ONE OF WASHINGTON POST'S NOTABLE NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in STEM fields—“beautifully written and full of important insights” (Washington Post).
In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and ’70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself far behind the men in her classes, she went on to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, as one of the university’s first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, starved for encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become a physicist.
Years later, spurred by the suggestion that innate differences in scientific and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured female faculty at Summer’s institution, Pollack thought back on her own experiences and wondered what, if anything, had changed in the intervening decades.
Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women—and minorities—in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women’s experiences in a way that simple data can’t, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face.
The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented.
ISBN-13: 9780807083444
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: 09-06-2016
Pages: 288
Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels Breaking and Entering (a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection) and Paradise, New York, as well as two collections of short fiction, an award-winning book of nonfiction, and two creative-nonfiction textbooks. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories. She is a professor on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Manhattan and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Read an Excerpt
Even in the 1970s, the sexism I experienced was rarely obvious. I grew up in a privileged, loving home with few barriers that might prevent a bright, confident young woman from succeeding in whatever field she took it in her head to enter. All this led me to suspect that the reasons for the scarcity of female physicists must be subtle, and those reasons must lie buried in the psyches of the women who loved science and math but never completed their degrees or, like me, earned their degrees but left their fields. . . . By trying to understand why I didn’t become a physicist, I hoped to gain insights into why so many young women still fail to go on in science and math in the numbers their presence in high school classrooms and their scores on standardized tests predict.
What I discovered shocked me. Although more young women major in physics at Yale than when I attended school there, those young women told me stories of the sexism they had encountered in junior high and high school that seemed even more troubling than what I had experienced: complaints about being belittled and teased by their classmates and teachers, worries about being perceived as unfeminine or uncool. . . . The same forces that caused me to feel isolated and unsure of myself at Yale continue to hem in young women today, acting like an invisible electrified field to discourage all but the thickest skinned from following their passion for science, a phenomenon that turns out to be less true in other countries, where women are perceived as being equally capable in science and math as men.
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Table of Contents
PREFACE: Bright College Years
PART I: LEAVING LIBERTY
CHAPTER 1: A Different Kind of Math
CHAPTER 2: Science Fair
CHAPTER 3: Science Unfair
CHAPTER 4: Advanced Placement
PART II: SURVIVING YALE
CHAPTER 5: Freshman Disorientation
CHAPTER 6: Too Much Male Hormone
CHAPTER 7: Electricity and Magnetism
CHAPTER 8: The Philosophy of Existence
CHAPTER 9: X-10, Y-12, K-25
CHAPTER 10: Life on Other Planets
PART III: RETURN TO NEW HAVEN
CHAPTER 11: The Two-Body Problem
CHAPTER 12: Statics and Dynamics
CHAPTER 13: Integration and Differentiation
CHAPTER 14: The Women Who Don't Give a Crap
CHAPTER 15: Parallel Universes
EPILOGUE: The Sky Is Blue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
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