This past Sunday at commencement, Harvey Mudd College graduated more female physics majors than male. For the first time in the College’s history, 52% of the 25 physics majors in the class of 2016 were women.
This is a remarkable fact. Nationally the proportion of women earning degrees in physics averages 20% across all degree levels, the lowest of all the physical sciences. Even more discouraging, the percentage of women receiving bachelor’s degrees in physics has fallen over the past decade from 22.2% in 2005 to 19.7% in 2012, the most recent year for which the National Science Foundation has reported statistics. While the proportion of women has risen in many STEM fields over the past few decades, physics is still considered by the NSF to be a “field of low participation by women” along with computer science and engineering.
What can we do to encourage women to pursue physics? Of course, we need to start at the middle and high school level. Teachers and families can encourage girls’ participation in science and math and counteract the stereotype that only boys excel in these subjects—a stereotype we know affects interest and confidence in STEM. Schools can strengthen their physics education; many schools in the U.S. don’t offer physics classes, or when they do, the classes are taught by math or chemistry teachers rather than a trained physics teacher.
At the undergraduate level, college physics departments can take deliberate steps to make their culture more welcoming and supportive to female students. Studies of college physics departments have shown that departmental culture plays a crucial role in attracting women to physics and sustaining their interest. Successful departments foster an inclusive culture by intentionally providing opportunities, activities and spaces in which students can build relationships with each other and with faculty. Informal departmental social activities, seminars, trips to conferences and women-in-physics groups expose students to the variety of possible career paths in physics and perhaps more importantly, create a sense of belonging within the department and the field. These activities are not difficult to organize and can have real impact.
Another important step for attracting women to physics is to hire more female physics faculty. The percentage of women among physics faculty is growing slowly, but is still quite low: 14% of all U.S. physics faculty members were female in 2010, the most recent year the American Institute of Physics reported data.
At Harvey Mudd, 38% of our physics faculty are women. For the past eight years, we have been educating search committees about best practices for recruiting a diverse pool, including guidelines on how to interview candidates so that they'll have a good experience and how to negotiate to land women. Factors such as spousal hiring programs, maternity leaves, parent-friendly work cultures and access to good childcare, as well as back-up childcare, help make a position appealing to outstanding women faculty.
This coming fall we will have another historical first: our first female physics department chair, Theresa Lynn. I talked with Theresa about what colleges can do to encourage more women to pursue physics.
Maria Klawe: For the first time in the Physics Department's history, we will have a female chair—you. Why do you think that’s an important milestone?
Theresa Lynn: As an institution, we’re very open to selecting whomever we think will do the best job without a sense that, “Yes, we can have women on the faculty, but let's make sure we have strong direction”—meaning having a man as chair. I think that’s just another reflection of the fact that we’re a dynamic institution.
Klawe: Do you think that having a higher percentage of female faculty impacts the learning environment?
Lynn: A lot of female students are consciously or unconsciously looking for role models. In that way, female faculty makes it a more welcoming environment for female students. It's also great for the male students. The environment in which you grow up forms a lot of your expectations moving forward. Growing up in an environment where they’re being taught and mentored by men and women fairly equally, sends a much stronger message—certainly more so than anything we could say about how they should expect to find their future workplaces, and how they should expect to interact with both men and women in their future careers.
Klawe: Has the department been working in certain ways to become more female friendly?
Lynn: When our female students talk about barriers to their becoming physicists, they talk about high school experiences, about expectations and attitudes of older relatives, and things like that. So it’s about issues that they bring with them.
We have tried to be sure that the gender diversity of our faculty is out there for students to see. In our core courses, in recent times, we’ve tended to have one man and one woman splitting the lecture. I think that’s something that makes an impression early on for students. I've had students comment that it was important to see different people, different genders, different personalities up there in front of the whole freshman class or the whole sophomore class, giving the lectures and answering the questions.
We’ve been thinking and working hard the last year or two on the topic of climate in the department—the extent to which we foster community, welcome those coming in from the outside, and nurture a strong sense of belonging. I think those efforts will also help us recruit and retain great students who are women or from underrepresented minorities.
Klawe: What are some of the initiatives that have supported improving our climate for women in physics?
Lynn: The Women in Physics student group, which is a student-led initiative, has done some welcoming things, such as community homework nights. Those have been nice climate events and not exclusively for women, which I think is exactly right. They might have an eye toward what is welcoming or encouraging to female students, but their membership doesn’t exclude men. And some of the men who participate are there because they believe so strongly in the need for physics to become more welcoming to women. We also send students every year to a Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, and that has been a great experience for our female students.
Klawe: Why is diversity important in the classroom?
Lynn: A lot of companies in the U.S. say that it’s hard to hire enough qualified employees who are trained in certain STEM fields, including physics. Under those circumstances, I think it’s important that we, as a field, don't lose students simply because they didn’t feel that physics was a field that accepted or welcomed their color, their gender, their sexual orientation, or what have you.
There are many possible, successful approaches to the world’s problems. And one of the key steps in solving important problems is choosing the best questions to ask. As we expand this field with people from very different backgrounds, it will inevitably enrich the range of questions we are asking and the types of problems we can solve.
Physicists play an important role in so many areas of technology. Physics graduates tackle critical energy issues such as solar power and how to develop new technology to reduce energy consumption. They design computer hardware as our society continues to demand more advanced and innovative types of portable, wearable technology. One of the most amazing things to me is that these students are going to begin confronting problems that we’ve never even imagined. Their generation will discover new questions as technology evolves, and they will be there designing the tools to equip us for the future.
The bottom line is that we need more physicists. It would be crazy not to welcome as many people as we can from as many different backgrounds as possible to help us address these critical issues.
