Lets not be mean girls

Last night I watched the movie "Mean Girls" and I really liked it. It was funny but had a good message that didn't dilute the fun into lameness. The movie is about a girl who has been home schooled until age 16, at which point she starts at a wealthy suburban high school. She makes friends with the "art freaks" but infiltrates the group of popular girls. Drama ensues. The screenplay was written by Tina Fey based on the nonfiction, non-narrative book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman.

I watched some of the special features after, including an interview with Wiseman. For years, she ran workshops for parents to help them cope with the social development of their teenagers, and then elaborated upon that experience in her book. She also started something called “The Empower Program” to help both girls and boys prevent and deal with violence in their world. In the interview, Wiseman claims that girls learn social rules from early socialization, but don't fully understand them as adolescents. They are responsible for enforcing those rules among themselves by creating cliques and gossiping. But sometimes girls don't know the rules until they break them and face social consequences for an action they didn’t know was prohibited.

Wiseman explores many perplexing behaviors, like why girls put up with crap from friends and why they pretend they're fat or stupid when they know they aren't. She notes that members of a clique treat each other badly despite putting up a polished, united front to outsiders. Wiseman argues that adolescence shouldn't be a rite of passage that parents expect their kids to endure, but rather is a period when kids learn important things that shape their adult life and so the experience should be as healthy as possible. She wants teenagers to be able to take good risks, like being a mathlete, instead of bad risks, like promiscuous sex.

I think all of this is great and socially healthy teenagers likely develop into better balanced adults, helping the girls become empowered women. But, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels to adult life, especially for women in science (because that’s where my experience lies). For example, the imposter complexes we all seem to have -- why do we say we can’t do top notch science when we know deep down we can? Or, how about when a PI is super friendly to outsiders, but is a jerk to the members of the lab? Or what about the risks involved with not trying a novel, innovative technique in favor of the status quo favored by established scientists, which also poses the risk of slow progress?

Anyway, I hope that the challenges women in science face don’t come from the women themselves. I hope that we aren’t inhibiting ourselves by holding on to some of our teenage whims and insecurities. And I hope that we aren’t establishing rules for women scientists that no one knows until she breaks them, like what constitutes a respectable position, or how much maternity leave it too much, or how much time away from kids is allowable. Because lets not kid ourselves, we do judge each other, if only to establish guidelines for ourselves. I hope that we are mature enough to make our social nature work for us as a group instead of holding us back more.