Physics and Pantyhose Days (article)

“This is Quantum Mechanics, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

Although the exchange was 20 years in the past, I can still hear the words reverberating in my head as if it were literally yesterday. It was late January 1985, my first day of graduate school at the University of Connecticut (UCONN). After finishing my undergraduate degree in physics in three and a half years, I had plowed straight ahead to graduate school, eager to achieve my life goal of achieving a PhD and becoming an astronomy professor by the age of 27, what I considered the earliest, realistically possible, date. Because I was starting mid-year, there were a limited number of courses open to me, so it was decided that I would sit in on a quantum mechanics course taught by Dr. Ronald Mallett, my thesis advisor and the main reason I was attending UCONN.

The road leading to that moment had been a decidedly unconventional one. My earliest memory is of sitting at age three in the back seat of my family’s station wagon on an agonizingly long ride home from the Bronx Zoo, a package of plastic dinosaurs clutched in a vise-like grip in my impatient fingers. I was under strict orders to not open my precious prize until arriving home in Connecticut. Within the next few years, paleontology had become my overwhelming passion, and the dinosaur room at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University my own personal Eden, where, to the palpable embarrassment of my mother, who somehow never seemed to understand my science obsession, I would correct the tour guides with all the self-assured authority a first grader could muster. In those early days, my gender had not seemed an issue. Perhaps it was a tad

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 odd that I was more interested in reading dinosaur books or playing in my sand pile with my rather impressive collection of Tonka trucks than in dressing up Barbie and Ken, but it did not strike me as reason for concern.

With puberty came the realization that perhaps I had outgrown my desire to dig up bones for a living, but my love of science had not waned in the slightest. Understanding the universe had become my new raison d’etre, especially black holes and the Big Bang. My individualistic personality had only become more so with the passing of years, and although my peers wondered why I seemed to insist on being the “class individualist,” there was certainly no ulterior motive involved. I was who I was, had the force of personality to pull it off, and the demonstrated scholastic achievement to demand respect from my teachers, despite the “heavy metal” exterior.

Despite the warnings from my mother and stepfather that they could not afford to send me to a private university, I applied to astronomy programs at Yale, Cornell, and Wesleyan, and was summarily passed over by all three. Thus it was that I found myself at Central Connecticut University, 10 miles from home, a physics major (due to the lack of an astronomy program), and a member of the first class of the university’s Honors Program. It was at college that gender first became a noticeable issue, specifically in my physics and math classes. In my undergraduate University Physics 2 class I was one of only two women, and the male students treated us with disdain until after the first exam, when it was announced that we were the only two students to pass!

In the upper level courses, the physics majors became a tight-knit group, and although there were only three women in our midst, this was the largest number of simultaneous female physics majors the program had had up until that time. The faculty treated us all with equal respect, and although I did not have any female faculty mentors, I certainly did not feel as though I lacked guidance and encouragement. It was in college that I learned to “play the game” and to exchange “leather for lace,” as it were, and I dressed more professionally when working in the planetarium with the general public.

With graduation approaching, I had mailed out dozens of those postcards advertising graduate programs which lined the walls of our physics study room. One Sunday morning, I received a phone call at home, from a faculty member from a physics graduate program from below the Mason-Dixon Line. Before he could get a word in edgewise, I excitedly babbled on about my GPA, experience working with a planetarium and observatory, and achievement in the Honors Program. When I stopped to take a breath, he admitted that the only reason his institution was interested in me was because I was a woman and from a Northern state. After making a hasty and polite end to the phone call, I seethed in righteous anger. I had worked too hard and achieved too much to become a mere “token.” I certainly could not tolerate being pandered to because of my gender. Fortunately, about that time I attended a physics seminar given by Ron, and based on his obvious brilliance, sparkling personality, and fascinating research, I decided to attend UCONN’s graduate program in physics.

This was the road which had brought me to that first day of graduate school. Eager to make a good impression, I had decided to dress up, and thus it was that I was sitting in a classroom of approximately a dozen white males, wearing a lavender dress and heels. After a few moments of whispers and surreptitious stares, one of the young men had come over to me and, naturally assuming that this young blonde was decidedly lost, did his best to rectify the situation. I still remember watching the male students slink in their skins when Ron entered the room, beamed a broad smile at me, and we called each other by first names.

Afterwards, I recounted the exchange with Ron, and he was horrified. I was slightly amused with it all, as I had become used to being a “different face” in physics classes, and with the exception of that singular phone call from the misguided Southern professor, had taken it all in stride. As an African-American, Ron was also painfully familiar with the problems of being a minority in physics. He himself had once been confused with the janitor, and had taken to dressing impeccably to accentuate his authority role as a professor. As a short, blonde, 21-year-old woman who could easily fit into the bimbo stereotype — at least externally — I learned from Ron’s example. Although I quickly fell into my usual college garb of jeans and concert t-shirts on most days, I became the only teaching assistant in the department to dress up on days I taught lab (my “pantyhose days”). It was a natural (and necessary) way to differentiate myself from the students I taught

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(some of whom were a year or two older). As for those quantum mechanics students who had initially questioned my presence in their class, Ron decided that in order to “teach them some respect,” I would proctor all their exams for the semester.

Over the next five years, Ron and I attended a large number of conferences and seminars together, always impeccably and conservatively dressed. Many times we were the only islands of difference in a sea of similar white male faces. Upon entering a room, I would commonly see some of the middle-aged, pocket-protector-wearing physicists nearly sprain their necks trying to get a look at Ron and me, something I would recount later as similar to the head-spinning scene in The Exorcist. At a conference in New York City, Ron and I were introduced by name (but not titles) to an elderly Nobel Prize winning physicist, and the man stared at me with a puzzled look, apparently trying to ascertain whether I was Ron’s secretary, wife, or student until I introduced myself further. At another conference in Maryland, I patiently waited my turn with a small group of people at the end of a question and answer period held by another famous physicist (who incidentally now holds a Nobel Prize). After one particularly long-winded exchange, the speaker turned and began gathering his things, apparently ready to leave. Not being a shrinking violet, I piped up with, “Excuse me.” He turned and looked at me with a quizzical expression and then said, apologetically, “Sorry, I thought you were with him,” referring to the object of his last conversation. In a rare display of my pent-up disgust at the obviously ingrained stereotypes I had found in the professional circles of physics, I replied non-too-gently, “No, I’m a graduate student, and I have a technical question for you….”

In an open display of the power of karma, I was offered two teaching positions in astronomy in 1989, a year before I finished my dissertation, thus fulfilling my life goal. The position I took, without hesitation, was at my alma mater, Central Connecticut State University. At 41, I have been a full professor for two years, direct the Honors Program in which I was once a student, look younger than my age, and when it is not one of my “pantyhose days” am sometimes still mistaken for a student. I am widely known as an excellent and exuberant teacher, and a dedicated advisor and mentor to all my students, regardless of gender. I find great satisfaction in their achievements. My individualistic streak has certainly waxed and waned over the years since college but has never disappeared. The tattoos collected since my mid-30s are in places which can be easily covered when the occasion dictates, but the eyebrow piercing remains my most obvious sign of overt rebellion against “the Establishment.” Childish, perhaps, but I have never felt the need to explain my personal choices to those who didn’t understand.

In March 2004 I presented a talk at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Montreal. It had been 10 years since my last attendance at that perennially huge conference, but it saddened me to see how little had changed. The faces were predominantly middle-aged, male, and “pale”; the attitudes aloof; and I still garnered considerable stares as I threaded my way through the crowded halls. In a reception held by the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, the only way to know it was the 2004 meeting rather than the 1994 one was the slight change in fashions. The same concerns and outright complaints were heard as were voiced a decade before. Although the number of women in attendance (especially among the graduate students and post-docs) was statistically higher, it did not appear to be significantly so.

Women have yet to reach a critical mass in physics when we can effectively bring about a change of attitude. We are still the “other.” Although I have made a successful and satisfying career out of being an individualistic personality, as I looked around that room in Montreal, I could not help but wonder how many of those young, enthusiastic faces would still remain in the field to return to the 2014 meeting of the APS. How many of them had the single-minded, internal driving force which had sustained me in my career? Unless significant changes are made in the culture of physics, my fear is the answer will be “very few.”

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