redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Only one out of every five honors-level
physics
students at UK high schools are women, and only 17-percent of female
students apply for undergraduate-level programs in the field at
universities, the Institute of Physics (
IOP) discovered in a recent study.
Using information provided by the National Pupil Database (
NPD),
IOP officials also discovered that nearly half of all state co-ed
schools in England did not have any girls participating in advanced or
“A-level” physics programs during the 2011 school year, and that less
than 8-percent of female physics undergrad students went on to become
senior lecturers in the discipline, Elizabeth Day of
The Observer reported on Sunday.
“By contrast, girls were almost two and a half times more likely to
take the subject at A-level if they were at a single-sex school – a
finding that suggests there might be an ingrained cultural perception in
co-educational establishments that physics is somehow ‘not for girls’,”
Day added. “Why is this happening? Is there some endemic sexism within
the world of physics? Or do women simply not find it appealing?”
“It might be that the problem is embedded in the ethos of the school
and that teachers are tending to interact more with boys who are more
outgoing. There are all sorts of subtle messages that ‘Girls don’t do
physics’,” Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics at the
University of Cambridge,
told The Observer. “I suppose the way we portray physicists and
engineers is as if it is not normal for girls to do these things. They
are often seen as quite nerdy men in programs like The Big Bang Theory.
They are posed as inarticulate and that’s not the kind of thing a girl
is going to aspire to when she is 12, 13, 14.”
While Day points out that women do account for 55-percent of biology
students, physics is far from the only area where the gender appears to
be underrepresented, according to a December 18 story by
The Guardian‘s Simon Neville. A new study conducted by the
Royal Society of Edinburgh found that only 4.9-percent of fellows at the Royal Society of Chemistry (
RSC), 3.8-percent of fellows at the
Royal Academy of Engineering, and 1.5-percent of the Institution of Civil Engineers (
ICE) were women, he reported.
Earlier this year, the
European Commission launched an ill-advised
advertising campaign
designed to encourage women to consider careers in scientific fields.
While the video itself was dismissed as “offensive” and “insulting” for
its depiction of women, it was an attempt to solve a real problem —
namely the “large number” of female students that the Commission said
“drop out of science, engineering and technology to pursue other
subjects.”
“Female graduates are severely under-represented in the areas of
engineering, manufacturing and construction, with women making up just
25.5% of graduates in these fields. Women are also under-represented in
the areas of science, mathematics and computing, where they constitute
40.2 % of all graduates,” the Commission said back in June.
“Furthermore, EU-wide, women make up only about 32% of career
researchers. Most countries acknowledge that this is a problem, not only
now but for the future of research. With businesses in many countries
already reporting shortages of skilled workers, Europe cannot afford to
waste any of its young talent.”
In the US,
Dartmouth College
is attempting a similar campaign, only instead of picturing supposed
female scientists wearing short skirts and high heels, the subjects of
the New Hampshire institution’s promotional video are depicted dealing
with “the gritty reality of field work in Greenland,” Carolyn Y. Johnson
of the
Boston Globe wrote last Monday.
“The topic of women in science is an important and complicated one,”
Johnson added. “Things have certainly improved in many respects. But
even as more women are getting science degrees, women are still
outnumbered by men, when you count the number who become full faculty
members. The numbers are improving but remain far from equal in most
fields — a National Science Foundation (
NSF) study notes that in 2008, women made up a little more than a fifth of full professors with science and engineering degrees.”
Advances are also being made at some schools as well, including the
Lampton School
in Hounslow, England. According to Day, one-fourth of the female
students attending Lampton study physics at A-level — a feat that
science teacher Jessica Hamer attributed to the staff’s efforts to
overcome negative stereotypes associated with the career choice and
depictions of physicists in popular culture.
“We realized there was a dearth of girls, so we tried to get more
speakers and role models to come into the school and talk to the
pupils,” Hamer said. Day said that the impact of those efforts has been
“noticeable” and that the female physics students she met were
“extremely bright and enthusiastic about their chosen subject.” The
gender gap in physics and in some other scientific fields may still be
prevalent, but given success stories such as the one at the Lampton
School, as Day says, “there are signs that the culture is changing.”
