Gender matters: Cures for bias
DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.3983
As I prepared a poster nearly 20 years ago to attract graduate students to the Drexel University physics department, I realized that we had many female graduate students. So I asked a few why, since we did not treat them any differently, as far as I was aware. They said, “That’s why.”
When giving a talk at another department, I always ask to meet students with no faculty present, a trick I learned from biophysicist and Nobel Prize winner Max Delbrück. A confident woman senior told me that she wore eyeglasses because the faculty then treated her more seriously. She showed the astonished me that her lenses were indeed parallel-sided, and she left the eyeglasses on the table for the rest of our chat.
More about the authors
Leonard Finegold, (L@drexel.edu) Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
