This special episode of Clear and Vivid, which highlights the experiences of women in science,

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I'm Alan Olga, and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

When I looked around and I saw there weren't new women on the faculty at Harvard, I thought,

oh, well, of course not, because they must have chosen to have children instead of being professors at Harvard.

And I didn't realize the fact that women had to choose wasn't itself a form of institutional discrimination, if you like,

to create a enterprise where half the people can't do the job.

What most of us perceive was not being told that we couldn't do it because we're women,

but just having people dismiss our ideas or roll their eyes or just always having a sense of, weren't not good enough.

I imagine that there have been times that I've been treated differently for being women,

but I've always been very reluctant to bring that up because I'm worried that their answer will be, no, it's not because you're a woman,

it's because you did this thing wrong or because you are a bad scientist.

Throughout my career, I've been told by both men and women that I don't look like a scientist, that I'm into fashion,

so I won't be taken seriously. I die my hair blonde, and so people think I've been idiot,

and I don't think that a man would be taken aside and said, you look fashion to much who can't be a scientist.

Every time we talked about unconscious bias or implicit bias to scientists, they would say, oh, but this couldn't possibly apply to us

because we're trained to be objective, and so that's not us.

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