No Leaky Pipeline for Women in Physics, but Discrimination Persists

The pipeline of women in US physics academe is not as leaky as is commonly supposed, according to a recent report by the American Institute of Physics.

Rather than women leaving physics throughout the path to a full professorship, AIP finds that attrition occurs mainly between high school and college: Nearly half of high-school physics students are women, but in 2003, women earned only 22% of physics bachelor’s degrees. At more advanced career stages, the report says, “women are represented at about the levels we would expect based on degree production in the past. There appears to be no leak in the pipeline at the faculty level in either physics or astronomy.”

“The [notion of a] leaky pipeline has been around for awhile,” says report author Rachel Ivie, “and you would expect to find evidence for it. We don’t. And it did surprise me.”

Among entering physics PhD students in the years 1981–97, men and women dropped out in similar proportions. In 2003, women earned a record 18% of physics PhDs. From 1985 to 2002, the fraction of PhD-granting physics departments that counted women among their faculty members rose from less than half to more than three-quarters.

Still, women haven’t achieved equality in physics. Across all employment sectors, women with comparable experience working in the same sector as men earn $3050 less a year on average. And while the 18% of new tenure-track hires in physics in 2003–04 who were women was commensurate with supply, the percentages were higher for women hired for temporary (20%) and part-time (22%) work. Despite improvements, physics, along with engineering, is the slowest among the sciences to attract more women.

The representation of minority women in physics remains tiny. In the period 1976–2003, only 35 African American and 57 Hispanic women earned physics PhDs in the US. The total number of US physics PhDs awarded annually now exceeds 1100.

Although the data poke holes in the leaky pipeline theory, says Ivie, “there are other problems. A lot of women have experiences that seem not to fit with our data. The issue of discrimination is still there.”

The report, Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2005, may be obtained free of charge from AIP, Statistical Research Center, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740; e-mail stats@aip.org ; website http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/gendertrends.html .