Download The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club AudioBook Free
Named one of the distinctive nonfiction books of 2015 by The Washington Post. A bracingly genuine exploration of just why there are still so few women in the hard sciences, mathematics, executive, and computer science. In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, right now, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack attempt to find the response. An effective fiction article writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and '70s fantasizing of a job as a theoretical astrophysicist. Refused the chance to take advanced courses in science and mathematics, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself very good behind the men in her classes, she continued to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, among the university's first two women to earn a bachelor of science level in physics. Yet, isolated, lacking in assurance, starved for encouragement, she discontinued her ambition to become a physicist. Years later, spurred by the advice that innate distinctions in medical and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured feminine faculty at Summer's establishment, Pollack thought back again on her behalf own encounters and wondered what, if anything, experienced modified in the intervening decades. Based on six years interviewing her previous teachers and classmates as well as a large number of other women who experienced slipped out before concluding their degrees in science or found their opportunities less satisfying than they had hoped, The Only Female in the Room is a bracingly genuine, no-holds-barred study of the social, interpersonal, and institutional obstacles confronting women - and minorities - in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and prepared book reflects on women's encounters in a way that simple data can't, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another time but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face. The Only Female in the Room shows us the problems women in the sciences have been hesitant to confess and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors with techniques which could bring a lot more women into fields in which right now they remain seriously underrepresented.
