“When someone says ‘physicist,’ you see Albert Einstein, not one of us [women],” says Meg Urry, an astronomy professor at Yale University. “When our colleagues are hiring, we all have a picture of someone like Artie Bienenstock, rather than one of us. These things are very subtle and hard to uproot. One thing that helps is when the numbers are sufficient to reach a tipping point.” Urry was a panelist at the “Gender Equity: Strengthening the Physics Enterprise in Universities and National Laboratories” workshop sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS) in May.
The workshop’s goal was to kick-start a doubling of the number of women in physics over the next 15 years. Some 50 department chairs from leading US research universities, 14 division leaders from national laboratories, and administrators from NSF and the Department of Energy came together to examine the underlying causes for the scarcity of women in...