Gender and Physics: An Evolving Field

Laura McCullough, University of Wisconsin-Stout

There have been an increasingly large number of articles in the news about various aspects of gender and STEM. Where are we at with this issue for our field of physics?

“Why do we need to keep studying this issue; haven’t we solved it already?”

Yes, it’s been three decades since the Chilly Climate report came out [1]. And no, we haven’t solved it. In the US, we’ve stalled out at 20% of physics degrees earned by women, and that’s at every level [2]. This problem is far from solved.

“You have it so easy these days; I had to fight for everything I got.”

Just as PER has evolved from figuring out student “mis”conceptions to exploring the effects of the classroom to the current breadth of what PER people are studying, the research on women in physics has changed and grown. From simply determining participation rates to exposing explicit harassment and discrimination to learning about implicit bias, we continue to explore what is preventing women and gender minorities from entering into and staying in physics. This is made more complex because the target is constantly shifting: what a female physics professor dealt with in 1990 is not the same as what a newly minted PhD will encounter next week. As our culture changes while maintaining a disturbingly robust gender gap, our research has to adapt to the new circumstances. And our interventions need to change as well. The early support programs to promote women’s participation in STEM focused on fixing the women—assuming the problem must be with them. Research has shown the problem is much more about the culture, and this is harder to change.

“You teach physics? You must be smart!”

How many of us have heard this—and cringed? As teachers, we need to understand that every student can learn physics. And we hope our students will believe they can learn it too. This is part of a growth mindset, where we know we can improve our skills and even our character traits. This is in contrast to the limitations that come with a fixed mindset, where a person believes their intelligence and abilities are set in stone—we are born at a certain level and we can’t be changed.

Why should we, as teachers interested in gender and science, care about mindset? We know that students with growth mindsets do better in school [3] and that there is a gender-related effect. A growth mindset in math helps women more than it helps men [4]. Consider this statement: “Girls can’t do physics.” This is a classic fixed mindset statement and one we should endeavor to change. By promoting growth mindsets, we are not only helping students do better individually, but we will be helping change our cultural mindset too. This is especially important for our trans colleagues; we can change ourselves and everyone can learn physics.

“Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.” [5]

One of the changes I have seen in 20 years of doing work on this area has had a subtle effect: I no longer say I study women and physics; I study gender and physics. As our world becomes more aware of the range of gender expression and as the strictness of gender roles relaxes, we need to make changes in our own language and our work. Along with this is one of the most important developments in gender research: intersectionality. Instead of assuming all women behave the same way and all women experience physics the same way, researchers are recognizing the importance of the multiple identities every person contains. A black woman in rural Wisconsin and a Latina in Texas will not have the same encounters with physics, and to lump them together because they are both women loses an important part of the experience. A trans woman and a cis woman can be exactly the same on other identities, yet their interaction with physics will be different. Our research has to take this into account. We have to understand all the ways that physics and gender interact and how that can discourage different people from participating in different ways.

“I never was any good at physics.”

Current research on where girls and young women lose interest or drop out of physics shows that it happens everywhere and for a variety of reasons. A female elementary teacher afraid of science passes on that fear to her female pupils. Parents don’t think about taking their daughter to a science museum. Middle school girls start believing that you can’t be cute AND smart. High school girls are encouraged away from science majors through implicit or explicit bias. A freshman is the only young woman in her physics class. A grad advisor tells her female grad students to put off getting pregnant. Hiring committees unconsciously rate a female applicant lower. Stopping the tenure clock is counted against an assistant professor. Fewer grants and more service mean a longer time as associate professor. A lab manager doesn’t get the same level of resources as her male colleague. The “problem” of women and physics is not women or physics or just one problem, but a broader culture that tells us from a very young age that physics is a man’s field.

“How do you change culture? Where would we even start?”

We need to be supporting research and the interventions it identifies as useful at every age and level. We need better science classes for elementary teachers, we need high school curricula about the under-representation of women and minorities in physics [6], we need better college physics education, and conferences for undergraduate physics women [7]. We need family-friendly policies that everyone is encouraged to use, we need people to understand cultural effects and implicit bias. We need to figure out how to support girls and women at every stage. We need to find all the points of friction between success in physics and identities outside of white male and smooth out the bumps so that everyone can participate in and advance the study of physics.

Why? Because if we fail in supporting every person of any gender, physics is losing out on unknown amounts of talent. How many brilliant ideas have been lost or delayed because a young woman was not welcomed into physics? To make physics the best it can be, we can’t turn away any interested people. And to change this, we need to change our culture.

So read those articles, learn from them, and share them with your colleagues; the issue of supporting everyone in physics is something that we all can work on.

Laura McCullough is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Wisconsin – Stout. Her primary research area is gender in science and surrounding issues, and she authored the 2016 book “Women and Physics”, a Morgan & Claypool publication as part of IOP Concise Physics.

References:

1. Sandler, B. R., Silverberg, L. A., Hall, R. M., & National Association for Women in Education (U.S.). (1996). The chilly classroom climate: A guide to improve the education of women. Washington, DC: National Assn. for Women in Education.

2. Porter, A.M. and Ivie, R. (2019). Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2019. AIP Statistical Research Center. https://www.aip.org/statistics/reports/women-physics-and-astronomy-2019

3. Dweck, C. (2007) Mindset: The new psychology of success (New York: Ballantine)

4. Degol, J.L., Wang, M., Zhang, Y., Allerton, J. (2017). Do Growth Mindsets in Math Benefit Females? Identifying Pathways between Gender, Mindset, and Motivation. J Youth Adolescence 47:976–990.

5. Barres, B. A., Does gender matter? Nature 442, 133-136 (2006) doi:10.1038/442133a.

6. https://www.aps.org/programs/education/su4w/index.cfm

7. https://www.aps.org/programs/women/workshops/cuwip.cfm

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.