Donna Riley spent a lot of her early academic career being “the only woman in the room.”

Her chosen field was chemical engineering, and with no female professors and few female students, Riley learned that “only is lonely.”

Her response was unusually academic: She did a deep dive into the social sciences to understand her feelings of isolation.

“I wanted to understand what I was experiencing in terms of (what) I felt as a woman in engineering,” Riley says. “So I developed an analysis of the situation. I learned I wasn’t alone. I learned that these are patterns and phenomena in male-dominated fields that women experience. So because of that, I became a student of it.”

Read more at: https://www.abqjournal.com/one-on-one-being-the-only-woman-in-the-room-in-a-top-field/article_b5034096-0edb-11ee-bdfb-97d4119138d6.html