For many people, including women, the answer is yes, which spurred dozens of paleontologists around the world – all of them women – to glue on beards for photos now being exhibited at the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley. The ironic message of the Bearded Lady Project is that, contrary to the persisting stereotype, you don’t have to be a man to love fieldwork and contribute to science; in fact: many field scientists are not.
UC Berkeley’s Leslea Hlusko, interviewed for a documentary film about the project that premieres Thursday, Aug. 22, at LHS, voices that love of field work: “For me, being in the field with the wind blowing in your face … at those moments, I feel like me.”