Questioning a female scientist’s education

Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist
by Sarah Boon

Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2025
$27.99  /  9781772127911

Reviewed by Loÿs Maingon

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If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.   –Charles Darwin

Nature is inherently messy, capricious, and playful. Field science is the art of teasing out fleeting facets of order out of nature’s creative chaos by collecting and analysing data. Nature’s chaos can be a very disconcerting reality for people raised in the sheltered universe of urban environments, such as universities, where limits and entropy are culturally masked by well-ordered schedules and educational routines. As a historian of Darwin, Noah Heringman, recently noted: the proximity between scientists and “modern savages” can actually be quite unsettling.¹ For all its veneer, the university environment has a normal distribution of unsavoury characters and modern savages in suits. It is a competitive primal world with savage biases that often bring out the worst of humanity, and sometimes the best.

Published at a moment when universities face a triple crisis of social relevance, a prevalence of impostor syndrome anxiety, and an economic downturn, Sarah Boon’s Meltdown is a perceptive memoir of her journey through “the university system” that failed her, as a student, a postdoc, and a young professor. It weaves together the various threads of personal life, uncertainties in career choices, uncertainties in field ice conditions, and inter-collegial relationships, and uncertainties in climate change and glacial developments.

Sarah Boon’s particular scientific interest is glacial hydrology and the modelling of the formation of rivers in the unstable melting phase of glaciers. She has also done some interesting work on forest hydrology, specifically on the impact of clearcutting of snow run-off. The memoir is interspersed with interesting comments and insights into glacier formations and on their importance for understanding the impacts of climate change. The focus is, however, on what it means to be a woman scientist in Canada and on Sarah Boon’s journey through a self-destroying system.

It is a memoir built on the study of the strains of glacial flows and hydrology where social experiences entrain their own set of psychological strains that are unfortunately not unique, but still common to the experiences of women in science. The experience is an inherent, if unrecognized, part of the ongoing “university crisis.”

The many-layered crises which universities are now experiencing are not without antecedents. Without wishing to minimize the value of a university degree, there is a growing debate about the substance of what a person gets out of a degree. In part the problem lies in what a university education has become in a technological age that is geared to the corporate interests of “the marketplace,” as opposed to the public interest in the education of whole human beings and citizens.  The world is changing. Even a leading institution such as Harvard gives an ambivalent answer to the question of the value of a university degree. Harvard’s own answer to this question should raise even more serious questions about what a university education is supposed to be: “So, is a university degree still worth it? It depends. For many, especially in professions that require formal education, the answer is still yes. But for others, especially those who are entrepreneurial, tech-savvy, or debt-averse, there are now more viable alternatives than ever before.”²

A traditional university education was supposed to be about the development of personal-growth.  It was supposed to be about a broadening of our cultural understanding and abilities in order to be more adaptable to a broad variety of situations and to become better problem-solvers in order to contribute to society’s well-being. It should be a positive nurturing experience that produces intellectually healthy human beings.  If what now passes for a university education is not what it should be, questions need to be raised. Sarah Boon’s account is a useful witness in that respect.  It can provide insights into where Canadian education is failing.

Contrary to the mantra of governments and the business-sector, an education is not about acquiring tech-skills to enhance “the marketplace.” That misguided belief is where a significant problem arises. The introduction and promotion of STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Math) education programmes, which were not originally a problem in themselves became a problem when these programmes became divorced from the humanities and social sciences component needed for a complete well-rounded intellectual education.  We made education an increasingly servile experience, instead of a liberating one. The study of literature and poetry is essential to developing mindfulness and emotional intelligence, essential to liberating individuals and society at large.³ Without emotional intelligence scientists who do not read poetry may be very dangerous people, as dangerous to society as an artificial intelligence.

Around the world universities and colleges are now either cutting back on, or closing, their humanities programmes because they are perceived as “irrelevant,” that is,  irrelevant to the marketplace, as though “the marketplace” were the only measure. In that context a university education, a STEM education, serves just “to provide talented workforces for economic development.”⁴ STEM becomes just skills training in a highly competitive environment, not a real education. The psychological impact of the loss of this essential component of a whole education, is unfortunately neither researched nor quantified.  Sarah Boon’s account of her experience may provide us with an insight into the potential damages of a STEM education.

There is a constant tension in Boon’s account between her desire to write, to be a writer, to do creative writing, and doing science. Significantly, writing is honed in writing workshops she takes, and science is researched in university.  There is an awkward split between these two pursuits. In a real world, the two should not be incompatible. Literary histories such as Noah Heringman’s Deep Time, or Renée Bergland’s Natural Magic, are replete with insights into the actual interdependence of science and literature. To cleave science from literature and poetry is an invitation to cultural and personal madness.  In Meltdown Sarah Boon’s life oscillates between two personalities: fulfilled in writing, but for the most part, depressed in science. In the end it is her pursuit of STEM that leads to a mental meltdown, but it is her love of writing that saves her.

It is no coincidence that survey after survey reveals that the biggest challenge in university STEM programmes is “impostor syndrome,” a feeling of inadequacy that comes from a lack of support and lack of coping mechanisms. Impostor syndrome is provoked by the lack of emotional intelligence and mindfulness of the community as well as by a lack of preparation for this gap in the victim.

From her graduate days working on her PhD, Boon slips into a medicated depression that she identifies as “impostor syndrome.” As Professor Juliet Daniels of McMaster University recently pointed out in a CBC interview, “I can tell you that every single female professor in STEM tells the students that we still feel it depending on the room we’re in. Many women in academia, even full professors, still have some level of imposter syndrome.”⁵

While the syndrome was first identified in 1978 and was originally limited to women, it affects all members of society regardless of gender, colour, or culture, who, in spite of their own gifts and qualifications, are made to feel excluded and marginalized, to the point of having to ask themselves the question: “Do I really belong here?”  The existence of the syndrome is an unfortunate proof that we have failed as a society to value every citizen, and as Sarah Boon’s account bears out, particularly so in the foetid competitive and discriminatory halls of academic field research where “64% of field participants experienced sexual harassment, while 22% experienced sexual assault” Not exactly a stellar recommendation for the social and intellectual leadership of institutions of higher learning!

Sarah Boon’s story begins near the end of her career as one of her students becomes trapped in a lower glacier melt event where slush became like quicksand. The accident five days into her field season curtailed her five-week research project.  Although the accident is no fault of hers, it casts her into a cycle of classical impostor syndrome, doubting whether she should have become a scientist instead of a writer, and at the heart of it all “I longed for female mentors to discuss this recent setback with as I was afraid that speaking to a male mentor would raise questions about my competence in the field.”

Although she does find some female colleagues who become role models, such as Dr. Rita Winkler, the lack of female mentors is a topic that is frequently repeated throughout the book. It does, however, lead her to turn to research and write about women in science. Her experience is one of many. Apart from hints at the usual gender dynamics between graduate students and advisors that run throughout the text, the reason for female mentors for female students really becomes self-evident in the last part of the book which covers Boon’s time at Lethbridge University.

Throughout her career Boon documents that, as on a glacier, her career development was not entirely on a level playing field.  Where that became singularly evident, was in her place of employment, The University of Lethbridge.  Although she eventually was granted tenure, Lethbridge turned out to be an unfortunate choice. 

From the very first she was made to feel marginalized. She was quickly informed by her colleagues that she was “the third choice candidate for the job.” (Presumably, the other two saw the light.)  The other hire, the local boy, “Keith,” taught all courses in his specialty so that he could concentrate on his research and publications. Boon had to contend with a mish-mash of courses nobody wanted, and not in her area, making her research secondary to her teaching duties. Now, that can happen to the best of us, but the icing on the overt discrimination cake must have been being called into the Dean’s Office to be told to hold off applying for a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) five-year research grant, so that “Keith” would not have to face too much competition, and fast track his career. There was not even a shade of an illusion of a level playing field and inclusivity.

This is not just a tactless act of a backwards sexist cultural environment.  It is a very personal violation. As Boon points out academic research is academic identity.  Research is not something one does as a “hobby” or for “recreation.” It is what one does with a passion. It is a very personal extension of the self. So, for any creep from officialdom to presume to interfere with one’s research is not just odious and demeaning.  It is an assault.  It is therefore entirely understandable that five years of this culminated in a nervous breakdown.  Tenure in these conditions is not a compensation, it is a condemnation.

It is no wonder that Boon left Lethbridge and academia to rebuild her life, and work for Canadian Science Publishing where she specializes in science communication. Science communication is more important than ever at a time when science is under threat from sectors opposed to facts, science, diversity, equity, and inclusivity.  Meltdown is an important, and highly recommended, contribution to understanding the distance that Canada has yet to go to fully include women in science, and make science itself inclusive.

Darwin’s mentor, Charles Lyell (1797-1875), often pointed out that geological and evolutionary change is not uni-directional.  So too with sexism.  It can always, as we witness in today’s America, revert and regress. Sexist discrimination that was supposed to have abated in 2007 is undoubtedly as alive and well today as in 1807 even if we pretend otherwise. It depends entirely on the conscious cultivation of every day mindfulness which is part of a good education.

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Dr. Loÿs Maingon was arrested at Clayoquot Sound in 1993 and remains a strong advocate for social, economic, and environmental change. He contributed a chapter to Clayoquot & Dissent (Ronsdale Press: 1994), and authored Field Guide to Basic Lichens of Strathcona Park (Strathcona Wilderness Institute Press: 2022). [Editor’s note: Dr. Loÿs Maingon has reviewed books by Rhonda Bailey (ed.) and The Cumberland Museum and Archives, M.V. Ramana, Arthur S. Reber, Frantisek Baluska and William B. Miller Jr., Peter R. Grant, and Joel Bakan, Melissa Aronczyk & Maria I. Espinoza, William K. Carroll (ed.) for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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Notes

1. Noah Heringman, 2023 ↩︎
2. https://harvards.us/2025/05/12/is-a-university-degree-still-worth-it/ ↩︎
3. Eugen Wassiliwizky et al. (2017) “The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 28;12(8):1229–1240 ;  https://www.physicianleaders.org/articles/emotional-intelligence-build-reading-poetry ↩︎
4. Ng Chee Hoe and  Mazlini Adnan. (2024) The needs of competencu assessment in STEM education International Journal of Modern Education 6(23):455-469. ↩︎
5. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hamilton-black-students-imposter-syndrome-1.7204913 ↩︎