Women in science: a daughter’s perspective

Abstract

In the first grade, in one of my first classes, my teacher read us a story about a scientist. To my utter shock, the scientist was a man. After the story, I asked the teacher, ‘can men be scientists?’ She looked at me, bewildered, and replied: ‘of course, anyone can be a scientist.’ It was not until later that my teacher learned that my mother is a scientist, and the only scientists I had ever met were women, like me.

Keywords:

• Development
• gene-environment interplay
• women in science
• persistence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).