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The reading on Tobias definitely tied together a lot of what we have been talking about in class. I was able to reflect, like Flora, on past readings that we have done, and it is clear to me that a particular theme keeps popping up over and over again. It seems that the "culture of competition" that exists within the sciences acts as a major deterrent to many people considering entry into the scientific world, especially women. This came up in Mary Thom's article about academia and graduate school (pp. 81), Sonnert & Holton's article on men and women's career patterns in the sciences (pp. 68), Sharon Traweek's article about her anthropological study on high-energy physics (pp. 90), and certainly it appears all over the Tobias article we just read. According to Tobias, hard sciences have a cold, impersonal nature and the focus of scientific study “emphasiz[es] extrinsic rewards like getting good grades, and objective goals like getting into graduate and medical school” rather than “love for one’s subject and intrinsic motivation in one’s work” (pp. 74). At an institution like Bryn Mawr, which is small and places special focus on women achieving in math and science, it is hard to imagine this scenario, but I do believe that this is felt at many institutions and that this sentiment may be a large culprit in reducing the number of women (and minorities) in fields like physics and engineering. In fact, if I hadn’t gone to Bryn Mawr, I can’t say that this would not have deterred me from science. One of the main motivating factors in choosing Bryn Mawr was the honor code and the fact that people actually do not talk about grades. Competing with myself is hard enough. Sonnert and Holten describe stylistic differences between men and women in physics, and one of those differences is “a niche approach” in which women “creat[ed] their own area of research expertise. One respondent observed that ‘women may shy away from very competitive projects more than their male counterparts.’” I find this particularly interesting, having researched the life of Vera Cooper Rubin, a female astronomer, for our class salon. She describes her incentive to study dark matter in this manner – she wanted to do it because no one else was working on it. She didn’t like working on problems to which everyone else was racing for an answer. A more cooperative environment may be more conducive not just to women, but to the type of people that find enjoyment or contentment in learning and experimenting for the sake of discovering without the anxiety of going it completely alone or failing to receive credit or fame… Traweek speaks of an anxiety about time that exists in high energy physics field… Perhaps this is part of what generates the competitive culture found in physics (and in the sciences overall)…