Fox Keller Anomaly

In Evelyn Fox Keller’s article “The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics”, she describes her struggles as a physics graduate student at Harvard in 1957 (Fox Keller, 2001, p. 9). Throughout her story, she details her at-odds situation with the physics department, her male peers, her advisor, and the two other female graduate students in the physics department. She starts off by being rejected by Cal Tech and the wildly successful professor under which she wanted to study, followed by being persuaded by her would-be advisor to attend Harvard for her graduate studies (Fox Keller, p. 9). During her first year, Fox Keller was unable to take her preferred class, despite being told before she arrived that all of her academic hopes and dreams could be made

true (Fox Keller, p. 10). Nevertheless, she audited it anyway. She was unable to befriend her peers, believing that she could only be involved with people that were intellectually stimulating (Fox Keller, p. 13).
Fox Keller considered herself to be an anomaly, despite the fact that she was not the only female physics student, and intellectually equal with her peers, even surpassing them (Fox Keller, p.

14). The anomaly part comes from the fact that she socially alienated her peers, and did not make an effort to fit in with the social norms of being a graduate student, including positively interacting with her department. So in a sense, Fox Keller herself was to blame for making herself an anomaly. By positioning herself as the outsider (and therefore anomaly) she was unable to fulfill the typical graduate student role of the intellectual social butterfly. Through her alienation, she found herself unable to motivate herself to continue with her physics graduate work, and eventually focused her studies on molecular biology, effectively removing herself from the male-dominated physics sphere (Fox Keller, p. 15). Prior to commencing her graduate studies, Fox Keller had idealistic goals for her academic future (Fox Keller, p. 9). When she did not reach those lofty goals, she failed to differentiate herself from her peers who did not achieve success themselves, despite being handicapped by her gender (Fox Keller, p. 16). Inevitably, she became the anomaly of her

gender.
By Fox Keller’s description, to be an anomaly of a woman in physics is to be intellectually, socially, academically and physically isolated from your peers. By being an anomaly, you face the usual pressures that a graduate student faces, but with the added kick of doing it while solitary. This is a prime example of the leaky pipeline when a woman has no support due to isolation, despite whether it is self-inflicted not. Keller Fox does admit that women can and do transcend the concept of the leaky pipeline, however it takes an immense amount of determination and strength that she did not possess at that time (Fox Keller, p. 16).
While Fox Keller’s experiences happened almost half a century ago, it’s important to recognize that women in STEM fields do still encounter the same issues today, and continue to be anomalies.