1. You are not an ambassador for all women when you answer a question in class.

I was the only girl in my physics class during sixth form, and I was scared the entire time.



I was scared I’d get the answer wrong, and I was scared that everyone would judge me for it. I was scared of asking a question that made everyone think I didn’t understand the class. But probably most of all, I was scared everyone would think that anything I did get wrong was because I was a girl, and that it would tarnish their good opinion of girls and our ability to do physics forever. That was a lot of responsibility for a 17-year-old to bear, hence the anxiety.

I’m not sure how much attention everyone else paid to the fact that I was female and there was only one of me, but it was something that niggled away at the back of my mind that entire year.

Ten years on, I actually have no memory of ever speaking in that class – though my teacher wasn’t terrible enough to let someone get away with not speaking for two years, so I figure that I must have spoken at least once. At this point I can only assume that my brain has taken it upon itself to block out the experience entirely, for my own good.

2. You shouldn’t confuse confidence and intelligence.

It wasn’t until years later, after I finished my physics A-level and then my physics degree, that I realised something very important about the world: Everyone is bullshitting all of the time.

I know that some people are very clever and can transform matrices and solve equations and switch in and out of Dirac notation with ease. But nobody knows the answer to everything, all of the time, with total certainty. And yet, from where I was sitting, everyone else in the class was able to answer questions with complete confidence. So for years, I believed that all those boys in my A-level physics class, and then my degree – by which time I was no longer the only girl, although we were still a minority – genuinely knew the answer to everything.

What amazed me most was when, on more than one occasion during class, someone (usually, if not always, a boy) actually corrected the teacher. I could have had a textbook open in front of me that confirmed a teacher was wrong, and I still wouldn’t have pointed it out. I wouldn’t even have raised it in an email, or written an anonymous note and slid it under their office door before running away.

Looking back, I think the boys were just less scared of failing than I was. I’d confused their confidence with how clever they were. They didn’t have the weight of half the world on their shoulders, they didn’t have to work harder than everyone else just to be thought of as half as good, and so they were less bothered about messing up in public.

The boys in my class could confidently get the answer wrong, and then just brush it off, safe in the knowledge that their reputation was still intact and they hadn’t brought anyone else down with them. Which is a nice way to live, but one that, years later, I’ve never quite been able to master.