Women in physics—a view from 1948
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010285
Physics Today made its debut in 1948. In that year’s December issue the young magazine ran a feature article about a topic that continues to challenge the physics community: encouraging women to become and remain physicists.
The article , “Women . . . in physics,” was written by Walter Michels, who taught physics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania from 1932 until his death in 1975. During Michels’s tenure at Bryn Mawr—and to this day—the small liberal arts college teaches only women.
I hope you’ll read Michels’s article. The arguments he made 66 years ago in favor of teaching women to become physicists remain valid and relevant today. He recognized, for example, that societal pressures push girls away from hobbies, such as amateur radio, that could prepare them for problems they’d face in physics labs. On the flip side, that lack of experience, Michels found, made it easier for female students to accept special relativity and wave–particle duality compared with their male counterparts.
Walter Michels in 1958.
CREDIT: Bryn Mawr College Special Collections
Michels also posed the question, “Do women continue professional work for a long enough time to justify the effort spent on them?” When he wrote the article, 20 women had graduated from Bryn Mawr with advanced degrees in physics. Only two were not practicing physicists. “The success of the women physicists I have known,” he wrote, “convinces me that much of the feeling against women in both academic and industrial laboratories results only from prejudice.”
When I read Michels’s article last week, I was struck by how it echoed a more recent publication, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013) by Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. Both Michels and Sandberg note that some women need encouragement to prosper professionally. According to Michels:
Too many women are satisfied to continue indefinitely as assistants to men, not because they like it but rather because they feel it is what they deserve. As pleasant as it is for men to have these loyal assistants at their beck and call, this means a waste of some of the country’s best brains and it is the job of every academic or industrial laboratory that deals with women to encourage them to more independent work.
Despite the good intentions of Michels and his Physics Today editors, the 1948 article reflects the sexism of the times. Michels praises one of his students, “a very attractive blonde,” for her ability to wield her sharp and critical mind in professional settings while behaving brainlessly in social settings. And whereas the two photographs that accompany the text show women concentrating on lab experiments, the cartoons undermine that serious impression through their frivolity.
This cartoon appears on the third page of Michels’s article.
In their recent survey of female physicists from around the world, Rachel Ivie and Casey LangerTtesfaye of the American Institute of Physics found that having children tends to slow the career progress of women physicists but not that of their male counterparts. Michels also recognized that problem and advocated changing personnel policy to provide maternity leave. If he were somehow alive today, I suspect he’d still be advocating maternity leave. Compared with other rich democracies, the US provides the shortest maternity leave, 12 weeks, and the least paid leave, zero.