Eileen Pollack Quotes

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.

I get scared when I approach teachers and tell them that I'll probably be able to attend only half the classes, .. I'm scared that they're going to drop me. In the fall of 2002 I signed up for five classes and had to drop three of them.

Girls were always my biggest distraction in school.

All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.

In order to be Miss Anybody you had to have excellent grades, and I had terrible grades because of my dyslexia.

I failed chemistry. I almost failed algebra.

School was very difficult. I was conscious of how I looked.

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.

At school, I had to work really hard to get a D in maths. And I wasn't slacking off; I actually did work quite hard.

I was like, 'I'm an academic!' I'm not at all. It turns out I'm not great at that.

I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.

I was in college for two years but I didn´t attend too much. Then I decided to drop out. I was having too many nightmares about failing in the exams.

I'm probably a little bit of an outlier for women because I don't believe that you have to self-promote to get where you're going.

In college, I was failing almost every class I was taking my freshman year. I was having difficulty in managing my time; I was just overwhelmed. Even though I knew I was smart and knew I was good enough, at that point, I doubted all of it because I struggled to handle my sport, classes and social life all at once.

We have plenty of young women coming into biology and medicine, but we don't have enough coming into physics and engineering. It's a really weird thing because, of course, all these subjects are completely neutral.

From the beginning of puberty, I did really badly in school. I was super dyslexic; I was in special ed. I had a hard time reading and writing, so I thought that my self worth was in my looks, how I presented myself, and how other people perceived me.

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.

It's not who you're going to sit beside at school that matters now: it's what resources will your school have.

I had done drama at university, but I never thought I could be a director. There were so few female directors then. I just assumed you had to be a man to be a director. I also assumed you had to be extremely authoritarian and extremely intellectual, none of which I was.

So many young black women love science, technology, engineering, and maths. But that's not the widely held image of the kind of person who likes those things.

Don't think of your gender as a handicap.

A strong, powerful, successful woman is always intimidating.

For me, as a woman in one of the less diverse fields - electrical engineering, which is what I studied in college - it was hard to persist and really build a career. Some of the things I experienced were really scary, and they weren't experiences that I wanted for my daughter.

I think a lot of women could be making great music but still don't feel like they're capable - in fact, I know that's the case for a lot of young girls who try to do music.

I am here to say that there is no drawback to being a woman in business. But if you think it's a drawback, then it probably does work against you. It's like playing poker. People will look for your weak spot, and your weak spot is only what you allow it to be.