The power of encouragement

The Schumpeter column in the Economist is devoted to the science of business and management. Like its influential and idiosyncratic namesake, Czech-born economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), the column ranges over wide intellectual terrain.

The 15 November installment was especially thought provoking. The author, Adrian Wooldridge, asked himself why the upper management of companies in Nordic countries is overwhelmingly dominated by men, despite those countries’ female-friendly workplaces and legally mandated quotas for female representation on the boards of publicly traded companies.

My interaction with the management of Nordic companies is limited to admiring the selection of pickled fish products at my local branch of IKEA, a 71-year-old Swedish company. The Schumpeter column interested me not because I have a fascination for the practice and theory of management—I don’t—but because it made me wonder whether the dearth of female CEOs in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden is matched by a dearth of female physics professors in those countries.

To find out, I visited the websites of physics departments at major Nordic universities, one for each country. After locating the departmental staff lists, I searched for the word “professor.” The browser told me the total number of instances of “professor” on each list. By scanning the names, I could count the number of women.

The smallest physics department, that of the University of Iceland, lists 16 professors, all male. The largest, the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, lists 139 professors, 13 of whom (9.4%) are female. Stockholm University lists 39 professors, 4 of whom (10.3%) are female. The University of Helsinki lists 54 professors, 4 of whom (7.4%) are female. The most female physics department that I looked at belonged to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Of its 41 professors, 6 (14.6%) are female.

In his column, Wooldridge noted that in 2013 6% of the publicly traded companies in Norway had female CEOs. For US companies listed in the Fortune 500, the fraction was 5%. The mean fraction of female physics professors in US departments is 15%—that is, about the same as the most female physics department in my Nordic study.

Among rich countries, the US lags other countries in policies that foster female- and family-friendly workplaces. The World Economic Forum’s 2013 Global Gender Gap Index ranks the US 23rd. Nordic countries occupy the top four places. It’s reasonable, therefore, to conclude that whatever their other benefits are, the Nordic countries’ female-friendly policies are not boosting the number of female CEOs. Nor are they boosting the number of female physics professors. Why aren’t those policies helping? Wooldridge sees two limitations:

The US should adopt female-friendly policies to make life and work easier for all working women, physicists among them. And while I don’t like the idea of quotas, I do support the inclusion of women and other underrepresented minorities on shortlists for academic jobs. But if the US does follow the Nordic countries and implements similar policies, the result when it comes to CEOs and physics professors could be the same failure to move the needle.

Strengthening the career ladder for women, as Wooldridge proposes, is worth doing. The American Astronomical Society, the American Physical Society, and other organizations have programs that aim to do just that. But what about encouraging women (and girls) to “aim higher”?

Wooldridge goes on to propose that companies “should make sure they include plenty of women among the high-flyers selected for challenging assignments.” Of course, physics is already a challenging assignment. But as Eileen Pollack concluded in a feature article published last year in the New York Times magazine, “The most powerful determinant of whether a woman goes on in science might be whether anyone encourages her to go on.”

Pollack, who was among the first two female physics majors to graduate from Yale University, recounted how she had excelled at quantum mechanics, taken a graduate-level course in general relativity, and learned how to program Yale’s mainframe computer (which must have been a quite an achievement, given that she graduated in 1978 when computers were user-hostile). Yet she didn’t pursue physics further, “because not a single professor—not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis—encouraged me to go to graduate school.” Earlier, when she had scored 32/100 on her first midterm exam, her own parents urged her to switch majors.

Pollack also pointed to cultural influences that discourage girls and women from pursuing mathematics, physics, and other hard sciences. Some of those factors, such as the portrayal of physicists on TV and in movies or the propensity of some boys not to date geeky girls, are difficult for any individual to change. For most physics students, female or male, taking graduate courses and producing a thesis will remain a years-long trial.

But if you’re a teacher, parent, or relative of girls, you have it in your power to encourage them to tackle physics and to persevere when the subject seems hard. Even if they choose to not become physicists themselves, studying and understanding our favorite subject will boost their confidence. They might become CEOs.