|
No Room at the Loo
Women in physics aren’t used to lining up for the loo. Unlike every movie theater, restaurant, club or hotel bathroom in the universe, the ladies’ bathroom at a physics department is usually pretty empty. I go to the ladies’ room to practice ballet moves in secret during breaks in my quantum physics class. No one has yet found me out. So imagine my consternation at lines for the bathroom – lines so long we had to sneakily commandeer the men’s toilet – during lecture breaks at a recent physics conference in Los Angeles. Of course it was the University of Southern California’s Undergraduate Women in Physics Conference, but nonetheless. To sit in a room full of physics students and see a vast majority of women was strange. To sit at a physics gathering and feel, well, socially comfortable was stranger still. But, I suppose, that’s why we were all there to begin with.
The conference was organized in an attempt to stanch the haemorrhagic flow of women from academic science. According to the American Institute of Physics, just 20% of undergraduate physics majors in the U.S. are female, and it gets worse from there. At grad school, a mere 15% of doctoral students are women and that proportion dwindles all the way through the ranks to tenured professors, of which barely 5% are women. In a world where, NSF stats indicate, women dominate fields like neuroscience and hold our own in mathematics, women physicists at conferences still get mistaken for secretaries. By bringing together women from all tiers of academia to give advice and support to our lowly undergraduate selves, such a conference might just lend us the courage to finish our degrees and even march on to graduate school. Or so the theory goes.
While the proceedings were liberally sprinkled with technical talks on topics from neutrino physics to spin electronics, the real focus was on life advice from women in the trenches. Many young women in physics still feel that they must make a decision between a family and a career – that having a baby is tantamount to giving up, or that getting married creates more problems than it’s worth. We asked all the speakers, whether their topics were inspirational or technical, to dish about who they were as people and how they got there with families in tow and sanity intact.
A particular highlight was the talk “Advancing Women in Physics,” by straight-shooting Beverly Hartline, a dean from Delaware State University. After her talk, I asked Hartline how she would respond to a common topic in science blog squabbles: men who claim that encouraging women to enter physics is lowering the bar and allowing too much competition (funny how people’s real opinions come out online). She scoffed. “Lowering the bar? We’re raising the bar by expanding the pool of talent!”
Funnily enough, just hours after the weekend was over, I had an opportunity to use some of my newfound confidence. With my mother. In the car on the way home from the airport, my mom wondered, “So what was this conference for?” I explained that the point was to boost the morale of undergraduate women physics students so that we would have some momentum to carry us through graduate school or whatever life throws at us. “Yes, but why just for women? Who cares?”
I paused, a bit puzzled, “Er, because there aren’t that many of us? We’re under-represented.” She oohhhed a bit knowingly, then started her spiel.
“Well, you know, men’s and women’s brains are just different. It’s just genetics, you know. Women are naturally better at things like English. You’re just a special one,” she laughed.
I cringed. “Mom, this is exactly the sort of crap that we’re fighting against, and it’s even worse that women themselves buy into it. Thinking like that made me get an English degree, because I thought I wasn’t good enough to do math. And you can see that’s not true at all.”
She said nothing more. But I thought about that roomful of engaging and intelligent women. I’m glad to know I’m definitely not all that special and I’m certainly not the only one. That, in essence, was what the conference was all about.
