The only woman in the room: Why science is still a boy's club by Eileen Pollack

I have a M.Sc. in Physics.  I'm a woman.  I did not go on to get a Ph.D.  I've never worked as a scientist.

I have a story that I tell when I'm asked about my history.  I think of it as my "just so" story.  It is a little fable that that makes my choices sound logical and satisfying.  I pull it out when I talk to young people about career choices and career progression, at networking events, or when I reveal my academic background to interviewers or colleagues.

As is the nature of such stories, it has been polished and abbreviated over the years.   While the story has a core of truth, it omits much more than it tells:  the anxieties, the uncertainties, the dead ends, and the mistakes.

Eileen Pollack is about 10 years older than I am.  She has a B.Sc. in Physics from Yale.  She did not do graduate work after she completed her bachelor's degree and has never worked as a scientist.  She is a novelist and author.

The only woman in the room is Pollack's attempt to get beyond her own 'just so' story to understand and explain why she did not become a scientist, and in doing so, to talk about factors that still keep women from becoming scientists.  The core of the book is Pollack's own story,  supplemented by "woman in science" research and with interviews with women who are scientists, who aspire to be scientists, and who, like Pollack, once aspired to be scientists.

The summary version of Pollack's story is that she chose to become a writer rather than a physicist because she lacked encouragement to pursue physics and lacked the self-confidence to do without encouragement.  She was pushed by a physics prof to expand her horizons beyond physics, then felt welcomed and validated by her writing professor and peers in a way that she never was in her scientific life.

When I read Pollack's story, I am staggered that she doubted her ability to become a physicist:  she won, and then turned down a scholarship to MIT.  As an undergraduate, she did original research in theoretical physics and was sponsored to present that research at a student conference. But she didn't know she was exceptional, and no one told her.  She took her initial awkwardness in the lab to mean that she lacked experimental talent, rather than understanding those failures as part of a learning process.  She didn't know, except in a general way, what her professional path forward as a physicist would have been, and lacked mentorship that might have helped her put her accomplishments in context or could have helped her understand the rewards and challenges that would have faced her as a scientist.

Did any of the factors that affected Pollack's decision to abandon physics influence my own decisions?  Like her, I got a terrible score in my first first year physics midterm, badly shaking my confidence.  Like her, I didn't know that the male undergraduates were completing their assignments collaboratively in a study group, instead doing all my own work throughout my undergraduate career.  Like Pollack, I ignored indications that my professors thought that I had talent, or did not understand them as such. (My experimental results from one first year lab were posted as an example for other students for a couple of years afterwards. In second year I received a physics scholarship.  No one told me that it was because in addition to getting good grades, I was asking interesting questions in class.)

Pollack cites research that shows that women need more encouragement to continue in science than men do, but receive less.  There are whys on both sides of that equation, of course.  But women may be less to blame if you consider that women start from a place where the paucity of women scientists itself sends the message that what they want to do is unusual, gives them fewer models to follow, and means they have fewer potential mentors who can address concerns particular to their experience as women.  And the fact that I feel defensive about women needing more encouragement also highlights another truth:  male is taken as the default, and when women deviate from that default their behaviour is seen as needing explanation. 

Pollack doesn't have answers to the "why" questions of women in science, and doesn't offer solutions.  She does expand the discussion past skills, aptitudes, and details of different program offerings to a more personal story, and to the consideration of the impact that more personal issues have on the lives of women who love (or once loved) physics.