women in physics

Parent Cafe
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<p>I am a freshman female potential physics major. I went to an all-girls high school, so the issue of girls in science seemed to come up a lot, especially while talking to prospective students and their parents. There has been a lot of talk about why there are so few girls in the hard sciences, physics included. Were any mothers out there hard sciences majors? Did any of you change your mind about what you wanted to do in college, starting as a hard science major and then changing your mind? Or changed your mind from something else to the hard sciences? Or had any friends who fit into any of the above categories? </p>

<p>You’ll probably all want to attack me for what I say next, but please hear me out and ask me to clarify before you argue that I must be wrong. I think that the reason there are fewer girls in physics might very well be an innate one. I don’t think it is because girls are less capable of learning difficult ideas or abstract concepts. It has nothing to do with intelligence. I think it is very likely that it has something to do with the method most of the top colleges seem to use in the physics department. They throw tons of information at students and see what sticks. A lot of the boys in the class seem to not mind this as much as I do or as much as some of my friends do. I simply do not understand how they can not mind not understanding the material! It really is a pretty awful way to try to teach someone something. Perhaps girls need more positive feedback. Maybe for whatever reason boys are better able to handle a 25/100 on an exam when they see that the mean was 22/100, whereas girls (or maybe it’s just me?) feel that that’s a sign that they don’t really know the material as well as they should. </p>

<p>I’ve just been somewhat surprised by the lack of girls I’ve met in physics who seem to be doing really well. Any thoughts why this might be? I’m alway tempted to conclude that maybe girls just aren’t as bright as boys, but that seems ridiculous to me. There must be SOME reason. Any ideas?</p>

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<p>Your question is something I’ve wondered about. I have a daughter who is a possible science girl (she’s a junior in high school, so she doesn’t really know yet–has not taken physics yet, for example). But she seems to have some math ability (despite the grade she is getting in BC Calc this term) and absolutely loves chemistry this year. I’m trying to steer her to a school that will nurture that interest, and it is one of the reasons I am trying to get her to consider one of the women’s colleges, along with LAC’s like St. Olaf–places that aren’t trying to “weed out” kids right off the bat. I have a feeling that if she goes to a school that has a really competitive environment in the sciences that will kill her interest completely.</p>

<p>Both of her older brothers are taking lots of physics courses in college. The older one is not the best student, but just keeps plugging away, and plans to get a degree in physics, eventually . . . the younger one does not know what his major will be yet–deciding among math, physics and music . . .</p>

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<p>both of my daughters are very interested in the sciences
older only had physics in 9th grade, but will be graduating from Reed college with a biology degree in a few weeks.( her roommate is getting a biochem degree)
My younger daughter is taking marine biology as a sophmore, is registered from chem next year, and probably physics after that ( unless they have advanced marine bio)
I didn’t major in science, since I didn’t attend college, but have always been interested in sciences
the way they teach math in this area, is not conducive to further exploration, so you need to be ultra motivated to pursue further scientific study, particulary with learning disabilties that affect math retention</p>

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<p>emeraldkity–your daughter is graduating – I guess I didn’t realize she is almost done – CONGRATULATIONS! </p>

<p>My daughter’s boyfriend is going to Reed next year.</p>

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<p>There is quite a bit of discussion of these issues at the Smith College engineering website. One of their basic assumptions is that, once they accept candidates (supposedly having done due diligence), all of them can and will succeed. So if there are failing students, the assumption is that it is likely the teachers’ rather than the students’ fault, and their responsibility to figure out what to do about it.</p>

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<p>*emeraldkity–your daughter is graduating – I guess I didn’t realize she is almost done – CONGRATULATIONS! </p>

<p>My daughter’s boyfriend is going to Reed next year.*</p>

<p>thank you - but all I did is be a mom.
she left a message last night- she just babbled so things must be going well- she turns her thesis in this week- this weekend Renn Fayre then next week is reading week.
he will like it @ Reed I hope- it seems like a lot of work- but also a lot of fun.</p>

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<p>Hmmm. I was a hard sciences major (chemistry) as was my husband, then went on to med school (though this was not why I chose chemistry…I just loved it). My daughter plans to double major…either in physics or chemistry and vocal music performance. Some of the most brilliant basic scientists I know are women. So, no, I don’t believe there’s anything innate about women’s intellectual makeup that makes them choose or not choose science, or makes them good or not good at it. In my D’s AP Physics class, 70% of the class, and the top 3 students are girls. In her AP Calculus BC class, there are 15 kids, 14 girls and 1 boy. This is a school with a 50/50 makeup of girls and boys. Maybe it’s that girls have less confidence in their ability to do science because of socialization issues in younger years. We are certainly NOT less intelligent!</p>

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<p>With 3 daughters, I have also asked the same question. D1 just declared chem as her major…up to her neck with lab work this yr…but enjoying it. D2 is a rising jr in high school…strong in math and the sciences. Her big dilemma is whether to take AP Chem or AP Bio in the fall. She is definitely planning on AP Physics senior yr. D3’s favorite middle school class is math. I do believe that attending an all girl secondary school advanced their interest in math/science. D1 even consulted her AP Chem instructor whether to take gen chem or move to the next level chem (that she tested into) as a freshman…mainly due to experience in the lab. Thanks to his advice, D1 made the right choice. Nurturing and great teachers do make a difference. By the way, I have a humanities degree…H was educated as a biologist and later in comp sci.</p>

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<p>“We are certainly NOT less intelligent!” </p>

<p>I didn’t claim that was the case. There could be other innate reasons that fewer women choose to study the hard sciences. Maybe they are more in need of nurturing? Maybe something completely different? I mean there must be SOMETHING and I refuse to accept that it’s all just an issue of prejudice. </p>

<p>Also, high school is VERY different from college. It seems that there may be a lot of girls who want to do well in their classes, who perhaps on average care about success more than boys. I have no real basis for that claim, other than a couple of articles I’ve read about girls getting into college and it supposedly being harder for girls, etc. If that is true, and I have no clue if it is, it seems very possible that non hard science classes would be more likely to offer positive feedback, to give signs to students that they are succeeding. Even if you score above average, if the average is like 20/100 on an exam to me that still SEEMS like you did poorly, even if comparatively you did well. </p>

<p>I don’t claim to know the truth. I’m just throwing out possibilities and trying to see if anyone has reasons to believe that any of them might be true.</p>

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<p>I’m a sophomore physics major who went to an all-girls school 6-12th grades and now has 20% girls in her major. Most of my friends hereabouts joke that my mind is wired “physicist first, girl second” for the record, so take this all with a grain of salt. ;)</p>

<p>First of all, marlgirl, I have to say that I do not agree with your line of reasoning here: I do not think that the girls are more upset than guys over bad test scores, it’s just they probably complain more amongst themselves so you hear about it whereas guys generally don’t. It really doesn’t bother me provided I’m not under the average as I know my professors aren’t going to fail anyone who gives it their all.</p>

<p>I will also take this moment to note that the principle reason to get a physics degree is NOT to understand all of the physics you encounter or some such as this is pretty impossible and unrealistic (you’re trying to figure out how everything works, after all!). Instead, the primary focus of a physics degree is to learn how to solve problems, pure and simple, with a few eureka moments mixed in that involve jumping around the room when you first understand general relativity. A lot of this does involve realizing you are fallible like everyone else, which is a good lesson to learn no matter what you choose to do later in life (and I think should be learned in college regardless of major).</p>

<p>As for why girls are still underrepresented in physics and engineering (they’re pretty even if not overwhelming in chemistry and biology by now), I would instead place primary focus on not the courses themselves but what happens right before college when people think what fields they’re interested in. My reason is this: if you ever look around even your freshman physics classroom you are already down to a male dominated field (mine was 20% girls already), which means girls are choosing before college to not go into these fields- we all hear about the evasive “workload” beforehand, but it never stops the recruits in the other sciences! I personally think this has to do a lot with the fact that when girls are encouraged into sciences physics is still a sort of unknown territory: you only reach it late high school if you’re lucky, and by then you often have other interests to nurture. Why does this not effect boys as much? I think a great part of it has to do with the fact that boys, by nature, tend to tinker a lot more as kids than girls: I was the only girl in my high school who had ever wired a circuit or used a soldering iron, for example. Furthermore, in my experience a girl is still much more likely to hear “you should be a doctor” when being advised on science aptitude while a boy is more likely to hear “you should be an engineer”… just something I’ve noticed at least.</p>

<p>I could probably keep going on this topic, but my lab report calls so I must attend to that. I’m sure I’ve mentioned enough for debate already, however, so have at it.</p>

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<p>My roommate (at MIT) was a physics major. I was a biochem major. (I also went to an all-girls high school, BTW.) My roommate later went back to school and got a master’s in EE/CS and was an early employee at Cisco. </p>

<p>Innate ability to do physics? Yes. Related to the X or Y chromosome? Not in my opinion.</p>

<p>I taught physics for several years. One year I had a class with 22 girls–all of them cheerleaders or drill team members (and all but one of them blonde, strangely!)–and 9 boys (all of whom suffered badly from ADD in that class). At the end of the year, the other physics teacher–who sincerely believed that girls couldn’t do physics and which was why I’d ended up with those girls–insisted on every student taking the same final. Strangely (he thought), my students did better than his. Why? Well, I think it had something to do with my strong belief that ANYONE can do physics.</p>

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<p>Anyone can do high school physics? Or college physics? Or get a PhD? Or publish new, interesting ideas that contribute to the field? I believe anyone can do high school physics… but after that I become less certain, in large part because “everyone” must necessarily include myself.</p>

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<p>It would be naive to say that everyone could do every field, and we all know that’s flat out not true (I, for one, had to drop Spanish 101 my first semester…). However, I do firmly believe that there is no reason girls inherently can’t do highly advanced physics when compared to men; they just don’t.</p>

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<p>My wife majored in physics for her B.Sc and M.Sc degrees, and got her PhD (biophysics) before I got mine (app.math). We have two daughters, who’ve both scored 800’s in all their math/science-related SAT’s. Their physics teacher at IMSA (high school) told us that every year, when he would get to teach them in their next advanced class, he would think “Here’s where I finally get to ask them questions that will give them a hard time”. Never happened.</p>

<p>Can’t infer too much from a sample of size two, but yes - girls CAN do well in physics, and in science in general. </p>

<p>So there.</p>

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<p>Of course girls CAN do well in physics. I’m well aware that, at least in a high school setting, girls can do very well in physics. In high school I always got top test scores on math/science SAT and AP exams. I did very well in my high school courses, always having a solid understanding of the material. I’m not interested in girls in high school. I’m more interested in college and beyond. Although there seems to be no reason at all to even suspect that girls can’t do well in physics, it seems to be the case that many of them don’t. Well many of them just don’t do physics. Why don’t they? Might there be some innate reason that has NOTHING to do with intelligence that is responsible for that? Is part of the reason that I am struggling with physics the fact that I’m female? Perhaps me being female changes how I process my success/failure?</p>

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<p>Marlgirl, just out of curiousity, are you enrolled in a co-ed or single-sex college?</p>

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<p>Most kids don’t major in most things. Let me explain - you can only pick one major and it sounds like you’re putting too much emphasis on physics - it’s not the only major most kids aren’t choosing. Most people don’t major in French or Sociology but I don’t think it’s because they can’t. (I’m surrounded by ‘p’ people and what they all seem to have in common, male or female, is a curiosity about everything. Some did not go directly into physics and others had a hard time choosing between Physics and English).</p>

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<p>marlgirl:</p>

<p>This might explain some of the reasons for the lack of women in the hard sciences:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.news.wisc.edu/11412.html[/url]”>http://www.news.wisc.edu/11412.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>You might want to follow that up by looking at this:</p>

<p><a href=“http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/Products/MoreWomen.htm[/url]”>http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/Products/MoreWomen.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>The president of Rensselaer (Dr. Shirley Jackson) is a female physicist. She spoke at the recent open house and is an amazing individual</p>

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<p>This is such a volatile topic, I am loath to wade in. I’ll give it a stab, but I ask in advance that everyone forgive and kindly correct me if I misstate some things or state them infelicitously. </p>

<p>As you may know, there has been a lot of research and argument about whether there are inherent differences between men and women in handling personal relationships and in preferred learning styles.</p>

<p>Carol Gilligan, for example, claims that (young) women are more interested in relationships and context, while males (though she did not explicitly study males in her basic book) are more abstract and interested in concepts of justice. </p>

<p>In high school, the learning structure seems to favor the allegedly preferred female learning style. The teachers may be more or less approachable, but likely they are on average more approachable than college-style, large-hall lecturers. The classes are small and interpersonal relationships are meaningful. </p>

<p>At large colleges, for better or for worse, the opposites exist. Interpersonal relationships mean relatively little. The learning situation in a discipline like physics is unlikely to suit the alledgedly preferred female style.</p>

<p>One can also look at assertiveness. Males supposedly are on average more assertive and directive than females. Females supposedly are more likely to see everyone’s point of view and be willing to allow a final decision to reflect all points of view. Males supposedly are less likely to do that.</p>

<p>In a discipline like physics, though, as it is typically taught, assertiveness and willpower, obstinately insisting on getting by, perhaps may be very important. </p>

<p>What bothers me about your post is the suggestion that you might be struggling “because” you are female. It bothers me because the conclusion of that is that you CANNOT succeed in physics. I doubt that, and in fact other people have given examples of female adults who are successful in physics. My preferred way of looking at it would be to ask yourself if you have personality traits that tend to work against success in physics. Then, if so, ask yourself if you wish to address those traits for the purpose of advancing in physics.</p>

<p>Of course, I have no way of knowing your personality and my speculation could be totally wrong. Please forgive me if I am offending you. I am just trying to put on the table for discussion some of what I understand some recent research to say.</p>

<p>I realize that there are, in addition, various obstacles to female advancement in the sciences, as detailed, for example, in an earlier post and its links. The big question, of course, from a statistical perspective, is what percentage of the differences are attributable to what set of issues. </p>

<p>But from an individual perspective, rather than a statistical one, I think it could be important to ask yourself how you can modify yourself in order to succeed. And IMO one good way to do that would be to look at those people, partciularly women, you know (or can learn of) who ARE successful in physics, and try to determine what it is about them that is breeding their success.</p>