More than a third of all US college and university physics departments have no women on their faculty. Does that mean those departments are biased against women? No. Do departments that do have women on their faculty provide a better atmosphere for women? Not necessarily.
After hearing one too many times that physics departments with no female professors are unfriendly to women, Rachel Ivie and Susan White of the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics decided to test the assumption of hiring biases by crunching the numbers.
Using a binomial distribution, they simulated distributions of female faculty in physics departments. They considered department sizes representative of both bachelor’s-only and PhD-granting departments. The simulations use the actual proportion of women physics faculty members (13%) and explore statistical distributions across departments for higher representations, up to 50%. (The report, Number of Women in Physics Departments: A Simulation Analysis,...
