships and grant money, they are less likely to be invited to speak at meetings, they are less likely to get awards, and the problem is that speaking at meetings and getting funding and getting awards: these are our scientific currency. And if you are slightly less likely to get an invitation to speak at a meeting, or a grant, then you’re also less likely to get that award, which means you’re also less likely to get invited to speak at a meeting. It actually snowballs, a lot of tiny things that snowball into this giant issue, the longer you’re in them, the worse the issue gets.
Francis: Where do you think this comes from? In my own personal life, I can’t imagine why other men would in any way look at women differently in science, more favorably or not favorably. Why do you think this even happens?
Lisa: I think it stems from a history of a power imbalance between men and women. So if you look at the majority of people in power in Canada and the US, those are Europeans that came over, right? Europeans with power who came over, and if you look at a lot of the European power structures, if you just look at the UK, women had very little power. They had to have a dowry so that their fathers could pay men to marry them, essentially. They had no choice, they were considered property. In other places around the world, women are still considered property. So I think that this comes from an historical culture that now we’re trying to change, because we recognize that it shortchanges people. We are losing out on human capital, we are losing out when people cannot come to work and perform their best. We are losing out when we say that we don’t want to hear someone’s opinion simply because they’re a woman, or they’re a person of color.
Francis: You mentioned Inclusive STEM—is that the same as I-STEM?
Lisa: No. Inclusive STEM is my own little title for my program of talks and workshops. I go all over Canada talking to scientists. I’ve given lots of talks in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC. I haven’t been out to the Maritimes yet, but I would love to. I also haven’t been up north yet, but again, I would love to. And I really try to tailor my talk to the audience that I am talking to. One of the really important things when you’re talking to anyone, when you’re trying to change someone’s mind about something, is making sure that you’re not shouting something from the mountaintop while they’re down in the valley below, because that shouting goes right over their heads, it doesn’t work to change their minds. And so I’m trying to meet people where they are, to get them to change their minds, really change their actions, about women, racialized people, people with disability and indigenous people, and LGBTQ as well. I tailor it to who I’m talking to, I have seminars that I give to high school students, everyone from high school students all the way to faculty at universities who make decisions and write grants. And I talk about the scientific benefit of working with diverse teams, I talk about the numbers in Canada and how, for women, the percentage of women in STEM fields hasn’t changed in 20 years—most people find that shocking. We might think that we’re getting better, but the numbers don’t actually support that. I talk about the data demonstrating bias in STEM, in the last 10 years. The amount of data that has been generated that demonstrates bias in very clear ways is just extraordinary. And then I talk about what do we actually do, every single one of us, on a daily basis; what do we do to change the culture, to make it so that people can actually come to work and be their authentic selves, and contribute to an amazing team.
Chris: What are your thoughts on the Harvard University implicit bias test?
Lisa: I think it’s a great starting point for getting people aware of their biases. Every single human being has bias, it’s normal, it’s cultural, it doesn’t make you a bad person. But acting on those biases is the problem—we’ve got two ways of thinking about it, there’s the intentional biases, there are people who actually think that they are better than you because they are male, or because they are white or whatever; and then we have something called unintentional or unintended bias, implicit bias, Harvard implicit bias test. And these are biases that we don’t know we have, and every single human being has them. They cause you to respond to situations, to respond to people, in ways that are discriminatory. It’s so important to note that the end result is still discrimination, regardless of whether or not you intended it to be. And so the Harvard Implicit Bias Test is a great way for people to start paying attention to what their biases are, and it’s only when you pay attention to what your biases are that you can actually start to change your behavior. You can have an interaction with a person and say, “am I feeling this way about this person because of their skin color, or am I feeling this way about this person because I genuinely actually don’t like what they’re saying?” And once you start to think about that in your daily interactions, you can start to modify your behavior, and that’s what we really want. We need to change the culture.
Francis: What are some of the implicit biases that came up in the Harvard study? What are the most common ones?
Lisa: There’s lots about women. There’s a really fun one, just if you want to have a little bit of fun with Canada-US biases; there are all kinds of racial biases, there’s ageism, sexism, all of the -isms that you’ve heard of. I imagine that sexism and racism are the most insidious, the most common of those biases and the most insidious, because most people don’t actually think that they are biased.
Chris: I am going to have to argue that able-ism is worse than those.
Lisa: Oh, yes, my apologies. I would agree, absolutely agree.
Chris: I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, that was an opinion piece, though, that said that the Harvard test doesn’t scale well and it has trouble reproducing results, which is common among almost any psychological study.
Lisa: Yeah, well, so the way that the test works, is that you’re given a set of associations: pictures, essentially, and you’re asked to associate a picture with a word, or a word with a word, and you have to do it as quickly as possible without getting it wrong. So that’s how the test works, it doesn’t actually ask you what is your bias. But if you are faster at associating men with, a picture of a man, with a word that represents power or strength, then you are associating the picture of a woman with that word, then that is how the test discovers your bias. And so you can sort of get good at getting in the zone sometimes, and you can go really fast, but you can also slow down and fudge the test. I mean, it’s an easy test to fudge. And it’s certainly probably not something that would hold up in a court of law, for example, but anyone who is going there and trying to start understanding their biases and how they might be interacting with people, I think it’s really good for that.
Francis: It sounds like a really great way to start measuring something like that.
Lisa: I think so. You have to start somewhere.
Chris: Another article I read, preparing to talk to you, was in the Atlantic, and it interesting—and this might speak to European culture in general—but it said that in the Scandinavian countries, where gender equity is considered the best in the world, there also seems to be problems with women in STEM that they don’t, that women there tend to trend toward the more traditional fields that women might be seen in, education and nursing and other sorts of things, while men tend to trend towards STEM subjects. I wonder what you might think about the Scandinavian situation?
Lisa: I have seen that data, and I’m not 100% sure what the rationale for that is. That culture definitely supports women; so for example, women have really nice (and I think men too, but that could depend), parental leave policy…
Chris: Yes, it’s for men and women…
Lisa: Yeah. So there are some things that they’re doing really, really well, that I think we could sort of model our own society on, but I don’t know if anyone has looked at their biases, right? Because you can have a really good parental leave policy, but then also expect that the woman would take that policy more than the man. So I don’t know about how the rest of that culture operates, because I haven’t looked into it, so I can’t really address your question. But I think it’s a very interesting thing that we should be looking at.
Francis: I’d like to play a devil’s advocate for a minute and suggest that there could be a biological difference between men and women that could account for some of it—what I’d like to mention is that, when I grew up, I guess because of being in New York and the type of people that I grew up around, I had a very strong belief that differences between men and women were pretty much, not necessarily imposed, but they were culturally imposed maybe, and that there really wasn’t any difference between boys, girls, men and women, and it was all just sort of like role-playing that we learned, learned behavior. Then, I had a child who was a boy, and what I witnessed was that when you take a bunch of 5 year olds and put them together, you know, the boys, most of them, not all, most of them like to play a certain way and the girls like to play a certain way. And you kind of see this continuing throughout childhood. And it was at that point I realized that, you know, there was just like nothing I did to make my son amazed at trains and fire trucks and wanted to play war stuff, but he just did it. It was like something in him that behavior was instinctual or something. So, I personally think that there is some kind of like biological mediator or, in the majority of men and women, there’s something that trends them in a certain direction. I don’t know necessarily if you agree with that or not, or if you do, whether that could have something to do with why people—when they’re still pretty young and figuring out what they want to do with their lives, some go into STEM and some go into other directions.
Lisa: So, there are definitely some differences between men and women at a biochemical level. There are a couple of different body parts, there is more testosterone, on average, in men than in women, and conversely there is more estrogen and progesterone in women than in men, and our immune systems function a little bit differently. There’s some really fascinating science that’s happening with the immune system and with pain receptors. But our brains don’t function differently. It was long thought that there were genetic differences that gave rise to the male brain and the female brain, and that research has been pretty much universally debunked. When you look at children, if you look at national toy catalogs—so, I don’t know if in the US you have Toys R Us, but in Canada we’ve got Toys R Us, and Canadian Tire—they sell children’s toys. And if you look at their catalog, from about zero to two years of age, those toys are gender-neutral, they are mostly sort of blues and yellows and greens in color, they’re rattles and stuff like that, whatever. But as soon as you get older than two years of age, the toys split into girls’ toys and boys’ toys. And if you look at the catalog, you can go online and you can look at these catalogs, the toys that are marketed to girls are all about passive things, they are about physical appearance, like braiding hair. The girls that are in these images, they look a certain way, there’s lots of pink, there’s lots of princess stuff; and the boys’ toys are very blue, but they’re also, the toys are full of muscles, they’re really, really overdeveloped muscles, there are guns—boys that are shooting guns, and there’s a lot of violence in these ads that are marketed to kids that are three. And so as young as three, we are socializing our children into what they should like and shouldn’t like. You should like toys, or you shouldn’t like toys. And as soon as you get into a situation where your child is interacting with lots of other children, whether that’s primary school or whatever, then you see a massive shift. So boys who used to like playing with dolls, or liked painting their toenails or wearing skirts, all of a sudden there’s now huge social pressure to not do any of those things, and five-year-olds can be utterly brutal to one another when it comes to these gender norms. And so I think what we’re seeing, even at these very young ages, is less about biology and more about society. I mean, it starts before the baby is even born, whether the parents decide to paint the nursery bright blue or bright pink; whether the parents decide to clothe their baby in gender-neutral clothing or in things that are very gendered; whether or not they allow their boys to grow out their hair, which is typically a very female thing to do—this starts way before we even think it starts. And it has echoes throughout your entire life, and I think that’s one of the reasons that we’re seeing a lot of young people experiencing this gender dysphoria, not knowing if they want to be more masculine or more feminine, or whether they prefer to use the pronoun “they” because they don’t want to be either of those things—we’re having a bit of a crisis, and it’s affecting our children right up until they graduate high school, they’re having these issues. So I don’t know of any really good evidence that points at biological differences for these socialized phenomena. I think it’s far more the social phenomena than it is the biological.
Chris: I’ve done a lot of work in India over the years, and there’s tremendous problems with sexism there, but at least in my field—software engineering—it’s about 50% female, which is entirely different than the US and Canada, where software engineering is dominated extraordinarily by white and Asian men. So I don’t understand why, how things are different in India, if it was actually biological. And I can’t speak to the rest of the STEM fields, either, though, I can only speak to software engineering, it’s the only one I know the data on.
Lisa: I think there’s some really good points in that. There are a lot of theories where, if you look at one dataset you can pull out things, maybe this is why men are better or whatever, but when you start to accumulate the data and try to reproduce those studies and look at other cultures, you start to see that maybe these theories don’t hold up so much, and that’s a really good example of one of those. I mean, even if you look in the US, the first software engineers were women, they weren’t men.
Chris: That’s true. And they were in the Navy.
Lisa: Yeah. There were lots in the Army, there were a lot at NASA.
Chris: They were called “calculators” at NASA.
Francis: There seems to be a huge difference, though, at least among whites and male vs. female—I guess it’s true, there’s something like, according to Scientific American in 2010, 51% in STEM were white males and 18% were white females; and then similar among Asians, where 13% were Asian male and 5% were Asian female. So pronounced.
Lisa: There was always that stereotype that Asians were good at math. I don’t know if you grew up with those stereotypes, but I certainly grew up with those stereotypes.
Chris: I had a good friend, she and I were at a bar in Las Vegas, and she’s an Asian woman, and we were talking about bias and things like that, and she says, “everyone assumes I’d know math, or Kung Fu.” She says, she was a model, paid to have her picture taken, and was not very good at math in any way, shape or form, but she said everyone always just assumed she could do math.
Lisa: So historically, there was a good reason for that—I mean, there were lots of cultural reasons, but the number system in Chinese is far simpler than it is in English, and the numbers themselves are shorter words. And I don’t know if this study has held up, someone who’s actually an expert in this area should talk about this instead of me—there was a study that was done that looked at how many words in a row you could remember, and it’s not the number of words in the row, it’s the timing it takes you to get through those words. The human brain seems to be wired so that you’ve got, I think it was like six seconds, but I can’t be certain, but it was like six seconds. Whatever number of things you can get through in sex seconds, that what you can remember later on when you’re challenged on it. And you can, just by the size of the words, you can get through more numbers when you’re speaking Chinese than you can when you’re speaking English. And so, the simpler number system, combined with the ability to remember larger numbers, combined with the societal factors that valued people who got really good grades so that they could maybe come over to North America and have a better life or make more money or whatever the reasons for coming over to North America were, certainly really provided the foundation for why North Americans thought that people of Asian descent had better math abilities. But that only works if your first language is Chinese. If you learn the number system in English, then that completely falls apart, and now that we have so many third and fourth-generation North American people of Asian descent, that stereotype doesn’t work anymore. But we cling to them for some reason—socially, we like to cling to these stereotypes.
Francis: I was thinking of maybe switching gears—right now, the percentage of grads that get funded is the lowest ever, and what I’ve seen and experienced is that the stress level of being a scientist—which was already really, really high when I started, a couple of decades ago—it’s just gotten worse. And I think a lot of people are wishing they never got into science to begin with, at this moment. I wondering if the general atmosphere of being a researcher, being a scientist right now is one that is chasing people away. I asked a friend who happened to be African-American, and he was in the MD PhD, why there are so few black men in research—and I think that number is bound to be something like 2% of researchers in America…
Lisa: Is it really that low? I would have thought it was much higher than that.
Chris: It’s about 13% in the States.
Francis: Yeah, I would have as well. Black females account for 6.5% overall, but like in science it’s 2%. Basically what he told me is that if you can get to the point where you can get a PhD, a lot of the African-American men that he knew thought, I should just get an MD, my overall quality of life will be better, ultimately. And honestly, I can’t argue with that logic.
Lisa: I absolutely hear what you’re saying. This job, being a faculty member, leading a lab, is the most stressful job I could imagine, for so many reasons—funding levels are low, competition is high. I take my work home with me every night, I am 100% a workaholic. So is my partner, who is also a scientist. So It is not a life for everyone, and I think that the harder that it gets, we are pushing people away, essentially, but we are pushing disproportionately women and racialized persons and non-able-bodied persons and indigenous persons away, because it’s already so hard, they have an even harder time because of the bias that they would have to face. And so their road to success is longer and harder than other people’s, which is already long and hard. And so I think that’s a major problem. We also are not set up as a scientific society to accommodate people who have different needs; so if you just look at parents, for example, a woman who has just given birth needs to breastfeed or pump, and there’s nowhere at a university where a woman could go to have a little bit of privacy so that she could do this in comfort, if that’s what she wanted to do. We could easily have a parent room in the department where people who have just come back to work can go for an hour over the lunch period to play with or spend quality time with a new baby, male or female—you know, caregiver could bring a baby in for an hour and they could sit and have little family time. This is a really easy change that we could make that would allow people to come back to work after a child is born; we don’t make these changes, even though they are easy. We don’t want to change our system to allow people who are different to be able to succeed on their own terms, and that I think is a major problem. We are failing in that regard.
Chris: So how did you personally navigate the “glass obstacle course” to get to the point of being faculty at a prestigious university?
Lisa: There are lots of things that you can do. You have to be tenacious and willing to work hard. Male or female, white or racialized, it is hard work to get where you need to go. Having a really great support system is crucial—it’s really hard, it’s just so much harder to do it, when you don’t have someone at your back cheering you on—and that goes for any field that you go into. And you have to be a little bit strategic about who you decide to work with, because they are the people who are going to help your career along. You need people who are gong to write you excellent reference letters, you need people who are going to give you opportunities to go and talk at a meeting, for example. And so, one of the things that I think is perfectly OK to do is to ask in an interview, what are your thoughts on equity, diversity and inclusion? And if your potential professor has never even thought about these things, or thinks it’s not a problem, then as a woman or a person of color, or whatever group you belong to, you don’t want to work for that person, because your journey is gong to be harder. You need to work for someone who is going to help you do what it is that you need to do. That’s what I did, I worked for some absolutely amazing people who were incredibly supportive, and that combined with my partner’s support, my own drive and a lot of luck, I was able to get to the University of Alberta. One of the things that I think is important to consider, and I’m happy to have people debate me on this, is—so there are people who are at the forefront of equity, diversity and inclusion thought, and these are the people who come up with words like “micro-aggression”—not just words, but the theory behind them and the meaning—micro-aggression, intersectionality, all of those kind of things. And so there it’s sort of at the forefront of EDI thought. And then there’s the rest of the human population, and when I talk to the human population about my science and my expertise, I don’t talk about the names of molecules and stuff like that, I talk to them in a way that they can understand. I talk about how I am trying to understand how bacteria sense and respond to the environment, because that is something that everyone can understand. I think it’s really important talk about EDI, to acknowledge that you can be an ally, you can be a good EDI person, without necessarily diving into the details. You don’t have to get pronouns right every time, you don’t have to be comfortable using the word “intersectionality” in daily speech. I think asking people to do that is asking them to meet you where you are, instead of meeting them where they are. And so I would really like to see people start making steps, every single person start making steps, start making little changes in their lives that gets them on the path. And those little changes will snowball into bigger changes, and that’s how we’re going to change the culture. I think demanding that someone use one of these newer terms, regardless of how great that term is and how important that term is to a marginalized group of people—because it starts to explain their experience, that’s really important—but I don’t think we should be asking them to be that savvy on this topic.
Chris: I’ve stopped attending intersectionality conferences because they always forget the accessibility for the people with disabilities.
Lisa: Oh god, yeah.
Chris: In many cases I’ve written to them months in advance, asking and even offering to help, and they just refuse..
Lisa: Yeah. I know that there are conferences now that are asking about food allergies, they ask in advance about accessibility issues and how they can help, and I think that that’s incredibly important. That’s the way that everyone should be moving, and it is ironic, and I’m so sorry you experienced this, that a group of people who are supposed to be experts on this were not inclusive. That’s just not OK.
Francis: One of the things that I’ve seen in science a lot is that, although we are supposed to be evidence-based, sort of on the cutting edge in a lot of objective—a lot of them are not necessarily very mature people, like on a social level. In academia especially you’ll see that, I think, because they don’t have the normal constraints that industry might have on what it takes to just get along in a group and function optimally. Maybe there’s some element of that as well.
Lisa: There’s definitely some of that, and my sister laughs at me all the time because I am not emotionally intelligent. I am incredibly smart and analytical and logical, and I have a really hard time managing emotions, and they’re two sides of a coin. It’s a spectrum. Some people are good at both, I guess, but when you train for so long to be a scientist, you train to be really analytical, and there’s also a power thing that happens; so once you become a professor, you have a lot of power over the trainees that work with you. That can be a problem. More educated, so you frequently know more than the other people in the room about topics, and that also goes to scientists heads a little bit. They start to think that maybe their experts outside of their area of expertise—there’s a whole thing that happens. But you’re absolutely right. I would say half of the people that I work with are not the most emotionally intelligent individuals, yes.
Francis: Maybe it would nice to discuss your work a little, in laymen’s terms.
Lisa: Yeah. We have two areas of expertise, or rather two areas of study. The first one is trying to understand how bacteria sense and respond to the environment and environmental changes. So, bacteria are literally everywhere, and we’re really interested in the ones that are on your skin and are part of what’s called your microbiome. So, all of the bacteria that live inside and on you, and they are just vitally important for humans to be healthy. And what we’re trying to do is to understand how they respond to a change in nutrients, or how they respond to a predator, because bacteria can actually be predators of one another. Viruses can show up, fungi can show up, it’s a very complex, dynamic environment and we’re trying to understand how bacteria sense that, with the hope of being able to modify it. So bacteria are incredibly important in IBD—Inflammatory Bowel Disease—in mental health, in immunity, in all kinds of things. So that’s one of the areas that we’re studying. The other area is the human immune system, and we are really interested in ways that the human immune system is different in men and women. Women obviously have a unique set of challenges, biologically, when it comes to reproduction, and the immune system plays a critical role in that. One of the major things is that you have to essentially turn the immune system down so that it doesn’t actually attack the growing baby, and so women have this particularly highly regulated immune system around pregnancy, and that changes how they get other diseases. So for example, women are ten times more likely to get autoimmune disease than men. And so we’re interested in trying to understand these differences so that we can figure out how this gives rise to disease.
Francis: The microbiome topic is really hot right now, and there’s a lot of areas, I guess, that it’s thought to be a key factor in. You mentioned depression, was it? Psychological?
Lisa: Mental health.
Francis: Mental health, can you explain that?
Lisa: Yeah. So, your gut microbiome, especially, is linked to your mental health. If you think about your nervous system, one of the largest nerves in the body wraps around your gut, the vagus nerve. And that has all sorts of communication with your brain—there’s some pretty good evidence that the composition and function of your gut bacteria can actually influence depression and other mental health disorders, and so by changing your microbiome, you might be able to change how it is that your thought processes work. It’s a fascinating area of study, and I think one that’s really, really important for us to be looking at, because I think mental health is one of the most important societal issues that we have right now.
Francis: Very much so. We had as a guest M.E. Thomas, who wrote a book about her life as a sociopath…
Lisa: Oh, cool!
Francis: ..and she’s a sociopath but she’s also extremely high functioning, does well as a professor, and is part of a community of people who are investigating what neuro-diversity really means in culture right now. What we’re doing is, we’re sort of understanding diversity in a different way, in how people’s minds function differently, and this one-size-fits-all concept for what it means to be a functioning human is really, never really made sense and it certainly doesn’t make sense now, with what we know.
Lisa: Yep. I think we should stop using the word “normal,” it doesn’t exist.
Francis: Yeah. They use “neurotypical.” That’s a little better. But yeah, I think “normal” is a pretty loaded word at this moment. A huge part of what’s gong to ultimately make this world a better place is acceptance and even celebration of diversity. Why not? You know, I live in New York City, and New York City is proof that diversity is something that can totally work. You know, because we have people from everywhere that come here, and we all get off on the fact that there is this diversity and [inaud]. That’s why people come here, because it’s not this cookie-cutter city where you only have one thing going on, and one culture. I mean, it just adds to the vibrancy, to the sort of like the ecology of it all. Diversity is good, it helps the world become a much more interesting and even sustainable place.
Lisa: I completely agree. I lived in Toronto and it was the same way, a melting pot of all different kinds of people. I wonder if some people don’t like that opening up of possibilities—for some people, knowing exactly what their prescribed path is and how they’re going to get there is a very comforting thing, and I wonder if that opening up of possibilities scares them.
Francis: Well, it’s scary until you experience it, and then you realize that those fears were unfounded, and that maybe you’re like limiting yourself with those. In science we use the term “elegance” that’s something that I’ve always loved in science, that concept of elegance in science, where you can have a result that, it’s just so simple and clear and pure, it’s something that you experience as beauty. That’s something I was wondering if you had any comments on, like, how you experience beauty in science or in the work you do to forward diversity.
Lisa: I experience beauty in science all the time. I absolutely love it, there is nothing else that I would rather do than science. It’s amazing. I don’t really see diversity so much in the science itself, but in my team, seeing people realize that things were possible that they didn’t know were possible, or working together cohesively to come up with that beauty in science, I think that is beautiful, and something that I really try to cultivate within my team. I am excited about the possibilities for the future, and what I would actually love to do would be to challenge you and your listeners to make some changes. Choose one thing that would advance Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, just one thing, and to try that out and see what they can do to try to change the culture. That’s what I would like to do.
Francis: So can I infer by that that you’re optimistic about the future?
Lisa: I am optimistic about the future. This is very much a social conversation, there are things that governments are doing to try to improve this, there are things that individuals are doing to try to improve this; if you look at the movie industry, they’re making incredible strides. We’ve got female directed, female led movies that are doing just outstandingly well at the box office. That’s been a real grass-roots, women deciding that they’re going to make things, and we can’t sit around and wait for the culture to change, we can’t sit around and wait for the people in power to empower us, we need to take that power for ourselves. And I’m incredibly hopeful for the future.
Francis: Do you have any books or anything you’d like to promote?
Lisa: I don’t. I am writing a couple of articles on what exactly scientists can do to change the culture, steps that they can take; hopefully that will be out in the next few months, but I don’t have anything at the moment.
Chris: Well, thanks so much for coming on the Making Better podcast.
Lisa: Thank you very much for having me.
Francis: Yeah, thank you, it’s been a real pleasure talking with you.
Lisa: Yeah, you too.
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