In this New York Times article, Eileen Pollack asks why the gender gap in STEM continues to exist.

She explores her own experiences as one of the first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics from Yale in 1978, and compares it to experiences of female grad students, administrators and professors today.

“In the end, I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in the major, having excelled in the department’s three-term sequence in quantum mechanics and a graduate course in gravitational physics, all while teaching myself to program Yale’s mainframe computer. But I didn’t go into physics as a career. At the end of four years, I was exhausted by all the lonely hours I spent catching up to my classmates, hiding my insecurities, struggling to do my problem sets while the boys worked in teams to finish theirs. I was tired of dressing one way to be taken seriously as a scientist while dressing another to feel feminine.”

Read the full article here.