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Oak Ridge National Laboratory "... partners with the state of Tennessee, universities and industries to solve challenges in energy, advanced materials, manufacturing, security and physics." It grew out of the super-secret Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Denise Kiernan's book, The Girls of Atomic City chronicles the development of the lab, project, and city from several perspectives, most notably the perspective of several young women recruited to work there.
Kiernan's book also gives a wonderful introduction to Lise Meitner for those of us who aren't aware of her. Lise Meitner, together with Otto Hahn, led a small group of physicists who first discovered nuclear fission of uranium which led to the development of nuclear weapons. From the Wikipedia article: "In the 1990s, the records of the [Nobel] committee that decided on [the 1944 Nobel] prize [in Chemistry, awarded for nuclear fission] were opened. Based on this information, several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion "unjust", and Meitner has received a flurry of posthumous honors, including the naming of chemical element 109 as meitnerium in 1997."
At least part of the reason Meitner was excluded may very likely have been her gender. So, it's not at all unreasonable to wonder how things in our modern, enlightened times compare with the Bad Old Days when women were actively excluded from physics.
In an article today (Aug 1) in Nature , Ramin Skibba reports on a special issue of Physical Review Physics Education Research devoted to the gender divides in physics and engineering.
[Continues...]
The special issue addresses the reasons why relatively few women enter the field of physics, as well as the factors that deter them from completing their degrees. They include a lack of role models, entrenched stereotypes and an undervaluing of their abilities. Many authors also highlighted the fact that women are -- usually inadvertently -- made to feel like they don't fit in.
Women comprise between 49% and 58% of undergraduates and graduates in the social and life sciences at US universities. By contrast, only about 20% of US undergraduate and graduate students in physics are women, according to the US National Science Foundation. That gap has persisted over the past decade.
Lack of role models, policies that address work/life balance, stereotypes, self-confidence, and social contribution are some of the hurdles and issues identified in the special issue.
Addressing these problems means significant changes at the university level, argues Ramon Barthelemy, AAAS Science Policy Fellow in Washington DC, who co-authored several studies in the special issue. Those changes could include an explicit code of conduct at conferences, striving for more diverse faculty and updating mentoring and teaching styles.
There is reason for hope, however. "More and more people are paying attention and getting passionate about these issues," says [Sarah] Eddy [a biologist at University of Texas at Austin].
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:15PM
but you can't take the physics out of the woman.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:22PM
Proof that discrimination is alive and well in 2016! More evidence of the vast conspiracy of assigned males keeping womyn out of STEM jobs!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:24PM
Activating SoylentCandid 0.1.
Analyzing post contents with deep learning algorithm.
kurenai.tsubasa was banned for this post.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:47PM
First they came for the businesspeople and I said nothing, because I wasn't a businessperson.
Then they came for the gender nonconformists and again I said nothing, because I was cisgendered.
Then when they came for me I hired someone to post for me.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:50PM
gone with Web Werks' journal [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:57PM
I don't think we've ever censored a journal, even the spam shit.
There is an option available for you to hide/delete your own journal entries.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:19AM
Whoa, spammers are deleting their own shit off this thing‽ Can't touch that.
(Score: 2) by Kymation on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:13PM
You'll get the same result for my journal. That's because I never use it, so it's empty.
I choose to believe the parent AC post is a clever joke. If it's not, please don't take away my illusion.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:07AM
Whenever a story is posted about the progress of women in science or tech on one of the tech sites, most of the responses will be arguing about whether
1) the story deserved to be posted
and/or
2) whether the program or attention shows how SJWs have taken over our society
Typically, none of the responses will be about the specific subject of the article.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:39AM
The article is about a Jew who left Germany during the Nazi era. Why isn't the regular Godwin's Law good enough? Everything has to have a special female version?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @02:47AM
Laid out clearly here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRnTovm26I4 [youtube.com]
If it is interesting enough to know about, putting up a flashing neon sign of OH, BY-THE-WAY, SHE'S A WOMAN, trivializes the accomplishment. The focus is then on the woman, not the science, and is as back-handed as
Did you know Wernher von Braun was German? I suppose Germans are capable of doing science
On the other hand, Alan Turing's homosexuality is pertinent to how his life ended.
But no one cares because he loved the cock. His accomplishments far exceed anyone trying to score points for their pet cause.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @06:16AM
There's an old quote, attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, that Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. I think that is and remains an accurate insight into society. Discussing gender is a subset of discussing people. One can only imagine her fine choice of adjective for such minds. This article mentions role models. Stephen Hawking has been an inspiration for myself and countless others. That a human who drools on himself without assistance; defecates upon himself without assistance is one of the most influential and inspirational voices in science, and physics today, is perhaps the greatest testament to the fact that in science people care not about your identity or condition, but instead about your contributions and your merit. Bickering over quixotic barriers in such a field is no more productive than battling those etymological windmills.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:08AM
who work there akin to the Spacelab Girls From Hunstville? :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:27AM
I tell women to stay far away from biomed. As far as I can tell there may be a conspiracy to fill the ranks with women and then finally start doing replication projects, etc to reveal the gigantic sham that has been ongoing for a few decades now. Even if not a conspiracy, the inevitable crash and burn isn't something it seems would be pleasant to participate in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:31AM
... But there is a STEM shortage!?
I tell everyone to stay away from biomedical sciences because there is an excess of PhDs that are continuing with endless postdoctoral studies waiting for job opportunities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:37AM
Her omission may be a blessing in disguise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @01:34AM
According to the Girls of Atomic City book, Meitner backed away from the nuke. Smart lady.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @02:19AM
Welcome to Soylent, o poster of incoherent shit! Trust in moms, etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @04:38AM
Phew! I think this is just what the news needs. More trite identity politics articles arguing for equality of result with, at best, tenuous foundations or logic. Women make up the majority in social sciences and biology. So by god they should also make up the majority in physics too! Men make up the majority of players in football, hockey, and basketball and so, by god, there must be an underlying conspiracy to explain why they're not also the majority in figure skating!
Okay, snark aside. These articles invariably take equality as an assumption. If we look to countries that are considered incredibly gender equal, such as Norway, we still find huge gender gaps in a wide array of fields. Ironically the place where gender gaps start to close is in very poor countries where individuals do not have the liberty of choosing from an array of careers but are forced to work any job available just to make ends meet. To this day the case in many places in Southeast Asia where you'll regularly see female construction workers. It most assuredly has nothing to do with gender equality, however as the area remains largely genuinely sexist.
I think we should do everything we can to encourage boys and girls to consider all fields equally. That is equality of opportunity. However, we should not assume that this will consequently result in boys and girls having an identical distribution of interests and that split in interests does not necessarily entail a societal bias of coercive force. It feels almost absurd that it has to be said, but in today's world of identity politics it must - male and females are not identical sans genitalia. From our first moments out of the womb our interests and behaviors begin to diverge. Working against this is ultimately doing a favor to nobody as you end up pressuring individuals into fields they otherwise may not have entered into resulting in decreased efficiency and happiness just for the sake of making a political point.
I, like a young and responsible egalitarian, pushed my girlfriend -now my wife- away from her social sciences major and into computer science. She can do it, too. I know she can! Well, she did - pretty easily in fact. And now a decade past graduation I'm a software engineer and she's a primary teacher where that sociology education she was initially pursuing could have been more beneficial to her. Sorry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @11:47AM
Just to push back against all of the stupid chauvinism: I find it really hard not to be biased against people because of gender and race. Even stupid things like tone of voice has a huge impact on my interpretation of what people are saying. I instinctively question/disregard high pitch voices more. Seriously. And there's loads of stuff like this.
That's even without the (citable) cases of people making stupid comments about things like "chick science" etc.
It is *really* hard not to be sexist, and many male scientists dont even try.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 03 2016, @04:54PM
And because you have that problem, everyone must have it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @10:37PM
Have a little sympathy for him. Think of the cognitive dissonance he has to suffer when Morgan Freeman talks.