Carl Sagan takes questions

Carl Sagan takes questions
‘Wonder and Skepticism’ CSICOP 1994 keynote
(Skeptical Inquirer)

Women, for example, who are told that they’re too stupid for science, that science isn’t for them, that science is a male thing, are turned off. And women who despite that try to go into science and then find hostility from the high school math teacher—“What are you doing in my class?”—find hostility from the 95 percent male science classes, with the kind of raucous male culture in which they find themselves excluded, those are powerful social pressures to leave science. It is amazing that there are any women in science as a result of this. I wrote a novel once, Contact, in which I tried to describe what women dedicated to science have to face, that men don’t, in order to make a career in science.