Summary of Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren | Includes Analysis

Instaread Summaries

• Publisher: Instaread, Inc
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781683780847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Summary of Lab Girlby Hope Jahren | Includes Analysis

Preview:

In her memoir LabGirl, Hope Jahren describes the life she’s lived and the knowledge she’s learned as a scientist trying to find her way in the world. Focusing mostly on a period of professional development that stretches from 1997 to 2008, the bulk of the narrative follows Jahren from her first appointment as a professor in Atlanta to her current job at the University of Hawaii. Navigating personal and professional challenges including bipolar disorder, meager budgets, and sexist work environments, Jahren and her eccentriclabmanager, Bill, learn a lot about themselves, each other, and the mysterious lives of plants.

Growing up in Minnesota, Hope feels starved for human connection. Her parents and her three older brothers are quiet, distant, and seemingly emotionless. The only sure love in her life is the feeling she experiences in her father’slaboratory, a place where she feels happy and curious…

PLEASE NOTE: This is summary and analysis of the book and NOT the original book.

Inside this InstareadSummary ofLabGirl

Summary of the book

Important People

Character Analysis

Analysis of the Themes and Author’s Style

About the Author

With Instaread, you can get the key takeaways, summary and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Themes

Feminism

Hope describes science as a man’s world, and her feminist values are on solid ground when she discusses how she navigated it. Growing up with a father and three older brothers, she always felt vaguely disappointed that she wasn’t a boy. That disappointment moves more toward resentment as she narrates challenges that she has faced as a woman during different stages of her career, including carrying a wrench for protection to nighttime lab sessions as a college student, feeling out of place at conferences, and experiencing discrimination from her department head during her pregnancy. There’s no real tidy conclusion to this thread of Hope’s story in which these challenges resolve into a sense of pride or accomplishment about her success in the field. The memoir isn’t so much a story of her triumph over these challenges as it is a straightforward account of how difficult it is to be a woman in a professional landscape dominated by men.

Even though Hope’s frustration towards sexist attitudes among men in the scientific community is plain, the memoir reveals her personal relationship to feminism to be more fraught. This anxiety is most on display throughout the section that details her first professorship at Georgia Tech, where she can’t quite shake old-fashioned ideas about womanhood even as she deliberately establishes her life as a modern career woman. She describes the standard issue start-up funds she received from the university to establish her lab as a “dowry”—a curious analogy to make in the year 1996, given that the same funds were available to men and the custom of dowries had long since become obsolete in the United States.

Hope also exhibits latent unease around her status as a single woman during her first years at Georgia Tech. The idea that she should be starting a family haunts her, even though it’s in direct conflict with her stated beliefs. At one point, she describes her studies as inoculation against what she calls being “bodily foreclosed upon”—that is, getting married. The strident tone of such observations doesn’t quite align with her anxiety surrounding the onset of menopause, which she begins to fixate on as early as her mid-twenties. Likewise, on several occasions, she uses language reminiscent of a newlywed or, later, a mother in recounting certain professional experiences. Hope’s description of setting up a new lab with Bill could be about a young couple establishing their first apartment. A field trip with Bill and a handful of students—which includes camping, students falling asleep in the backseat of the car, and an impromptu stop at a tourist attraction called Monkey Jungle—sounds a lot more like a family vacation than an academic exercise. Though she doesn’t think of having a family as something she’s “giving up” to pursue her career, the concern that she may be doing so plagues her.

Later, when Hope is in her thirties, she gets married and has a child. Although she is fond of her family, they barely figure into the memoir; she spends little time describing her husband, Clint, and she never mentions her son’s first name. Though her family’s omissi...

Table of contents

• Summary
• Main Characters
• Analysis
• Character Relationships
• Themes
• Author’s Style