Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes

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.

Even before Sputnik, scientists and policy makers worried that not enough Americans were studying science.

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.

If we want to get beyond this whole I'm-cool-because-I-care-about-women thing, what we really need to do is we have to start encouraging women to get engineering degrees in college.

At Swarthmore, the Dean of Women was very opposed to women going into science or engineering - so opposed that if she couldn't talk a girl out of it, she just never had anything more to do with her for the four years she was there.

Inner city education must change. Our responsibility is not merely to provide access to knowledge; we must produce educated people.

Very few women are creative. I would not send a daughter of mine to study physics.

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.

To make computer science more attractive to women, we might help young women change how they think about themselves and what's expected of them. But we might also diversify the images of scientists they see in the media, along with the decor in the classrooms and offices in which they might want to study or work.

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.

I'm very, very focused on not only creating world class schools at scale, but changing the public policy in this country that every day prevents children from getting access to the American dream.

Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

Women are very special. I think it's a very special time because a lot of things are coming out and I think that's good for our society and I think it is very, very good for women. And I'm very happy a lot of these things are coming out. And I am very happy - I'm very happy it's being exposed.

We're viewed as equals - but we're still not there yet. The challenge for our girls, I think, is dealing with that resistance. How can we lift and defuse it, how do we make it so our equality is not so threatening? Our girls are going to have to contend with that. I contend with it right now in every realm I operate in.

Why are women still this underclass? If we all banded together...

society, while willing to make room for women, is not willing to make changes for them.

The only thing the women were after was just the chance to help the world on. But some men were so dreadfully afraid of them that they refused to understand, and talked about 'shrieking sisterhoods' and 'disappointed spinsters' and rubbish of that sort.

A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah.

Whether we regard the Women's Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a movement that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.

The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.

In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

I do think that more people are feminists than they realize.

The man's world must become a man's and a woman's world. Why are we afraid?

Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.