Dreaming of a more diverse physics community

Natalie Angier’s article in last week’s New York Times has once again served as a reminder that in the sciences, and particularly in physics, we still have a long way to go before we achieve gender equity. I’ve had a number of conversations in the past week prompted by Angier’s article. In the various conversations, three questions about the current situation and future possibilities for women in physics came up repeatedly so I’ve included a few thoughts on those questions here.

Do you introduce students to the issues that women in science face or do you let students travel their own paths and meet challenges as they come to them?

I think this is a tough question. I don’t want to demoralize students or induce worries about issues that some women may not encounter. However, it is also helpful for women to be aware of the forces out of their control that impact their progress in school and in their careers, and how they might work to counteract negative influences.

My eyes were opened early, and I think it made a difference in how I made decisions. My mother was active in AAUW in the early 1990s when AAUW published its widely discussed report “How Schools Shortchange Girls.” We talked about that report around the dinner table when I was in about 9^th grade, and I was never able to be ignorant in my education again. I suddenly noticed that teachers did indeed give different feedback to boys and girls in my classes. From then on, I realized that while I could control aspects of my performance/involvement in the classroom, there were environmental elements in my learning that I could never control. I learned that I had to monitor my experience, and that I had to make sure that my decisions and feelings were based on my own internal beliefs and preferences and not simply a reaction to environmental influences.

Are you optimistic about the situation of women in physics?

I have become less optimistic the longer I have persisted in physics. Initially, I imagined there existed a few old guards resistant to change, but that the attitudes and actions that hindered women in physics were on their way out. Yet I have had physicists of my generation say appalling things to me, and I continue to be disappointed in the complacency of people who claim to be allies.

What does make me optimistic is that women who have had 30+ year careers say that they have seen improvement over the course of their careers. However, now that the blatant discrimination is gone, the challenges are more insidious. For that reason, I think Virginia Valian’s book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, might make good required reading for scientists. She explores “women’s lack of achievement in situations where nothing seems to be wrong.” Just because things look good on the surface does not mean that everything is good. Gender schemas are more powerful than many acknowledge.

What would you like to see in the future?

I’ve come to accept that there are so many factors at play in the issue of increasing women’s participation in physics that the solution is beyond simple prescriptions. Although we face challenges today, I dream about the future (with apologies to one famous dreamer).

• I have a dream that one day my physics classroom will reflect the demographic make-up of the college at which I teach and the demographics of the college at which I teach will more closely reflect the demographics of the nation as a whole.

• I have a dream that one day all future physicists will be taught by teachers who enjoy teaching physics, advised by advisors who support them regardless of their personal and professional goals, and welcomed by colleagues who want the physics community to be vibrant and diverse, not static and exclusive.

• I have a dream that one day physics faculty will be judged not just by the quantity of publications or the numbers on student evaluations, but by the quality of the range of contributions they have made to the community as a whole, and that these contributions can be made through meaningful part-time or full-time work.

• I have a dream that one day women won’t have to be the primary advocates for change, but that the status quo will be confronted by a broad based coalition of men and women, who want to lead balanced lives with time for paid work in a profession, unpaid work at home or in the community, and leisure. (I find myself inspired by the discussion Robert Drago presents in his book Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life.)

• Most of all, I have a dream that by the end of my professional career posts like these will seem extremely dated. We’ll see…

Indian experimental physics

I haven’t posted in a while, and am I ever glad that Melissa has had a run of excellent posts on this blog, else this would be one dormant space. Excuses: Suffice to say that my various different responsibilities have been a little more demanding than I would like, but more that I was unable to carve the head-space and the efficiency to write here.

But before I completely lose the memories, I’d like to briefly report on a blitz of a trip through India that I took in December. About a third of it was for science — I started by visiting Gautam Menon of the Indian Institue of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai (Madras) for a talk. I knew Gautam when we were both undergraduates at St. Stephen’s, and we re-connected through this blog, so I have already reaped the benefits of the time I have spent writing here, and should keep me motivated to keep writing.

IIMSc was really fun to visit — there’s a large collection of theorists (of course! with a name like that). I learned about the excellent work there, got feedback on my own stuff (I talked about my paper with Arik) but more so, got to see up close how science is doing in India. Things have changed a lot, particularly on the financial front: about 10 years ago, when I gave a talk in Delhi, all my hosts were able to offer me was — essentially — cab-fare. Things are far more generous now — flights etc taken care of, and the amount of money available in grants at the highest levels comparable to or better than the United States. I heard about people getting $2M to start up labs at the Research Institutes (India is structured a bit like Europe — most of the funding and prestige flows to stand-alone research institutes, and Universities are considered to be teaching institutions). Wow!

I also went — after a brief break with family — to an International Conference on Cold Atoms in rural Bengal, a hair-rising ride through late night fog away from Kolkata (where I spoke on my work with Kenfack and Gong) heard great talks and connected — and re-connected — with a lot of excellent physicists, and figured out even more places to visit in the future. This being India, and India being what it is, I even discovered that I was related to one of the people there. I had no idea — relatives in neighboring fields. Hah! This is also where I really got to meet the experimentalists as well. It only confirmed my sense of opportunities increasing greatly. Let me clarify — Indian theorists have been thriving for years. But experimental physics in India — despite the remarkable early example of C.V. Raman — isn’t at the same level. The typical graduate student doesn’t get to do any truly interesting experiments in the home-grown labs, and then goes abroad for post-doc training where finally (s)he does something at the highest level, and then returns back to India to try to set up something, but struggles with getting expensive equipment, which handicaps the next set of graduate students, etc. Perhaps this cycle will be broken.

It’s so much fun for me to combine visits to India with science. It was a really wonderful visit for me, and I hope to do this far more often than I have in the past.

You can’t judge research potential by classroom performance

It’s that time of year when physics students are beginning to consider their options for summer research. As usual, I will be hiring 2-3 undergraduates to work with me this summer, and as always, I find it difficult to judge a student’s research potential. FemaleScienceProfessor’s recent post “In Praise of B Students” addresses just this issue.  She has two key claims:

“Doing well in classes, even really difficult ones, does not mean that someone has the skills necessary to do research.”

and

“Doing research as a student typically means you have to be willing to interact with at least one other person…Some people can do this well and some people can’t, even with experience, no matter how high their GPA.”

I have found that some personality traits are more effective predictors than transcripts of students who will have a rewarding research experience, but sometimes it can be hard to identify these traits until after you have worked with a student. When I advertise for summer research assistants, I include some variation of the following statement in my project description:

“Being an experimentalist is, in part, about being creative, patient, detail-oriented, self-motivated, and able to solve real-life, messy (quite literally!) problems, and these characteristics are more important in the lab than the number of physics classes you have taken or the grades you have received.”

Nevertheless, it’s always a challenge to convince some students that I am really interested in more than just their grades.

Teaching science first

In January’s issue of The Physics Teacher (TPT) there is an interesting article by Keith Sheppard and Dennis Robbins on the “First Physics First” movement, which occurred from 1880-1920. (Sadly, I think you need a subscription to TPT to read the whole article.)  For those of you who are unfamiliar with “Physics First”, it is a proposal to change the order of science courses in high school from biology-chemistry-physics to physics-chemistry-biology, with the idea that knowing about atoms, electrostatic forces, and energy before you learn chemistry is helpful, and likewise, in order to appreciate molecular biology and biochemical processes in cells, it is helpful to know some chemistry before taking biology. The “Physics First” movement hasn’t caught on widely in the US, and some folks in the physics community feel that physics taught in 9th grade with limited amounts of math isn’t “real” physics.

While I don’t want to get into a debate about “Physics First,” I have been pondering one suggestion made by Sheppard and Robbins in their TPT article. Essentially, they argue schools shouldn’t be choosing between 9th grade conceptual physics or 12th grade math-intensive physics, but instead schools should make introductory physics a two-year course. They write, “Indeed, the limited time and credit allocation is the ultimate problem facing U.S. high school physics. Physics is a 21st-century subject confined to a 19th century curricular time allocation. We would suggest that high school introductory physics needs parity with other subjects. It should be at least a two-year, two-credit course…”

Sheppard and Robbins claim, “No other curricular area teaches its separate disciplines as fixed one-year courses. Imagine the obvious nonsense of teaching languages in a Spanish-French-Latin order with students completing the study of each language in a single year.”

While there would certainly be benefits to having a two-year physics sequence in high schools, what does that mean for biology and chemistry? Wouldn’t biologists like to have a two-year introductory biology course, or chemists a two-year introductory chemistry course? Additionally, I don’t think the language analogy is an apt one. In my mind, the most valuable aspect of high school physics (or biology or chemistry, for that matter) is not expansive content coverage, but building students’ understanding of the scientific method and how physicists (or biologists or chemists) approach the world around them.  Moreover, scientific habits of mind are relevant across all science disciplines, and any high school science class should help students to appreciate empirical investigation and how such investigations are used to develop a framework of theoretical principles by which to understand the universe. Ideally, high school science classes would provide students hands-on and minds-on opportunities to make and use observations to build and refine models of physical and biological systems.

Leon Lederman, a Nobel prize winner and a champion of “Physics First,” gave a talk at the Minnesota AAPT section meeting this fall, and there he remarked that perhaps we should require all students to take three years of science in high school with an emphasis on the connections between all science disciplines, perhaps even naming the classes Science I, Science II, and Science III.  I find aspects of this proposal appealing, particuarly in an era when interdisciplinary opportunities in science are growing. Most students who take high school science classes are not going to be scientists, but we do want students to recognize the power of science as a tool for understanding the world and the process by which scientists approach and solve problems. A three-year science series could focus on the key ideas taught in physics, chemistry, and biology courses, but weave them together in a more integrated and intuitive manner. Then, in their 4th year, students could choose to take an advanced course in biology, physics, or chemistry depending on their interests.

Of course, there are challenges to this three-year integrated science approach. Teachers are certified to teach biology, chemistry, or physics so in deciding who teaches Science I — the person certified to teach biology or the person certified to teach physics — a science department is, in some sense, weighing in on the “Physics First” question.  Additionally, school districts would need to provide significant professional development opportunities for those teaching Science I, II, and III to discuss the appropriate curriculum and decide how to best link content and provide a coherent approach to addressing overarching goals for the three year sequence. Despite these challenges, at the high school level, I think it makes more sense to focus on promoting science as a connected whole rather than trying to make a disciplinary grab for a larger piece of the science pie for physics.