When I was young, my grandmother used to say to me while we looked at the stars on a clear night, "When you look at the stars, try to think what's on the other side, what's beyond them." By the time I was 9 years old, men had already walked on the moon, and I decided that I wanted to be an astronaut. But I soon discovered that bad eyesight wouldn't get me very far in that profession so I turned my attention towards physics and learning about space. Today, I don't have any grand experiences of awe or mystery when I look up at the stars but, rather, a sense of satisfaction. I'm really excited about what I know about those distant pinpoints of light, and always find myself looking up at the night sky whenever I get a chance. During the daytime, I think about physics when I do astronomy, but outside, I thoroughly enjoy the feeling of knowing something about, say, the Orion Nebula.
I think I was rather unusual as a young girl. When my parents had guests, I preferred listening to the conversations that the men had, rather than the women. I wanted to go camping and backpacking with the Boy Scouts, not the dull, indoor activities that my Brownie troop did. In high school during the early '70s, I was the only girl in my prep school taking advanced placement physics. Physics was different than other subjects. It was objective, and I was excited to see that you could use mathematical formulae to make predictions about how things were going to turn out before you observed them. It wasn't like english whose rules of grammar I could never master. Physics made the world around me seem understandable for the first time in my life. Curiously, I hated science fiction. I never bothered with UFO's or ESP because it was all hogwash so far as I was concerned. ESP would be cool if it were real, but I can't take the evidence that some people seem to have for it as being valid.
I have, on occasion, observed things that might be considered subtle sexism such as faculty members leering at me or students telling demeaning jokes. This type of behavior is the most difficult to eradicate because objection to it is often deemed "being too sensitive". In general though, I've never had any barriers to overcome just because I'm a woman. Science is a good field because scientists are to a lesser degree than the rest of society concerned with a person's sex. The American Institute of Physics reports that 20% of physical science graduate students are now women. When I began graduate school, it was only 5%. I hope that this 'womanizing' of the profession helps to make for a more equitable and comfortable working environment for us all.