I’m guessing that the reason Eileen Pollack’s new book is called The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club is because it’s a more interesting title than The Trials and Tribulations of Eileen Pollack. So three cheers to the marketing department at Beacon Press. They certainly suckered me into reading this—oh, what should I say?—hopelessly self-involved effort to explain a major social problem.
And then there’s the dilemma of being a woman working in a field that’s still, in many ways, a boys’ club. How do you handle deep-seated sexism when you’re the only woman in the room with dignity and grace and maybe even a sense of humor (one that doesn’t require you to sell out the sisterhood)?
Yet they encouraged her in other, nonverbal ways: they gave her As, they arranged for her to get campus jobs, they recommended her for prestigious conferences and summer internships, they agreed to take her on for independent research projects, they wrote her letters of reference for grad school, and they even took an interest in her personal well-being. It was because of a professor who was concerned that she appeared to have no interests besides physics that Pollack decided to become a writer instead of a scientist: he made a bargain with her that he would only write her a grad-school recommendation if she enrolled in a creative writing course. Near the end of the book—after a conversation with her former thesis advisor, during which he informs her that her thesis had been exceptional—she writes, “I want to shake my younger self and say: Really, Eileen? None of that was enough?“
It may be true that the personal is political, but the personal has to get beyond the individual person. There seems to be a trend in nonfiction writing at the moment that everything must be personal, even if the person writing is merely an observer, not a participant. (You can see this in the New Yorker where the writers insert gratuitous “he told me”‘s into stories in which the “me” has previously been completely invisible and irrelevant to the story.) I’m not sure why. Do 150 pages of Eileen Pollack’s experiences at Yale 35 years ago somehow make the problem of the lack of women in science more relatable to the average reader? How does the experience of one woman—who studied science but then abandoned it to do something else that she admits she found more enjoyable and satisfying—stand in for all women who study science and don’t abandon it? (“The praise recognized not only my ability to complete the assignment,” Pollack writes of her first writing class, “it commended me for who I was, in that only the person who had experienced what I had experienced could have written what I had written.” That singularity comes much, much later in the process of studying science.)
