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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 02 2016, @09:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-why-not? dept.

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].


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:31AM (#383420)

    ... 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.