“There’s just something so intrinsically irritating about it,” she says.

But many in the academy say that the very way science is taught and practiced—at Harvard and elsewhere—is shutting women out of the field. They point to the cutthroat competition and a heavy focus on the theoretical in teaching.

Such a view is supported by Research Associate in Physics Gerhard Sonnert, a sociologist who published a 1995 book based on his extensive study on the factors keeping women out of the natural sciences.

He says that great strides have been made to level the playing field for women in the sciences, but the bulk of that work was focused on removing structural barriers. And now the hardest part—eliminating the obstacles caused by the culture and environment of the sciences—remains, he adds.

“Initial changes can be rapid. Now we have to deal with more subtle things—and those are harder to deal with because they cannot be legislated,” Sonnert says.

Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi ’67-’68 says he first noticed a problem with the way Harvard taught science in the early 1980s.

When he looked at the results of the annual senior survey for the first time, he says he noticed that, on average, women concentrating in physics were doing a whole grade better in their non-science classes than in their science classes.

He broke all of the results down by gender—and what he found surprised him.

“I discovered that women physics majors hated it,” Georgi says. “That struck me as absolutely intolerable because these were the women that stuck with it and hated it. I wanted to understand this.”

Georgi says he began talking to female physics concentrators and came to believe the difficulty they were having was related to a lack of confidence and a different style of communication.

“[Women] communicate very differently about physics than men,” Georgi says. “Women are typically less aggressive than men are in communicating…Unless you’re willing to tell your adviser he’s an idiot, you’re not going to do well.”

Georgi began a tradition of weekly Wednesday night physics study group sessions to give women more confidence in themselves and show his students how to behave as colleagues.

“There are times when you’re doing a problem set in a course where you have to keep going even though you don’t know what you’re doing and that’s psychologically easier for men,” Georgi says.

Eleanore L. Chadderdon ’03 says while the physics study groups are for both men and women, they especially help female concentrators build confidence.

“I’ve heard that if a woman cannot solve a problem she might think, ‘I’m just too dumb to do this,’ whereas a guy might think this problem is wrong,” Chadderdon says. “If you meet with other people…you realize the problem set is hard and it’s not you.”