Eileen Pollack Quotes

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.

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.

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.

I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.

If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.

Given that many girls are indoctrinated to believe that they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, as well as brought up to assume that girls are not innately gifted at science or math, it is not surprising that so few can see themselves as successful computer scientists.

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.

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.'

I think today women are very scared to celebrate themselves, because then they just get labeled.

If you keep telling girls they're less good at science, that will probably be self-fulfilling. But there are quite a lot of women who are good at it.

I was always good at math and science, and I never realized that that was unusual or somehow undesirable.

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 love math and science, and also, my mom is a doctor. I grew up not even having an awareness that women were not supposed to be good at science.

When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.

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.

I think parents want their kids to have a strong, competitive education. The message [of my victory] was that includes a full set of science standards and that includes evolution.

I don't agree with beauty contests. I did it one time. It wasn't embarrassing being Wonder Woman; it was embarrassing walking around on stage in a bikini. It was ridiculous, stupid, and humiliating.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

Sometimes parents squash students' interests because they are afraid of science or math. So they don't participate. You don't have to know the answers to engage kids; you just have to let them know it's important.

Playing a woman in the tech world never crossed my mind as a thing until people started bringing it up all time. People act like it's unicorns speaking English all of a sudden.

You'd be surprised how self-conscious a lot of women are. That's something I've witnessed firsthand.

I have met a lot of women who are good at math.

I think failing the qualifying or the 11-plus actually hurt me more than I realised. After I'd become a professor of physics at the Open University, I suddenly thought, 'This is a bit silly.' So I suddenly became much more open about it. But I think probably I was hurt by the failure and didn't want to talk about it.