Mary K. Gaillard: One Woman's Journey In Physics

In the face of these insults, did you ever think of giving up physics?

I was motivated all the time by loving physics and enjoying doing physics. There was a time in my life when I was being a mother, cooking dinner, washing and doing physics and not much else. But it never occurred to me to give up. It was something I loved.

You lost one job in the lab in which your husband, Jean-Marc Gaillard, worked when they discovered that you were pregnant. Yet these experiences eventually led you into theoretical physics.

The culture was very discouraging; that going into theory is something that is very hard and that you won't be able to succeed. I just assumed that I would go into experiment, but then when I got to Paris, nobody would take me in an experimental lab. And so I just took the graduate courses and did well and was accepted by the theory group, which everybody said would be impossible. I was more comfortable solving equations than I was building or trying to use apparatus.

This was in the French research establishment, but you eventually settled in at CERN in Geneva, which has a large staff running experiments on the particle colliders. What was your experience there?

At CERN it took me a while to realize that there was something wrong there too. Why is everyone else getting these offers (as staff researchers) and not me? Even after I got my doctorate, and got promoted to the top rank of director at the university, CERN never offered me a job. CERN didn't want to hire me, and they still haven’t hired a senior woman physicist as a theorist.

What raised your consciousness?

Somebody gave me a copy of Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique. That was the first thing. It was just amazing; I'd never thought about it before in those terms. I was just going along trying to do physics because I liked physics. And then it became pretty clear that I was better than a lot of the people who had been given jobs at CERN and that the reason I wasn't was because I was a woman. At some point we had a meeting at CERN to discuss women, and during the discussion someone said that women don't have any more difficulties than men, and I said, "That's not true. I could write an essay about it." And someone said, well, why don't you?

You were the first person to write a report on women at CERN. Did anything change as a result?

It certainly did not have any immediate impact. But I was told that it influenced a lot of women. The environment at CERN changed in the '90s. The incoming director-general of CERN is a woman experimentalist, Fabiola Gianotti, who was the spokesperson for the ATLAS collaboration that found the Higgs particle. She was the first woman appointed to a senior staff position at CERN, in the mid-'90s.

You describe how you left home after your husband each morning in order to attend to child care, would often return home at lunchtime, and would leave work early every day to relieve the housekeeper or take your kids to music lessons, yet you continued publishing important papers. You did it all. Is the situation the same today for women in science?

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Mary K. Gaillard: One Woman's Journey In Physics

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