There’s a shortage of women in the sciences and reading A Portrait of the Scientist As a Young Woman gives you some clues why that is. Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a smart, unrelenting woman. But when she was going to school, Lindy received very little encouragement to pursue her interest in science.
But everything changed in 1982 when physicist and Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe visited Ithaca High School and Lindy heard him speak. Bethe lit a fire in Lindy and she applied to MIT (although the teacher who wrote a recommendation for her assured Lindy she would not get in).
Lindy was accepted to MIT but struggled in her early years. Many of the male students looked down on female students (and, sadly, so did some of the professors). Lindy graduated from MIT but then decided to try a business path. She got married and had a child. But the marriage didn’t work out and Lindy decided to return to MIT to get her PhD. More struggles. Her mother and father had mental problems. Her favorite brother, Tom, dies in an accident with a drunk driver.
Each step Lindy took in her career came with hurtles. Sexual harassment, conflict, doubts about her ability were just some of the problems Lindy had to overcome. Then, Lindy found out a male counterpart–with less experience and less education–was being paid much more than she was!
Reading about Lindy’s struggles both saddened me and inspired me because no matter what obstacle Lindy faced, she found a way to overcome it. I highly recommend A Portrait of the Scientist As a Young Woman. Today, Lindy is in charge of a NASA mission to send a probe to the massive asteroid Psyche. Living well is the best revenge. GRADE: A
Table of Contents:
Prologue: Creating a Mission to Space 1
1 All I Had Were Questions 5
2 In Fragments 26
3 Being Relentless 52
4 The Search for Meaning 68
5 Every Endeavor Is a Human Endeavor 92
6 Past Is Prologue 131
7 The Kinds of Things a Person Can Want 147
8 Expanding Courage 163
9 Change Begins with a Question 187
10 On Not Being a Hero 201
11 Every Day, a Brick 216
12 At the End of the Marathon, a Sprint 245
Acknowledgments 259
As a non-woman I can only imagine how infuriating it must be to read about this crap, much of which is still going on today. If the Republicans get their way, we will all be back in 1950s mode,
Jeff, Lindy Elkins-Tanton faced a lot of resistance from men, but she overcame it. But you can see why many women leave science because of the hostility.
Hopefully this will change as more woman than men are going to college and getting degrees.
Steve, when Patrick was going to the Rochester Institute of Technology as an undergrad, RIT offered a free computer to women majoring in Engineering. That’s nice, but support from professors would go a long way to retaining those women in that field.
I have never quite understood how one justifies a pay differential, but, then, I guess it’s along the lines of I Can Get Away With This, So Why Not? Wonder if she ever read Vivian Gornick’s WOMEN IN SCIENCE…
Todd, in many professions, men got paid more than women for doing the same work because That’s The Way It Is. Hopefully, with more women bosses, that will change.
That’s The Way Ii Is because middle managers are weasels, or their bosses are. Why mms would want to cause their underlings to suffer for no good reason, particularly when the money they are withholding isn’t theirs, is beyond me. Why their bosses would be is too frequent a flaw in our society, but one which too many like to pretend is a virtue. More women bosses have already happened, if not sufficiently…we’ll see how greater approaches to parity work out.
Todd, the middle managers who are weasels act badly because power tends to corrupt. I’ve seen both men and women get into middle management jobs and start to wield their power in dysfunctional ways.
A a mathematician who studied also physics in the 1960s I remember that we almost had no girls in our lessons.
It’s a real discrimination which is still going strong – you have to be really excellent to compete with those masses of male students.
Part of the problem surely was and still is that in schools already there is discrimination against girls in science, the teachers don’t care …
A bit OT:
Still at school I helped my friends with maths and science and then I or rather my parents got asked whether I would help othe pupils too – paid of course, So I had several students, almost every afternoon, helped with my pocket money.
Forty years after finishing school at 18 with the Abitur or Matura and then going to university we had again a class reunion. I had not participated in the ones before because I hated the older “clerical fascist” teachers. When I entered the bar with my beard and long hair (which at school obviously had not been allowed) one of the women looked at me and asked: Are you Wolf?
I answered yes and she came to hug me and declared loudly: You saved my life!
I hadn’t seen her for forty years and she told us a secret:
She had a fiance at scholl and her father had told her she would only allowed to marry him if she got the Abitur and went to university. The problem was that 6 ie F in these core subjects would have made her ineligible so I helped her to a 5 (E) or even a 4 (D).
One of the problems was that our maths and physics teachers were obvious misogynists so as a female you had no chance with them.
Yikes all around, Wolf, and glad you were able to help and be remembered fondly. Clerical hatred for women and girls even more than everyone else, further yikes. And, for what it’s worth, American schools, at least, didn’t award E grades except in rare cases where an E for Effort was awarded (usually implying an effort was being made, but the student’s work was unsatisfactory…a famous sf story “E for Effort” by T. L. Sherred draws its title from workers being commended with that note). Our grades tended to be A, B, C, D and F.
Todd, thanks!
Of course I remember that fantastic and moving Sherred story E is for effort but I forgot that in schools E was not a regular note.
I found the story in the 60s in one of those anthologies at our “America House”. They really had fantastic SF – and of course other modern US books, went there almost every day on my way home.
Wolf, the misogynists are still around tormenting women in the sciences (and elsewhere). I’ve had female students return to my College years after they graduated to thank me for helping them and giving them confidence to further their education. They just needed someone to believe in them.
Good for you, George. Jerks take their shots everywhere…and it only takes a few jerks to ruin one’s outlook (or self-image, too often).