Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!mcnc!ecsvax!sethg@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
From: sethg@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Seth Gordon)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Countering discrimination your children will face
Message-ID: <5416@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Date: 25 Sep 88 21:06:17 GMT
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pedersen%math.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU in <5396@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>:

`I was supported by my parents and teachers too [in being a math major].
`The general public is a different story....
`
`	"Oh, my, math, that's unusual for a girl to do"
`	"You must be really bright"
`	"You don't look like a math nerd (you're really pretty)"
`	"You don't act like a math nerd (you have social skills)"

I have a tale of a computer science major I know.  She wanted to do
computer science all her life, but formally declared it in her *senior*
year of MIT (if memory serves; normally, you declare your major at the
end of your freshman year).

Incoming women at MIT, she says, are told *explicitly* what majors Women
Should Not Take.  Engineering, except perhaps civil engineering, is
verboten.  And *computer science* -- heaven and Phyllis Schadfly forbid!

I have heard one male student "joke": "Women at MIT are actually men who
worked their balls off getting in here."  And then, of course, the
director of MIT's Women's Studies Program was a professor for fifteen
years before getting tenure... but that's another story.

-- 
* L'shana tovah... forgive me my net.sins
: Seth Gordon / MIT Brnch., PO Box 53, Cambridge, MA 02139
: bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!sethg / standard disclaimer