Cheering On the Next Generation of Women Scientists

From Popular Mechanics

A story about a beautiful woman always begins with a description of the flush the February wind has brought out in her cheeks. The length and litheness of her legs under the table. What she's ordered (a burger!) during the interview.

So let's try something else.

Melissa Hodges, thirty, earned a bachelor's degree in neuroscience from Vanderbilt University. No easy feat in any case, but even more impressive when you consider that at the time of her graduation, she was captain of the Vanderbilt Commodores dance team, a spirit group that performs at every football game, every basketball game, and various outreach events throughout the year.

After graduation, Hodges began working as a laboratory technician in a Vanderbilt molecular neuroscience lab, analyzing DNA sequences in a lab coat so close in shade to her white-blond hair that they could be adjacent paint swatches on a Sherwin-Williams card. On Sundays, she marched into Nashville's Nissan Stadium in a baby-blue halter top and a skirt no larger than a dinner napkin, perfectly toned midriff bare to the admiring gaze of almost seventy thousand fans. During the times she wasn't researching the molecular components of Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, she rehearsed, performed, and did obscene sums of ab exercises as a professional cheerleader for the Tennessee Titans.

On a rainy Friday in Phoenix, Arizona, down the street from the furor surrounding Super Bowl XLIX, Hodges is preparing to give a presentation alongside an elite group of her peers: Summer Wagner, who holds a degree in aerospace engineering, manages a lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center, and used to cheer for the Houston Texans; Samantha Sanders, who engineers Wi-Fi networks for AT&T and used to cheer for the Arizona Cardinals; Kelly Bennion, a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive neuroscience who currently cheers for the Patriots; and psychotherapist Brittany Bonchuk, who does the same. To be sure, all these women are beautiful. Even in the dim light of the Arizona Science Center, their eyelashes leave dark, inviting shadows on their cheeks. Their painted lips could be exotic fruits. But their appeal runs much deeper.

Along with nearly three hundred others, these women make up Science Cheerleader-a not-for-profit group of current and former National Basketball Association and National Football League cheerleaders pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. They have come to the science center, braving the madhousery of Super Bowl weekend, to lead half a dozen youth cheerleading squads in a pep rally for science, to give tours of the center's galleries based on their individual areas of expertise, to sign trading cards, and to change the minds of fans who, if they've given professional cheerleaders a thought at all, probably don't imagine them teaching engineering classes when they're not on the field.

On account of the rain, the audience today is smaller than anticipated, a couple hundred people instead of the tens of thousands Science Cheerleader appearances can draw. The result is that the cheering expands to the edges of the science center's vast marble-and-concrete welcome center like helium, reverberating off the sharp-edged planes in a way that would have been lost to the damp grass and trees outside.

These days, Hodges works in the neuro modulation division of a medical-device company, where she teaches doctors how to use electronic devices to help people with paralysis and intractable pain. She spends much of her day in an operating room. The rest she spends teaching families about therapy. In return, she receives none of the automatic flashbulb glory of NFL Sunday. Only small moments of quiet gratitude.

And yet, when she chooses to, she still attracts the attention of others like a spinning, flashing, glittering siren. "I'm Melissa, a Tennessee Titans cheerleader, and I do neuro science," she chants, waving blue-and-silver poms. "Gooo science!"

In a semicircle around a stage, girls ages nine to eleven, their Pop Warner youth- cheerleading-league coaches, and chaperones sit mesmerized. A few unsuspecting science-center visitors, perhaps in town for the game and drawn to the "Gridiron Glory" exhibit on one of the museum's upper floors, pause to watch the women perform. "Gimme an S!" the cheerleaders shout. "Gimme a C …"

"What's that spell?"

"Science!"

"What do we love?"

"Science!"

Darlene Cavalier is observing the pep rally from the side of the stage in a fitted tee and a navy blazer. True to the spirit of the group she has created, the erstwhile Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader dreamed up Science Cheerleader while completing a master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania. As an extension of a paper she wrote in school, Cavalier attempted to reopen a government agency that provided analysis of technology and science to members of Congress. Called the Office of Technology Assessment, it was a sort of Cliffs Notes for people who made world-changing decisions about science and technology-until it was shuttered in 1995. Cavalier hoped that reassembling the program, or something like it, could change the tone of national conversations about science policy. She wanted to get more regular people interested in the impact STEM subjects could have on their lives.

As both a researcher and a cheerleader, Cavalier, who has honey-blond hair and a forthright way of speaking, knew that scientists could often talk past themselves, boring, antagonizing, or otherwise blowing their message to a public that desperately needed to receive it. But cheerleaders! You couldn't design people more capable of catching eyes and hearts than cheerleaders. They're beautiful, sexy, athletic. They wave sparkling poms in big shining arcs. Cheerleaders are basically human advertisements for sports teams. Couldn't they do the same for stuff that matters on a national stage?

Unlike NBA and NFL stars, professional cheerleaders don't make enough money to live on, a situation that has landed several NBA and NFL teams in lawsuits over wage theft in the past year. "Throughout my tenure as a cheerleader, I held a full-time job," Hodges says. "In fact, nearly all NFL cheerleaders have careers." In most cases, these women are not doing menial work. They are the overachiever types who would choose to spend twelve to twenty hours a week rehearsing and performing on top of a 9 to 5. Cavalier knew there had to be others working in STEM fields, so she contacted professional cheerleading squads, asking coaches if anyone would be qualified to join her. She found hundreds.

Perhaps now this story has progressed far enough to have earned the right to examine how these women look. Melissa Hodges, for example, has almond-shaped blue eyes and a curvy figure and white-blond hair that waves in on itself like ribbon. Brittany Bonchuk is a compact, raven-haired bombshell with obliques so defined that, were she lying down, they could hold a turn's worth of Scrabble letters upright. These women's sex appeal exists whether they choose to use it or not. Science Cheerleader simply provides a place where they can employ it in the service of a noble purpose.

In time, Science Cheerleader became the publicity arm of Cavalier's other initiatives to get regular citizens more involved with STEM subjects. In particular, the cheerleaders promote SciStarter, a Kickstarteresque website where scientists can recruit regular Joes who want to participate in their experiments. At every appearance, the cheerleaders showcase a project featured on SciStarter and recruit audience members to help. In 2014, they collaborated with the University of California, Davis, on Project MERCCURI, in which they enlisted four thousand people to collect microbes to send to the International Space Station for testing. They also promote ECAST, Cavalier's citizen-led version of the Office of Technology Assessment. Through it all, the cheerleaders put a human face on work that can often seem intimidating, antiseptic, or inaccessible. It is a very pretty face.

THE WOMEN of Science Cheerleader are, in effect, donating their good looks to the advancement of science. In return, they ask only that the world give them the respect that is their due. The U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration found that in 2011, the most recent year for which information is available, women held nearly half of all jobs in the U.S. economy but less than a quarter of STEM jobs. Though the report gave many reasons for the disparity, key among them were lack of role models and stereotypes.

In November 2014, British physicist Matt Taylor, project manager for Rosetta, the European Space Agency's mission to land a spacecraft on a comet, delivered a news update about the mission on live television while wearing a bowling shirt emblazoned with images of scantily clad, voluptuous women with guns. Within hours, Twitter had erupted with comments from irate female scientists concerned about the impression the shirt would have on women's desire to enter STEM fields. It even had its own hashtag: #shirtstorm.

Examples of authority figures explicitly endorsing this kind of sexism in science are far too common. In 2015, Nobel laureate Tim Hunt espoused his views on women in science, or "trouble with girls," at a lunch for women scientists in Seoul: "Three things happen when [women] are in the lab," he said. "You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry."

Whether they mean to or not, people who look at a young, pretty girl and assume she's dim contribute to her underachievement in science and math classes-a psychological effect called stereotype threat. Girls who worry they're at risk of confirming a negative stereotype tend to underachieve in exactly those situations where they're expected to fail.

"There were times I couldn't reveal-and I didn't-to my lab that I was involved in cheer because people would look at me differently, take me less seriously," Hodges says. "A woman who graduated with an honors degree in neuroscience from Vanderbilt shouldn't be embarrassed for people to find out she's a cheerleader."

Seated at a table in the museum's exhibit on the "original supercomputer-the human brain," Hodges is signing trading cards for visitors, many of them children. Hodges is careful to interrupt our conversation in order to ask the kids who approach her what they're studying in math or in science.

Later, Hodges asks a group of fourth-grade girls and boys who they imagine when they think of a scientist. They pause, considering the question. Finally, slowly, one child says, "Albert Einstein."

"Don't you usually think of a man?" Hodges says. It dawns on the children that yes, they do. How effective are the Science Cheerleaders? That's a hard thing to measure, until the next generation grows up, chooses careers, and continues marching toward progress. But glimmers of hope flash through the pep rally like light off poms. Toward the end, after all of the youth squads have had their moment in the spotlight, one girl is still cheering above the others. The crowd turns toward the lone voice, and there she is, a tiny blond cheerleader-almost a miniature version of Melissa Hodges. Eyes aglow and poms fluttering, she keeps cheering, alone and unintimidated, while the crowd watches. "What do we love?" she shouts. "Science!"

This story appears in the February 2016 issue of Popular Mechanics.