Two scientific worlds, one male, the other female, emerge from the faculty interviews. These dualities were expressed in the key moments of an academic science career such as setting up a lab and preparing for the tenure decision. The question of how to act as an advisor to female graduate students was also fraught with tension. With respect to these various issues, the female experience in academic science was typically far more difficult in contrast to the well-connected male. Lacking a satisfactory conduit for information, a junior faculty woman reported that she and her peers would ‘sit and discuss for hours and hours what to do, then we walk away not knowing if we should do it because we are too young. We are brand new in this department and we don't know if that is the way to do it.’. Even having peers did not necessarily help, for they were equally clueless.

For others, the separate and unequal experience was one of invisibility and denied professional identity. A new woman faculty member may be mistaken for a secretary, student, or technician by hostile older men, or considered inauthentic: ‘I really don't know what they think [about me] because I interact with them so rarely. I mean I'm the only woman among 42 faculty members, so they don't know what to make of me, period. Most of the faculty here are used to treating women as wives and secretaries, or both.’