Women in STEM at SPS—Erin Cable

Erin Cable, PhD, is a powerhouse at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies (SPS). She serves as the academic and career adviser for students across the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs with many of her advisees being in the school’s professional health programs. She also teaches undergraduate social psychology, introductory biology, and fundamentals of neurobiology courses for SPS. Erin holds a BS in Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Psychology with a focus on Integrative Neuroscience from the University of Chicago.

We recently sat down with Erin to learn more about her path to STEM as a woman. Read highlights from our conversation below. 

Please note that this interview has been edited for clarity. 

SPS: STEM professionals often trace their interest in science and math to their childhood. What are your earliest recollections of an interest in STEM?

Cable: I would say I have always been really interested in health, medicine, and science. As a kid, my sister wanted to play make-believe teacher and school and I wanted to play doctor in our “medical office.” I was a kid who liked to watch bugs and constantly ask my mom “why.” As I started going through school, I really fell in love with science as a whole. I had a fantastic biology teacher in high school who was passionate about the subject and really brought it to life.

SPS: Was there ever a time in your academic and professional life where you heard “no” or “you can’t do that”? If so, how did you respond and how do you think that experience has affected you?

Cable: I think that’s a great question. There are times that I have heard “no.” Many times in grad school, you will hear no, that an experiment is not feasible or a time limit is not feasible, and sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s coming from someone with more experimental knowledge than you, but sometimes it’s just an opinion. There were a couple of times that an adviser would tell me that a time limit for my dissertation wasn’t going to work, that I would need an extra year. And I knew that more time wouldn’t be helpful for my career development because it was not my goal to take a post-doc in research. And so when I heard “no,” I said “I respectfully disagree. I will have a draft on your desk.” And I just kept on turning those drafts around, sticking to my own timeline and goals. Hearing “no” is discouraging and disheartening, especially from someone who you hold in high regard, but it can also foster determination and light a fire in yourself to get things moving. I came out the other side all the more determined and confident in my abilities and my capacity to assess my own capabilities.

SPS:  Did you see in your lab or in academia at large that dissertation timelines ranged between genders?

Cable: Yes. I saw this a lot throughout universities and in different programs, that oftentimes women in research labs tend to defer a little bit more to their advisers. Or maybe don’t have as much opportunity to advocate for themselves or their career growth. Or the adviser takes a male graduate student’s word a little bit more seriously. Due to societal and systemic gender norms, women might feel that they don’t have the space to question as much, to ask for something more, negotiate a higher pay, negotiate different or more advanced responsibilities within a work environment. So absolutely, I think that came into play in my own experiences, whether it was conscious bias or not. Starting in my graduate career, I absolutely deferred to perceived authorities in many situations. Through experiences, however, I learned how to be assertive, to stand up for myself, to be confident in my abilities and state what I need.

SPS: What advice would you give to both women starting off in STEM careers or already established in their STEM careers?

Cable: Something that I tell my advisees all the time, and I think is universally important but especially important to women in science, is to not focus solely on what you’re doing now but to think about the next step. Think about where you want to be, what are you looking forward to? So it’s not about, for the advisees for example, finishing that class, right? It’s not about what extracurricular activities can you get on a resume right now. It’s about asking, why are you doing that? Why are you taking that class? Why do you want that job? What about your current role is going to help you get you to your overall goal? Thinking ahead, doing your research, and making sure that you are informing yourself and giving yourself that power to be able to confidently make a decision and confidently come to an adviser or supervisor and say “Hey, here’s what I have. Here’s what I know I want to do. I am confident in this. I’ve done the research. I have talked to people in this role. I have done the informational interviewing. I know that this is where I want to go and this is what I need to get there.” I think that information gives you confidence in yourself and in what you’re saying. If you are dismissed, you have all the more power to say no, this is something that I’m very serious about, this is something that I am informed on, and I am an authority here. I am telling you what I need.

SPS: Can you further describe the process for you to feel that confidence of being the authority?

Cable: That state of confidence and perspective did not happen overnight. I think being in academics, especially in STEM fields, played a large role in that. In STEM, you have to be able to defend what you’re saying, right? You’re not going to go to a conference and present a poster or give a talk and expect that your audience is going to defer to your every word. It is the intent of the scientific method, of hypothesis-based testing, to question, to confirm, and to make sure that what you’re saying is challenged in a productive way, so you have to build the skills to be able to speak knowledgably and passionately about your subject and be confident in your data, whether that data is scientific in nature or authoritative about your own person. Many experiences presenting and talking about my research and my background built that confidence.

SPS: Regarding your learning, teaching, and working in STEM thus far, how have you found your gender or other salient identities affecting those experiences and what you bring to the table every day?

 Cable: As far as finding your identity as a woman in STEM, I think that that also comes over time and it comes a lot from talking with other women in STEM. I think that it’s important to see the challenges you face being addressed by other people like you. For example, the fact that you can go to a conference and maybe you don’t get the kind of feedback that you’re hoping for from your audience because for whatever reason they don’t want to engage in discourse about your work. You can draw your own conclusions as to why a male colleague might not want to debate with a young woman in STEM. But, it can feel isolating to not be treated the same way that you might see a male colleague being treated. So, I think talking with other women in STEM, hearing their perspectives, hearing those commonalities, and that you’re not alone in some of these challenges, is so important. There are plenty of individuals that don’t fit my exact gender identity who are communicating the same kind of challenges, so having that open discourse is essential. Because, if you think that your experience is the only one, then you’re never going to be able to really have a conversation about inequity and biases in a productive way. I think bringing my gender to the table, bringing my perspective to the table, is a big deal. Making sure my voice is heard is essential, and I think that it’s important for women who are just getting started or well into their scientific careers to see someone who is voicing their opinion being respected for it. I know it was and still is important for me to see.  

SPS: In your experiences, have you found that networking has helped bring you to places in your career that you haven’t have expected?

Cable: Oh, 100% absolutely. I think that for every person who’s trying to get anywhere in a personal, professional world, networking is essential. I think it is those relationships, that comradery, even if you don’t know that person as a friend, if you just have some commonalities, that they can see themselves in you and vice versa, makes it a lot easier to excel in your field. That is one reason men tend to have an easier time networking, because it’s much easier to see themselves represented in these roles. When women look for mentorship or advice from someone who might have a shared experience or perspective, it can be difficult to find the same representative sample of women in these roles. The reverse is true, too. The mentors who have advanced in their careers see more of themselves in a mentee who looks like them. That problem goes well past gender. It’s race. It’s ethnicity. It’s age. So getting that representation is essential and I have absolutely benefited from building a network and having good role models or women who I can look to and are looking out for me.

SPS: What is the best advice you have ever received?

Cable: I would say that this is probably not necessarily advice, but one of my best friends who went to high school and college with me (she is currently a clinical psychologist) used to say whenever we would encounter something tough in grad school, “Erin, this isn’t the thing. You are greater than this, you are more than this. This is not the thing that stops you.” It’s a simple statement, but it has been and still is a powerful reminder of what we have, the power to persevere and achieve.

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