How I was like a Nigerian high-school girl
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010027
Five years ago the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics conducted a web-based survey of women physicists around the world. The survey coincided with the second International Conference on Women in Physics , which was convened in Rio de Janeiro by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.
AIP’s Rachel Ivie and Stacy Guo put together the survey . Their goal was to discover women physicists’ “educational backgrounds, careers, the balance between work and family, and opinions about physics as a career.”
I found the survey fascinating. More than 1350 women responded from 70 countries. Asked when they decided to become a physicist, 60% replied “in high school"—just like me! Asked why they decided to become a physicist, 85% replied “interest in the subject"—just like me!
I grew up in Conwy , a small town in North Wales. Discovering that I decided to become physicist at the same stage of life and for the same reason as a woman from, say, Lagos, Nigeria, gave me a comforting sense of global togetherness. It also made me wonder about role models. If high-school girls from Albania to Venezuela are enthralled by physics as a subject, do they need role models to convince them to pursue physics as a career?
Maybe not. But if Albania, Venezuela, or any other country wants to boost the number women physicists, then Rachel and Stacy’s survey suggests governments should put more priority on helping those keen young women stay physicists. Subsidizing child care would help women physicists (and, of course, mothers who aren’t physicists and fathers).
Providing that benefit is a matter of resource allocation. Democracies have established procedures for balancing competing claims on the public purse. But the survey revealed a source of discouragement that, while costing nothing to remedy, is more pernicious. Eighty percent of respondents said men’s attitudes to women in physics should be improved.
If that high figure isn’t shocking enough, consider the following quote, which I extracted from the survey. The anonymous respondent comes from a country, Finland, that was the first in the world to give all its adult citizens, men and women, the vote:
I belong to [the] new generation of female physicists and I don’t need to face the problems my predecessors had to face during their undergraduate or graduate years. Nevertheless my gender will always have some influence on my life via the behavior of my colleagues or via the opinions of others. . . . It is sometimes annoying to be treated first as a woman and after that as a physicist.
