October 16, 2005
Okay, I will admit it, not only do I like eating and cooking, but I also really like feeding people. Besides cooking dinners for friends and family on a regular basis, I also maintain the highest chocolate and coffee distribution rate of any single office on the floor where I work. So when jobs were being passed out for "extra work for locals" for the MINOS 
collaboration meeting at Fermilab this past weekend, I thought I would try my hand at organizing the collaboration dinner. This meant I called a great Thai restaurant near Fermilab and ordered (and picked up) my favorite dishes for 65 people, and with a lot of help set it all up in a special serving and eating area near the meeting room.
So if I'm so comfortable being a feeder (something I admit women are socialized to be 
more than men), then why am I bummed when my kids show tendencies that also follow traditional gender stereotypes? This past weekend my father-in-law gave my kids the chance to pick out whatever toys they wanted from a giant toy store, and sure enough my daughter Sonia chose two dolls while my son Isaac chose a ball and a 3-d puzzle of the Sears Tower.
I was describing my kids' toy choices to my friend Kevin (who is also a 
feeder and physicist) but he assured me that it gets much worse: thanks to his two older sons David and Ross, his daughter Elizabeth has now discovered the movie the Ice Princess, which I guess is the story of a girl who is talented in physics and whose mother wants her to go to Harvard to major in physics, but who really wants to be a professional figure skater instead. I have never seen the movie (nor has my friend Kevin) so maybe it is better than it sounds, but the trailer I saw on the internet makes me skeptical: as a physics student she is geeky and annoying, yet as a figure skater she becomes graceful and popular (and feminine, as you can see in the poster at the left).
I guess what Hollywood has yet to learn and I have to remember is this: Playing with dolls and kitchens as a 
child does not preclude you from liking and even doing science as a grownup, just like playing with circuits and puzzles does not preclude you from wanting to feed people. In fact, I have worked (and eaten) with several male physicists who were also serious feeders. So why are kids bombarded by these messages that you're either on one side of the fence or the other? As an adult I obviously ignore these messages, but I sure hope that Elizabeth and Sonia learn to ignore them faster than I learned...
p.s. in the interest of making this entry the best it can be, my mother sent me the following Claire Bretecher cartoon, which I leave as an exercise to the reader to translate. 
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