Category: …and everything else

Through the generosity of some mutual friends, I was taken to a day spa today, for a fabulous afternoon of soaking and spa’ing. For several reasons, I opted to indulge and treated myself to a full body scrub, as well. It was an interesting experience, and as I was laying there having someone else scrub my skin, the academic CHIDbrain kicked in and I found myself thinking about issues of access and privilege. After all, it hadn’t occured to me that the only people there were old Asian women and white women of all age until the young woman from India walked into the spa room.

What a privilege it really is, to live in a place where I, a very broke college student, can still pay someone to scrub me clean, to massage me, or to place different conditioners on my face in a facial, or have parafin treatments to soften my hands. What a privilege it is that I can take a day to sit around and soak in pools of different temperature, or repeatedly get up to drench what is essentially mugwort tea all over myself. What about the people who can’t, who don’t have that privilege? Do the people working there have the option for free or discounted treatments? What about those who work in other service jobs – after all, isn’t it a service job to scrub the dead skin off of me? – and can’t necessarily take the time? Or, even more basically, afford it to begin with. I certainly couldn’t have afforded a body scrub if someone else hadn’t been paying for my entrance, and most of the time wouldn’t be able to pay that. What about the people who make less than me (and they do exist, and in more numbers than people want to admit)?

Issues of access came up, as well, although largely tied to privilege. You have to have a car, know about the place, have the time, the energy, the ability. And what a completely and utterly upper middle class thing to spend your time doing, and to pay someone for.

The final thing that kept going through my head was one of colour, of the Indian girl awash in a sea of whites and yellows, and of the fact that all the women doing the body scrubs were Korean, and the women giving the massages were white. An odd hierarchy of colour, prestige, and cleanliness versus less; do you just rub the skin, or do you have to remove it? I didn’t receive a massage, but from what I heard you weren’t handled like a piece of meat, and being scrubbed was a detached cold and clinical experience. Which makes sense, but also makes it seem as though the people who don’t have to so strongly dissociate their clients have it a bit nicer.

I’ll definitely go back to the day spa, but I’m not sure I’ll have another treatment of any type done. Or maybe I’ll just avoid the full body scrub – or just make peace with the part of me that can’t stop thinking about race, access, and privilege.

Issues of access and religious belief are probably the two greatest hurdles we face in modern medicine. Perhaps not coincidentally, they’re also two areas of my strongest interests. (Some day I will write out all it is I study and why, and then I’ll realize just why it is I feel pulled as thin as taffy…)

Well, maybe it’s not called the social sciences for a reason…

Girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view science as a solitary rather than a social occupation, according to a University of Michigan psychologist. “Raising girls who are confident in their ability to succeed in science and math is our first job,” said Jacquelynne Eccles, a senior research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the U-M Institute for Research on Women and Gender. “But in order to increase the number of women in science, we also need to make young women more interested in these fields, and that means making them aware that science is a social endeavor that involves working with and helping people.”

Young women were more likely than young men to place a high value on occupations that permitted flexibility and did not require them to be away from their family. The women also valued working with people. Even though young women had higher college GPAs than young men, young men were more likely to have a higher opinion of their abilities in math and science, and in their general intellectual abilities. They were also more likely to value jobs that required them to supervise other people.

“In addition to improving the confidence of girls, we need to show them that scientists work in teams, solving problems collaboratively. And that as a result of their work, scientists are in a unique position to help other people. We as a culture do a very bad job of telling our children what scientists do. Young people have an image of scientists as eccentric old men with wild hair, smoking cigars, deep in thought, alone. Basically, they think of Einstein. We need to change that image and give our children a much richer, nuanced view of who scientists are, what scientists do and how they work.”

This interests me. I’m not certain I fully agree with Dr. Eccles, but there is probably validity in how society as a whole views scientists – as wild haired Einstein’s thoughtfully staring off into space. (Then again, that describes Phillip to a tee, so…) But I’ve never heard a single girl say she didn’t want to become a scientist because she would be trapped in a laboratory all day, while I’ve heard many girls say that science is too hard, or (on the flip side) boring.

When the president of Harvard is proselytizing the notion that women aren’t biologically adept at the hard sciences, we have a greater problem than girls viewing science as a solitary endeavor. For better or worse, our society still places a lesser value on the ability of girls, and until we address that, no amount of socialisation will fix the gender inequalities we find in the so called harder scientific fields.