I gave a talk to Ochanomizu High School and affiliate high schools in Japan about my career and feminism. As with any seminar, the Q&A session was enlightening. I was jazzed to learn about what the students were interested in talking about and passionate about contributing to.
Questions from students and my answers:
If you weren’t born in a PhD family, what do you think you would have been now?
Maybe I’d still be a professor but if not a professor, maybe a chef. I love food.
Do you think Japan has terrible gender differentiation?
I don’t know what it’s like to live in Japan so all my information comes from news, like the New York Times. I heard a story that followed a working mother in Japan and her life seemed very busy. She not only had to take care of most of the house chores, but she also had a full-time job. There seems to be an imbalance in opportunities and responsibilities. The message was about why women are holding off on having children, because having children is a lot of work and having a job is awesome!
I’m in high school with only girls. Do you think we can do anything while being in this kind of environment for some feminism kind of action?
Yes! The best thing you can do is kick butt. Honestly, a lot of distractions for me were boys and drama. You luckily don’t have this distraction so use this time to be a bad ass.
Do you think gender bias could disappear?
I think that there are reasons why we distinguish between the two genders but what we are striving for is to get rid of unreasonable biases that are unfounded. I think there will always be bias, like a math function that is always decreasing but never reaches zero. The difference would be the rate of change of this function if we proactively fight against bias.
How can I persuade students they deserve that job other than telling them you should do it?
I have a cynical, negative perspective and a more positive response to this. My negative response is that men are going to apply without following the rules so why don’t you? My more positive perspective is to put yourself in the shoes of your friend telling you to apply. Your friend would be so supportive of you. Your friend would say that you’re perfect for this job. So tell yourself the things that your friend would tell you.
What is the most important thing to overcome?
I think the problem we just described of low confidence may have taken me off my career trajectory. We need that resilience of thinking that you can do it even if other people may not think you’re as smart, but know that you are. That one person is not in the majority. They don’t know you as well as you know yourself. So if you stay in the game as long as you can, you will last longer than that person. The message is to not take yourself out of the game.
I’m also interested in space and I was to study something about space, like astronomy, but we cannot go to space easily. What is an important thing to study or research about space?
Japan has a great space agency. JAXA has sent modules to the international space station and Japan has phenomenal robotics engineering. You may consider a path that is related down that line. Maybe intern at JAXA. I’m not sure about space science but I know aerospace engineering is a very strong suit.
Do you think companies should provide more opportunities so that women can work?
Companies can promote women to not only enter the workforce but to stay in the workforce. To enter the workforce, you can pay more special attention or give more incentive to hiring women to seeing non-traditional qualifications as a strong suit. There’s something called the mommy track, which is when women get pregnant, they fall out of a leadership track because employers think that they may not return or they will produce less hours. We need to resist that temptation and give women who want to be mothers just as many opportunities to excel in management and leadership. There’s actually a men’s right that we should give. When men have children, they should also get paternity leave equal to maternity leave. Gender equity is not only making sure that we’re getting rid of obstacles for women but also for men. There are ways that gender inequity affects men, such as higher expectations of longer work hours. Not all men want that so we should make accommodations for both men and women.
How do you recover your confidence when you become discouraged in a situation?
I like to talk to my friends because they can see my positive traits when I cannot. This is not a very resilient answer because I depend on others so let me think about if it’s just me. I like to journal, to write in a book, to break down the situation as facts vs feeling. When I reflect on the facts, the facts reflect a situation that isn’t as bad as what I’m feeling. I can use the facts, that I have a degree, that I have these accomplishments, that even though this bad thing happened to me, that I still have all the good things that I’ve already done.
I want to know if you have experienced happier things from men. How many of my friends are men?
My best friends are men. There have been supportive allies who agree that there is gender inequity and try to help me, support me, advocate for other women. Most men are quite nice and good. It’s only a few bad ones, maybe even some good men who have bad days that do bad things.
You mentioned that you continued your career because you really enjoy your job but in your career if you really can’t stand the harassment, do you think quitting the job is a solution?
One of the solutions is to leave the problem altogether. If you feel like harassment is not only with one person but is within the entire system, then women have left that kind of situation. For example, since I’m a professor, I pay attention to other female professors. Some female professors will report harassment has happened to their university and then a long time will pass in the university and the university will either not do anything to fix the problem or side with the wrong person and so the female professor just leaves. So that is A solution but it’s a very sad solution we all want to fix this problem.
To get rid of gender bias, what must boys, especially high school boys, be aware of in high school?
I don’t have an answer specifically for high school boys, just men in general. I think we need to question why we say something, why we think something of this person. It doesn’t matter if they’re a girl or boy, what color their skin is, but question why you thought what you did. If it turns out that the base of the foundation of your thought is an assumption or is based on something that you don’t factually know, so there’s no statistics or studies, then do some research, expose yourself to people who are different than you so that you have diversity in thoughts. That’s a general solution.
I have heard that dividing students into gendered schools can improve their academic ability. I think there are positive and negative aspects. What do you think?
Huh! I didn’t know that separate schools improve academic performance. I think that while improving performance, the disadvantage is that this is not how the world works after high school or after university so at some point, there needs to be mingling ot coexistence between the two genders. So the question may be when. Is that introduction best and I don’t know the solution to that. There’s also performance vs experience. How much do you enjoy your education and they may not be the same.
I was very saddened to hear Japanese politicians saying that women can lie as much as they want or that meeting with many women takes time. I am still young and I don’t know what I can do to oppose the misogynistic mindset in Japan. If you were a high school student, what kind of campaign would you do?
You bring up a good point of women being sexist as well. One of my stories was how I had sexist ideas or mentality when I was younger. Maybe in high school, foster trust and community among each other instead of trying to compete against each other. One reason why women can fight with other women is because if there are so few women in a group that they think to survive, they’ll have to push the other few women out. It’s this idea of survival, of a concept called tokenism, where you are one in many so you are a token but there can only be one of you so if another lady comes then you must fight her out. That’s a bad mentality so starting from high school and onward, be open and welcoming to other women to support each other as much as possible.
There are many kinds of sexual harassment but do you have any good things about being your gender?
There are not many women so I do get more attention. Now this is a good thing if I do a good job, I get noticed but if I do a bad job, I also get noticed. So there’s a saying, a double-edged sword, it’ll cut you on either side. I am very fortunate now in the US, there is something called affirmative action or they’re trying to promote diversity so as a woman, I’m more likely to get opportunities. It doesn’t feel good to be the diversity application to be valued only for your gender or the color of your skin but at least you’re there, at least you got the job, and then you can prove them all wrong with you accomplishments later.
In Japan, most politicians are men, and there are few women in government. What do you think about it?
I think no twitter where, no matter what job, we should have equivalent representation. I like to think about it like this: if there was no bias, we have red marbles and blue marbles in a bag. If you picked marbles out randomly, you would get 50 / 50 chance of blue or red marble. So if you take is that these people are marbles and you select them for a job, they should equally and randomly come out that this boy will be assigned to this job or this girl would be assigned to this job. That should be a truly random, unbiased system. That’s what we need to see government, in industry, in research.