'Not Just For the Boys' by Athene Donald
Athene Donald tells us something we already know about: the low numbers of women in science. The list of female achievers in the field is short, not from any inherent disability but from longstanding (still standing?) chauvinist assumptions about women. Institutional barriers have been removed, but “the speed of this progress is slow, far too slow,” she writes. Donald, a physics professor emerita at Cambridge, experienced greater prejudice as she came up than women are likely to face today, and yet the need to expand the ranks of working scientists (and public understanding) has never been greater in a world facing climate catastrophe, the likely outbreak of new pandemics and other problems yet to be foreseen.
