This week, we’re sharing two stories that were recorded before the pandemic, but that we’ve actually never shared on the podcast before. Both are from women in science, as our title suggests, and each one will bring us in to a different career journey in science.
Part 1: While working at a whale research station in northern Maine, Brenna Sowder receives an unexpected visit from a celebrity.
Brenna Sowder is a writer and nonprofit communications professional. She has spent much of her life on boats looking for whales, first as the daughter of a marine biologist, later as a research assistant in the Bay of Fundy, and now with her family on their sailing adventures. In addition to telling mission-driven stories for nonprofits, she has worked as an environmental educator and freelance journalist. These days, she divides her time between writing and raising two small humans. She is currently working on a memoir, and she also writes essays about how to be an observer of nature and her evolving definition of an adventurous life. She lives in mid-coast Maine with her family.
Part 2: Raised in a very traditional Cuban family with very little money, Catalina Martinez fights for her place in science.
Catalina Martinez is Regional Program Manager for NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER) at the University of Rhode Island. She spent many years sailing on research vessels as Expedition Coordinator for OER, and currently spends most of her time managing partnerships at URI, and working as regional liaison for the program. She also consistently seeks to increase representation of underrepresented scholars and women in STEM, and helps to increase potential for life success for individuals born to challenging circumstances. In recognition of this work, she was honored by the YWCA as one of their 2015 Women of Achievement in Rhode Island for promoting peace, justice, freedom and dignity. She also received the 2016 NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research EEO/Diversity Award for Exemplary Service for dedication to improving the representation of women and minorities in STEM. Most recently, Catalina was awarded the 2019 Women of Color in STEM Diversity Leadership in Government Award for leading the way for a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive Federal workforce.
Story Transcripts
Part 1: Brenna Sowder
In the summer of 1999, I was 18 and I was working at this whale research station in Northern Maine. We're all sitting around the office one day. I was doing data entry and somebody was looking at whale photographs and we get a call in the marine radio. Phil goes over to answer it and we realize that it's our friend Steve who's a long-time friend of the project.
Brenna Sowder shares her story last year in Seattle, at one of our last in-person shows in 2020. Photo by Elizar Mercado.
But Steve lives like 80 miles south of us so Phil goes, “So Steve, what brings you up here?”
And Steve goes, “Well, we're out here, me and Martha Stewart are out here on her boat and we were thinking we might drop in.”
In the silence that follows, I'm looking around the room and I'm thinking, “Okay, data protocol tacked to the wall, assortment of flea market chairs and tables, the floor is like slanting in one direction to the corner where the foundation might be falling into the ground. There is no place that I can think of that is less likely to be featured in Martha Stewart Living Magazine than this research station.”
So when I say research station, I'm actually talking about two, old New England homes that are kind of cobbled together. It's not a fancy lab. It's not an office building. It's definitely none of those things.
So you walk down the hall from the office where I was sitting and you're in this dining‑kitchen area which has this really long table. We frequently host like 25 visiting scientists but they are usually eating out of like a single pot of spaghetti. And none of the chairs around the table match. There is no matching flatware, there's no matching dishware, and the dish towels are definitely not seasonally themed.
In the other direction, you get to this stairway which is covered in this awful green shag carpet. On the wall is this wallpaper which is like floral and peeling off in places. That's concerning because it might actually be structurally important to the walls.
But my favorite part is there's this bathroom which is in the hallway. It's a single stall and it is just a toilet and three walls and a door. And all over the walls are these inscriptions from the crew over the years. There's like funny jokes that are inside jokes and little bits of wisdom and all sorts of just random things that are on the wall kind of memorializing the crew over the years.
The door, you can actually see above and below the door out into the hallway and this is all illuminated by a single light bulb.
All that's to say definitely not Martha Stewart material. But the other thing about it is that I totally love it.
So I spent every summer of my life going there as a child with my sister because my dad started the project in 1980. And so it was as much home for me as any other place that I could claim in my life.
People from all over the world would come to this research station to study one of the most endangered whales in the world. And as a young kid, it was a great place to just hang out. I could stomp around in my boots and dump my beach treasures on the floor and nobody cared, nobody batted an eye. It became very clear to me even as a young child that what was happening there and the people that were there was way more important than what any of this place looked like.
So that's all well and good. You can live your values in the middle of nowhere Maine and people are really busy doing important things and nobody notices the wallpaper peeling. But suddenly, when someone who's about to walk through the door who has her own line of designer wallpaper, things seem to take on a different light.
So Steve on the radio has now told us that this is not a joke, which is possible, but he and Martha Stewart are in fact about to show up. At the time, he was the president of this small college and she was a potential patron and they're on their way.
So what do you do when Martha Stewart is about to walk through the front door? Well, the first thing that happens is that one of the lead scientists leaves. She's like, “I want nothing to do with that woman.”
And I'm like, “Okay, that checks with what I'm expecting of this crew. Who else is going with her?”
But remarkably, a lot of us decided to stick around, probably from curiosity.
And I'm standing around with people like, I don't know. What do you do? Do you clean? Do you like whip up some scones and some fresh tea? Like do you change into something more presentable? It's not like anybody has sweater sets or pearls lying around.
But then there was this third group of people who were actually trying to make this place look presentable. They were like rifling through the cabinets looking for mugs that didn't have chips in them or trying to find two plates that matched. Or they were standing in the pantry and they're like, “Okay, we got Cheez-It’s, Oreos, pretzels, sardines. What are we going to feed this woman?”
And they were being very diligent, not very successful but very diligent. I realized that I had never seen this side of the crew.
Growing up among the women of that project, and the project was mostly women, was kind of an incredible and unusual experience as a girl. They really showed me how to be strong women. None of them cared about appearances. They were totally committed to marine science conservation and they were basically up for whatever needed to happen. They were frequently in jeans and t-shirts and messy hair. They would haul gear up and down the docks and they'd be fixing the engine and doing whatever needed to happen.
There would be a dead whale that would show up on the beach one day and they would be in their hip waders standing in the guts of this animal, taking samples and making measurements, trying to figure out what had happened.
Frequently, on our surveys, it would be all-female crew and there would be a woman on the helm. We'd pull into the dock and women would jump off and secure lines and the fishermen in the parking lot would be standing around scratching their heads like this is kind of not what we expect. But for me, it was totally normal. In fact, gender seemed to be entirely beside the point.
So it was pretty unsettling to see this group of the crew, that I thought I had known, really trying to shine up this research station. And the feeling that I had rising inside me was actually kind of indignation. Like why should we have to show up in any way other than how we are for this woman, this stranger who is Martha Stewart.
I think underneath that, upon reflection, maybe not as an 18-year-old, but underneath that was this worry that somehow we weren't going to pass muster in the eyes of this woman, mythologized woman.
But despite my reservations, Martha Stewart did in fact show up 20 minutes later. She walks in the door and Steve kind of does this introduction. She looks exactly how I imagined her to look. She's wearing this sharp casual outfit that could be straight off the pages of L.L.Bean, except she's wearing these like sparkly earrings, which I assume were diamonds. And her hair is perfectly quaffed, like it definitely doesn't look like she was just on a boat, except she's wearing Crocs.
But in her defense, she was totally engaged. She was really quite curious about what we were doing there. We took her on a tour of the research station and she asked some good questions. She did not bat an eye about the wallpaper.
The tour did not heavily feature the green shag carpet and she did politely decline tea from our best, non-chipped mug. But, in the end, it was quite a lovely visit. She was gracious and polite. And after a short visit, we said our goodbyes and she went back south on her boat and we went back to our version of normal.
At 18, I had thought that being a badass tough woman would somehow protect me from feeling insecure as a woman. And Martha Stewart who kind of embodied the societal expectation of how to show up as a woman and be feminine was something that just totally flipped that on its head.
I had expected to have to show up and be tough and show that I wasn't dainty or squeamish or somehow like too girly, but I hadn't expected this other thing which happened. Which was instead of worrying that I was going to be perceived as too feminine, I was worried that I wasn't going to be perceived as feminine enough.
It was just this bizarre thing that happened where it was one extreme of these badass women who were totally engaged in science and I thought were kind of infallible and Martha Stewart who was this totally like mythologized version of domestic goddess and they just got thrust together in this strange environment. I was left wondering was it possible to show up and be comfortable as a badass woman of science in a world that elevated Martha Stewart?
So fast-forward 20 years and I don't think I've got that figured out, but maybe I have a little bit more insight. I do think that I'm glad that I got to meet Martha Stewart the person instead of that myth living in my mind. I had the chance to visit the research station this past summer and I was really glad to see that not much has changed. The green shag carpet is still there. The office is still slightly more sagging into that corner and I got to visit the bathroom and see what had been added to the walls over the years, which is kind of fun.
And I'm perusing and reading the inscriptions and chuckling to myself when I come across this inscription which I had forgotten about. And it says, “Martha Stewart peed here.”
It immediately brought me back to this moment of like Martha Stewart standing in that kitchen in her diamond earrings and her Crocs. And also reminded me of those women who were badass and in marine conservation science and they were also sorting through plates, trying to find plates that matched.
And it was a moment that I was just reminded of the fact that these mythologies that we create for how women are supposed to show up, or really anybody, but in this case how we're supposed to show up in the world don't really serve us and aren't really an accurate representation of any one of us.
I, over my life, have been both a badass woman of science and a mother and I like to bake cookies, but, you know, I'll wear my jeans and t-shirt. I much prefer digging for clams than dusting my house but we are all that complicated. And it was a good reminder standing in the bathroom that day that we, in the end, are all just human, and even Martha Stewart. Thank you.
Part 2: Catalina Martinez
Oh, so about five years ago, while I was presenting during a Women's History Month celebration at the Rhode Island Job Corps program, I met the most amazing young woman. She had been homeless since she was 18 years old because both of her adoptive parents had passed away. I met her a few years into her homelessness when she was really struggling to find a reason to really, you know, keep going, you know. And she came up to me after my presentation and she told me how much my story really resonated deeply with her. And I was so thankful to have met her. And before we parted, she turned to me and she said, "Catalina, it's not what's on you. It's what's in you." And this powerful, brave young woman, so resilient because of what she had been through, she was wise beyond her years. And I understood that. Coming from a very traditional Cuban family who had very little money, I grew up living with my Cuban grandparents. And some of you may recognize that in your own stories. I was kept home a lot as a kid to help take care of my sick grandmother and to take care of the family in a lot of other ways. My grandparents didn't believe that girls needed an education. They believed that only boys should go to school. Thankfully, I lived in a really diverse community because then I could see that there was more out there in the world for girls than what I could see within my own family.
Catalina Martinez shares her story at the InclusiveScicomm Symposium in 2019. Photo by Zak Kerrigan.
And there was this large African-American community around me and they supported their kids to go to school, including the girls. And there was this really amazing family of all girls, and they were the smartest kids in school. And I used to fantasize that I was one of those smart sisters and my name was Karen instead of Catalina. And I would stand next to those girls in school every chance I got, hoping some of their specialness might rub off on me. And I remember for years I would dream as Karen and I could fly high above our tree tops in our neighborhood, high above the school. And I would look down on that schoolyard and see those swing sets. And I would do this only at night when nobody could see me. And when I look back at that dream flying, I think it was my first secret superpower where I could take control of my life in some way. Yeah. And my family was in the racetrack business and I mean horses. And I don't mean that fancy-schmancy cocktail-sipping, hat-wearing Kentucky Derby glamorous shit. I'm talking the ghetto, down-and-out shit where child labor laws did not exist. And I was kind of too small to be that much use on the racetrack, although I worked there a lot.
So I was kept home a lot to do other kinds of jobs for the family. And I spent so much time in the local laundromat that my my friends would come visit me there and I would have to wash all the family's dirty, smelly laundry and the horse-shit-covered blankets and those wraps on those horses' legs. And it was so heavy, there was no way I could carry it myself. So I had to jam it down into these old feed bags and shove it into this wheelie cart made of medal and I would ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee over to the laundromat. And those poor laundromat folk, they hated to see me coming because I would stink up that joint. I would clog up their shit with all the horse manure and all the hay and other horrors that would come out of those bags. And I would flood those floors. And my and, you know, we could afford to wash but not wash and dry all those clothes. So my grandmother taught me this trick. Yeah. So I had this dime and it was taped to the string that was just long enough. And you'd stick it in that coin slot and click-click some time on those dryers and you'd retrieve it and use it later. And the reason I got away with it is because my grandmother would tell me, "Cati, you have to hide your hand with a girdle."
Yes. A smelly, big-ass girdle. I would hide my hand because people would be too ashamed to look. She was right. So I spent a lot of years and I feel really bad to this day. Laundromat people are wonderful people. I am so sorry. I would flood their floors, and I would rob them at the same time while I was stinking up the joint. And there is a really special smell that comes with the racetrack. I mean, it clung to us. We stunk like this, you know, mix of horse sweat and horse manure and the sweetness of the hay and the feed mixed in with the leather of the saddles and the shanks and these weird chemicals like sulfodene and this other stuff they would rub on the horses' legs. And that smell sometimes still comes to me kind of as a memory. And it pulls me right back to that place. And we had this Cuban community around us in my neighborhood, all around the racetracks. And again, I'm talking horses. Right. And we all had this smell associated with us. So the others in the neighborhood would call us dirty spics. And you'd be amazed at what you can get used to, that stink and those assholes. And as you can imagine, school became more and more problematic the more time I missed, right? And I wanted to get out of my house.
So by the time I was 16, I had my own apartment. I was completely self supporting and I had dropped out of high school, not surprisingly. I had to work a lot on minimum-wage jobs, several at a time, to support myself. And when I look back on those jobs, sometimes I laugh and sometimes I cringe. At first I worked in a factory during the day and I was a telemarketer at night for the phone company right alongside my mother at both of those jobs. But she is a Story Collider unto herself, so I will not go there. And those of you who knew my mother, you know what I'm talking about now. I also worked in the lighting showroom and I was trained to sell cars. It's not the deal they get. It's the deal they think they get, right? Yeah. And for a while I was a waitress and I was a terrible waitress. I would wear the food a lot more than I would serve it. And let me just tell you, in Rhode Island, wearing creamy clam chowder down the front of your shirt is not a good look. And eventually I was hired in this really crappy toy store in the mall, and this woman walked across the hallway by day two and she handed me a job application from another store and she said, "You need to be working with us over there."
And that started my three-year stint working for Frederick's of Hollywood. Now, I always knew somehow that I had to keep educating myself and building skills so that I could get better jobs and increase my earning potential, right? I didn't know that language at the time, but I had to get myself out of poverty. So while I was working at Fredrick's at night, at one point I was studying during the day to become a medical assistant. And because of those skills, I got a job as a phlebotomist. You know, the person who draws your blood when you go into a lab? Well, because I did that during the day and I worked at Fredrick's at night, my brother told me, "You're a vampire by day and a vamp by night." And at some point I was hired, after I did that training, in the most amazing job to help start an alternative middle school for potential dropout kids in Providence, Rhode Island, where I grew up and dropped out. I was the perfect person for that job. I had the right lived experiences. I had the right perspective. And those remain five of the most important years of my life working for the Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program and helping to start that amazing school that still stands today. I got to work alongside the most dedicated teachers and staff who were supporting these resilient, powerful students who worked so hard to come to school every day despite what they went through at home.
And I worked hard, too, during that time. And I kept chipping away at my education one course a semester while I saved up money until I could enter a university as a matriculated student. And at twenty-eight years old, I entered the University of Rhode Island right here on this campus. And as hard as it was coming into a university for the first time in my life with very little academic preparation, nothing was harder than walking into a white-majority environment for the first time in my life. It was at this university in the first year that I was at this university. We're being called a spic meant something for the first time in my life. And it was from a professor. He didn't even call me a dirty spic, but it had so much more meaning and I didn't realize it at that time. But that undercurrent and sometimes blatant hostility toward me and other people like me was would carry on through my entire academic experience. And when I was accepted into graduate school in oceanography, a different professor told me I was hiding behind my minority status by accepting a minority fellowship. He said the only reason a professor took me on at all was because this professor could check off two boxes, a female and a minority, right? Double jeopardy.
And that double jeopardy followed me into graduate school because several graduate students, as well as other professors, would remind me periodically that I was not there on merit. I was there because I was a female and a minority. And even when I would win the award for best presentation at a conference or the best student paper or poster, I was reminded that those accolades only came my way because I was a female and a minority. And I guess I was really good at supporting myself in graduate school because at one point I received research funding on a grant to do my work and that funding was given to another student, a majority student. Because "Catalina, you can always apply for minority funding. You're really good at supporting yourself." I guess struggling to survive was some kind of mediocre superpower I hadn't figured out yet. So I continued to study until I was satisfied and I now have three graduate degrees from this university and I don't know where my resolve came from, ever. I only know that I have always been determined to get the education of my choosing and not let my circumstances or my family or the perception of others dictate that for me. Overcoming significant adversity to find success left me with a lot of gaps that I still struggle with today. But it also allows for a really special perspective, and, yes, I do now see that as a bad-ass superpower.
Those of us who experience it early in life tend to hone particular skills that allow us to add value in certain professional and personal spaces and places. First of all, we tend to view obstacles as detours instead of outright barriers. We are fearless when navigating challenges and we are courageous problem solvers through seriously unconventional ideas. Basically, we know how to get shit done. We don't expect it to be easy and we know beyond a doubt that that road to success will be paved with potholes. We also understand the importance of building family out of community and surrounding ourselves with amazing people while always championing others. Lift as you climb and collect your peeps, right? We are also warriors and we are determined to kick down doors for others despite the consequences, and I personally have a scorched earth policy when it comes to taking care of my collection of peeps. And I got some in this room. Mm hmm. So if you're a scrapper like me and you've had to fight to get to where you want to be in life and then had to keep fighting to prove that you have a right to be there, never, never, ever limit your vision of who you can become or where you belong based on the perception of others. Dive into those badass super powers and never forget it is not what's on you. It's what's in you. Thank you.