“For starters, he said, “Look around at this table,” motioning to the five Yale Undergraduate women. “I am sitting at a table eating pizza with all these smart woman, and it never occurred to them to do science.” They were all in the humanities. Why? I asked Stern. There were a variety of reasons, and they applied to both young woman and men in America today, he said. To begin with “People want to do stuff that is fun. But there is no fun in algebra or memorizing the multiplication tables. But [those fundamentals] eventually become freshman chemistry. And that’s boring too. You can’t say anything good about it. So it’s not until you get to the senior level of advanced classes that you can start to have fun. But you need to have acquired all these fundamentals beforehand . . and getting those fundamentals is not fun . . The culture now is geared toward having fun” ”
