The Only Woman in the Room Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club

Eileen Pollack

eBook - 2015

ONE OF WASHINGTON POST'S NOTABLE NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEARA bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in STEM fields—“beautifully written and full of important insights” (Washington Post).In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and ’70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself far behind the men in her classes, she went on to graduate summa cum laude, wi...th honors, as one of the university’s first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, starved for... more