Replies

• Krushna Mavani

  21 August 2008 | 09:06

  I read the answers by Prof. Meg Urry. I agree with her on many things she mentioned.
  I am a postdoc in physics and I am a woman. I have few observations being in physics.

  I feel that people do not believe in women in physics or atleast they keep doubting here and there when any woman postdoc/student does something very good. It is sometimes really upsetting. Specially they never easily accept or believe in a woman’s expertise in any difficult technique. I have found that if a woman gets a project or a good post, some may even ask whether it was ‘specially for woman’! When they receive the answer ‘no’, they show ‘blank’ on their face. The more you pass years in your career in physics as a woman, the more you get tired of such attitude and sometimes even feel lonely in physics. Such things really causes breaks or dropping out by a woman, I suppose. I would say, women have to be mentally stronger than men in physics in order to go though their career path.

  There are generally discouraging people or attitude or statements or comments for women in physics but women must learn to deal with or learn to ignore them. Such biased things should not influence anybody’s career or decisions.

  I wish that people start to see a physicist as a physicist first and not as a woman or a man. I would really like to see un-biased scientific society in my life.

• Matthew Brown

  21 August 2008 | 20:46

  Hi Krushna,
  Thanks for checking out the interview. Here is a brand new one that I just did with Kathy Flanagan, a NASA astrophysicist, in case you are interested.

  Here’s the Flanagan Interview

  She says “If you feel inadequate, you’re right on schedule. I struggle with that feeling every day…but I prefer to deal with it after I’m done with work for the day.”

  I think everyone feels inadequate pretty much at least a few times every day—men and women. Do you feel like men and women deal with these feelings differently, because of the way we are socialized? I think probably so.

• Krushna Mavani

  22 August 2008 | 03:29

  Different dealing with such feeling by women may not be the only reason for dropping out of them from research because dropping out does not happen so much in biology or many other fields. It also depends on how often you have to face such feeling and how different the situation may be.

  Did you notice the following?

  Women get to interact less often with other physicists in lab, meetings and conferences, being in minority. Men get more collaborations and professional friends to discuss with. Women are more often underestimated as compared to men. Also mentoring for women is comparatively not as much effective in some labs (how often have you seen a girl being serioulsly paid attention by her guide during discussions in a group). Women at higher posts are rare somehow, as a result, there are less examples for junior women researchers to follow. Some young women physicists sometimes feel confused about how can they deal with discriminating environment being the only woman in their lab.

• James stern

  07 September 2008 | 20:35

  We all need role models, someone who’s like us to make us believe that we too can have a career in a perticular field. The few women there are in science, you rarely ever hear of, my guess is when young girls are considering a career in physics, they see no example to follow. that gives them the impression that this is not a good field for them.

• Brian Derby

  07 September 2008 | 21:09

  @matthew – You might get an interesting perspective (UK based) from Prof. Helen Gleeson who is the new head of the School of Physics in the University of Manchester.

• Maxine Clarke

  08 September 2008 | 07:52

  There have been several studies on this question to try to address these questions, here are some articles in Nature reporting on them and other relatded questions.

  There are some good blogs by women in physics, one very good one is Female Science Professor but there are others (you can probably access them via Women in Science blog).

• Matthew Brown

  08 September 2008 | 16:15

  Thanks Brian…I think she may be very helpful!

  Maxine…thanks for the link in the other blog to the Christina Hoff Sommers article about Women In Science. I’ve had a chance to read a lot of her other articles, and for balance I’ll be doing an interview with her as well.

  Have you had a chance to read her other stuff, like “Feminism and Freedom” or “The Gender Equity Hammer Comes Out”? She’s got quite a lot of stuff out there that gives you a good idea about where she’s coming from RE Women In Science and why she has taken a bit of a controversial stance on the subject.

• Frank Norman

  26 September 2008 | 14:28

  Not physics but chemistry – the Chemical Heritage Foundation podcast this week is about women in chemistry .