Why are there so few women in physics?
Matthew Brown
Thursday, 14 August 2008 18:50 UTC
I just interviewed Professor Meg Urry in my column (she’s written quite a lot about gender equality in science), and physics appears to be strange in that there are so few women in this field of science (but quite a lot in other equally demanding fields!). What’s going on?
I highly recommend listening to the audio of the interview…she’s amazing and answers a lot of great questions…but left me still wondering why women are not very well represented in certain fields of science.
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Replies
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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.
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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.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.
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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.
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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.
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@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.
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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).
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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.
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Not physics but chemistry – the Chemical Heritage Foundation podcast this week is about women in chemistry .
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The number of women in various fields of physics depends on geography and type. By “type” I do not mean what immediately came to your mind, but rather the type of physics, a subject that comes in “many flavours”. In my career I’ve sampled at least five types of physics and the one where the most women were to be found was biophysics. Roughly a quarter of the attendees at Biophysical Society meetings in the US used to be women.
For some reason the Nordic countries of Europe seem to be less prolific at producing women scientists. Some people have ascribed this result to the “Madame Curie” effect. She did “hard science”. I suspect that many women in North America end up doing “soft physics”.
Peter Martel
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I’m technically a physics “drop out.” I have a Bachelor’s in physics (graduated with honors) and have always wanted to go to grad school in physics, but got married and popped out a kid. I’m dying to get my PhD, but having a toddler makes it difficult. Neither me nor my husband—a math post doc here in California—wants daycare raising our baby, so I’ve traded physics to become a stay-at-home mom (for the time being, anyway).
Here are my insights:
Physics is competitive and demanding (at least, if you’re doing heavy duty research and publishing). If you have a husband and/or child, it’s so much more difficult to find the time and energy to devote to physics. As much as I would LOVE to spend all day in the lab working on an experiment, or all day in front of my computer working on a paper, I just can’t. Hubby would get annoyed, and my kid would throw a tantrum.
My experience in physics is that it’s all or nothing. The only way to be good in your field is to dedicate every waking moment to physics. However, if you’re a mother or wife, a healthy fraction—and sometimes a majority—of your waking moments are already spoken for. Other physicists will doubt your dedication to physics if you have anything substantial going on outside the lab, including a marriage and especially children.
Additionally, if you’re married to someone in academia, it’s soooo hard to find two jobs at the same university or even in the same town. Academic jobs are rare, and finding two openings—one for the husband, the other for the wife—is even more rare. If you’re a woman like me who’s taking off time to raise a family while your husband’s career advances, you find yourself following your husband to wherever he lands a job and then trying to carve out a life for yourself wherever that job took you. There’s no choosing a field that you’re passionate about, or even choosing mentors you want to work with. Instead, out of necessity, you’re associated with a school who’s research specialties just don’t interest you.
Or, worse, you and your husband find yourselves wanting to buy a house and send your kid to a preschool, all of which cost money. So, instead of getting that PhD in physics you’ve longed for since you were a teenager, you find yourself applying to be a high school science teacher (because the school schedule will match your kid’s, and so you can start earning some money today instead of five years down the road…).
Sorry for the rant. I really, really want to finish my education. I think I would make a first-rate researcher and an excellent professor. However, I’m stuck with circumstances—marriage to a math professor and raising a child—that make pursuing my dreams a challenge right now.
(Other issues I face: getting letters of recommendations for old professors. It’s been four years since I finished my bachelor degree and I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone. How do I get good letters to grad school? Letters often make or break a grad school app…)
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