In nuclear theory, women get about 50 cents for every dollar men get in grant money from the US Department of Energy. Why the discrepancy? And does it exist in other physics subfields too?
The American Physical Society’s (APS’s) Committee on the Status of Women in Physics decided to see how things stood for physics after learning that two studies—from the Government Accountability Office in 2004 and RAND Corp in 2005—found that some agencies, notably the National Institutes of Health, give smaller grants to women than men. The GAO study reported a “serious data limitation” from DOE, a major funder of physics research, so the CSWP started there.
“We picked one subfield, nuclear theory, for a pilot study because we had anecdotal information about problems in that area,” says Roxanne Springer, CSWP vice chair and a nuclear theorist at Duke University. Later, DOE worked with the CSWP on a more...
