The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, EileenPollack, Beacon Press, 2015. $25.95 (266 pp.). ISBN 978-0-8070-4657-9 Buy at Amazon

All science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are white-male dominated, but physics is particularly homogeneous. According to NSF, in 2013, 90% of PhD-level employed physicists were men and 74% were white. Many studies have been conducted to investigate that discrepancy, and many books have been written to explain it.

A recent addition to the literature is Eileen Pollack’s The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club. The book has three parts. The first is a memoir of Pollack’s experiences in the 1970s at a small high school in western New York State and as a physics major at Yale University. In the second, Pollack, now a successful writer, returns to her high school and college to interview many of her teachers. The last part is an informal summary of the existing literature on why women leave physics for other careers.

Pollack attended Liberty High School “in the heart of the Jewish Catskills.” There she was barred from advanced science and math classes because, according to the principal, “girls never go on in science and math.” Despite that barrier, she accomplished enough—teaching herself calculus and doing independent projects—to become a member of the fourth class of women admitted to Yale. There she decided to major in physics and became one of the first two women to do so.

Pollack’s time at Yale sounds like a nightmare; she endured eating disorders, anxiety attacks, and a constant fear of failing. She describes never feeling like she was doing well and never receiving any encouragement from professors or fellow students. Yet multiple signs indicated that she was doing remarkably well. For example, several teachers invited her to work with them on independent research projects. She graduated from Yale summa cum laude. A reader could be excused for wondering about the cause of her lack of confidence, her inability to read the signs of success, and her constant self-doubt.

During her senior year, Pollack began to take writing courses, in which her experience was totally different. Her classes included other women, and teachers and fellow students were encouraging and supportive. Based on that experience Pollack abandoned her ambition to go to graduate school in physics and become an astrophysicist. She’s not very clear on the reasons for her decision; I suspect she herself still doesn’t know. In any case, she has become a successful, award-winning writer and teaches writing at the University of Michigan.

In the second part of the book, Pollack goes back to Liberty High School and Yale and interviews her high school and college teachers. At her high school, she finds encouraging changes—the physics instructor is female and the advanced class includes three girls. But one of the math teachers tells her that “guys are more hard-wired to build things.”

At Yale, Pollack finds a similar mixture of exciting changes and more of the same. The physics department chair is Meg Urry, a woman who, in addition to having a distinguished career in astrophysics, has made significant contributions to the cause of women in physics. Pollack gets to know a group of girls who “don’t give a crap,” who take pleasure in their ability to do math and physics, and who are not crippled by self-consciousness as she was. And yet, in numerous ways, nothing has changed; many a girl still worries that “if she’s perceived to be a feminist, the boys won’t ask her out.”

In the third and last part of the book, Pollack moves beyond her own personal experience to review much of the literature and offer alternative reasons why women in physics are so rare and why they so often drop out. Her preferred explanation is that “female science majors need far more encouragement than men, even as their instructors perceive any need for praise as a sign that the student lacks the seriousness or commitment to succeed in research.”

Pollack is an engaging writer with an eye for an apt anecdote. Her personal story should convince skeptics that the culture of physics makes it difficult for women—even talented and enthusiastic women—to persist and succeed. On the back of the book, former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers is quoted as saying, “I certainly understand many aspects of the issue better for reading Pollack’s work.” I sincerely hope that others will feel the same, that they will find her discussion of being “the only woman in the room” compelling, and that they will be inspired to think differently about women in physics.

Barbara Whitten is a professor of physics at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Her physics research is in theoretical atomic, molecular, and optical physics. She also works to understand how to enhance diversity in the physics community.