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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, 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.