Women, and Some Men, Ask Why Women Don’t Flock to Physics

The Paris meeting touched on both locale-specific and more general problems. A delegate from India, for example, reported that, in her country, physics is not seen as unfeminine; indeed, for women, earning a master’s degree is considered advantageous for marriage, but continuing to a PhD is not. Communication among physicists, particularly in the US, was described as “combat physics”: At talks and in individual conversations, explains Kim Budil of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “you’d like people to engage in scientific discourse, but it often goes beyond that to become a fight for ego, to decide who is the smartest person in the room.” And a widely reported 1999 study showed that female scientists at MIT had less lab space and lower salaries than their male counterparts; other universities are no better, as subsequent studies in the US and elsewhere continue to show. “No one understood the problems women faculty encountered until the women began to talk to each other and to work with the administration to collect the relevant data,” says MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, one of the original study’s authors. “MIT has corrected the inequities found and now focuses on preventing them from arising.”

In some former Soviet Union countries, says Erna Karule, who heads the theoretical physics lab at the University of Latvia’s Institute of Atomic Physics and Spectroscopy, “the lack of research funding is leading to low salaries and no possibility to buy new equipment. It is making research unattractive to the younger generation and overshadows gender inequalities.” In other poor countries, schools lack even electricity. Attendees from developing countries, for their part, were shocked to learn that child care is not readily available in places like the US. Indeed, says Jaynie Padayachee, who is working on her PhD in physics at the University of Natal in South Africa, “I personally was a bit disappointed [in the conference]. The focus was on problems experienced in developed countries, which were not entirely relevant to the developing countries.” Broadly, though, changing both the climate and the nerdy image of physics, conference attendees say, would make the field more attractive for women—and men.

Data gathered for the meeting showed, among other things, that four out of five women physicists in developing countries are married, compared with two out of three in developed countries; one-third of respondents older than 45 in developed countries had no children, compared with one-tenth in developing countries; and overall, three out of four women said they would choose physics if they had it to do all over again.

Some trends are surprising: In Scandinavian countries, where women have made deep inroads in politics and other fields, few women pursue physics. The delegation from Iran reported the highest level of women undergraduate physics majors: 56%. Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland award among the lowest proportions of physics PhDs (8–10%) to women, while Australia, France, India, and Poland award the highest proportions (20–30%).

“Discrimination tends to be subtle—it’s more sins of omission than of commission,” says Meg Urry, director of the new Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. “Women tend to accumulate disadvantage. Minor differences add up.” It’s a critical issue, she adds, “not just for fairness and justice, but for the health of our field. We are missing good brains.”

“My male colleagues don’t want to hear about anything affirmative action–like,” Urry says. “The most infuriating thing is when you say, ‘Can we think about hiring women?’ and they say, ‘Sure, but our first priority is excellence’—as if there were an inherent conflict between the two. I think if they thought hard about how physics works, they’d get it: You put in 13% and you get out 6% [the proportions, respectively, of US physics PhDs going to women and of women physics faculty at the top 20 US universities]. It’s the top universities that are falling down on the job. If you assume no innate difference in ability, then you have to assume that the men you are hiring are less good than the women you are not hiring.”

At the Paris meeting, the delegates unanimously passed eight resolutions calling for fair treatment of girls and women at every level of physics education, employment, and policymaking. (The resolutions, country reports from delegates, and related information are on the conference Web site, http://www.if.ufrgs.br/~barbosa/conference.html.) The plan is to use the resolutions—which advocate, for example, transparency in hiring, promotions, and awarding of research funding—to exert pressure on schools, employers, scientific societies, funding agencies, and governments. Judy Franz, executive officer of the American Physical Society, the first woman to serve on IUPAP’s council, and a chief organizer of the conference, says the resolution aimed at IUPAP may have the biggest teeth: “Some years ago, we found that women don’t get invited to talk at large international conferences. If IUPAP would only sponsor and fund international conferences that had a fair representation of women on their organizing committees, I think that would begin to have an impact. It’s an important thing you can put on your vita.”

On the heels of the meeting, the European Physical Society voted to form a working group on women in physics. The idea is to strengthen personal and professional connections among women physicists and pool strategies from different countries on such things as how to minimize the postdoc period so that physicists can land stable academic jobs at a younger age. That would help women, says the group’s interim head, Gillian Gehring, a condensed matter physicist at the UK’s University of Sheffield, because they are more likely to give up their career in favor of their male partner’s. “If people get permanent jobs before they form permanent two-body relationships, they are more likely to form a relationship with someone in the same town. It doesn’t solve the two-body problem, but it helps.”

Indeed, the Paris meeting has set off a flurry of activity aimed at achieving equity for women physicists. It gave a boost to networking efforts by women at the three US weapons labs, where, says Budil, “we have learned the power of supporting one another and have used this to build a strong relationship with our management. We want to have more influence across NNSA laboratories [National Nuclear Security Administration, the new Department of Energy body established to oversee the weapons program].” And in Latin America and other parts of the world women are forming regional networks. The various groups will be linked via the conference Web site, which is turning into a networking hub. A follow-up meeting in Brazil is in the fledgling planning stages.

In Japan, Hidetoshi Fukuyama, a member of IUPAP’s working group on women in physics and director of the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo, says industry has responded better than academia to equal opportunity laws introduced a few years ago. But activities leading up to the Paris meeting triggered changes, he says, and “both the Japanese Physical Society and the Japan Society of Applied Physics are now deeply involved.” For example, when the government asks the Japanese Physical Society to recommend reviewers for research proposals, says Fukuyama, “they can work immediately to get more female scientists involved in reviewing. There are a lot of things to do on both the long and short term.” As in many countries, Fukuyama adds, “the most important thing is to increase the number of women in physics. And once we have them, we need to encourage them to stay.”

To do that, says IUPAP President Burton Richter of SLAC, “it’s essential that men help. There will be considerable resistance from men, who may feel that women are whining. If a male colleague says things have to change, [men are] more likely to say yes, it’s true.” These days, such resistance might actually be lower than in the past, what with physics enrollments shrinking worldwide and many departments trying to woo students by, for example, introducing degree programs that combine physics and business. The time may be ripe for engendering a welcome for women in physics, says Urry. “It’s a good moment. Frankly, I think [male physicists] are interested.”