{"id":5488,"date":"2018-02-18T21:25:50","date_gmt":"2018-02-18T20:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=5488"},"modified":"2018-02-18T21:25:50","modified_gmt":"2018-02-18T20:25:50","slug":"the-only-woman-in-the-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2018\/02\/18\/the-only-woman-in-the-room\/","title":{"rendered":"The Only Woman in the Room"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Only Woman in the Room<\/a>, is not only an experience I have frequently endured, but is also the title of a 2015 book by Eileen Pollack<\/a> (subtitled Why Science is Still a Boy\u2019s Club<\/em>). I\u2019m not sure why this particular book hadn\u2019t crossed my path until recently, given it is about her experiences as an erstwhile female physicist during her education, but it hadn\u2019t. She and I are near contemporaries but her environment in the USA seems to have been infinitely more hostile than anything I experienced, despite formal similarities.<\/p>\n

I went to a girls\u2019 grammar in London. I may have been the only girl in my year \u2018weird\u2019 enough to want to study physics at university but no one told me so to my face in so many words and they certainly didn\u2019t make it difficult for me. I had an experienced teacher who had herself studied physics (at Oxford). How different from Pollack\u2019s experience where, in a co-ed school, she was in a minority of one from early on in her attempt to get the subjects under her belt which would enable her to study physics at university. For a girl to enter Yale, only a few years after they had first admitted women and coming from what might have been termed a \u2018bog standard comprehensive\u2019 had it been in the UK, rather than some elite academy or private school, was also a huge accomplishment for her. Perhaps when she did it, she hadn\u2019t quite appreciated how big a step she was taking or quite what she would be facing; no one had taken the trouble to warn or prepare her. At least my school had a track record of sending girls to Oxbridge and, even more to the point, Oxbridge had been accepting girls for many years even if in segregated single sex colleges. We were simply not unexpected in the lecture theatre even if uncommon (with a ratio of about 10 men to every women on average across the subjects).<\/p>\n

I wrote about the not-so-very-close parallel between the Ivy League transition to coeducation and the opening up of Oxbridge colleges to a mixed entry in a post<\/a> last year, written in a more impersonal vein on the back of the book Nancy Malkiel<\/a> wrote (Keep the Damned Women Out<\/a><\/em>). It did occur at around the same time but the fact that Yale and its peers had never previously allowed the admission of women to its courses seems to me to have made the transition to coeducation an awful lot harder than in the UK. Certainly, to return to Pollack\u2019s detailed experiences of isolation, what she terms \u2018subtle hazing\u2019 and a constant battle to be recognized simply don\u2019t tally with my experiences of a few years earlier.<\/p>\n

Girton when I went up was a women-only college and therefore every time I returned there I returned to being surrounded by women. If I had wanted support \u2013 as of course I sometimes did \u2013 there were plenty of female friends and Fellows to offer it. But in fact I don\u2019t recall my experiences in the lecture theatre or practical classes resembling the atmosphere Pollack found herself in. All alone as a female in a practical of around 60 men I might have been, but that didn\u2019t seem to be the problem in itself. (The fact I was incompetent was much more to the point). In fact, in my chemistry practical in the first few weeks I was helped enormously by a lad from a posher school than mine who knew exactly what all the different glassware was for. He became a good mate throughout my three years, as well as my best friend\u2019s boyfriend, all because we bonded over a conical flask.<\/p>\n

Nor do I remember supervisors treating me differently from my male peers when, in my final year I was finally paired with men away from my own college. Indeed one of those supervisors was supportive then and has remained so ever since (thank you Archie Howie<\/a>! My erstwhile head of department at the Cavendish, now an emeritus fellow of the college I am proud to serve as Master.). I was one of those tedious students who used to pin down lecturers at the end of lectures about missing minus signs and other things I wasn\u2019t sure I understood, and they never brushed me off however annoying I must have been.<\/p>\n

My Cambridge was, for me, a totally different experience than Pollack\u2019s Yale. To take a very close parallel. In my first year \u2013 as in hers \u2013 I had a test (mine was just a dry run) in physics in which I scored some dismal score in the 30s. I forget precisely what appallingly low percentage it was but Pollack clearly felt scarred that she had scored 32.\u00a0 She remembers it exactly. She describes in detail how she was so mortified by this failure, the belief it gave her that she was rubbish and everyone else was much smarter, and hence the compulsion she felt to work even harder. She doesn\u2019t seem to have discussed her result with anyone to see whether any of her beliefs were true. I, on the other hand, had a sympathetic Director of Studies, the late Christine Mackie<\/a>, who said merely she was sure I would do much better when the actual exam came around and she suggested I took the weekend off to clear my brain. (Advice, I may say, I took and cycled to Saffron Walden with a friend on a lovely spring afternoon. \u00a0When I next saw Mrs Mackie she seemed a bit startled by the literal way I had taken her advice.)<\/p>\n

Pollack was so burnt by all her experiences, feeling at the time that no one ever offered her support or encouragement (although at the end of the book she admits that perhaps that wasn\u2019t quite true) and that she basically was not wanted in the male geek club of physics, that she left the subject despite her initial determination to proceed to a PhD. Instead, although I never really understood exactly how this change was effected, she started attending creative writing and literature courses toward the end of her Yale years, found far more women in the room and a far more welcoming environment, and switched her aspirations. She has since made a very successful career as a writer and as an academic in creative writing. Yet clearly, all these years later, she was driven to try to explore what went wrong, what has changed \u2013 at Yale and elsewhere \u2013 for women studying physics and engineering. The latter part of her book describes her conversations with young women and, most notably, with Meg Urry<\/a> the well-known astrophysicist and head of Yale Physics.<\/p>\n

She reveals that many women still regard themselves as outliers, as unsupported and struggling in a hostile predominantly male environment. Again, I wonder how similar the experiences she describes of these current students would be to those in Cambridge. I would like to think the answer would be, as in my day, not very. The numbers of women in physics still struggle to get much over 20% but on the whole those I talk to do not describe a hostile workplace. They may find the course tough. They may feel, as I did with my chemistry practical class, that other students are better prepared than they are. Studies of exam results suggest that first year women do fare slightly less well but that the gender attainment gap closes with each successive year (by no means true in all subjects). Perhaps the legacy of the 1970s experiences of Yale and other Ivy League universities lives on in subjects like Physics. Perhaps Oxbridge got some things a lot righter then and now.<\/p>\n

I did not warm to Pollack in the first part of the book. Her anger and hurt were visible but she came across as a fairly self-centred and unsympathetic character. I note that one of the reviews I read of the book in the Chicago Tribune<\/a> obviously shared my reaction saying \u2018As the sole focus of two-thirds of the book, they [her stories] land with a tremendous whine<\/em>.\u2019\u00a0 Other reviews were kinder and I certainly felt drawn in by the end of the book to her exploration and comparison of now versus then. \u00a0In that sense it was a book well worth reading. But the contrast with my own, clearly relatively fortunate experiences, was clear.<\/p>\n

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The Only Woman in the Room, is not only an experience I have frequently endured, but is also the title of a 2015 book by Eileen Pollack (subtitled Why Science is Still a Boy\u2019s Club). I\u2019m not sure why this … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1102,1218,368,1217],"class_list":["post-5488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women-in-science","tag-coeducation","tag-eileen-pollack","tag-physics","tag-yale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}