1. Why does 65 percent of the national workforce, have a particularly adverse effect on women inside the academy.
2. While only 7 percent of the members of the American Physical Society are women, an astonishing 44 percent of them are married to other physicists and as a result are NOT able to have the same mobility within academia as their spouses. How come?
3. An additional 25 percent of women in the American Physcial Society are married to some other type of scientist. They also lose their mobililty. And the reason is?
4. A remarkable 80 percent of women mathematicians are married to men in their own fields. 2+2=stay down because?
5. Some 33 percent of women chemists are married to men in their own fields. The women advance to tenure in smaller numbers than men. Why? Why? Why?
Stanford began a couple of days ago to survey 30,000 faculty at top US research universities to find the answer.
If anybody can find the answer to these questions...Stanford can.
Why do you think women get the short end of the stick so often in academia?
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It appears to be a physicist, you have to identify more with individualistic patterns of behavior.
If you are a women physicist, busy doing a single-minded thing, you may only end up interacting with other scientists. You may also come to exhibit or worse, value, the behavior of non-inclusion that helps you get by. Or, on the other hand, you may stop speaking up, being so isolated (7 percent?!).
Most importantly, it's parents who get kids involved in various pursuits through to college (the foundation of future careers), and non-physicist parents aren't suddenly going to have their kids go into physics if they don't know about it or care.
Dr. Franz, APS director, admits to not being interested in training outside of her field, in a discussion about management training at the Chronicle of Higher Education. This is the feeling you get; that physicists don't care about what the rest of us are doing, at all, nor do they want to abide by the same "rules."
It is reciprocity that will always bring disparate folks together and expose them to things that are good for all. Inside physics, discrimination might decrease. From outside physics, physicists get more talent headed their way.
APS and AIP need to admit their own biases (just like all of us have to). Then step up and do more than make committees, talk, publish, generate press releases amongst themselves. Something more than simply making their own publishing millions (sometimes off rhetoric about it).
Posted by: sister of physics brothers | November 15, 2006 3:54 PM | Permalink to Comment