"Women Who Don't Give a Crap"

One of the often-bemoaned characteristics of modern life is the absence of leisure time due to chronic “busyness” and the constant connection afforded (or required) by our ever-present digital devices. As a result, time for nonessential reading is often in short supply, and we fiercely guard any minutes that we can steal from the other commitments of life. So when we do find time, what do we read? As the literary critic Harold Bloom said, “We read to find ourselves, more fully and strangely than we otherwise could hope to find.” Therefore, perhaps not surprisingly, when I get time, I read about women in science, past and present. Unfortunately, there are remarkably few books about the experiences of non-Nobel-Prize-winning female scientists, so I’ve had to look pretty hard to expand my reading list. In this Deep Reads article, I recommend four books about women and science that I read in 2015 (“When did you have time to read four books?” some will no doubt wonder). My hope is that PLOS Genetics readers, irrespective of gender or generation, will also find stories and ideas in these books that connect to their own professional and personal experiences (Fig 1). Profiles of great scientists chronicle not only their discoveries and career paths but also other dimensions of their lives and personalities. Too many profiles of great women scientists, however, have focused on their exceptionalism, too frequently treating the “subject’s sex as her most defining detail. She’s not just a great scientist, she’s a woman! And she’s also a wife and a mother, those roles get emphasized too!” [1]. In 2013, the New York Times obituary of the physicist Yvonne Brill raised controversy by opening with the sentence, “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children,” deemphasizing her scientific career and accomplishments [2,3]. Science journalist Christine Aschwanden developed the “Finkbeiner Test” in response to the Brill obituary and this kind of journalistic bias. To pass the test, a profile of a woman scientist must not mention “the fact that she’s a woman, her husband’s job, her child care arrangements, how she nurtures her underlings, how she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field, how she’s such a role model for other women, or how she’s ‘the first woman to. . .’” [4]. Alternatively, authors are encouraged to take what they write about a female subject and flip it around as if it were being said about a male, and if it sounds ridiculous, it doesn’t belong in the story [4]. While it is true that Brill’s obituary is an example of an absurdly skewed focus on women scientists as women first and scientists second, I think that it would be unfortunate and counterproductive to remove all references to other aspects of a scientist’s life, female or male, from an obituary or profile. There is an interesting and productive way to describe how a person, especially a woman, balanced myriad and competing expectations and obligations, especially social and institutional barriers and attitudes. This is the nuance of good biography and narrative, interwoven with social history, and to surgically remove certain aspects would be to tell an incomplete story. By examining the lives and struggles of successful women scientists in the