The Only Woman in the Room

Why Science is Still a Boys' Club

Author: Eileen Pollack
ISBN: 9780807046579

A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in the hard sciences, mathematics, engineering, and computer science   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 accoun

Publisher: Beacon Press
Publish Date: 2015

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Science / History, Social Science / Women's Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: )