It comes to me then, the thing that’s been nagging at me, and I don’t at all like the realization: a lot of my failure to up the aggression factor is due to my social conditioning. Over the years, I’ve learned that it doesn’t pay to be aggressive while female. It’s unattractive to those in power—namely men, but also some of those women who have managed to make it to the top and now don’t want to jeopardize their position. It’s not just perception. It’s reality. I remember reporting a story a number of years ago about a woman who’d been offered that rare thing in academia, an assistant
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