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Mission Possible
Famed Female Astronauts Helping Gifted Girls Reach for the Stars By Kim Byrum Skinner
to make noise. The girl's told to be quiet and sit down and settle. He's allowed to be a nuisance because he's expected to go out and conquer the world. You're not supposed to be a nuisance."
Ride agrees. "If teachers, for example, just take the time to monitor their own responses in a classroom, they may be surprised at what they find," she says. "I've had lots of women come up to me and say, 'My gosh! I absolutely couldn't believe it, but when I watched myself, yeah, I was doing it.'"
Sullivan recalls a friend, now a Ph.D. college researcher, whose freshman class at MIT was evenly split 50-50, male-female. That same class at graduation? Just 10 percent female.
"They did this little investigation within their peer group [and found that] just one harsh, critical comment from a professor on a project or in a lab something B-grade, something less than perfect they took as a signal: 'Well, you know. You probably can't really be good enough at this, anyway. Yeah, that's right. You shouldn't be here. You should change,'" Sullivan says. "It's as if they felt like impostors. They'd gotten there through 'luck' or 'happenstance' or other things. They didn't think they really deserved it.
"Do that to a guy and it's, 'You're not running me out of here! I'm doing this,'" she says. "It's a complete opposite reaction."
Researchers describe such a mass exodus as the Impostor Effect. "Women who reach unusual and advanced places, there's still that deep, deep core conditioning that leads even them to presume, when questioned or criticized, that there must be some validity in that challenge or criticism," says Sullivan. "It can't be that you're absolutely, positively deserving and properly there and this is bull****. You've been 'discovered' and you'd better bail."