The pipeline of women in US physics academe is not as leaky as is commonly supposed, according to a recent report by the American Institute of Physics.
Rather than women leaving physics throughout the path to a full professorship, AIP finds that attrition occurs mainly between high school and college: Nearly half of high-school physics students are women, but in 2003, women earned only 22% of physics bachelor’s degrees. At more advanced career stages, the report says, “women are represented at about the levels we would expect based on degree production in the past. There appears to be no leak in the pipeline at the faculty level in either physics or astronomy.”
“The [notion of a] leaky pipeline has been around for awhile,” says report author Rachel Ivie, “and you would expect to find evidence for it. We don’t. And it did surprise me.”
Among entering physics PhD students...
