DALLAS (AP) - At first glance, the black-and-white photos look like classic images of 19th century scientists. One wears a dark beard and carries a pickax. Another, with a fluffy white handlebar mustache, poses in front of a museum diorama. A third, with a long brown beard, sits at a desk surrounded by an overstuffed bookcase, a safari hat and a giant pine cone.
But wait. Something in that last image looks amiss. The cheekbones are smooth, pale. And is that an elegant pashmina scarf wrapped around the scientist’s narrow shoulders? Hmmmm.
The 38 large-format photographs that hang in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., are part of “The Bearded Lady Project,” a tongue-in-cheek traveling exhibit that shows women paleontologists at work wearing fake beards. The project features researchers from Southern Methodist University, UT Southwestern Medical Center and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
Bonnie Jacobs, a paleobotanist at SMU, told The Dallas Mornings News joining the project was a leap of faith.
She hoped people wouldn’t misunderstand its message, as one of her male friends did after she showed him a short trailer for the documentary. “He said, ‘What is this, a bunch of women who want to be men?’ He just didn’t get it at all.”
Her concerns were eased, though, the first time she saw the portraits together at an academic meeting. Scientists crowded around, pointing out the colleagues they recognized, laughing together but also having serious conversations. That was the project’s goal, she says, to dispel academic stereotypes and get people talking about the need to make scientific workplaces more inclusive.
“In most field sciences, there’s this stereotype of the big, bearded man who goes out in the field and makes discoveries away from civilization in a tent without the ability to shave,” says Ellen Currano, a plant paleontologist and associate professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, who created the project with film director Lexi Jamieson Marsh and photographer Kelsey Vance, both of Cincinnati.
Currano, who trained as a post-doctoral researcher at SMU, says beards are a symbol of belonging in her profession. “By stealing that and putting it on women, it’s saying, A. ‘This is something we can have, too’ and B. ‘OK, this is completely ridiculous. Do you take me more seriously as a field scientist if I have a beard?’”
The project came out of a dinner conversation between Currano and Marsh in the spring of 2014, when both were living outside Cincinnati. That night, Marsh vented to Currano that a male superior had discouraged her from pursuing film directing, saying he found it “cute” when women wanted to direct. When women actually became directors, he said, they realized it wasn’t for them.
She assumed Currano, one of the smartest and most accomplished people she knew, wouldn’t have the same problems. Instead, Currano replied, “I feel exactly the same way.”
Currano told stories of men talking over her at meetings and dismissing her ideas. In graduate school she had thrived, she says, with supportive mentors and peers of both genders. But now, as one of very few women on the faculty, she felt she was passed over for awards and collaborations.
“I started to feel like maybe science was too hard, maybe it was time to pursue something where there were people who liked me, and where my ideas would be listened to and recognized,” she says in a telephone interview.
While many women study geology and paleontology in college and graduate school, their numbers thin out in the profession’s upper ranks. Only 25.5% of faculty in two- and four-year geoscience departments are women, according to the American Geosciences Institute’s 2020 Directory of Geoscience Departments.
“You know, if I could just slap a beard on my face and show up and do my job, it would be great,” Currano told Marsh.
Marsh couldn’t get the comment out of her mind. At 2 a.m., she emailed Currano and asked if she’d be willing to follow through on what she had said. Would she wear a beard and recruit other women paleontologists to do the same?
The project started with a short video about Currano, her work and her experiences as a woman in paleontology and expanded from there. Marsh produced two documentaries - a shorter one and a longer one that include women of diverse races, ages and outlooks. The films also capture photographer Vance’s work as she shoots large-format black-and-white portraits of the scientists wearing beards and mustaches.
The photographs look vintage for a reason. Marsh says the photos document a history that never was. “These women don’t have the classic portraits that are in all the textbooks,” she says.
Marsh, Currano and Vance let the scientists choose their own beards, which Marsh purchased from a theatrical supply company. They are made from real human hair, which, Currano says, makes them “grosser.” Some scientists wanted to look sinister; one wanted to look like The Dude from The Big Lebowski.
Another surprised the team by asking to bring her own facial hair. It turned out that Carole Hickman, an emeritus professor at the University of California at Berkeley, had worn a bushy mustache while working in the Australian outback in the 1970s to keep from standing out. Since then, she has used it to dress up as a macho field biologist for Halloween.
Ultimately, more than 100 scientists participated in the project, including Jacobs, who served as Currano’s adviser when she was a postdoctoral researcher at SMU; Alisa Winkler, an anatomy professor at UT Southwestern who also conducts research on fossil rodents, rabbits and other ancient mammals at SMU; and Dori Contreras, a paleobotanist at the Perot Museum.
Currano said she was initially nervous about how the project would be received. She was just starting her academic career and worried that her superiors would hate the idea. “It’s different than what scientists are used to,” she says. “We’re used to reading academic papers and not talking about diversity, though I think that’s changed in the last five years.”
But her colleagues have embraced the project. Six institutions hosted the exhibit before it opened at the Smithsonian in November. Starting in May it will travel to more parts of the country, though the itinerary has not yet been finalized.
This spring, Columbia University Press will publish the book The Bearded Lady Project: Challenging the Face of Science, which showcases the portraits and includes personal essays and analysis by many of the women featured, including SMU’s Jacobs.
To Jacobs, the project also showcases differences in how her generation and Currano’s have tackled sexism. “Before, you really had to pick your battles,” she said. “You had to hold your head high as much as possible and keep going forward. Now, it’s possible to hold your head high and speak out.”
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