Episode 31: How the COVID-19 pandemic is hitting women museum workers
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under the million stars by Springtide
Rate. Review. Subscribe.
In this episode, the hosts dive into the history of science museums and how education and public service roles in museums became a “pink collar” profession. Since women staff such a large portion of these roles, women museum workers have been particularly hard hit by COVID-19 layoffs.
Show Notes
The evolution of the science museum by Alan J. Friedman
Rationally Entertained: Non-Museological Foundations of the Contemporary Science Center by Jason Jay Stevens
Women in the Museum: Lessons from the Workplace by Joan H. Baldwin and Anne W. Ackerson
Gender Equity in Museums Movement (GEMM)
No Room of One’s Own by Colleen Flaherty
Correction: The SEA Discovery Center is located in Poulsbo, WA., not the Pacific Science Center.
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Rebecca: Welcome to Episode 31 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month as usual are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Leila: Before we jump into the episode, a little update on our pledge drive from last month. We did not reach our goal, so we're not able to do everything that we wanted, but we did get a significant boost in monthly pledges, which goes a really long way in helping us maintain a budget, making sure that we can pay all of our writers on time and pay all of our editors on time.
Leila: And so I just wanted to extend a very big thank-you to everybody who helped us out, either by pledging or sharing our drive and Lady Science with their family and friends. We do take pledges all year round, so if you weren't able to pledge during the pledge drive itself, you can pledge anytime. We're always accepting them.
Rebecca: Yes. Yes. I feel like this brings us closer to reaching the point that we wanna be at even if it wasn't everything we hoped and dreamed. But nothing is these days.
Leila: Yeah. And, I mean, we understand that this is real hard times for lots and lotsa people, so we're grateful for everything that we got and what everybody did. And we really also hope that everyone's just doing okay out there.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Anna: Yeah.
Rebecca: And how are my fellow hosts doing today? I laugh 'cause I know the answer to this question.
Leila: Basically our voices are our meat suits animated by our ghosts at this point, I think. Our souls have left our bodies.
Anna: Yeah. This is Anna, or what's the essence of Anna wisping around broadcasting to you live from my shell of a body.
Rebecca: I exist in time and space, and that's really all I can say.
Leila: Yeah. Man, this is a weird energy to start the show.
Rebecca: It is.
Anna: Everybody's got weird energy right now.
Rebecca: Everybody does. Yes. So I guess all we can do is embrace it.
Leila: Yeah. Let's just ride that wave until the end.
Rebecca: Exactly. And I will admit that this podcast is built around one of the sources of my weird energy currently, which is my own professional anxieties. And this is gonna sound weird, but it does make sense 'cause I do work in museums. I've been thinking a lot about gender in science museums because of COVID, which is not necessarily something that you might think might go together, but turns out they do.
Rebecca: Like so many fields, museums have been hard hit by coronavirus shutdowns. Museums are far from the only field, but it's the news that I hear pouring in all the time. And there is, of course, a spreadsheet being crowdsourced by museum professionals that is tracking information about layoffs that have happened in the museum field. According to that spreadsheet, about 100 museums have laid off or furloughed workers, and that is surely an underestimate 'cause that's just self-reported.
Rebecca: Here in Philadelphia, where I live, the Franklin Institute, which is the big science and technology museum in town, laid off about 200 people just two weeks after it was forced to close to the public. And that 200 people included all of their part-time staff.
Rebecca: Those layoffs haven't affected institutions evenly. This is where gender starts to come into it. About half of museum professionals are women. And women are far more likely to work in education and visitor services departments, which are precisely the departments more likely to be affected by these layoffs. That would be obviously pretty infuriating under any circumstances, but I have found it particularly maddening given that for almost a century, science museums and science centers on the whole have had missions grounded in education and interactivity.
Rebecca: And so that kinda brought me to wanting to spend some time today talking about the history of science museums, how that kind of hyperfocus on education came about, and what that means for the museum workforce right now.
Leila: So museums that preserve and display medical information and technological marvels for research purposes have been around since the early modern era, and we've talked about these kinds of medical and technological collections before, particularly back in our episode dedicated to the Anatomical Venus in Episode 24. But by most accounts, the interactive science and technology museum, the kind we think about today, first came about in the early 20th century.
Leila: One of the first of those museums was the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which opened in 1903. And unlike the displays of medical curiosities like the Anatomical Venus, fossils and taxidermied exotic animals, or fancy scientific instruments, the Deutsches Museum was primarily focused on educating the general public and not just collecting objects for the sake of display and research, most likely objects that were looted from other countries. Anyway, it was also highly interactive and literally had buttons you could press and levers you could pull.
Rebecca: The Deutsches Museum inspired a number of other interactive science museums all over the world. And building on the kind of experiences created at big, fancy scientific lectures and World's Fair demonstrations in the 19th century, these museums were really interested in educating people through spectacle.
Rebecca: So some museums even used techniques from cinema. So this was early movies are happening, and so that's all the rage as well in this moment. So for example, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago offered a number of different simulations, including one called the Coal Mine, which took visitors into, you guessed it, a simulation coal mine. Everything about this just makes me laugh.
Leila: Yeah. Did it have little children in there working in the coal mines, getting in the small crevices?
Rebecca: Yeah. I'm just picturing well-dressed, middle-class, Edwardian or 1920s Chicagoans going into this experience of the dusty coal mine, which just cracks me up but isn't that different, honestly, than some kinds of simulations we still have today in museums. We're still doin' this stuff.
Rebecca: And according to an article called "Rationally Entertained: Non-Museological Foundation of the Contemporary Science Center," the experience included, quote, "a cage elevator, railcars, underground mine shaft, and mining machinery made to appear to be working the face of a coal seam."
Rebecca: The exhibit still exists today. I have never been to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, but now I wanna go and see this. And of course there are other examples in science and technology museums of these sort of simulating some kind of technological experience that are more recent.
Leila: The one that I'm thinking of is I'm in Dallas, and we have the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. And in the Tom Hunt Energy Hall, there is a virtual reality tour. So, I mean, in the 19th century they were using the innovations of new cinema. Here we're using virtual reality to do a tour of the Barnett Shale drilling rig.
Leila: And, I mean, I don't know. I have never been on the tour. I've been in the Tom Hunt Energy Hall. But, I mean, it's real weird. I think, I mean, it's just real weird to go down and see and explore in a really spectacular way one of the things that's destroying our planet.
Rebecca: The one that really jumped to mind for me was I remember as a child I grew up in Southern California. And at some point as a kid, my family took me and my sister to the California Science Center in Los Angeles, which is part of Exposition Park. And there was an earthquake simulator that the room shook, but also it looked like a living room. And there was a TV, and the TV would have disaster movie reporting, but slightly more realistic kind of thing.
Rebecca: And it's still true, but I feel like there was this burst in the '90s of "The big one is coming, and we might all die. You should probably have canned goods available" as the kind of natural disaster discussion in California. But I remember it being super weird, and also, yeah, this is super real, guys. I think I went there before the 1994 Northridge earthquake, but it seems particularly strange to have that there, say, after that earthquake since that did some significant destruction to precisely those areas of California. And it's like, "Yeah, people lived through this. I don't know if we need to simulate it in a science museum for families."
Leila: Yeah. I can imagine that being a thing that visitors to L.A. are super into but the people that live there are like, "No, we're good."
Anna: The popularity of these kinds of interactive science museums really exploded after World War II as part of the sort of generally increased interest in science education. The 1950s and '60s were the era of Sputnik and the Space Race and Mr. Wizard and science television. We talked about science on TV during this era with our guest Ingrid Okert in our August episode, and you'll definitely see a lotta parallels between the approaches to science education that we talked about with her and the interactive science museums that were founded in this same era.
Leila: One of the biggest and most influential of these Cold-War-era science museums is the Exploratorium in San Francisco. And that is a fabulous name for an interactive science museum, by the way. The Exploratorium was founded in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer, a physics teacher who had developed a, quote, "library of experiments" over the course of his teaching career.
Leila: He was particularly interested in having people learn science by doing experiments, and he envisioned a museum that encouraged people to conduct experiments on their own. But while he wanted visitors to have the opportunity to experience and learn in a self-directed way, he also thought that it was important for the Exploratorium to hire staff and volunteer, quote, "explainers" to, well, as you guessed it, explain why the experiment worked the way that it did.
Rebecca: And I kind of love that they call them explainers. They still do to this day. People who would be called education assistants or floor staff or other things at other museums are called explainers at the Exploratorium. And I feel like this is kind of your basic template for the classic science museum exhibit or experience that you have at a lot of these big science centers all over the place, sort of you go into a room, and there's some kind of gadget or something you can interact with, and you poke at it, and it does something. Or you pull a lever, or you pour weird things together.
Rebecca: And then a person who is almost always wearing a brightly colored T-shirt—that's the rule, I swear—comes up and is like, "Hey, what are you doing?" or "What do you think that does?" or "Hey, can I show you something cool?" They usually say that if you're not doing anything or if you're doing the wrong thing. But I don't know. Did you guys spend time in science museums as a kid and have the sort of weird awkward but enthusiastic interaction with your museum floor staff?
Leila: Well, I didn't really have that with the floor staff that I remember, anyway. The one that we had in Dallas before we got the Perot a few years ago, I remember in my child memory that to me it felt like a big, huge fuckin' playground. And, I mean, I'm sure there was staff, but I just recall kind of tearing in there like a tornado and just touching everything that could be touched, pulling anything that could be pulled. I remember doing that, and it kind of just felt like free rein of this really exploratory space. I really liked that.
Anna: I do remember at the aquarium, which isn't necessarily a science museum, but there's similar stuff going on, there's a touch pool, which is obviously crewed by someone and is not just there for people to stick their gross fingers in and harass the animal. And I just remember thinking when I was a kid that that's the job I wanted to have when I was a teenager 'cause I wanted to be a marine biologist, but I thought that would be a good middle step for me, would be to be the touch pool attendant at the aquarium and teach everybody about all the creatures that were in there.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. I was actually thinking about touch pool attendants, too, 'cause I think that it's the thing where there's always someone there for obvious safety reasons, but those people's main job is to teach people things. And as an adult, when I have seen touch pools, my thought has always been, "That seems like a stressful combination of things to do." I mean, like anything that involves educating children—let's be real—but it really does involve a really careful balance of "Do not harm yourself or any other living things, and I want you to be excited about this weird creature."
Rebecca: Yeah. So it's hard to say if the Exploratorium was the first science museum to take this approach. And obviously, as we were noting earlier, Oppenheimer was pulling from lots of other trends in the culture. This is the big moment of chemistry sets and science on television, like we were saying, and "Everyone should learn science so we can win the Cold War" moment. So he's pullin' on all of that.
Leila: So we can defeat the Communists.
Rebecca: Yes.
Anna: With our science children, our army of scientific children.
Rebecca: As far as I can tell, that's basically how the Cold War went. Yeah, but in any case, this model is, I think, very familiar to us all today, and there are interactive science museums and natural history museums and aquariums all over the place.
Rebecca: I earlier mentioned the Franklin Institute here in Philly. The Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, has some of these aspects while also kind of being a history museum. It's kind of an interesting hybrid. The Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio, is another big one. And hundreds of institutions in between. It's just one of those things where it's like there are giant versions of this in big cities and small, weird dinky versions of it in small towns just all over the place.
Anna: Oh, that just reminds me. One of my absolute favorite small science centers is the Pacific Science Center in Poulsbo in Washington. It's just this really tiny marine biology learning center. I don't know if you would call it a museum. They have lots of open-top tanks where they raise different kinds of coastal sea creatures. And it's all kind of more guided. There are people there to explain stuff to you 'cause there's open-top tanks of sea creatures.
Anna: It was the place where I learned what a sand dollar looks like when it's alive 'cause I had never seen one before. Some of them are purple. And we used to go there every time we would visit my cousins because that was the only thing I wanted to do, was to go to this little science center and look in all of these tanks at all these sea creatures.
Leila: Speaking of open tanks, in Animal Crossing you get to build your museum on your island, and there is a marine section of the museum. And it's just full of these open tanks. It's the most relaxing thing. I'll just go with my little character and post up in the marine area and just watch the water move on top of the tanks. Sorry. It's another COVID thing.
Anna: It sounds really soothing, though.
Leila: It is extremely soothing.
Rebecca: That is. That is. Also I know especially big museums, like I think the Getty has gotten really connected, has created Animal Crossing content because you can build your museum and stuff, which cracks me up.
Anna: Everybody's just like, "I wish I could go to a museum or an aquarium, look at something outside my house. That'd be so cool." Back to our history of science museums.
Leila: Back to the actual podcast.
Anna: In the years that have followed, interactive science museums have only continued to emphasize the importance of their educational mission. A 2010 article titled "The Evolution of the Science Museum" observes that, quote, "With no mission to collect, conserve, or research, science technology centers have had the luxury of establishing education as their undisputed first priority."
Anna: And, I mean, that quote's a little weird 'cause the idea that focusing on education is a luxury, that's kinda not great. But I do see the point here, which is that science centers and museums are focused on what they can teach people who visit them, which is really different from the mission of a lot of other types of museums like art or history museums, where traditionally taking care of the collection of objects comes first and teaching people things about those objects is sort of the secondary mission.
Leila: And I think it's important to consider who the staff members doing all that educating are. In 2018, the organization Gender Equity in Museums Movement released a report analyzing museum work as, quote, "pink collar profession." And pink collar is a phrase that came to prominence in 1977 when writer Louise Kapp Howe published Pink Collar Workers: Inside the World of Women's Work.
Leila: The idea is that professions associated with women like teaching and nursing are often more poorly paid and looked down on than comparable professions that are dominated by men. So as more women have entered the museum profession in recent decades, it has increasingly fallen into this pink collar category. Now as we mentioned earlier, about half the museum workforce is women, but according to surveys done by the American Alliance of Museums, people who work in education and visitor services roles in museums are 70% to 80% women.
Rebecca: So that's a big gap, or at least a big difference from the general percentage. But what all of that means is so we have a situation where science museums are purely focused on teaching, and the majority of the people doing that teaching are women. And both teaching has long had that pink collar stigma, and museums in general are starting to have that pink collar stigma.
Rebecca: And that brings us back to COVID-19 and the resulting wave of museum layoffs that are making me crazy. Staff members whose job it is to interact directly with the public have been the hardest hit by layoffs. So there are practical reasons for this. In a very practical way, okay, fine, that makes a kind of sense. These positions are usually hourly, and their purpose is tied directly to people coming in the door, so if people can't come in the door because we all have to stay home, then, yeah, sure, these roles are not needed at this time.
Rebecca: But these are roles that have been the heart and soul of the experience at museums since their founding, and it feels like the crisis is shedding light on the fact that the mission of a lot of organizations rests on the shoulders of staff who are the most sorta financially vulnerable and more likely to be from marginalized groups.
Rebecca: Anecdotally, I also believe that education and visitor services tend to be the most racially diverse departments, though I could not find specific stats on that, so that is also a part of all of this. But that's true in museums, but it's true in a lot of other industries as well. COVID-19 is kind of in all of our discussion of what's an essential worker and what isn't, and who are the people who are at the front lines of all of this often have fallen into these pink collar categories.
Leila: In addition to what this has exposed in the museum world, I think we're just seeing this across the board in so many industries. I think we're even starting to see it in the home. I can't remember where this was published, and I will find it and I will put it in the show notes, but there was a report that was showing that in science right now, women are putting forth less articles for peer review than men, which I think really shows who is having the time right now to be able to continue to produce work and who isn't.
Anna: Mm-hmm. I was gonna mention that as well.
Rebecca: Yeah. I saw that article, too. My one thought was "Yeah, of course." It's so on the nose.
Anna: Yeah. I think the science museum case was an interesting one to ruminate on because of the sort of multilayered effects that are kind of being, I don't know, exacerbated, or we're seeing them more clearly now. This idea that teaching is a pink collar profession. And then you mentioned that there is a sense that museum work in general is now becoming kind of be-pinked, the collars are becoming be-pinked.
Anna: And I think it's a canary-in-a-coal-mine kind of situation for the devaluation of what the museums do and the museum as an institution. But there's just this strange dynamic that with science museums in particular, their mission is education. That's the first part of it. We're still finding some way to undervalue people who do the primary mission of the museum, and it's usually because they're women. It's just great. It's really awesome.
Leila: Well, Rebecca, I don't know if you came across this during putting this episode together or if this is something that you know, but is leadership largely male?
Rebecca: So this actually is something that I looked up, and this is interesting. And by interesting, I mean unsurprising and terrible. So you gotta remember that museums are a massive and diverse category that cover the tiny historic house and the Exploratorium and MoMA and just so many different kinds of organizations. And so when they talk about museum professionals, it really is this giant category. But they do find that if you look at all executive directors, CEOs, leadership level, it tends to be pretty 50-50 split.
Rebecca: The big thing that you do see is the higher a budget of a museum, the more likely it is that the CEO will be a man. So basically women run a shit ton of tiny historical societies but men run the giant museums that people have heard of, is kind of what that means in practice. And that comes from, actually, a book that was published by Gender Equity in Museums Movement. The people in charge of that wrote a book called Women in Museums: Gender in the Workplace, I think is the title. And we can link to that. It's really an interesting book where they did a lot of surveys with women museum professionals and found that.
Leila: Yeah. Interesting. Not surprising. Well, not a super happy note to end the episode on, but it is where we will end nevertheless. If you have not yet caught our bonus episode that we put out this month with Wendy Zukerman, the host of Science Vs, be sure that you go back and listen to that. We chatted with her about what it's like to be a science journalist amidst this pandemic and also what it's like to be a woman in science journalism.
Leila: And for this episode, if you liked it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions about the episode today, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com.
Leila: And we are an independent magazine, so we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter and Instagram at @ladyxscience.
Image credit: Children interacting with an exhibit at the Nemo Science Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2019 (Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 4.0)
