How to Become a Scientist — High School Years 99 



expensive education to prepare themselves for a life of such 

 doubtful blessings. 



If all this is true for boys, it is much more so for girls. 

 The cultural pressures both in and out of the home make 

 it very rare for a girl to emerge from adolescence deter- 

 mined on a career in science. School teaching, especially 

 at the lower levels, may be all right, and the arts which 

 almost require that some of their practitioners be women, 

 like acting and dancing, are allowable. Anything requiring 

 intense intellectual effort is out of the question. This atti- 

 tude is all the more mystifying since there is every reason 

 to suppose that girls are just as bright as boys. Indeed, as 

 a group they routinely get better marks than boys do. 

 Furthermore, the very few who have survived the cultural 

 pressures and gone on into scientific careers have done 

 very well. 



We said a little earlier that existing inequalities in this 

 country may no longer be attributed primarily to legal 

 restraints or even to differential distribution of wealth, but 

 must be traced to more subtle cultural factors. No more 

 convincing evidence need be cited than the continued low 

 status of women in the intellectual world. They are now 

 legally fully equal to men; they have roughly the same 

 access to scholarships and student jobs; but they fail to 

 enter intellectual careers in anything except token numbers. 

 The most reasonable explanation for this failure seems to 

 be the low value they have learned to put on intellectual 

 achievement in comparison with other attributes presumed 

 to make them better wives and mothers. 



Many recent studies have shown that a modern nation 

 like the United States must recruit sharply increased num- 

 bers of its best minds into intellectual work if it is to 

 survive. Fewer than half of the upper 25 percent of all 



