When I was a physics major in the late 1970s, my very few fellow female students and I had high hopes that women would soon stand equal with men in science. But progress has proved slower than many of us imagined.

Though women are no longer barred from university laboratories and scientific societies, the idea that they are innately less suited to mathematical science is deeply ingrained in our cultural genes.

Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

Margaret Wertheim Quotes