Download The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club PDF EPUB
Author: Eileen Pollack
Pages: 288
Size: 3.662,00 Kb
Publication Date: September 15,2015
Category: Science for Kids
A bracingly honest exploration of just why there are still so few ladies in the hard sciences, mathematics, engineering, and computer technology
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In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, after that president of Harvard, asked why therefore few women, right now, obtain tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack attempt to find the reply. A successful fiction article writer, Pollack had developed in the 1960s and ’70s dreaming of a profession as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the opportunity to take advanced programs in science and mathematics, she non-etheless made her method to Yale. There, despite finding herself considerably behind the males in her classes, she continued to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, among the university’s initial two ladies to gain a bachelor of technology level in physics. This frankly personal and informed reserve reflects on females’s encounters in a manner that basic data can’t, documenting not merely the even more blatant bias of another period but all of the subtle disincentives ladies in the sciences still encounter.
Years later on, spurred by the recommendation that innate distinctions in scientific and mathematical aptitude might take into account the dearth of tenured feminine faculty at Summer season’s organization, Pollack thought back again on her own encounters and wondered what, if anything, had transformed in the intervening years.
Predicated on six years interviewing her previous teachers and classmates, in addition to dozens of other ladies who got dropped out before completing their degrees in technology or found their professions less rewarding than that they had hoped, The Only Female in the area is certainly a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred study of the public, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting ladies—and minorities—in the STEM fields. Yet, isolated, lacking in self-confidence, starved for encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become physicist.
Named among the notable non-fiction books of 2015 by The Washington Post
The Only Female in the area displays us the struggles ladies in the sciences have already been hesitant to admit, and expect changing attitudes and behaviors with techniques that could bring a lot more women into areas in which right now they remain significantly underrepresented.