In all, the authors had survey data from 15000 physicists from 130 different countries.  While the article can be read in it’s entirety here, I’d like to highlight some main points.

1) The majority of housework is more likely to be done by women than men.  The female physicists are also more likely to be married to someone with a high level of education. The authors write, “Taken together, the survey results indicate that if family responsibilities do affect physicists’ careers, they are more likely to affect women than men.”

2) Having children slows the career progress of female physicists, but not the career progress of male physicists.  In fact, according to a different survey, male faculty members with children are the most likely group to achieve tenure.

3) In both less developed countries and highly developed countries, women have less access than men to key resources such as funding, office space, lab space, and equipment (among other things).

4) In both less developed countries and highly developed countries, women have less career advancing experiences, such as being invited to give talks at conferences, and serving on committees for grant agencies.

I highly recommend taking a look at the tables and figures in the article, as they reveal distressing facts about the status of women in physics worldwide.  Not only are women physicists underrepresented, but they have less access than men to important resources and career advancing experiences.  The careers of female physicists are also affected negatively by family responsibilities while the careers of male physicists are not.

I recently stumbled across this really awesome blog called “This Is What a Scientist Looks Like“. Essentially, this blog tries to change the stereotypical perceptions of who a scientist is and what they look like.  Some of the pictures posted on the blog show us scientists who are women, and scientists who have families (including several with young children).  But it also shows us scientists doing things that aren’t science.  Scientists are not one-dimensional, and spend plenty of time doing things outside the lab/classroom.  There is a weightlifting entomologist, a soccer-coaching psychologist, a bagpipe playing biologist, a scuba-diving planetary scientist, and a fashion blogger/pharmacologist.

I think that showing that scientists come in many different forms can go a long way in increasing the representation of women in the sciences.  Scientists are not mythical men in lab coats, doing experiments through the night in their basement laboratories.  We do not all wear nerdy glasses and sport pocket protectors.*  Scientists can be your sister, your friend, your neighbor, your mother, and may even be you!

What stereotypes about scientists do you think need to be dispelled?

*Despite this, we will probably be nerdy in other ways. And actually myself and most of my friends wear glasses..

I think it’s really important to be aware of this issue.  Several months ago, I assumed professor was male during a conversation with my sister.  When she corrected me, I was a little embarrassed (especially  since I try to be really careful about that sort of thing), and I haven’t made the mistake since.  When discussing a person whose gender is unknown, try to always refer to them as “he or she”.  Women are scientists and professors, and plenty of men hold stereotypically female positions.  It’s really easy to make these sorts of assumptions.  For me, being corrected on it was a great wake-up call.  So don’t be afraid to politely correct people when they wrongly assume your physics professor is a man!  By correcting these preconceived notions, we can start to change the image of the stereotypical scientist.

First things first: I need to introduce the concept of a schema.  A schema is basically a structure we use to help ourselves organize knowledge.  In this context, it can be thought of as a broad assumption (or group of assumptions) about a group of people.  An example of something that used to be more of a schema than it is today is that mothers do not work.  A schema that still exists is that scientists are male.

Schemas can be mismatched.  A female scientist with children is an example of a mismatching schemas – it is in conflict with with the schema that scientists are male, and also with the (slightly outdated) schema that mothers don’t work.

Unconscious bias occurs when schemas are mismatched.  In hiring, unconscious bias can occur when a candidate’s schema does not match the schema of the outcome.  If a woman is interviewing for a research scientist position, her schema does not match that of the hired research scientist (who would typically be male).  The person in the position to hire may form invalid opinions about the candidate based on their schema, which may result in a negative hiring decision.

Unconscious bias sounds really similar to overt discrimination (forming untrue, negative opinions about others based on their sex/gender/race/etc).  But it differs from overt discrimination in that a person may not even be aware that they are biased against a certain group (or groups).  Unconscious bias is very subtle, which is why it is so important to be aware of it.  Making others aware that unconscious bias exists is the first step towards eliminating it!

Since September, it’s been a pretty stressful year for me.  Some of you are probably in the same boat, whether you were applying to graduate school like I was, or to college, or even to postdocs.  So for those of you who found yourselves swamped in applications for the last couple of months, I wish you the best of luck!

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog more.  I’ve been slacking in the blogging department due to my crazy year, but I think next year should be a bit calmer.  It’s my last semester of undergrad, so all of my classes are fun classes that I’m really looking forward to taking.  Between that and having all my applications done, I should have plenty of time for blogging! I’m looking forward to it

I hope you all have a safe and fun night, and a great new year!

In case you haven’t heard, NASA has confirmed the discovery of the FIRST Earth-sized exoplanets (exoplanets are planets outside our solar system)!  There have been a lot of planet discoveries in the news lately.  A lot of this is due to NASA’s Kepler satellite, which looks for exoplanet candidates.  Kepler detects small dips in the brightness of stars, which can be due to objects passing in front of them.  If a dip occurs regularly and in even intervals, you  know there is an object orbiting that star.  One then needs to conduct follow up observations with another telescope to confirm that the object is a planet.

Today, two new confirmed exoplanets – Kepler 20e and Kepler 20f – were announced.  Kepler 20f has a radius 1.03 times that of Earth’s, and Kepler 20e is even smaller – it has a radius of .87 times that of Earth’s.  Although both planets are Earth-sized, they aren’t as hospitable as our home planet.  Kepler 20e and 20f are both close to their sun-like host star, meaning they are very hot.  Kepler 20e is more than 1400 degrees F, and Kepler 20f is about 800 degrees F.

NASA chart showing how the sizes of Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f compare to Earth and Venus. (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/images/kepler-20-planet-lineup.html)

Although these two planets aren’t exactly the Earth-twin we’ve been searching for, it seems that it’s only a matter of time before we find it!

To read more follow this link!

There’s a bit of background information here that is necessary to understand the situation.  The city of Topeka is part of Shawnee County.  In September, Shawnee County told Topeka that they no longer had the money to help them prosecute domestic violence cases, since their budget was cut.  Topeka responded by telling the county that they didn’t have the money to prosecute them either.  Topeka’s city council then voted to get rid of the law that made domestic violence a crime in an attempt to force Shawnee County to prosecute the domestic violence offenders.  To me, this sounds like a game of chicken. Both the city and the county are trying to force the other to take responsibility for these cases, but while they are going back and forth seeing who will “blink first”, they’re putting the lives of women at risk.

One in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime (Domestic Violence Resource Center).  Since Topeka stopped prosecuting domestic violence cases in September, 18 offenders have been jailed and then released, because no charges were filed against them.  This is incredibly dangerous.  It is difficult enough for domestic violence victims to get the courage to go to the police for help, and by releasing offenders, Topeka is putting victims at serious risk of retaliation by releasing their abusers.  They are sending the message that there won’t be consequences for abusing your partner.  They need to know that this is unacceptable, and that they cannot put the lives of women at risk over a budget dispute.

You can read more in this New York Times article, or sign this petition!

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Maria Mayer was born in 1906, in what was then Germany.  In 1910, the family moved to Göttingen, where her father had a job as a Professor of Pediatrics.  Her father was in the 7th generation of university scholars in his family, and so it was expected that Maria would get an education.  Maria went to public and private schools, taking the entrance exam for the University at Göttingen in 1924.  She originally intended to be a math major, but switched to physics after taking a physics seminar with Max Born.  Other students of Born’s included Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Dirac.  Maria got her PhD in physics in 1930.  For her dissertation, she she calculated the “probability that an electron orbiting an atom’s nucleus would emit two photons of light as it jumped to an orbit closer to the nucleus.” (http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/mayer.html)  Her calculation was experimentally confirmed in the 1960s.

She married Joseph Mayer, a physical chemist, in 1930, and moved with him to Baltimore, where he had a position at Johns Hopkins University.  Because of anti-nepotism laws, Maria couldn’t have a paid position at the university and instead became a “volunteer associate”.  Nevertheless, until the Mayers left Johns Hopkins in 1938, Maria produced 10 papers, a textbook, and had her daughter.

After her husband lost his job at Johns Hopkins, the Mayers went to Columbia University.  She still could not hold a paid position at Columbia, but she still worked in physics, becoming a member of Enrico Fermi’s lab.  When WWII started, she received a part time, paid teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College.  She also started working on a secret project regarding fuel for nuclear fission weapons at Columbia.  She visited the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico several times.

When the war ended, Maria went with her husband to the University of Chicago, where she was a professor (although the work was voluntary, and she was not paid).  Several months later, she got a paid position as a senior research associate at Argonne National Laboratory.  There, she developed the theory that won her the Nobel Prize – that if electrons orbited the nucleus in shells, the number of electrons in the stable atoms represented “full” electron shells.  These full shells were more stable than non-filled shells.

In 1956, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.  In 1959, UC San Diego offered paid positions to both Maria and her husband. They accepted the positions and moved to California.  In 1963, she won the Nobel Prize for her shell model of the nucleus.  She shared the prize with another scientist who developed the shell model around the same time as she did.  She became the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics, and the first to do so for theoretical work.  No Physics Nobel Prizes have been awarded to women since Maria Goeppert-Mayer.  Maria Goeppert-Mayer died in 1972.

Source: 1, 2

Afterwards, I felt offended.  While the comment itself wasn’t offensive, given the context, I found it to be totally uncalled for and inappropriate.  With that comment I was reduced from “fellow student and scientist” to “woman”.  We don’t go to professional science conferences to be hit on.  We go to share our science with others, learn about work other people are doing, and network with each other.  I don’t want to have comments made about my appearance; I want to have comments made about my research!

Has anyone had a similar experience (being inappropriately hit on in professional settings)?  How did you deal with it?  I feel like I should have said something along the lines of “thank you, but that’s not really appropriate right now”, but  I’d really appreciate some feedback from others.