Sexism Still an Obstacle for Women Scientists

I find it interesting that the article on advanced physics in high schools and the article on women in physics appeared in the same issue. If my experience is any indication, the lack of women in physics is linked to the problems female students encounter in high school.

My high school offered AP calculus. I started high school in the honors math program. But I didn’t continue, in part because one of my teachers would have been a man well-known for sleeping with female students. When he was finally arrested for sexual misconduct with a minor, I knew I had made the correct decision. What message does it send to young women when a teacher sleeps with students, the whole school knows, and no one does anything until a student reports it more than a decade later?

Moreover, when I told my high-school guidance counselor that I wanted to take physics, she said I shouldn’t, because physics is hard. It angered me at the time, but I was going to be a music major then. The same woman advised my brother, a much worse student than I, to major in engineering in college. Such early experiences with sexism in the sciences are very discouraging to young girls. It is important to rein in sexist teachers in primary and secondary education.

Despite my high-school experiences, I finally discovered that my true calling is physics, and I’m in my fourth year at Colorado State University. I know I’ve had it much easier than women even a generation before me, but sexism is not gone yet. It is still tacitly accepted in higher education—especially in the sciences—even though equality may receive lip service.

An acquaintance of mine went to her organic chemistry teacher for help and was told, “Sometimes men just get it better than women.” I overheard another faculty member making a joke about how he wouldn’t help one of his male students unless that student brought in his attractive girlfriend. In light of the many hardships women have had to endure in the past, comments like that just aren’t funny.

Discrimination against women still exists—it’s just more subtle than it used to be. Attracting more women to physics will require confronting the latent sexism that remains in the field.