Boys' Day: New Horizons for Young Men in Germany

Yesterday was not only Girl's Day, but also Bay's Day. First introduced in 2011 in follows the thought of gender Equality and acknowledges that there are also vocational fields dominated by female workers and seldom seen as career options for male jobseekers.

It’s a well-known fact that women are underrepresented in many STEM professions, but it turns out that societal expectations can go both ways: while a girl may shy away from a technical career because it is not perceived as “feminine” enough, boys may avoid many jobs traditionally held by women for fear of not seeming “manly”. Enter Boys’ Day, a German initiative that aims to introduce boys from grade 5 to 10 to skilled professions less commonly practiced by men.

Image source: gfairchild via flickr

One Small Step for Boy-kind…
Did you know that more than half of all male teenagers choose to pursue less than 20 careers [1]? Interestingly, these careers skew heavily toward technical work, such as being a car mechanic, and almost none have a social, caring-oriented focus. In a country with an aging population such as Germany, this is a serious problem. When entering the Boys' Day program, boys can choose from a list of 30 different professions to try out. Some of these “rare” professions for young men are also linked to (neuro)science. For example, boys can try out being a biologist, psychologist, nurse, or health researcher.

Future Payoff?
Since the program started in 2011, more than 194,000 boys have taken part in the program in Germany [1]. As the program is younger than Girls’ Day, it’s still hard to tell whether the impact will be as great. However, judging by success stories on the website [1], many young men have found their way into non-traditional careers that they turn out to love.
Working in life sciences means a challenging, but ultimately rewarding life. No-one should have to miss out on the opportunity to do science because of tradition or societal expectations! Boys’ Day serves as an important reminder that building a diverse scientific community means confronting our expectations about both men and women.

Many important jobs are not seen as "manly"
Boys’ Day takes place this year at the same time as Girls’ Day, on April 27^th.
For more information, please visit https://www.boys-day.de/

by Constance Holman, PhD Student AG Schmitz

[1] http://bit.ly/2kDGVUn

Girls' Day – Future Prospects for Girls

Tomorrow is Girl's Day in Germany and many other countries! A great opportunity for young girls to peek into jobs that are not typical "female jobs".

On Girls' Day, female students from grades 5 to 10 can get an insight into vocational fields that girls seldom consider as careers. Primarily technical enterprises, companies with technical departments and technical training facilities, universities, and research centers organize an open day for girls.
On average, girls have better grades than boys [1]. Still, in scientific or technical study programs and professions such as engineering or computer sciences, females represent the minority. Girls' Day encourages schools, media and employers to change their common attitudes towards vocational orientation.

In 2001, the first Girls' Day was initiated by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research and the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. The idea came from the American “Take Our Daughters To Work Day”, in which since 1993 schoolgirls in the US visit the workplace of their parents or acquaintances for a day.

Girls' Day Is Effective
Since then, Girls' Day has become the largest career orientation project for female students. In 2016, nearly 9,600 institutions offered about 100,000 places for female students.
The vocational choices of girls are influenced in a very positive way. For companies, Girls' Day has evolved as an important instrument of their recruitment policy. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in female professionals in technical fields. Now, the growth in employment of women is stronger than that of men in almost all scientific and technical professions.
Want some solid numbers? 40% of the girls would like to do an internship or get training in one of the participating companies. 33% of the participating organizations get applications for internships from women who participated in Girls' Day as a student. One in every five participating organizations ends up employing female candidates [2]!  

International Girls' Day
Meanwhile, Girls' Day takes place in more than twenty different countries, among them many in Europe, but also Japan and South Korea, and more recently Ethiopia and Egypt.
For more information, visit http://www.girls-day.de

[1] Voyer and Voyer, Psychol Bull, 2014
[2] www.girls-day.de

By Claudia Willmes, PhD Student AG Eickholt / AG Schmitz

At the Interface Between Medicine, Communication, and Business

With an impressive curriculum including a MD, PhD, and MBA, Shari Langemak has been Editorial Director at the German branch of Medscape for 3 years now. Medscape is an international online magazine that offers information and media resources on a wide range of medical topics destined for healthcare professionals. In addition to this, Shari is also a public speaker at conferences, and a coach for startups, especially in the field of digital health. We sat down to talk to her about how she got here, her thoughts on diversity in tech and much, much more.

What is your role at Medscape?
I am responsible for the production of medical content that enables physicians to stay up to date with their specialty. I work with science writers, medical experts and colleagues from all over the world. Regular discussions with all of them are crucial, as we need to identify the biggest topics in medicine and to stay updated on the latest findings in research. My job also includes quite a bit of traveling, as we make videos with key opinion leaders at international congresses.

Shari Langemak, Editorial Director at Medscape Germany

 How did you get into this field? Why did you decide not to follow medical practice or research?
I appreciated my medical studies a lot, but from the very beginning I felt very intrigued by the entire healthcare industry and was curious about innovation, both medical and technological. I realized quickly that a role in journalism would enable me to understand the healthcare system on a meta level. Somewhat randomly, I got an internship at Axel Springer, wrote quite a lot of articles about topics in medicine for Die Welt and Welt am Sonntag, and continued working as a freelance journalist in addition to my medical studies and my PhD.

"Journalism enables you to get a broader understanding of the healthcare system"

Journalism is very interesting, because you keep up with all the different topics out there. You get a broader understanding of the healthcare system, and you meet many people. So it was a very cool job to do while being a student. After finishing my medical degree, my freelance activity paid off, and I started working as an editor for Die Welt. This was definitely exciting – going from a clinical career to a big media corporation where I had a completely different life!

And when did you do the MBA?
I did my MBA in parallel to my current job at Medscape, as I really like to challenge myself. My main goal is to understand the healthcare system from all the different aspects and stakeholders’ points of view, especially from an entrepreneurial and an economic perspective. I aim to play an active part in the innovation lifecycle. But I realized that without business knowledge, this would not be possible.
I already had the medical and the research point of view, and then journalism, which allowed me to talk to a lot of people from different areas in healthcare. But especially because I work with startups a lot (I am a startup mentor and speak about what the healthcare system might look like in the future), I should know the basic principles of business, finance, and entrepreneurship. So the MBA was a great opportunity for me to catch up with that. I think I now have a broad view of the healthcare system.

What do you like the most about your job?
I like that I can learn about many different topics in medicine. And I love working internationally. And building a product in the German market, while working with very insightful colleagues. I also really like our company culture. We have many women working at Medscape, and they are really tough and smart.

What are some of the challenges of your job?
Media is a tough field, with lots of competition. It’s really hard to get the attention of the reader in a digital world, where everything is so quick. It’s not like you stay at home on a Sunday and read the newspaper anymore. There is so much distraction and information, and competition for the reader’s attention. Also, it is challenging to keep up with the innovation in digital health across the globe. The industry is rapidly evolving, which – to be honest – is also incredibly rewarding.

The world of technology is very male-dominated. Have you gone through any difficulties for being a woman, or experienced inequality?
No, quite the opposite. I'm invited to be a speaker quite often, being a young female, so I cannot say I have a disadvantage. I think people want to hear more diverse opinions, different perspectives. I also see a growing number of women who are founders in the startup scene, including health-tech. I believe that the male domination has other reasons. Many women, or rather girls, maybe pursue the wrong career path because they don’t know that they make great engineers, programmers, and entrepreneurs.

"I personally was a little nerd child"

During school and university we are told that women are not good at tech. I personally was a little nerd child. I used to game, I built my own computer... So I was always around many males. I learned a lot by just playing and being around friends with the same interests – that’s the best way to learn and pick your interests for your career later.

Can you tell us about the Startup Bootcamp where you are a mentor?
It’s an accelerator. Startup Bootcamp helps startups to grow by empowering entrepreneurs with knowledge and network. Many mentors from different areas do this type of work. I coach startups on digital health. I help them with market access, understanding how each player in the health industry thinks, product design, identifying which regulatory challenges they might face – as there are plenty. Many startups are international and want to grow a product in Germany, so they don’t know which problems may come up here.

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were in university? What would the current Shari tell the student Shari?
Everything is possible! It’s not because you chose one field of study that you will eventually end up in this specific field of work. But it’s also not as if it comes to you. You have to define your path and build your own brand. You should think early in your studies where you want to be, and many options are possible. You have to think about what makes you happy and get an inside view of the job you would like to do, so that you can actually see what it is like – by doing internships, talking to people… And if you still like it, perfect. Then you should think: what do I need to do to get there? Or what kind of skills would this future employer like to see? And then work on these. Academia is one thing, but especially if you want to move into a different field, you need very specific and practical skills. And while you are still studying, you can start developing some of them.

"You have to define your path and build your own brand"

Interview by Mariana Cerdeira, PhD Student, AG Harms
This article originally appeared March 2017 in "Diversity in Neuroscience"

The Secret of Beauty

Beauty Lies in the Eyes of the Beholder

The concept of "ideal beauty" has changed over time, based on a shift of cultural values. Beauty involves symmetry, harmony, and balance with nature and is associated with emotional wellbeing [1]. For example, women are widely acknowledged most beautiful when they are relatively young, with smooth skin and well-proportioned bodies (a waist-to-hip ratio of approximately 0.70) [2].

Ideal Meets Reality 

Surprisingly, scientists have found that “ideal beauty” can be found in "averageness" [2]. When averaging images of human faces to form a composite image, they are perceived as more attractive. In contrast, cultural values and the media influence “real beauty”. For example, in ancient China, women with small feet were considered more beautiful. Girls bound their feet tightly to inhibit their growth and appear attractive. Contemporary western media has extended this ideal of “slimness” to the whole body, often featuring very slender women and promoting eating disorders as a side effect.

An ideal beauty arrived in reality – Nefertiti. Her name means "a beautiful woman has arrived". Nefertiti, regarded a legendary queen of beauty, has been honored not only for her beautiful face, but also her kindness and intelligence. The definition of beauty is not only based on external features (i.e. facial and physical attractiveness), but also the inner beauty (i.e. personality, intelligence, grace, and charisma). Even cloaked in ugliness, we humans tend to prefer inner beauty to outward appearances [1].

Nefertiti bust in Neues Museum, Berlin, taken by Philip Pikart

The Value of Beauty

Beauty cannot be understood without ugliness. To be ugly is to deviate highly from “ideal beauty”. Ischizu and Zeki (2011) formulated a brain-based theory for this duality: our brain may have at least two different judgment systems for experiences involving beauty and ugliness [3]: The experience of beauty engaged the medial orbito-frontal cortex, an area containing the centers of desire, pleasure, reward, and value judgments in the brain. The experience of ugliness was confined to the amygdala and the motor cortex [3]. Gotshalk said that ‘‘beauty is a value’’, that it evokes desire and that whatever is desired has value [4]. This implies an intimate link between beauty, value, and desire in cortical processing.

BEAUTY CANNOT BE UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT UGLINESS.

What is Beautiful?

Our judgments of beauty are not arbitrary, but are slanted towards highly phenotypical and genetic quality to enhance survival and reproductive success [5]. A healthy, fertile mate offers considerable benefits over an unhealthy, infertile one in evolutionary terms. One example is that of mens' preference for women with high reproductive value (young and healthy) [6]. Thus, perceptions of beauty are likely evolutionarily determined by a “mate-quality hypothesis” [5].

Perceptual biases and associative learning also regulate beauty preferences [7]. Face recognition is not innate, though the ability to develop this skill is. Infants can discriminate between individual monkeys and human faces at 6 months, but not at 9 months without continued learning [7].

Given the same input (i.e. the existence of men, women, variation in age and features), we might expect to find generally similar preferences across cultures [8]. This can be tempered by associative learning of local conditions (age­‐specific fertility). Ghirlanda et al. (2002) showed that chickens share some of the same beauty standards as humans and that they prefer beautiful humans [9]. This result seems to speak against the mate-quality hypothesis, which suggests that preferences are species-specific. It might, however, be that similar preferences could develop by learning. 

CHICKENS PREFER BEAUTIFUL HUMANS.

Show, Do Not Tell 

Beauty seems to be about many obvious, but also subtle things and it might well be that beauty is not about anything except itself. If someone wanted to make sense out of beauty, it would kill what is great about it. But those who accept beauty on its own terms will find it a fascinating experience. Samuel Clemens said, “Don't tell us that the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream." Through interactive action instead of passive reception, it enables individuals to have their own experiences, interpret it in a way that they understand and lets them draw their own conclusions. Regardless of the complexity of beauty, its simple secret lies in the fact that you feel that you and someone (or something) can understand each other even without explicit communication.

[1] Umberto Eco, History of Beauty, 2004

[2] Little et al, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2011

[3] Ishizu and Zeki, PLoS One, 2011

[4] Gotshalk, J Philos, 1935

[5] Andersson, Sexual Selection, 1994
[6] Smith, Perrett et al, Proc Biol Sci, 2006
[7] Pascalis et al, Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci, 2011
[8] Coetzee et al, PloS One, 2014
[9] Ghirlanda et al, Hum Nat, 2002

by  Shuyan Liu, PhD Student AG Heinz
This article originally appeared 2015 in CNS Volume 8, Issue 2, Art. And the Brain.

How Different Cultures View Early Life and Death

The students of MedNeuro are multinational and so diverse are their ways of celebrating easter and other festivities. Betty Jurek had a look of how beginning and end of life are celebrated around the globe.

The Beginning…
When a baby is born, parents are usually overwhelmed with emotions, and only want the best for their child. But the interpretation of what “the best” is also depends on the parents’ nationality and can be somewhat, let’s say, "unique".

Baptism by keskieve via pixabay

Sifudu Smoke
This ritual is practiced in Nigeria and means “passing baby through smoke”. Between the third and fourteenth day after birth, leaves from a Sifudu tree are burnt, causing a pungent smoke that is irritating to the mouth and eyes. The baby is held head downwards into this smoke several times, in the belief that this prevents the child from being frightened, timid or shy [1].

Precious Saliva
An interesting way to give blessings to a baby is practiced by the Wolof people in Mauritania. They believe that saliva can retain words so the women spit into the baby’s face while men spit into the baby’s ear. To ensure that the blessing works, they rub the saliva all over its head [1].

Recycled Wedding Cake
In comparison to applying saliva onto Mauritanian babies, Irish babies seem to have better luck. Couples freeze the top tier of their wedding cake and re-use it for the christening of their first baby. Some crumbs are sprinkled over the baby’s head and if the couples have leftovers from their wedding champagne, this will also be used to wet the baby’s head for good luck [1]. Cheers!

Placenta Power
In contrast to many animal species, eating up the placenta following delivery is a somewhat unusual practice for humans. Proponents of human placentophagy claim that eating their own placenta results in better mood, increased energy and lactation although there is no study that gives evidence for a causal effect. Dried placenta is also commonly used in Chinese traditional medicine to treat infertility, impotence and other conditions [2].

Lithuanian Baby Race
Every year on International Children’s Day (June 1^st), Lithuanian toddlers compete in a race where they have to crawl a 5-meter carpet to their mothers as fast as they can. All participants seem to have great fun, and the winner this year crawled the distance within 11 seconds [3].

Toddler Tossing
This ritual may be the scariest one for outsiders. At an annual festival in India, babies and toddlers are tossed from a 15-meter high tower, right onto a landing sheet. Despite appearing to be a traumatic experience for the babies, it is supposed to give luck, health and prosperity to the child [4].

…And The End
Depending on our spiritual or religious backgrounds, we see death as either the end of life or as some sort of transition. Every people has its own way of dealing with death and grief. Some of them seem very creative, others more disturbing.

 fantasy coffin by Regula Tschumi via Wikimedia Commons

Fantasy Coffins
This interesting tradition from southern Ghana is based on the belief that life continues after death the same way as it was before. Therefore, people make individual, colorful coffins that often reflect the dead person’s profession or passion, which is thought to allow them to start the afterlife as conveniently as possible [5]. From a boat to a piano to a pack of cigarettes, everything is possible.

Death Beads
Space in graveyards in South Korea is running out, so a law was passed in 2000 mandating that people who get buried need to be removed 60 years later. This crisis led to an invention which has gained popularity during the last decade: Death beads. These turquoise beads are generated by melting the cremated ashes at ultrahigh temperatures [6]. In this way, the beloved one can be kept at home “forever”.

Consuming Grief
As an act of compassion, some tribes in South America, Africa and India used to eat their deceased family members. As a part of the grieving process, the Wari’ people in Brazil ate the complete corpse whereas other tribes, like the Amahuaca Indians, made some sort of gruel out of the ground bones and corn [7].

Death is Not the End
In contrast to Western culture, members of the Toraja ethnic group in Indonesia are buried weeks, months or even years after they pass away. For the Toraja, death is a gradual process toward the afterlife. Therefore, the deceased is wrapped in several layers of cloth and kept in a special room in the family’s home. They are still part of family life, are symbolically fed and taken out every once in a while. At the actual funeral, the social status of the deceased is reflected in the numbers of sacrificed chickens and water buffaloes [8].

Sky Burial
This special form of funeral is practiced in different regions of Asia (e.g., Tibet, Mongolia), where people practice Vajrayna Buddhism. A monk or a rogyapas (body-breaker) prepares the dead body (by taking out the organs) and places it on a mountaintop to return the body to nature. Most of the time, this means that the dead body will be devoured by vultures to the bone. The bones are then ground with a special sort of flour and given to crows and hawks that wait until the vultures have departed [9]. This way, the deceased merges with the wind.

[1] http://glblctzn.me/2ewEsaT                               
[2] http://bit.ly/2ewE5Ng           
[3] http://bit.ly/2ewEtLS                             
[4] http://dailym.ai/2eo6Wbq                   
[5] http://bit.ly/2ewFl39                              
[6] http://lat.ms/2eo69Ho
[7] http://bit.ly/2ewEfo0                             
[8] http://bit.ly/2enT6Wx           
[9] http://bit.ly/2eo70I6

by Betty Jurek, PhD Student AG Prüß
This article originally appeared 2016 in CNS Volume 9, Issue 4, From Cradle to Grave in the Brain