When aggression is viewed as brilliance, it hurts women in science, and science itself

As a young aspiring scientist, the South African cosmologist Renée Hložek, who is now an associate professor at the University of Toronto, noticed that the few female scientists she could look up to seemed to be successful in spite of – and not because of or independently of – their ‘womanness’. And, as she details in this brief animation from Thought Café, when she was getting her start, she began to truly understand the distinct barriers women faced in the male-dominated scientific culture. This includes how the process of tearing down ideas, which is fundamental to scientific practice, can be corrosive to the experience of female scientists – and indeed to science itself – when it bleeds into the interpersonal.