As a graduate student at Harvard University in the late 1950s, one of three women among 100 students, Evelyn Fox Keller encountered nothing but scepticism among her fellow students and professors that she might “make it” as a theoretical physicist. She later wrote about how “painful and unsettling” it was to meet “unmitigated provocation, insult and denial” as she pursued her PhD.
These early experiences drove her to become a pioneer in studying the interplay of gender and science, and to challenge the very notion of science as a purely objective pursuit. Interviewed by the Boston Globe in 1986, she said: “When there are more women in science, everybody will be free to do a different kind of science.”
