At one point in my third year of my postdoc I went out to lunch with a nice older male professor in my department, and three other postdocs: a female from my department, and two visiting males, one of them from the institution where I did my undergraduate degree. The topic of the skewed male-to-female ratio at my undergrad institution came up. At some point in the discussion the professor asked "but what was there for the girls to study there?" and after a brief pause (while the rest of us were too shocked to say anything) he added "oh, I guess they could study biology..." I added that some of us studied physics.

My PhD supervisor (who is sadly deceased) used to tell us the following story: she arrived at her first physics class in university, and sat at the front. The professor arrived and looked around, spotting her in the front. He said to her "honey, I think you're in the wrong class. This is physics". She nodded and said "yes, I know". She went on to have a successful career in astronomy, which she pursued with inspiring enthusiasm and energy.

Aside from the usual "oh, females have it easy these days because of positive discrimination" or "if I was a female I would sleep my way up" comments, the one that really disturbed me was when a male colleague and I were discussing the problem that females have when trying to have children and attain tenured positions at the same time. I mentioned that a few universities have adopted family-friendly policies towards tenure-track positions, allowing women extra time during the tenure-track stage for maternity leave and child caring. My colleague disagreed with this idea and his argument was: "think of the analogy of a crippled race horse. If the race horse's best years are behind it, and it probably won't get back to its previous form, would you buy it?". I was so appalled I didn't know what to say.

Getting into and staying in astrophysics has been a real struggle and in the main, it's due to the unbalanced male to female ratio, which makes a certain fraction of the community think they can behave in an inappropriate way. I was sexually harrassed during my PhD and when I wouldn't reciprocate advances, my advisor said I was too stupid to do a PhD and "should be frog marched" out of the university. I managed to replace this advisor, but was a pariah in my own institution for years afterwards. I managed to get a postdoc at an Ivy League institution, only to be told by my boss that because I took 3 years to do a PhD and he had taken 7 years, that my PhD was clearly inferior to his, being abbreviated and that as long as he was around, he would make sure I never got another job in astrophysics again. He said when I applied for jobs, he didn't have to say anything bad to prospective employers, he'd just say he wouldn't comment and that would damn me. And it did. I applied for upwards of 400 jobs and didn't get one. He has really damaged my professional standing and made it very difficult to get tenure. After the postdoc debacle, I obtained a temporary half time position at a liberal arts college and this gave me breathing room to find a fellowship elsewhere. I did this and the boss I had decided to leave the country, taking my last year of funding with him to pay his own travel expenses and help his favorite postdoc get paid. I diversified into another field, obtaining NASA grants to work in it, only to find the astronomer in charge of my paperwork was stealing my ideas, undermining me to colleagues and taking my grant money without my knowledge to fund conferences he arranged on other subjects. This sort of behavior suggests something is deeply aberrant with the psyche of many of the people in charge in this field. I have never understood it, I doubt I ever will, but the mentality is so small and petty that I can't see how big discoveries are going to be made with such tiny minds.

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