I liked math – that was my favorite subject – and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
I think it’s important for little girls growing up, and young women, to have one in every walk of life. So from that point of view, I’m proud to be a role model!
I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.
Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It’s posing questions and coming up with a method. It’s delving in.
For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.
For whatever reason, I didn’t succumb to the stereotype that science wasn’t for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.