Today I got the campus news from my alma mater with this story. It reminded me of an article I read last fall in the NY Times, under the headline “Numbers Are Male, Said Pythagoras, and the Idea Persists“. The campus news story is a short story, and a link to a longer NPR interview with Earth & Environmental Sciences professor Suzanne O’Connell, who I had an email exchange with after reading a book called ‘Sea Legs: Tales of a Woman Oceanographer,‘ and feeling more solidly that I want to go to science. (O’Connell, of course, is a friend of Kathy Crane, the author.)

The theme in all these? In the upper echelons of the “hard sciences” you don’t find many women. And you find men who’ve been doing it their way, without feminine input, for a good long time, and they’re having a hard time of it, adapting, which makes it less likely for women to stick around to work with/near them.

I have a scrap of paper pasted in a book that I think has its origins in the teacher I had for gifted classes in middle school, who taught boys and girls alike grammar, greek mythology, and how to properly set a table. It says:

HOW TO BE A WOMEN AND HAVE A SUCCESSFUL CAREER
Be the first-born in an all-girl family
Have an adoring father and a working mother
Enter school early and accelerate whenever possible
Stay a tomboy until late teens
Idolize Katharine Hepburn or a reasonable facsimile
Take every math course possible
Decide not to marry–or not to have children
Marry late after your career is in place
Start a career before a family
Be rich enough to afford live-in help
Have a role-reversal with spouse
Share a position
Work in a setting with childcare facilities
Live close to adoring grandparents who babysit
Stay at home for awhile and write feverishly