No thanks for the people who let Rachel feel free ‘that I don’t hear in science’

Almost every dissertation ends with a word of thanks: a chapter in which friends, family and colleagues are thanked for their support. But The dissertation on which nanobiologist Rachel Los (29) obtained his doctorate at TU Delft earlier this year, about collaborating microorganisms in biofilms, contains besides that Acknowled gems also a chapter entitled Anti-ecknowled gemsin which she explicitly draws attention to people who have not been helpful.

These include: the study association of physics, where she had to sing on her first study day that women cannot study physics without sex with the professor. The fifth -year physics student who immediately gave her (first -year) a ‘stripper name’. The older researcher who sent her inappropriate messages after a congress. Anyone who said it “surprisingly” to find that she was going to promote as a girl.

And also: the researcher who asked her at a congress what she was wearing under her clothes. The man who saw her for a coffee lady and when she corrected him told him she should consider that profession. And the board of TU Delft that, when the Education Inspectorate last year concluded that social safety was short at the university, in the first instance mainly the research method criticized And asked lawyers to assess them – instead of looking at the problems found, according to Los.

“I wanted me to tell you that this has made me all somehow stronger,” writes Los in her dissertation, “but in reality it has destroyed my self -confidence. You have given me the feeling that I do not belong in science and I cannot forgive you.”

Rachel Los: “I was just finished to explain that I had not felt welcome, and then to get it back: that is not too bad, there is not much to it.”

Then a few weeks ago her anti-thin word on LinkedIn put them thousands likeshundreds repostsalso on other social media, and hundreds of reactions. Deltathe university magazine of TU Delft, asked her for one opinion piecethat appeared last week. In it she wrote that universities are losing good scientists to a plague culture, a “constant stream of discouragement, sexist comments and undermining” – but that her mainly male colleagues with disbelief reacted when they raised that problem.

The reactions to her LinkedIn post were predominantly positive, says Los on the phone from Edinburgh, where she now lives. “I thought: I will get a lot of negative reactions, but so far there were just a handful and they confirmed exactly my point: most of them were men who said they didn’t believe me or that not all men were that. By the way, the most beautiful reaction was of a man who wrote:” Now I read this, I realized that I would not have been able to achieve it. ”

I think every association of physics students has sexist songs

You do not mention names in your anti-thin word (except TU Delft, but that issue with the Education Inspectorate had already come into the publicity). Not even the study association. Why not?

“My goal was not to accuse certain people. I was just ready to explain that I had not felt welcome, and then to get it back: that is not too bad, there is not much to it. It is not about specific people, and I think that every association of physics students has sexist songs. That whole culture is so much.

“And physics also has a certain arrogance that made me not felt at home there. I studied nanobiology, that is between physics and biology, but physics is full of all the fields of all fields, the most pure, the most difficult. The field has a ‘better than you’ complex. I felt a strange duck in the bite of it Theoretical physics, where I sat, is a dramatic homogeneous gang of white men. ”

Scientific success is strongly influenced by social dynamics, you write. What should change?

“First of all, it should be accepted that science is social and about people. So that not every conversation about it is parried with: if you are good, it doesn’t matter who you are. The science is very hierarchical and competitive, there is a great publication pressure and a huge plague culture. If that was not the case, you would not be able to do that. Identity that science wants. ”

Have you left science now?

“I am not out of that yet. I moved to Scotland in December-I just wanted that, I think it is very beautiful here and I had no good reason to stay in the Netherlands. I am looking for a job and I am looking quite wide. I also talk to people at the university. But I have decided that I no longer want to work in a physics department.”