Perils and Pitfalls for Female Physics Majors


Women in science--why not more?

The previous pithy posting on Sally Ride's innovative program to encourage more girls to get interested in science and engineering was actually intended mainly as a lead-in to what is intended to be a far longer, multi-part epic describing my own thoughts on women in science. As this is an enormous topic, I plan to focus on women physics majors at the college level, the various factors that lead them to drop out of the field at a significantly higher rate than men, and my suggestions for ways of mitigating these factors. While my focus is specifically on physics, I think this article is also relevant to the participation of women in the other hard sciences and in engineering, which require physics courses as prerequisites.

My thoughts here are based upon my own experiences as a woman majoring in physics from 1986-1990, and as a tutor and teaching assistant during this time and in graduate school, and upon conversations with a other students, teaching assistants and professors, and the reading of random assorted articles throughout the years. This writing contains no actual statistics, research data, or reviews of the literature, because I didn't feel like doing extra work.

My mechanics class the first semester of freshman year had about 140 students. My quantum mechanics class in the second semester of sophomore year had about 60 students. Physics is a tough major which weeds out a lot of students in the first couple years. But at every stage in the process, women students fell out at a higher rate then men. Heck, even I didn't end up staying in the field. Although I graduated with a degree in physics, I had arranged to specialize in biophysics which gave me the option of taking chemistry and biology classes to fulfill some of my course requirements, and I ended up going to graduate school in biology. So what are some of the factors that make physics departments unappealing to women?

Posted: Wed - April 16, 2003 at 01:21 PM      

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