Book Review: A Singularly Unfeminine Profession—One Woman’s Journey in Physics

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I recently came across an obituary in the New York Times for Mary Kay Gaillard, an internationally renowned expert in theoretical physics. Known to many as simply “Mary K”, Dr. Gaillard, who died on May 23, 2025, at the age of 86, was the first woman hired as a professor by the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. Much of her groundbreaking work had occurred prior to arriving at Berkeley during a long engagement at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, located outside Geneva, Switzerland.
In 2015, Professor Gaillard published a memoir titled A Singularly Unfeminine Profession—One Woman’s Journey in Physics. STRUCTURE runs a series called Structural Influencers focused on professionals who we think can serve as role models for others. In that vein, I highly recommend Dr. Gaillard’s book as a look into a fascinating life which ought to be an inspiration to others pursuing a career in any academic or STEM field, particularly one considered historically male-dominated.

Not to bring back memories of college physics classes, mostly best long forgotten, Dr. Gaillard’s academic credits include significant contributions to the Standard Model of particle physics particularly the correct predictions of the masses of the charmed and bottom quarks, two of the six quarks that make up all matter. Decades ago, Gaillard produced the roadmap that theoretical physicists Peter Higgs and François Englert would later use to find the Higgs particle in 2012, which earned them, but not Professor Gaillard, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The book is a fascinating weaved discussion of Gaillard’s personal academic and professional career alongside a high-level look into theoretical particle physics and the Standard Model. Her story should be an inspiration for all, particularly for women in or considering a career in STEM fields. She knew she wanted to be a physicist from a young age and she dogged pursued her dreams, from childhood in New Jersey and Ohio, to a small college in Virginia, to graduate work at Columbia in New York City and summers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, to a PhD at the University of Paris at Orsay, to CERN, to Fermilab outside Chicago and eventually to the Berkeley campus and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In the book’s preface she notes that “the evolution of the Standard Model is described through the lens of my own work, in a language intended for a lay audience.” Readers will soon see that Gaillard’s “dumbed down” version of particle physics is still well beyond the reach of most people (including me), although if nothing else the reader will learn that protons, neutrons and electrons are made up of a large number of even smaller particles (quarks) that only theory and experimentation via high energy colliders can detect.

Every reader will have their own takeaways, but these should be of special interest to structural engineers, particularly those who face similar obstacles as Gaillard in the physics world:

Gaillard had a good, although not wealthy, upbringing where she was involved in many activities, beyond regular school studies. She constantly evaluated what she liked and didn’t like, what she was good at and what she wasn’t, and through it all kept her eye on physics, deciding that physics was “her thing,” despite a high school classmate calling physics a singularly “unfeminine” profession.
She was obviously gifted in mathematics, but due to limited family finances, attended a college with a very limited physics curricula because the school offered her the largest scholarship. But that didn’t stop her. Through her mentors, she became involved in as many experiences as possible to make up for her deficit in formal undergraduate physics education which through persistence led to her acceptance at Columbia for graduate work and all that followed.
A recurring theme of importance to structural engineers is a personal dedication to life-long learning and proactively finding and engaging with mentors who can provide guidance and open doors to valuable opportunities.

Gaillard’s personal stories were the most engaging parts of the book. She married young, divorced, and then remarried. Her husbands were distinguished physicists too. She had three children in relatively quick succession and was responsible for more than her fair share of cooking, cleaning, and childrearing. She arrived at work late and left early to pick up the kids. She traveled a lot.

She experienced many of the same challenges that working parents today face while engaging with and working alongside the most highly regarded physicists in the world. A person with less dedication could easily have given up, but she obviously had a special drive and made it all work, as unfair as we might judge her circumstances today. She arrived in Berkeley in the early 1980s looking for greener pastures, only to find home mortgage rates were 12% (we think 7% is high today) and house prices were astronomically high compared to France. She acknowledged that lifestyle adjustments had to be made because she was finally where she had always dreamed of being.

Gaillard faced tremendous gender discrimination and overt sexual harassment at a time when there were no obvious legal remedies other than responding with equal or greater toughness and self-determination. In her time at CERN, she drew a meager wage compared to her equal male counterparts, and it took her years to move, literally, up the height of the building, from an office in the basement to one in the upper stories. She had to take to wearing pants to avoid being mistaken as being one of the female secretaries who at the time all wore skirts.

I think it is fair to say that workplace conditions are far different today. Some might disagree. But I think we can all agree that a person shouldn’t have to battle gender discrimination because it shouldn’t exist anymore. But I am not so sure this is the case. Most people don’t overtly discriminate, but first impressions still matter, particularly for people who don’t fit the bill of a stereotypical structural engineer (white, male, a few gray hairs, etc.). Doing it better and more professionally than the next person is still an important survival mechanism, at both a personal level and in corporate marketing and sales. Survival is forever!

You might ask why a structural engineer should bother reading a memoir written by a physicist. The reasons are many, but the most important is to see how others, like ourselves, dealt with and overcame obstacles far larger than we will probably experience in our own careers. We aren’t the first ones to have family matters get in the way of a well-planned career, or to see a promotion go to someone we judge as less deserving than ourselves, or being assigned to the same kinds of projects that offer little chances for advancement. Reading an interesting story that offers free mentorship and ideas on survival in tough situations is a good investment of your time. You will also learn about the spin of quarks. ■