Eileen Pollack Quotes

We still raise girls to look to other people for assurance they are attractive and smart, while boys are raised to determine their own value. Many girls are still made to feel it's not feminine to be good at science or math.

Negative gender stereotypes related to girls' education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics begin as early as primary school and have the devastating effect of making them doubt their own potential.

If you're a white male growing up in this society, you're constantly receiving encouragement to go on in science in the form of all the images that you're receiving.

Success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture - a culture that teaches girls math isn't cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics.

For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

When I was in 7th grade, we were all given an exam. It was science and math, and the boys who did well were skipped ahead so that when they got to be juniors or seniors in high school they would be able to go to the local community college and take calculus and physics there. And I wasn't skipped ahead.

I think as soon as you're a woman, or any minority doing something, you automatically become a representative for it, and I think a lot of brilliant women's interviews are being wasted on talking about what it's like being a woman.

The important thing is when you look at areas like physics and you realise that only one in five A-level students is a girl. We know it isn't about aptitude.

You sit men and women down and give them a maths test, and they will do fairly equally. Then you set up the same test, but with different people, and make them tick a box to say whether they are a man or a woman, and the women do significantly worse in the maths test than they did previously in a group set.

When parents ask why there are still so few girls in advanced science and math classes in high school, I tell them, because girls still need way more encouragement than boys to take those courses.

As a girlchild in the early-to-mid 1980s, I wasn't expected to like math. So I stopped liking math. As a young woman, I wasn't expected to have high self-esteem.

Males and females can both have a fixed mindset about math and science, but it hurts girls more because they are on the negative end of the stereotype.

Why were the little girls all frightened To be just what they are The boys were told to ask themselves How high how far The girls were told to reach the shelves While the boys were reaching stars That's why little girls were frightened To be just what they are.

When girls are asking themselves 'Who am I?' for the first time and they hear all this bad PR about math, they think, 'Well, whoever I am, I'm not somebody who likes math.'

The problem is with men. I know I shouldn't say this, but they've shrouded and hidden women to hide their incompetence.

An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.

If I'm teaching girls that do love to make cookies and do love fashion - that they can use math as a part of that - you think that's me saying, come on girls you belong in the kitchen, you belong shopping? Or, do you think it's me showing them how math is part of all their life, even the part they thought it had nothing to do with?

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

Female inferiority is internalised by us. Women need a lot more confidence.

Women have made tons of progress. But we still have a small percentage of the top jobs in any industry, in any nation in the world. I think that's partly because from a very young age, we encourage our boys to lead and we call our girls bossy.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

I had a great deal of confidence when I graduated from Berkeley. I had almost none when I was at Princeton. After a while, when people tell you you can't do something because you're a woman, you begin to believe maybe they're right.

We don't live in a society that has genuine equality, and every woman we know has experienced that.

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.