Photo: Dr. Josephine Baker, an accomplished early 20th century scientist who lived with female partners all her life.

Coming out in any workplace can be a daunting task. With all the recent discussion around the lack of women in science, I got interested in investigating the experiences of queer women in science. So in the spirit of National Coming Out Day this month, I interviewed ten queer professionals and students working across science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields about how they decided to come out or stay in the closet at work.

Compared to the cultural dialogue we have around gender bias and racism in the sciences, there is little discussion in media of issues of queer-related bias. Many scientists keep their queer identity invisible, which leaves young queer and questioning people with few queer role models in scientific fields. By failing to discuss the unique barriers to queer people in the scientists, we allow the image of smart, successful scientists to become disconnected from our socially constructed projections of homosexuality.

Historically, the choice to come out or stay in the closet was much easier—women working in science two decades ago say coming out was not even an option.

“In the early 90s at Princeton, there were only a handful of students who were out as LGB people,” says Dr. Donna Riley, who helped found the first engineering program at a U.S. women’s college (the Picker Engineering Program at Smith) and is openly bisexual. “We were mostly just met with silence. We knew to compartmentalize, and we knew when and where it was safe to be out—and that was definitely not in the engineering building.”

This tactic of keeping personal life separate from school and work life is common, says Dr. Erin Cech, co-author of a groundbreaking 2011 study (PDF) on the experiences of LGB undergrad students in engineering school. “For them, there are always questions of personal life vs. school life, and they have to manage how to keep them separate,” says Cech, whose study found that queer women often feel isolated and unable to speak up for themselves for fear of being pushed aside or losing credibility. Instead, many queer women spend large amounts of emotional energy staying in the closet, overachieving to “make up” for their queerness, or compartmentalizing and downplaying queer cultural signifiers.