Headline dominating a Virginia newspaper’s front page: “Gender disparity vexes physicists”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8117
At least in some of southeastern Virginia, and at least for a day, a question that perennially perplexes the physics community has received some serious public attention. The 9 May Newport News Daily Press prominently spotlighted what reporter Tamara Dietrich calls “one nagging mystery” that even the “brainy” female physicists whom she interviewed “can’t crack: Why the U.S., Great Britain and other Western nations lag so far behind Italy and some Latin American countries in their percentage of female physicists.”
The online version carried the headline “Jeff Lab women physicists try to plug the ‘leaky pipeline’ of women in physics.” The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility was founded for nuclear physics three decades ago as the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. Jefferson Lab has also conducted a pathbreaking free-electron laser program.
Occasioning the article was the 6 May “Women in Science Panel Discussion ” at the sixth International Particle Accelerator Conference in nearby Richmond, Virginia, hosted from 3 to 8 May in part by Jefferson Lab. The panel’s 10 women included Fabiola Gianotti , CERN’s next director general. She participated electronically, as did a Pittsburgh high school class attending online.
Some 30 high school girls from the Richmond area attended in person. The Richmond Times-Dispatch covered the conference with a clichéd smirking-about-science-nerds tone—complete with an allusion to the physicist-caricaturing CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory—but never mentioned the panel or the local students.
The Daily Press‘s Dietrich consulted and quoted particle theorist and women-in-science observer Elizabeth M. Simmons, dean of Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University: “Factors include practical matters like a lack of reliable parental leave and affordable childcare, cultural issues like pervasive implicit bias that reduces women’s chances of being hired or promoted in a field seen as ‘masculine,’ and cultural conditioning that makes it harder for professional women to advocate or negotiate for the resources they need to succeed. [And] the fact that a much higher fraction of women physicists are married to men physicists or scientists than is true for men physicists means that dual-career issues disproportionately impact women physicists.”
Concerning the women-in-physics panel discussion, Dietrich also quoted Jefferson Lab nuclear physicist Cynthia Keppel: “I am not sure that we made any major breakthroughs, but a lot of good questions were asked, awareness raised and interesting thoughts shared. Many of the latter also came from the audience, which, rather surprisingly and refreshingly, was half men. It was nice to see people bringing their daughters in particular.”
Citing figures and analyses from the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics, Dietrich summarized what’s known quantitatively about the problem of female underrepresentation. At the end, she reminded readers that curiosity motivates—in fact impassions—scientists:
Both [Jefferson Lab nuclear physicist Patrizia] Rossi and Keppel say physics for them is more about the joy of discovery.
“You have to have some level of math aptitude,” Keppel said, “but it doesn’t have to be that super-brilliant. I think people get intimidated by that. But the more important thing is to really kind of catch the enthusiasm—to catch the excitement for learning this stuff. What we do, really, is solve puzzles. We’re answering questions—or trying to answer questions, or at least asking them—that no human on Earth would really know the answer to.”
“That is the most important thing—a curious mind,” said Rossi. “You have to be motivated. It is a question of will. And the passion, of course. So if you want to achieve something, if you want to understand something, just go. Do.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.