she may be a scientist, but looks come first... you'd NEVER see a man described this way

Esquire Magazine
The Women of America
By John H. Richardson
December 2006, Volume 146, Issue 6

Naomi Halas is wearing a clingy green blouse with tight black pants and two-inch black pumps, looking as if she stepped off the set of a Pedro Almodovar movie. She smiles and giggles and uses words like awesome and totally without ever dropping her intense focus on the things she is saying, which are often very complicated, because she is a scientist and she is famous for inventing something called nanoshells. Because of their freakish ability to capture light, nanoshells will soon be helping mankind kill tumors, sniff out chemical weapons, and even improve solar power. (So, would you ever see a lead paragraph like this? "Dressed in a clingy suit with tight black pants and business shoes, Joe Smith looks as if he stepped off a Hollywood set. He smiles and giggles and uses words like awesome and totally without ever dropping his intense focus on science." Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Sounds equally ridiculous to mention looks first and foremost to describe a woman, especially as a way of deflecting the fact that this woman is a scientist. Cuz we all know that science is way scary to begin with, and a strong, articulate, highly educated woman who also happens to be a scientist with a PhD, and who's also an inventor, is doubly, triply, quadruply threatening to the American male psyche. Freaking SPARE ME the sexism!)

Halas is first on our list of five exceptional American women. Picked for their accomplishments alone (BULLSHIT, it really helps that she's a babe even if as a "female scientist" that's way scary and way too intellectual for the average Murican), they work in very different fields and live outside the media glare in places like Nevada and South Dakota - yet all their great inventions and breakthroughs have a common root. The first seems to be age. (Does age matter so much if the scientist is male? Doubt it unless he's a wonderboy. Funny how there's no real common word like wondergirl in our language.)

Halas grew up in Pittsburgh during the 1960s, the daughter of accountants, playing her flute and her viola in her pretty silk blouse but fascinated by the movie Fantastic Voyage and the idea of very small things hidden under the skin of the visible world. (I doubt you'd ever hear this said of a man: "Joe Smith grew up in Pittsburgh during the 1960s, the son of accountants, playing his flute and viola in his pretty silk shirts but fascinated by the movie Fantastic Voyage and the idea of very small things, etc." It just sounds SO ridiculous. Why not just say that she grew up in Pittsburgh, was the daughter of parents, played musical instruments and was fascinated by very small things hidden under the skin of the visible world? No editorializing, no sexism. Just facts that respect her as a person. Spare me the "pretty silk blouses" that seem so absurdly necessary to keep her feminized and put the emphasis on her being a woman way before she is a scientist. No. This is sexist writing... subtle, but sexist.)

She was two years into a music degree at the University of Miami when she realized she didn't want to be "the nice little girl playing the flute" and put her instruments in a box, dropping out of college and getting a job at a food co-op. (Ever hear of someone not wanting to be "the nice little boy playing the flute"? Again, sexism: emphasis on nice, emphasis on little, emphasis on girl, even though by then she was a grown woman.)

By then it was the early 1970s, a time when women scientists or engineers or even doctors were rare - Yale only began admitting women in 1969, she reminds me. But it was also a good time for unconventional lives, and finally she made the plunge - first a B.A. in chemistry, then a master's in physics that involved working with something called "optical chaos," then a doctorate through a special program at IBM where she worked on ultrafast optics. (Not too bad.)

By the 1990s, she was running her own laser lab here at Rice University in Houston. That's when nanotechnology exploded, and for the first time, all the odd twists of her career seemed to line up; on the nanoscale, engineering is a combination of chemistry and physics and light. For several years she did experiments and explored theories, and finally, in 1998, she discovered that coating an extremely tiny piece of glass with gold seemed to affect light. Then one of her students noticed that if you made the shell structure thicker or thinner, it could actually change the wavelength of light - a lot. (This is actually quality, sound, un-editorialized, straightforward science reporting without a trace of sexism.)

She had stumbled on her life's mission. Dropping everything else, she turned the focus of her lab to nanoshells. Within a few months she and her students had figured out a reliable way to manufacture and "tune" them, a breakthrough that is still the industry standard. Working with a professor in the Rice bioengineering department named Jennifer West, Halas injected nanoshells into the veins of cancerous mice and found that the nanoshells naturally accumulated in the tumor. When they aimed a laser at the tumor, the nanoshells heated up and killed the tumor without affecting any of the surrounding tissue, the first completely nontoxic treatment for cancer. (This is also good quality science writing.)

Halas is philosophical about all this. Happily married for twenty years to a theoretical physicist she met at IBM, she was unable to have children. Maybe, she thinks, she was meant to do this instead. (Back to sexism! You'd never see this: "Happily married for 20 years to a theoretical physicist he met at IBM, Joe Smith was never able to have children. Maybe, he thinks, he was meant to do this instead." Yep, gotta mention marriage and children since that's the exclusive purview of women-folk. Snort.)

Or maybe, she says, it is like this stand of live-oak trees she planted at her ranch outside Houston. Trees like that take a lot of care and irrigation and cost a fortune to get started, but they can live for a thousand years. So one time she was out there pruning and she thought, Maybe nothing I have done will survive, maybe the nanoshells will come to nothing, maybe mankind won't survive, but maybe this oak tree will survive - so this might be the most important thing I've ever done, simply cutting this branch and not that branch.

"It's not like destiny with a capital D or something," she says, "but because some things don't happen, it opens doors to others." (Not bad for the rest of the article. I detect no overt sexism, just straightforward reporting, although there is a slight undercurrent of alleged 'regret' that trees take the place of children, which is again extremely subtle sexism. After all, it won't play in Peoria that what we could have on our hands here is a childfree career woman who isn't particularly upset about never having kids, and who may not have actually wanted any. Like you'd ever see that in print, though. Not even in 2006.)

So, without the sexism and without editorializing, here's how the article SHOULD have been written:

Esquire Magazine
The Women of America
By John H. Richardson
December 2006, Volume 146, Issue 6

Naomi Halas is a scientist and she is famous for inventing something called nanoshells. Because of their freakish ability to capture light, nanoshells will soon be helping mankind kill tumors, sniff out chemical weapons, and even improve solar power.

Halas is first on our list of five exceptional American women. They work in very different fields and live in places like Nevada and South Dakota - yet all their great inventions and breakthroughs have a common root. The first seems to be age. Halas grew up in Pittsburgh during the 1960s, the daughter of accountants, playing her flute and her viola but fascinated by the movie Fantastic Voyage and the idea of very small things hidden under the skin of the visible world. She was two years into a music degree at the University of Miami when she realized she didn't want to play the flute, so she put her instruments in a box, dropped out of college and got a job at a food co-op. By then it was the early 1970s, and finally she made the plunge - first a B.A. in chemistry, then a Master's in physics that involved working with "optical chaos," then a doctorate through a special program at IBM where she worked on ultrafast optics.

By the 1990s, she was running her own laser lab here at Rice University in Houston. That's when nanotechnology exploded, and for the first time, all the odd twists of her career seemed to line up; on the nanoscale, engineering is a combination of chemistry and physics and light. For several years she did experiments and explored theories, and finally, in 1998, she discovered that coating an extremely tiny piece of glass with gold seemed to affect light. Then one of her students noticed that if you made the shell structure thicker or thinner, it could actually change the wavelength of light - a lot.

She had stumbled on her life's mission. Dropping everything else, she turned the focus of her lab to nanoshells. Within a few months she and her students had figured out a reliable way to manufacture and "tune" them, a breakthrough that is still the industry standard. Working with a professor in the Rice bioengineering department named Jennifer West, Halas injected nanoshells into the veins of cancerous mice and found that the nanoshells naturally accumulated in the tumor. When they aimed a laser at the tumor, the nanoshells heated up and killed the tumor without affecting any of the surrounding tissue, the first completely nontoxic treatment for cancer.

Halas is philosophical about all this. She says her work is like this stand of live-oak trees she planted at her ranch outside Houston. Trees like that take a lot of care and irrigation and cost a fortune to get started, but they can live for a thousand years. So one time she was out there pruning and she thought, Maybe nothing I have done will survive, maybe the nanoshells will come to nothing, maybe mankind won't survive, but maybe this oak tree will survive - so this might be the most important thing I've ever done, simply cutting this branch and not that branch.

"It's not like destiny with a capital D or something," she says, "but because some things don't happen, it opens doors to others."

But hey, let's face it folks: this woman is SUBVERSIVE because she is highly educated; she is working in a male-dominated field; she is successful in that field; she is an inventor; she has no kids whether by choice or by circumstance. So she's been prettified and femmy-fied by this magazine so as not to come off as too threatening, unfeminine, and of course butch. Of course, when you read my re-write, she doesn't sound threatening, unfeminine or butch; she sounds like just another educated professional doing what she loves and what she's good at. And that, of course, is how we want to be seen: as being educated, competent human beings first of all. And we do NOT need to be prettied up and femmy-fied just because we happen to have brains and vaginas.