The author's experience strongly echoes my mother's experience getting a chemistry masters in the 1960s. One of her professors outright told her at the beginning of the semester that she would not do well in the sciences because she was a woman. That semester she actually tutored a group of men who were in the class, and all of those men received higher grades than her (she got a C-). These men told my mother they would help her fight the professor to get the grade she deserved, but she let it go.

A few years later, my mother met other women who had the same professor and had the same stories to tell about him. One of those women told my mother, "Because no one is fighting him, he thinks he can just keep doing it." For the next forty years, my mother never passed up another fight, excelled in the sciences, and is a respected professor of nursing today in her 70s giving talks around the globe.

When I attended the same university in the 90s, I told some friends about my mother's experience. They laughed and said it couldn't be the same guy, but their professor of chemistry announced on the first day that women were inherently incapable of doing well in his class. I'm thankful that today such a statement would get recorded, go viral online, and force dinosaurs like that into early retirement.