Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  Blackburn went on to graduate school at Cambridge and a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, where she recalls her mentor, cell biologist Joe Gall, as particularly supportive. Looking back on her career, however, she believes she was subject to plenty of bias; like many successful women in nontraditional fields, she was just particularly adept at denying it. “I was oblivious for a long time,” she recalls, “and that’s the way I coped. It was very much a defense. If I had stopped and thought about it, I would’ve felt so vulnerable to it.”

  As she talks, Blackburn sits in the living room of the house she shares with her husband, John Sedat, a cell biologist and microscopy expert at UCSF who works on three-dimensional structures of chromosomes in nuclei, and their fifteen-year-old son, Ben. It’s a typically chilly San Francisco summer Sunday. Wisps of fog slide by, rendering the view as undefined as the cost to a woman of blocking out an unfriendly culture. “I spent so much time exhausted and anxious,” Blackburn sighs. “It was a different kind of tension than for my male colleagues. And I can’t really say what that means. Was I more afraid of being wrong? I don’t know.”

  Not until she was an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and saw a talented female colleague turned down for tenure did Blackburn realize that denial might not protect her. “That was my first wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee feeling,” she says. “For a long time, I was stupid enough to think it’s only the science that counts. That’s a great comfort because you love doing your science. But realistically I knew—I know now—that’s not the whole thing.”

  What propelled Blackburn forward was her passion for the work. She is a driven, gifted scientist, and the exciting results of her research reinforced her commitment. If they hadn’t, she wonders whether she would have persisted. Like many women, she was tempted to dribble out of the pipeline toward the end of her postdoc. “At one point I thought I was pregnant,” she says. “And I thought, Oh well, I’ll just have a child, and I won’t have to think about this pressure. I don’t know if that would’ve been short-term or not. I look back and think how easily one can be deflected because one is at a daunting stage such as having to go out and look for a job.”

  Blackburn had only one child, at thirty-eight, after her appointment to the safe haven of full professorship. When she was placed on bed rest for the last five months of the pregnancy, she offered to take the time as a sabbatical with reduced pay. Her department head, a man, informed her that she was entitled to a leave with full salary. “Here I was, all apologetic,” she says. “I was inviting discrimination. It was pathetic. Even at the time, I realized that. But I felt like, here I am not keeping up my end of the bargain.”

  After Ben was born, she moved to UCSF. For years, she says, her life consisted of exactly two things: work and family, which makes her sympathetic to other parents in her lab. “Many women wonder, ‘How am I going to do this and have a family?’ Because part of the culture of science is that if you’re not there until late, you’re not really doing it, which is the biggest pile of crap. All these hours and chatting and things like that don’t make the science better.”

  She and Sedat were lucky and affluent enough to find a child-care provider they trusted. Luck is a word that Blackburn uses often. She feels lucky to have had encouraging mentors, lucky that her research vindicated her commitment, lucky to have found consistent, loving child care for Ben, lucky to have satisfying work, a happy marriage, and parenthood. Listening to her, though, one wonders: Serendipity plays a role in every life, but is it disproportionately necessary for a woman who wants to pursue academic research? “Someone once asked me how I did it as a woman,” Blackburn recalls. “I said something that surprised even me at the time: ‘I disguised myself as a man.’ I had not really realized until that conversation that that’s what I was doing. At the time, I didn’t think of it as a sad thing, but it is sad.”

  She does not perpetuate that strategy. Her lab is half female; a bulletin board is covered with photos of pregnant grad students and postdocs. Some of her students have gone on to mentor others. And twenty years after she and Greider discovered telomerase, the research on the enzyme is largely dominated by women.

  Blackburn packs me off to lunch one afternoon with three of the most promising young women scientists in her lab. Jue Lin, thirty-two, is a postdoc in molecular biology with a PhD from Cornell. Melissa Rivera, thirty, who did her undergraduate work at MIT, will soon move on to a postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin. Carol Anderson, twenty-nine, is a graduate student in molecular biology with a BS from Yale. Rivera and Anderson are single. Lin is married with two toddlers.

  We stroll down the hill to a Thai place in San Francisco’s Sunset District, taking a circuitous route to avoid the steepest streets. While each of these women had once assumed that she would become a principal investigator, they are no longer quite so sure. All three consider their doubts to be personal, yet they sound awfully familiar to me. “It’s just, you’ve got to be this person that I don’t want to be in order to be successful as a scientist,” Rivera says. “You have to be competitive, and grab things from wherever you can get them, and be protective of what you present.”

  But surely they’re accustomed to competition. “This is different,” Lin says. “It’s not just about studying and getting good grades. I’ve always done well at that. This is politics.” In addition to, or perhaps because of, her disenchantment, the demands of work seem to conflict with family life. “When I’m in the lab, I think about what’s going on in the house,” she says. “At home I think, ‘I could be working, I could be getting something done.’”

  Rivera has put her social life on hold until she finishes her degree. At thirty, she is more interested in biology than in her biological clock, but when she projects forward, she’s apprehensive. “By the time I’ll be established, I’ll be forty,” she says. “So then I get to maybe date and get married and have children. People can do it, and they do, but meanwhile, you’re working twelve hours a day. It’s not human.”

  Anderson, the youngest, frowns. “Maybe it’s not necessary to work sixteen hours a day to be successful.” she says. “I wanted to be in Liz’s lab, to have an example of someone who was successful but lives a balanced life.” She has joined a support program for women graduate students in the sciences. Does she expect to become an advocate for change? “I would,” she says, “but I’m not sure what change needs to happen. The problem isn’t clearly defined.”

  “How do you get rid of those subtle biases?” Rivera asks of no one in particular.

  “It takes effort,” Anderson says. “Women mentoring other women, supporting each other—which won’t happen if women don’t go into academic science.”

  On the way back to the lab, the three enthuse about Blackburn. “Liz is really special,” Rivera says. “My next principal investigator is also a woman. She’s not typical either. Maybe if I see a lot of PIs like them, it will make a difference. The door is still open. Ask me again in five years. Maybe I’ll see that I can do this and still be me.”

  Blackburn is troubled by the younger women’s perception of what it takes to be a successful academic. True, she says, the pressure is more intense for this generation, male or female, at all career stages. But those three could more than meet the challenge. “How many years have these women spent doing incredibly difficult, demanding work? Ten? Thirteen? They ought to get more choices and not feel intimidated after all that. If you have a passion for the work, you should be able to go for it.”

  Maybe they will. Recently, there have been signs of change. A follow-up to the MIT report, issued in March, showed that while the institution still had a long way to go, it had made progress: More women had been appointed to leadership roles, salaries had increased, collegiality had improved. The university is considering innovative hiring practices and has changed the tenure process to allow time out for childbearing. Other universities have launched their own investigations. Some already offer on-site day care, pa
rt-time positions, housing, and mentoring.

  For more radical thinkers like Debra Rolison, head of the Advanced Electrochemical Materials Section at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., waiting for reform isn’t acceptable. She believes taxpayers shouldn’t support discriminatory institutions. Title IX legislation ought to be applied to hiring practices in academic science, she says. “It’s simple. We should yank all federal funds if departments are not hiring women commensurate to how they’re training them. You can bet that would solve the problem quickly.”

  In late June, Blackburn is in Washington, D.C., serving on the president’s Bioethics Council on Stem Cell Research. Other scientists had declined to participate, believing the committee would be stacked toward conservatives. Perhaps those years of being a lone female voice make her more willing to stand up for the minority position. “This research is enormously important,” she says. “There are intractable diseases out there, and we can’t continue with business as usual.”

  When the council breaks after three days, she is cautiously optimistic. A narrow majority of the members have been swayed to her point of view: ban reproductive cloning but proceed with cloning for research under strict regulation. Will that position be reflected in the final report? “They could easily present this in a way that would hang up the research, that would effectively make it impossible to proceed,” Blackburn warns. (The following month, when the report became public, it did disappoint. It advised a four-year moratorium, an option that had hardly been discussed by the group. Discouraged, Blackburn skipped the next meeting.)

  For now she has brought her son, Ben, with her, and they’re eager to hit the museums. I ask Ben how he copes with his mother’s frequent travels. Even as the question escapes my mouth, I realize it reflects my own unconscious bias: Would I ask the son of a male biologist whether his father’s travel schedule upsets him? Am I not implying that Ben ought to resent his mother’s work?

  The truth is that when Ben was younger, Blackburn’s absence did make him anxious, which worried her. She cut back on trips and stayed away no more than two nights at a time. She and Sedat never traveled simultaneously. Today Ben seems enviably close to both parents and quietly proud of his mother’s accomplishments. “I don’t like her going away,” he says thoughtfully. “But this council is a worthy cause, and it’s important for her to make some good happen. I’m in agreement with her on these issues; we share the same opinion—and she didn’t prime me to say that!”

  It is difficult to believe there could be any barriers left for Blackburn to break through, but I can’t resist asking. She has been nominated for a Nobel Prize, an honor only ten women scientists have won since it was first awarded in 1901. Will those XX chromosomes undermine telomerase’s chance for glory? “If you look at the track record, it would certainly factor against it,” she says, then smiles wryly. “But every now and then, you know, someone has to make a gesture to prove the track record is wrong.”

  Miranda Cosgrove: The Good Girl

  Kids’ media tends to market its stars’ innocence as part of their appeal—Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Britney Spears all at one time wore “promise rings” indicating they would remain virgins until marriage. As they get older, to prove they’re all grown up, those same stars turn their sexuality into a marketing gimmick as well—in the process teaching girls that self-objectification is a feminine, even a feminist, rite of passage. Miranda Cosgrove, star of the hugely popular Nickelodeon show iCarly, was different: she had a reputation for being diligent and sensible. I caught up with her in 2010, a few months before she turned eighteen. I wanted to find out whether she could make the transition more creatively. The piece ran in March 2011, just before she decided to enroll in the University of Southern California. Since then, she has voiced the character of Margo in the Despicable Me films and acted in two failed sitcoms. Has she achieved Miley-Selena-Britney-level status? No. But at twenty-two, she’s still in school, still working, still close with her parents, and seems to be balancing fame and real life just fine.

  On Veterans Day at Mary Fay Pendleton Elementary school on the Camp Pendleton Marine base, American flags lined the sidewalks. Bunting festooned the windows along with children’s crayoned drawings of tanks, fighter planes, and soldiers shooting bullets or throwing grenades. Although the school was closed for the holiday, hundreds of kids and parents had gathered on a playing field to break ground for a new “teaching garden.” The program was sponsored by the American Heart Association and Kelly Meyer, the wife of the Universal Studios president, Ron Meyer. Which explained the improbable presence of Miranda Cosgrove, the seventeen-year-old star of the hit Nickelodeon show iCarly. A photographer stopped her as she walked toward a makeshift stage and asked her to plant a cabbage seedling, but a strand of her long, dark hair fell across her face, ruining his shot. Cosgrove’s smile never dimmed as she scooped up the plant and tried again. This time her hair stayed put. “Perfect,” said the photographer. And it was.

  If you don’t recognize Cosgrove’s name, you must not be between ages two and fourteen, the parent of such a child, or, possibly, British (nearly 8 percent of England’s population tunes into iCarly). You’re also not of much interest to Nickelodeon, which aims for the eyeballs, as well as the prodigious pocket change, of today’s media-hungry tweens. iCarly is the network’s most popular show among that desirable demographic—two years ago it surpassed the seemingly untouchable Hannah Montana in ratings. Cosgrove, who reportedly earns $180,000 an episode, is the second-highest-paid child actor on TV (bested only by Angus T. Jones, the “half” on CBS’s blighted Two and a Half Men). Her first album, Sparks Fly, was released last spring by Columbia Records and made its debut at No. 8 on the Billboard 200. She is also an official “ambassador” for Neutrogena; topped a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; and serenaded the president’s daughters in a White House Christmas special.

  That makes Cosgrove the latest in a series of “It” girls—among them Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Hilary Duff—who have emerged over the past decade: not just actresses, not just singers, these young women are industries. In addition to TV shows, they have movies, recording careers, clothing and cosmetic lines, and their images appear on everything from coloring books to nail clippers. Their popularity, in part, rises from the new perch they occupy in tween girls’ hearts. Rather than wanting to be with their idols (as they would, say, Justin Bieber), young fans want to be them. That’s a different relationship entirely.

  Still, the secret to their juggernauts may have less to do with kids’ fantasies than with the one they evoke in parents: from the smoothness of their skin to the length of their hemlines to the banality of their song lyrics and sitcom plots, these young stars embody an ideal of teenage innocence that adults are grateful to embrace. For as many seasons as the illusion can be maintained, they remain, at least on-screen, uncomplicated, untroubled good girls on the verge of, but never actually awakening to, their sexuality. There is a lot of money to be made—and a lot of parental anxiety to be tapped—by walking that line. There is also a lot of fury unleashed at those who step across it. When young stars pose seminude or get caught drinking, they threaten the notion that our own daughters’ coming-of-age could be effortless. Suddenly, the “role models” who have perpetuated that myth become the vector of our fears. The betrayal feels personal and cuts deep.

  Cosgrove seems to wear the pressure lightly. At Mary Fay Pendleton Elementary school, she extolled the virtues of broccoli and regular exercise, her affect appealingly, accessibly awkward—just like a real girl. Her flowered swing top (purchased, she told me, the night before to go with the garden theme), skinny jeans, and fake-distressed combat boots were fashionable yet modest; pretty but not sexy. When she leaned forward to sign a few hurried autographs, children hugged her, kissed her.

  After a few more quick publicity photos, her escort suggested that Cosgrove wait for her driver inside the principal’s office. “They’re about to let the kids go
,” he explained, “and you’ll be mobbed.”

  Cosgrove glanced hesitantly at her mother, Chris, who accompanied her to the event. “It’s okay,” Miranda said. “I don’t mind.” Chris added firmly, “She’s here for the kids.” Two more officials rushed over to shoo her away, and each time, Cosgrove was reassuring. Finally, the school principal called the escort’s cell and said: “They’re coming! Tell her to just get in the car and go!” So, reluctantly, she did.

  As Cosgrove’s Town Car pulled away, I noticed a mother hurrying forward with her two small daughters, looking expectant. “She’s leaving?” the woman said, disgusted. “That’s just terrible.”

  Disney has churned out more tween-girl idols, but Nickelodeon pioneered the concept back in 1991, with Clarissa Explains It All, starring Melissa Joan Hart. That show demonstrated that a female lead could play to both sexes. Until then, the conventional Hollywood wisdom held that girls would watch a male protagonist but that the reverse was not the case, so a show with a female star would instantly halve your market share. Additionally, Clarissa featured an actress who, at fourteen, was the same tender age as the part she played, intensifying fans’ identification with her.

  It took Disney until 2001 to broadcast its own perky-girl-centered sitcom: Lizzie McGuire, starring Hilary Duff, who was then thirteen. “Lizzie” books, “Lizzie” albums, a “Lizzie” movie, and a “Lizzie” clothing line soon followed. When Duff quit the brand over a contract dispute, Disney merely replicated the formula with Raven-Symoné, filming sixty-five episodes of That’s So Raven in rapid succession, before its star could age out of her role.