In those days, the 1970s, I thought I’d be able to do anything with my life. I chose physics because it was clean and elegant. I didn’t go through that thing that often happens to teenage girls where they fall off of the cliff of self-confidence and get discouraged about science. The discouraging things happened later on.

When?

In graduate school and later, when I was a postdoc at M.I.T. Before then, there was a lot of discrimination around me, but I had rationalizations. If I didn’t see other females in advanced classes, I thought, “Maybe no other woman wants to do this.” I now think my attitude was laughable.

When I got to M.I.T., in 1984, there were very few women full professors, maybe two. I was the only female postdoc at the Center for Space Research. It was there that I first started examining the environment I had chosen. I could see that there were plenty of young women starting out in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields, though the higher one went, the fewer the women.

Was the atmosphere at M.I.T. discouraging to your own ambitions?

The guy who hired me was wonderful, but there were very few women. I remember a male assistant professor once telling me I’d have an easy time obtaining employment once I finished, because affirmative action “gave women a big advantage over more qualified men.”

In 1990, when I got my first faculty position, I saw more sexism. This was at the Space Telescope Science Institute, on the Johns Hopkins campus. At the time, around 15 percent of the Ph.D.s in astronomy went to women. Yet, there were only three other woman among 52 faculty members.

When women applied for jobs, the guys would come hear their talks. Then, they’d go, “Well, I don’t know how much of that was hers.” And then some guy gave a talk that was vague and undocumented, and they’d go, “Let’s try to hire him.”