The Only Woman in the Room by Eileen Pollack

The Only Woman in the Room by Eileen Pollack

ONE OF WASHINGTON POST'S NOTABLE NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A 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, with 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 encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become a physicist.

Years later, spurred by the suggestion that innate differences in scientific and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured female faculty at Summer's institution, Pollack thought back on her own experiences and wondered what, if anything, had changed in the intervening decades.

Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women--and minorities--in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women's experiences in a way that simple data can't, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face.

The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented.

Pollack, Eileen: - Eileen Pollack grew up in Liberty, N.Y., the heart of the Jewish Catskills. After graduating from Yale with a BS in physics, she earned an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of the novels The Professor of Immortality, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering (which won the Grub Street National Book Prize and was named a New York Times Editor's Choice selection), and Paradise, New York. She also is the author of two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and In the Mouth (which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award). Pollack's work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club was published by Beacon Press;a long excerpt appeared in the Times Sunday Magazine and went viral. Pollack has received fellowships from the NEA, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her novella The Bris was chosen by Stephen King to appear in the Best American Short Stories 2007. Her essay Pigeons was selected by Cheryl Strayed for the 2013 edition of Best American Essays;Righteous Gentile appears in the 2018 edition of Best American Travel Writing. A long-time faculty member and former director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, she now lives and writes in Boston.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780807083444
ISBN 10	0807083445
Titel	The Only Woman in the Room
Autor	Eileen Pollack
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Beacon Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2016-09-06
Seitenanzahl	288
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.