Why Is Scientific Sexism So Intractably Resistant to Reform?
Harassment drove me out of physics 30 years ago and little has changed. Why is scientific sexism so intractable?
By Margaret Wertheim | Edited by Marina Benjamin
In the final months of my physics degree, one of my professors asked me into his office — an exciting prospect, given that I assumed we’d be discussing subjects for my potential honours theses. He closed the door, invited me to sit, and declared he’d fallen in love. He wanted to have an affair, he said, and if I couldn’t share in that plan he couldn’t continue as my advisor — he’d find my presence ‘too distracting’. He was a senior academic, and married; but this was Australia in the late 1970s and the subject of sexual harassment wasn’t on any university radar. It seemed this was just one of life’s inequities, another hurdle facing being a woman in science. So I made the decision to leave physics — a subject I loved — and in the following academic year switched to computer science at a different university.
At the University of Queensland, I’d been the only woman in the physics department, aside from the secretaries. There were no women lecturers or professors, and for two years no other female students. Students and professors in science departments didn’t…
