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 achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. In the 1970s, Pollack had excelled as one of Yale’s first two women to earn a Bachelor of Science in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, and starved for encouragement, she abandoned her lifelong dream of becoming a theoretical physicist. Years later, she thought back on her experiences and wondered what had changed in the intervening decades, and what challenges remained. Based on six years of interviewing dozens of teachers and students and reviewing studies on gender bias, The Only Woman in the Room is an illuminating exploration of the cultural, social, psychological, and institutional barriers confronting women in the STEM disciplines. Pollack brings to light the struggles that women in the sciences are often hesitant to admit and provides hope that changing attitudes and behaviors can bring more women into fields in which they remain, to this day, seriously under-represented.
Acclaim
“The Only Woman in the Room is absolutely brilliant–even a sleeping pill and head cold couldn’t stop me from reading it through the night. Pollack’s story reveals so much-I want to give it to my children, my husband, my older sister (a biologist), and every physicist I know, perhaps with key passages underlined. And especially, young women in science: read this book!” —Meg Urry, President of the American Astronomical Society, and former chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University
“With excruciating candor Eileen Pollack details how society’s relentless message that girls lack the intrinsic aptitude for high-level math and physics leaves young women without the confidence to stay the course in the brutally competitive environment of high-powered science. This is a riveting, insider’s-account of how unconscious biases make a mockery of meritocracy, why women’s equality remains elusive, and why Larry Summers was so wrong.” —Nancy Hopkins, Amgen Inc. Professor of Biology (emerita), Massachusetts Institute of Technology “
“In Eileen Pollack’s vivid description of the issues facing women in science, I immediately saw the truth of what I have lived. Pollack is convincing in showing how the obstacles for women in the U.S. are erected by our culture. In the 1960’s my mother had to put up with exclusionary rules that kept her out of a career in science. You would think things might have gotten better for my generation, and for the current generation. But they have not. Eileen Pollack courageously and honestly examines her own life and shows us why.” —Carol Greider, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and Daniel Nathans Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins University.
“An unvarnished account of what it was like, in the mid-1970s, to be, one of the first two women to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in physics at Yale….Hard-hitting, difficult to read, and impossible to put down.” – KIRKUS REVIEW (Click for full review)
“Current (and future) women in science should be immensely grateful. In “The Only Woman in the Room,” an accomplished creative-writing professor at the University of Michigan, who also happens to have a bachelor’s degree in physics, has chronicled her travails as an undergraduate at Yale some 40 years ago, offering an engrossing look at the barriers still facing women in science. Rather than dwell on the dry statistics found in so many essays on this topic, Eileen Pollack draws attention to this important and vexing problem with a personal narrative, beautifully written and full of important insights on the changes needed to make those barriers crumble.”–WASHINGTON POST (Click for full review)
LISTEN TO EILEEN BEING INTERVIEWED…
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