With great pride and joy I followed women all around the world celebrating International Women’s day (March 8th) to acknowledge their achievements. I am proud that after thousands of years of suppression the “weak sex” does not need to hide any longer.

In the last years I have realized that almost everyone in my surrounding seems to have turned into a feminist. A while ago I have attended an amazing event for women to take their careers into their own hands. I was looking forward to this for a long time, however when it finally started and we got into the discussion about our daily life challenges, I shockingly realized that I seem to be the only women in this world that does not call herself a feminist. Despite me being an ambitious, self-determined and independent women. Quietly, I listened to women of all ages bashing the “straight white man” who is responsible for the still existing gender pay gap and that we women need to fight for more rights. Some women even blamed men for being so self-confident and not having experienced the for us so familiar imposter syndrome. It was not only during this event that I came across these discussions, I am hearing this all of the time in every situation. Very often I started questioning myself for why I am not thinking in the same direction!

To be honest, I never had any problem with men and I never felt treated unfair because I am a women. And most of the men that I have met in my career path to date never considered women as weaker than men. I am very grateful that I have never experienced any harassment from a male person, unlike a lot of females in this world unfortunately did. I don’t want to say that there is no gender inequality in the availability of high positions for example, and I also don’t want to deny the existence of the gender pay gap.  However, I personally just cannot blame the “straight white man” I am more a person blaming myself and how I behave. I have the impression that we women need to take silent action to fight the still existing gender inequality.

Let’s for example take the imposter syndrome. I have to ashamingly admit that I just learned this word and the meaning of it during this previously mentioned event. Not that I never have experienced it – I do almost every day – I just did not know that there is a special term for it. It is true that the imposter syndrome is a loyal companion of our everyday life and sometimes or even often holding us back from achieving our goals, whilst men just go ahead and feel like superheroes that can achieve everything, even when they are clearly not qualified. Whenever I am exposed to such a situation, it feels so unfair to me, but then I realize that the only person I can blame for my feelings is myself. No men (or other person on earth) is holding me back from stepping up and achieving my goals, but I am the one putting stones in my path by thinking that I am not good enough.

The same holds true for the gender pay gap – which definitely exists. I have plenty of male and female friends with an equally successful carrer path, and the male part has a higher salary. It is so easy to blame the men’s world or society for it and grief. However, in most of the cases, men are payed more because they simply ask for it and we women don’t. For a men it is the most normal thing in the world to ask for a salary increase after the probation time, whilst we are too scared to do so and are telling ourselves that we are grateful that we did not lose our job. We women (including myself) need to learn to appreciate our own values and how to sell it and we need to overcome our fears to do so.

There are plenty of other examples in which we women hide in the shadow of successful men and we tend to blame men and the society for it (I clearly do). Men and women are completely different in almost every imaginable way and in regard to a successful career path a lot of men seem to have more confidence and a bigger ego to go straight through what they want. (Sorry for generalizing, I know men struggling with the same problems than women and I know women that have never experienced these feelings). Women are very often blamed for being emotional and showing our femininity is often correlated with a lower intelligence. I am clearly a very emotional person that likes dressing “girlish” and I always considered it a weakness. So many women in high positions seem to have lost their femininity to be able to compete with men. In University times,  I liked to party with friends and I liked dressing up. We all have met the kind of men that reduces you to your visual appearance which was clearly never in favour of our intelligence. Back then, being reduced to my body made me angry. However, over the years and with the help of the right (male and female) mentors, I discovered that being emotional and feminine is not a weakness but rather a secret weapon that can help us dealing with difficult situations in a more successful way. It sometimes even gives us the surprise moment and makes us superior, especially when the other person did not expect it. None of us should hide our femininity in order to be successful.

We women need to stand up, fight all the obstacles and gender inequalities that are out there. However, I personally think that we need to do so by taking more silent actions rather than shouting out loud. We need to put on our superhero costumes in the right situations and fight the inequality by proving that we are equal. We need to teach our girls that being a women is not a disadvantage, and we need to teach them how to use our secret weapons. I am very proud to already see so many women which I consider a role model for myself, because they are very feminine and they don’t fear men and hide in their shadows, but stand right next to them on the winner’s podium and in contrast to men they are more likely to work together and throw down ladders to the rest of us that we can and need to climb. I am convinced that when more and more women just live and work in that way, most men will acknowledge our achievements.

There will always be men in this world that will always consider women as weak, but in these situations we need to sit back and smile, because we know that we will never change them, but in contrast to them we have the foresight that our secret weapons much more powerful than theirs. And we need to become stronger, so that we don’t need to have a dedicated day for us, but celebrate our achievements every day instead.

 

 

What is the research question you want to address in your future?

At the moment I hear this question quite often, and it always induces a quite high level of stress. My heart rate increases, I am blushing, I start sweating and my english sentence structure could be downgraded to level A. I always thought I am prepared for this question but until now I have no way how to deal with it. This question is even worse than 13 years back after finishing high school when parents and teachers (and all other sorts of adults) asked, “What do you want to do with your future?” The plain and simple but very true answer is, “I have absolutely no idea!”

Although I clearly did not feel like that during my academic training, but now looking back starting an Undergraduate, a Masters and even a PhD was relatively easy. The only thing you needed to do is finding a rough topic you like (let us take Microbiology as an example), finding a supervisor that seems not evil (most likely a lecturer that did not make 50% of the students fail in every exam and you did not fall asleep during lectures) and maybe having some good grades in your most important exams. Once all the formalities were settled, the supervisor came up with a brilliant project that was ready to go and you could dive into labwork immediately. Very often, a previous student did even acquire some preliminary data for you and you felt like the raising star in science. Although PhD life is clearly more frustrating than that (this is completely different topic on its own), the intellectual parts of your project – at least from the beginning – were done by someone else.

Starting a postdoc was already more difficult, although also here there were quite some suggestions of what could be done. With some help from fantastic people I somehow managed to write my first own fellowship application for a research project of 2 years and to my surprise, it was successful. Already then, I had quite a high number of sleepless nights before the project plan was defined. I realized that this was literally the first time in my scientific career where I had to do the thinking. I am not talking about coming up with your next experiments and how to interpret some weird looking (and most likely controversial) data; I was working independently on that early on in my PhD. I am talking about developing your own research idea from scratch, which is highly innovative and exciting, a little bit risky but not too risky to achieve, doable in a specific amount of time and most importantly indispensable for the continuation of mankind ( we all want to cure cancer of course!) As I had already started some work and some more experienced people had their magic hands involved, I managed to come up with “my own” project. And still I am pretty proud of this.

Now, I want (I really do want! However, in stressed times I need to remind myself every day.) to start my own research group. My supervisor and mentor is very supportive and clearly helps me finding my way and encourages me to do this step. I have published well, presented my work at important meetings to be visible in the community, shown that I can get some money, have supervised some people, so I am all ready – although I am in a constant fight with my inner self to find out if I really feel ready. The only thing that is missing is developing my own research idea from scratch, which is highly innovative and exciting, a little bit risky but not too risky to achieve, doable in a specific amount of time, indispensable for the continuation of mankind (rember to cure cancer), outlined not only for yourself but for other people you want to employ, well costed, collaborative, better than 80% of all other research proposals, backed-up by some preliminary data to prove that your crazy idea is doable and most importantly completely independent from your previous supervisor but not too far off your topic as otherwise you would not have the expertise. That sounds impossible – at least it does to me. I have quite some ideas about what I want to do (and at least I think they are quite exciting), but whenever I walk into the office of my supervisor, convinced that this is the genius breakthrough idea that will win me every grant in the world, I come out in tears with the echo in my head. “So what is your specific question you want to answer and what is your hypothesis?” After these meetings, I blame myself for shooting so high. Why am I so stupid that I want to apply for research grants after only 2 years as a postdoc? Why did I not become a lab tech that can forever work in the lab without doing all of this? Or even better, why did I not become a baker? I love getting up early and there is nothing better in the world than the smell of freshly baked bread in the morning.

Is this only so difficult for me? Am I just not good enough to become an independent scientist yet or will I ever be? I wished that our academic training would prepare us a bit better for these tasks so that we don’t need to jump into the cold water when there is no other way out any more. I know that my mentors are right and this is what I need in order to be successful and I am grateful that they push me into this direction, but it is really difficult. I am really nervous and scared that I will never come up with my own idea, but for now I just chose the male approach: I get it out of my head, pretend that the problem does not exist and hope that this issue will be solved on its own at some point. In the meantime I am working happily in the lab on some exciting new experiments that were made up in my own head.

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the field of neuroscience with a research focus on Multiple Sclerosis. I have been awarded with a European Marie-Skłodowska Curie research fellowship and I have just recently published my first paper in the journal that I would not have even dreamed of before (I don’t want to say the N-word here). Therefore, my career seems to be on the ascending branch and friends and colleagues think that my life/career could not go any better.

However, I am scared and I very often feel overwhelmed by life, and I don’t mean this only on a professional basis.

I am not a professional blogger or any other type of writer. I am not even an English native speaker, but I really do want to share my struggles and experiences, but also how I manage(d) to overcome them. I want to achieve that more women share their struggles and experiences to throw down ladders to other women to make them achieving their goals.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton