Sexism is Alive and Well at BU BME

The BU Biomedical Engineering department hosts four to six department seminars each semester. PhD students are required to attend at least four and many faculty also attend, making them one of the few times during the semester in which a large number of students and faculty in the department are gathered in one place. It is these seminars in which we present the face of the BU Biomedical Engineering department to the larger academic world.

With this context, it frustrates and angers me to be writing about an incident that occurred at our last department seminar. The speaker was Dr. Danielle Bassett from the University of Pennsylvania’s Bioengineering department. Our department scheduled this talk two years in advance because she is in such high demand. Her work lies in the developing field of network neuroscience, a fascinating blend of neuroscience, graph theory, and network dynamics. She has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant, an NSF CAREER Award, and named one of Popular Science’s top 10 brilliant scientists in 2016. The talk was fascinating and Dr. Bassett did an excellent job of walking a bunch of engineers through this interdisciplinary and cutting edge approach to studying the brain. It was when we hit the question and answer session that things went downhill fast.

A few questions in, Dr. Bassett called on a faculty member from the BU BME department, my department. His “question” was a thinly veiled accusation that the field Dr. Bassett described as network neuroscience is not as novel as she had made it seem and that the techniques she described had been used for decades. To be more specific, he referred to her calling the field new and developing as “amusing.” It is also worth noting this faculty member is more on the senior side of the faculty. While I was sitting stunned in my seat that a faculty member made such a disrespectful comment, one that he probably would not have said to a younger male professor in the field, Dr. Bassett took the insult in stride and went on to explain the fields that network neuroscience is newly synthesizing and why this approach is different from the approach of system neuroscientists from the past few decades.

I don’t have to get in to the statistics on female underrepresentation in science. I don’t need to remind you that women drop out of the sciences because they see fewer and fewer women the higher up the academic hierarchy they look and because this lack creates a toxic environment for the few women that are in those upper levels. The “question” was embarrassing for everyone in the room and stained the reputation of our department as a whole. The fact that Dr. Bassett took the question in practiced stride reveals how much she has had to deal with people constantly questioning her ability and intelligence. And this is coming from someone who is literally a MacArthur GENIUS.

As a male in a male-dominated field, I can never know the full extent of discrimination my female colleagues experience, I can only do my best to listen to their experiences, be aware of my own behavior, and work with others to improve our environments to free them of such discrimination. It is worth noting that, so far, I have found the BU BME department to be a welcoming and inclusive environment, which is why this situation stands out so starkly. That being said, last week’s seminar was a disappointing reminder that such sexism is alive and well in the field, including right here at BU. Today, I recommit myself to work to ensure that one day, one of these reminders will be the last.