Women in physics: unnecessary, injurious and out of place?

The subtitle for this article is taken from a Strindberg essay written at the end of the 19th century opposing the appointment of the mathematician, Sonia Kovalevsky, to a professorship at the University of Stockholm, in which he attempts to prove “as decidedly as that two and two make four, what a monstrosity is a woman who is a professor of mathematics, and how unnecessary, injurious and out of place she is”. It is certainly a much more extreme statement than anything likely to be voiced publicly today but it does vividly and tersely encapsulate many of the opinions that have been expressed to me in much more veiled and discursive form over the last ten years. Largely because of these continuing though muted attitudes I have accepted an invitation to write this article for PHYSICS TODAY. I will very briefly sketch the history of women's participation in physics as a background to the current situation and then discuss some statistical information about women physicists in the recent past and present in the United States. It will come as no surprise that the percentage of physicists who are women is small and that their employment patterns are different from those of men. I will discuss the possible reasons for this situation. Finally, I will comment briefly on recent changes and what expectations one may have for the future.