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Women in Science: Are they accepted?

© Janice Karin

When I was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania one of my professors, Fay Azjenberg-Selove, invited all of the female grad students in physics to her house for a pot luck dinner. Fay is a dear woman who seems to like everyone and was genuinely interested in making our educational lives run as smoothly as possible. After we had eaten, the 12 or so mostly first year students all gathered in the den. After a few minutes, Fay asked us if we believed we faced any discrimination in the department because we were women. One by one, the other women started answering yes, and came out with a series of minor inconsequential incidents that showed how badly women were treated in the department.

I sat there listening to these women, some of whom I considered friends, as they said things like "I am put on the spot and asked to answer questions in front of the whole class" and a whole other series of what seemed to me like mostly imagined slights I can no longer remember. Everyone was put on the spot and asked to answer questions in class. I didn't know how to react or what to say when my turn came around.

You see, I am perhaps a bit biased in this area. I am a Jew who lived in a very anti-semitic area for most of my childhood. Having people put live snakes in our mailbox, being called trash compactor and other less pleasant names, being constantly asked why I don't believe in G-d or told I'm going to rot in hell for eternity, having teachers lose my work, being kicked off teams for manufactured reasons, and having the school board change the rules so a Jew couldn't speak at graduation were but a mere sampling of the real prejudice and discrimination I faced growing up.

On top of that, my vision problems had progressed to the point where I was legally blind and I needed real accomodations at school or I would be discluded. I had professors telling me I couldn't use a tape recorder in their classes, professors refusing to enlarge the text of exams or give me any extra time at all, and many other decrees from on high that made it nearly impossible to do the work. This was real discrimination from the department, not the incidents the other women recounted.

I freely admit that my definitions of what consitutes discrimination and prejudice might be just a bit more severe than that of most people. I have, after all, experienced actual acts that inhibited my ability to live and work in my environment of the time.

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