The description for this book is a bit misleading. The first half is Pollack's memoir of her own experiences as a student from childhood in public school in a predominantly Jewish area through college at Yale as one of the few female physics majors. The second half of the book is more in line with what I had been expecting given the description, and includes anecdata from other women who Pollack had known or interviewed from her own generation and the later generation of female science majors and scientists, as well as recaps of interviews with her former professors and teachers who we had met in the first half of the book.

This is a deeply personal story for Pollack, but at the same time it is also deeply personal for every girl who thought she wasn't smart enough, or every woman who decided to drop out of a science major, or every student who didn't even try for a science degree in the first place. This book was deeply personal for me.

Pollack's experiences are not every woman's or minority's experiences, but they are similar enough that many can relate. One of my criticisms of this book is Pollack's weakness in connecting women's experiences with the similar experiences of minorities and economically disadvantaged students. She does mention that several times, but it is definitely a message that can be strengthened. Towards the end of the book, Pollack noted that some students, even if they enter into college at the top of their high school graduating class, find themselves floundering and behind other students because they were not privileged enough for their schools to offer certain courses. I wish Pollack had highlighted that more because it's a problem that systemically places students from under-served, poorer schools at a disadvantage in college.

I write this review the day after a 14-year-old Muslim boy with brown skin was detained by his school and arrested for bringing in a homemade clock to show off to his science teacher, which another teacher reported as a bomb. That is an extreme case of the educational culture discouraging a minority from entering a STEM field, but it highlights the challenges that some students face by virtue of their sex or ethnicity.

Pollack's story is an important one, and both its strength and weakness is its reliance on anecdotes (what I referred to as "anecdata" earlier) from her own experiences and gleaned from interviews or missives with other women or minorities. She does mention the results of a few studies of bias against women in STEM, but the bulk of the book are anecdata rather than empirical controlled studies. The anecdata bring the problems to life in a way that pure numbers don't, yet at the same time anecdotes are easy for those in the sciences to discount because they are not data (hence why I have been referring to them as "anecdata"; because, well, it can be argued that the plural for anecdote is data).

Given the larger conversation that has been on-going for the past few years of women in the sciences, and the blatant misogyny that I keep running up against from big names (Google "Richard Dawkins women"), The Only Woman in the Room is an important book, and very timely. Remember in June when Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine Tim Hunt said at a science conference in South Korea, "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry"? Or last November when European Space Agency Rosetta Project scientist Matt Taylor gave public interviews after the Philae space probe landed on a comet while wearing a shirt covered in nearly naked women? It is heartening, I guess, that all of these incidents have lead to huge public outcries and public apologies (in the case of Taylor) or firings (in the case of Hunt). A decade or two earlier, they would have been the status quo.

I hope that Pollack's book inspires change in STEM education at all levels, and I hope that it also inspires women to pursue STEM educations and careers.

Review copy courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley ( )

I read THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM mostly because I so enjoyed Eilen Pollack's later memoir, MAYBE IT'S ME, and because she makes me laugh, something that's become increasingly important in today's polarized society. Well this one's A bit more serious, but there were still some chuckles. What's it about? Well, the subtitle is a pretty good clue: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club. Because Pollack took on that closed club and cracked it, earning, despite numerous obstacles and frequent disparagement, a degree in Physics from Yale. Yes,YALE. There's a lot in here about her struggles with upper level, esoteric courses in science and math, which I found extremely interesting. Which surprised me, because math and science are NOT, and have NEVER been my thing. I took ONE Physics class in my senior year of high school. And no more. In college I took one semester of College Algebra, and that was the end of my math. No, wait, in grad school u was required to take a course in Statistics and Probability. Which I hated, never quite caught on, but scraped by. But Pollack makes her adventures in higher science and math INTERESTING. And she also makes very real how lonely it often was, being the only woman in the room, feeling left out and ostracized. But she persevered, got that degree. But then instead of grad school, she took a hard look at he life, then made a hard right turn to become a writer. And I believe it was indeed a RIGHT turn, because Pollack's is an immensely talented writer, or I wouldn't be reading her. There were a few things here I could definitely relate to, like washing dishes in a cafeteria to make a few needed bucks. Me too, Eileen. And scrubbing and waxing floors. But reading about the prejudice and slights she faced for being a woman made me a bit ashamed for my own sex, for being a man. I know that kind of sexist crap went on in college (and in the military too, where I spent eight years), and still does. Pollack spent nearly twenty years running a Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan and has published several books, so she's done okay for herself. And I've just begun reading her 2008 story collection, IN THE MOUTH, and was already laughing by page two. Did I say I just love how this woman writes, whatever the subject? Well I do. Loved this book. Very, very highly recommended. ( )

This memoir definitely stirred up a lot of memories for me. I have a PhD in engineering, and I could fill this review up with a lot of stories of the bullshit I had to get through to get as far as I have. And even now, when I tell some of those stories, invariably the guys around me will gaslight me and tell me I must have been making it up. So it never ends. I definitely belong to the "don't give a shit" club, but that doesn't take away the sting of having to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously.

Honestly, I thought the memoir was... just okay. I couldn't tell if it was a memoir or a book about women in science and sometimes it was both and sometimes it was neither. I didn't love it. I thought it went on too long, and the anecdotes in the last chapter and epilogue were just tacked in at the end.

Maybe I am in the minority of women in STEM, but I never had crushes on my professors, or cared about how I dressed and looked, or gave a flying you-know-what about my marriageability. Do women care so much about finding a man (the book was really heterosexist and didn't even bring up the concepts of lesbians until like the very end) that they really would jeopardize their careers? I guess so, but it seems foreign to me. Maybe we need to smash the picture of women getting married and having babies as the default view of what women are supposed to do.

Finally, I thought it was strange how infrequently the word "engineer" or "engineering" came up in this book. Engineers were swept into the corner, and not really examined until the last chapter or so. I'm not sure if the author meant to include engineer in the word science, but engineers are not scientists. We go through a lot of the same bullshit as scientists, so I don't see why the need to ignore us.

That said, my issues with the book are minor compared to the topic it discusses. This is still an issue. I will teach 100s of students in my engineering classes before I get a single woman sitting in my classroom. It's exhausting teaching to a bunch of male faces. The women who do sign up for engineering don't do electrical, and maybe it's because electrical has a reputation for being the hardest, or they feel that they needed to have experience playing around with circuits as a kid (experience that I never had either). Either way, the lack of women in STEM is a big issue, one that I hope will see remediation in my lifetime.

Edited to add: several days after I wrote this review, it occurs to me that something has been nagging the back of my mind. At more than one occasion in this book, the author mentions that quantum particles can tunnel through infinite potential wells. This is distinctly untrue, as the walls of infinite wells act as nodes, and the answers are sinusoidal functions with 0's at those points. A finite well, however, has results where the wave-function actually does penetrate into the boundary. A simple Google search would have cleared up this misconception. The academic in me cannot let this go. The part of me that hates being corrected by academics thinks I should go easy on the author. ( )

Some few years back, Lawrence Summers, then President of Harvard, made some off-the-cuff and disparaging remarks as to why women are not better represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. While he attempted to walk back those statements later, many people still regard the moment as a clarion call for a better encouragement and representation of women and minorities in the hard sciences. Pollack takes up the gauntlet in her “The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is Still a Boys’ Club.”

Pollack grew up in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, in rather humble rural beginnings. Even though she had high test scores, she was regularly discouraged in her ardor for math and science. Her early education did not prepare her well for the rigors of the Yale physics department and she struggled to fit in as one of only two female physics students. Despite graduating with a BS summa cum laude, and lacking strong mentorship, Pollack ultimately succumbed to her inner doubts and sense of illegitimacy as a scientist and pursued writing instead. She went on to run the creative writing program at my alma mater, the University of Michigan. Her writing ability is quite evident throughout.

The first two thirds of Pollack’s book reflects on this personal history, recounting her subjective and anecdotal efforts in a male dominated field. Some of what she recounts rang true to someone who also pursued studies and a career in a male dominated field. Of course, in such a telling, everyone’s battle is their own, so what resonates of one might be less compelling for another. If other readers find her reflections off-putting, it is worth soldiering ahead.

The latter third of the book jumps ahead some 30-40 years and from the personal to the more objective to examine where American education and industry stands now in representation and support of women in STEM. This, to me, was the far more successful portion of the book, providing solid examples, data and studies. There is much that still discourages women in the hard sciences. I wish that Pollack had been more prescriptive in how to better address these issues. Ultimately, however, it’s encouraging that progress has been made. The current crop of young women ‘who don’t give a crap’ about how they are perceived (‘if they have a problem that we are women, that’s their problem’) gives one hope for the real changes happening even now. ( )