Companies like I.B.M. have offered women scholarships to study engineering for years and women engineers routinely get higher starting salaries than men.

Women's sports is still in its infancy. The beginning of women's sports in the United States started in 1972 with the passage of Title 9 for girls to finally get athletic scholarships.

My mom was on welfare and the occasional food stamp but I have never participated in any of those governmental programs even the ones that kind of work like education scholarships and whatever and I managed to do just fine.

I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it's too late by college.

I was really bright as a kid and tested well and it was clear that I was going to get scholarships to any schools I wanted. My dad always said I could be an engineer at that time it was the elite of society: steady job working in science which was then the answer to every problem we had. It was kind of a mandate. Kind of a dream he had for me.