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From: linda@amdcad.UUCP (Linda Seltzer)
Newsgroups: net.women,net.sci
Subject: Re: Why are there so few [female|black] physicists?
Message-ID: <12515@amdcad.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Jul-86 21:35:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdcad.12515
Posted: Tue Jul 29 21:35:10 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Aug-86 07:33:20 EDT
References: <1970@brl-smoke.ARPA> <320@rtech.UUCP> <2064@brl-smoke.ARPA> <315@uw-vlsi.ARPA>
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Xref: watmath net.women:11687 net.sci:1396
Summary: success at Caltech

When I was in the M.S. program at Caltech I found that one group of
men had formed a clique and never talked to me or to the other
American woman in our class.  At first I thought it was male chauvinism.
Then as the year went on I got the picture.  We had take-home tests
in which we were supposed to stop and draw a line under our work after
the first hour.  I did this, and I was not exactly getting straight
A's for it.  However, these men were consistently coming in with
graphs neatly drawn with a ruler, and work which I doubt could have
been done in one hour (or alone).  I very strongly suspected that
these men's cliquishness existed in order to hide violations of the
Caltech honor system.  In fact, two other men had telephoned me during
a take-home final to ask me for information, and I had to report to the
professor that an incident of cheating had occurred (luckily I did
not have to report the names, I think the professor could tell
who it was).  In the first class I mentioned, I mentioned to the
professor that I thought some of the papers couldn't have been
completed in an hour, but he didn't take the matter seriously enough to
try to investigate it.  In classes without take-home exams, I found that
the men were not getting better grades.  

I have later run into professional situations in which, at first, I
thought I was being excluded because of being female, but later, I
found out that the group of men was engaging in unehtical, if not
dishonest, behavior.  One woman I know was accepted into such a group
after she did several things to show that she was one of them and could
act as just as badly.  Unfortunately, she believed she was being
"sophisticated" and businesslike.