NYT: Women in Physics Match Men in Success

[DeepModem Mom]

Women in Physics Match Men in Success
By KENNETH CHANG

Published: February 22, 2005


Only about one-eighth of the physics professors at Harvard are women, a statistic that might seem to support the recent assertion by its president, Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, that fewer women than men are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. He also suggested that a difference in "intrinsic aptitude" between the sexes might help explain the disparity.

A report released Friday by the American Institute of Physics offers a contradictory conclusion: after they earn a bachelor's degree in physics, American women are just as successful as men at wending their way up the academic ladder.

Physics continues to be the most male-dominated field among the sciences. Men hold 90 percent of physics faculty positions, and earned 82 percent of the doctoral degrees in 2003.

"I'm not saying it was easy for women," said Dr. Rachel Ivie, a sociologist and an author of the report. But she said her statistics showed no indication of discrimination in the hiring of female physicists - supporting one of Dr. Summers's points - or women dropping out of the field at a higher rate than men, countering what Dr. Summers had offered as the most important reason there are fewer women in science and engineering....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/science/22phys.html

[Senior citizen]

1. Women can be better physicists than men.

Case in point, Dr. Prof. Lise Meitner, the woman who discovered nuclear fission.

Dr. Meitner had doctorates in both mathematics and physics, and was a member of Einstein's circle--one of only about a dozen people in the entire world who understood Einstein's theories at that time.

The Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission was given to Otto Hahn, who was not a physicist and had never studied math. But it was important to the powers that be to de-Nazify him, as he was involved in the use of poison gas in WWI and worked for the Nazis in WWII, so they gave him the prize.

Hahn was actually Meitner's assistant. He was a chemist, but in those days, before atomic theory was widely accepted, it was possible to become a chemist without studying math. It was Meitner who designed, oversaw, and interpreted the experiments they carried out. Hahn was capable of following orders, but not of original thought.

As for that ignorant Harvard president, he is probably unaware that Harvard's Schlessinger library is devoted to the history of women and contains a plethora of evidence proving him wrong. What is really impressive is that most female accomplishments were achieved in an atmosphere of severe repression and discrimination, so that women had to overcome almost insuperable obstacles merely to gain entry to higher education and male-dominated career fields. Despite this, many were so successful that our patriarchal society has gone to great lengths to make sure we never hear about them.

On edit: Many years ago I was in the Berkeley public library, leafing through a little book about Einstein. I came to a passage about how Einstein was always annoyed when people called him, "the father of the bomb." His response was, "There was no father of the bomb. There was a mother of the bomb: Lise Meitner." So, having never heard of Meitner, I go, "WHAAAAA????," and I walked over to the physics library at Cal Berkeley, a few blocks away, and started going through the stacks, examining the books that touched upon the topic of the discovery of nuclear fission, one by one, looking for Meitner in the index, and if there was no mention of Meitner there, reading the pages of each book that described the discovery. It was only when I came across Hahn's own autobiographies (he wrote two) and found his statement that he had never studied mathematics, that I began to understand the true historical facts.

[Robert Oak]

2. ever see Einstein's Wife, PBS special?

http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife/

Mileva Maric...the evidence is strong she wrote some of the 1905 papers,
at minimum was a collaborator.

It's pretty amazing how many women are discounted and not credited for
their accomplishments in math and science, historically.

Thx for the Meitner story I hadn't heard that one.

[Senior citizen]

3. If one thing has been scientifically proven

in human history, it is that disadvantaging people (slaves, females) doesn't make them stupid, and, conversely, advantaging stupid people (like Dubya), doesn't make them smart.

If the morans running the world, like that Harvard president, were smart, they'd have figured it out a long time ago. They're advantaged, but they're not too bright. If not for their wives providing a support system, and female staff keeping their careers on track, they'd be lost. In many cases they copied from female classmates in grade school, got their moms to help with their homework, had female classmates do their college papers, and furthered their academic careers when they became professors, by stealing the work of female grad students. Like Dubya, they were born on 3rd base and think they hit a triple.

[glitch]

7. Or Rosalind Franklin the molecular biologist who photographed the double

helix,
"In 1951 she accepted a post at King's College London to study the structure of DNA with Wilkins. The two didn't get along and pursued their work separately, with Franklin discovering two different forms of DNA and making detailed X-ray pictures of each type. Her Photo 51, which required 100 hours of exposure in May 1952, was exceptional.

The following January, without her knowledge, Wilkins casually showed the image to Watson, who was unofficially working on the DNA problem with Crick at Cavendish Laboratory in nearby Cambridge. "My mouth fell open and my pulse began to race," Watson recalled in his famous memoir, The Double Helix (Atheneum, 1968). The distinctive pattern in Photo 51 proclaimed that the structure had to be a helix.

Back at Cavendish, Watson and Crick quickly took the next step by working out a structure that accounted for Franklin's data and other pieces of the puzzle, including an unpublished report by Franklin containing additional critical data. The discovery won Watson and Crick the Nobel Prize in 1962, which they shared with Wilkins. Sadly, Franklin was not eligible since she had died in 1958, at 37, from ovarian cancer; the Nobel is not awarded posthumously."

The last line is quite disingenuous, since no one even acknowledged her part of the discovery, or proposed that she be included in the honor, although Crick did respect her and felt bad about how she'd been treated.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/about.html
The show is a real eye opener.

[girl gone mad]

10. She was robbed..

and worse, her reputation was dragged through the mud and she wasn't around to defend herself.

[alarimer]

12. I read a biography on Franklin

Quite an interesting person though not always easy to get along with (not that I blame her with all the sexist behavior she had to put up with). She should have been credited too, since the information was shared without her knowledge.

[Tansy_Gold]

9. Thank you for the Meitner account

I hope you don't mind if I pass it along to another list of mine that is discussing (with appropriate loathing) Lawrence Summers' assininity.

[Senior citizen]

17. Please do.

Meitner died in obscurity, having failed to obtain funding to research ways to safely dispose of nuclear waste--a problem that remains unsolved to this day and will probably remain unsolved until and unless another Meitner comes along. On the other hand, if the necessary genius is also female, there is no guarantee that we will be deemed worthy of such knowledge--a person of that caliber who has to endure sexism in academia and elsewhere, might decide that our species deserves to die in its own toxic wastes precisely because of the patriarchal systems that make us ecologically nonviable.

Einstein publicly regretted that the secret of nuclear fission had to be given to a fascist country like the United States in order to defeat the Nazis. We have not become less fascist--on the contrary, we are probably more so.

One resource on Meitner is "Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics," by Ruth Lewin Sime, University of California Press, 1966. Sime did quite a bit of research, but appears to have missed Hahn's autobiography, "My Life," where he states that he had never studied math.

[Lisa]

4. people used to say that women didn't have the aptitude for academia ...

Not just physics, but other fields as well.

For a number of years now, there have been more female university students in Canada and the US (I don't know the stats for other countries, but it wouldn't surprise me if the same patterns occurs elsewhere). It's not unusual for medical schools to graduate more female than male doctors (McMaster, in Canada, had this happen as early as the 1980s). And apparently there are many departments where female MSc or MA students outnumber the guys. (Doctoral programs have fewer students so it's harder to see a pattern, but I know that my own department has graduated many women with PhDs.)

Some major schools, like Yale, didn't go co-ed until the 1960s. I think it's safe to say that this didn't hamper the quality of the teaching and research coming out of those places!

It will likely take a couple of generations to see changes percolate through the system. As time passes, the older faculty and admin people die off (sorry, Dr. Summers -- but if you look at Kuhn's theories on how science changes, this is often how paradigms get replaced). My own department went from virtually all-male to 40% female in about 15 years. Affirmative action policies helped, but there were enough qualified women applying for the jobs that we sure didn't have to go to the bottom of the barrel! Plus, things like more humane policies regarding parental leave, etc., clearly benefit men as well as women.

[jdj]

13. people used to say we couldn't exersize 'cause our ovaries would fall out

etc.

[Lisa]

24. yup -- remember when a bunch of women showed up for the Boston Marathon

... and were physically dragged away from the event as they were trying to compete?

[megatherium]

5. my specialty in mathematics,

something called harmonic or Fourier analysis, was electrified in the late 1980s by the advent of a new set of ideas called wavelet analysis. The leading researcher in this new subject is Ingrid Daubechies, who is now a professor at Princeton. Her book Ten Lectures on Wavelets is a best-seller in research mathematics, having sold more than ten thousand copies. Never have I read more lucid scientific writing.

The latest image compression standard (JPEG 2000) is largely based on her math.

[Lisa]

6. are there implications for analysis of natural systems?

Climate and oceans, for example? I've heard that there have been some amazing new developments that are enabling researchers to extract patterns from long-term data series like ice, sediment, and tree ring cores ... is this connected to her work?

[megatherium]

8. possibly connected.

One application of wavelet analysis is to solve complicated differential equations of the sort that model the climate; another application is to analysis of time-series (statistical data sets over time). The key idea behind wavelets is they extract time information as well as frequency information. They were first used to analyze the kind of acoustic signals generated in petroleum propecting (when they set off small explosions to generate sound waves, to listen to the reflected sound and thereby map the rock layers).

[Lisa]

23. thanks! this is cool ...

I overheard some colleagues raving about how much they'd be able to get out of their data sets -- I haven't seem them so enthused since the Natural Science and Engineering funding agency had a function here on campus, with a free buffet!

[ElectroPrincess]

11. We need to motivate young girls and women too!

I was the only girl in my high school physics class. Not because girls were banned, but only that girls were encouraged to follow a more artistic, secretarial path.

When I was a Graduate Assistant Academic Counselor at ASU, I found many more women than men (not scientific - just anecdotal) would express to me profound fear that they would have to take a entry level *statistics course* to receive a BS undergraduate degree.

It's a shame because I know these women were bright from their academic histories to include algebra. Yes, they all had the capability, but lacked a good dose of self confidence.

[Dudley_DUright]

14. "they all had the capability, but lacked a good dose of self confidence"

That has been my experience in almost 20 years of teaching physics at the college level. My female students are as good or better than the males, but often they don't realize just how good they actually are. They usually know more than they think they do (and conversely, the guys usually know less than they think they do ;-) ). I see part of my job as increasing the confidence of my female students and to inform them of all the career opportunities in physics that they could consider with the talent that they display.

[neuvocat]

15. I'm in a Calculus III class

and the teacher (a male) made the comment that the scores among women were better than the men.

[Triana]

16. Of course! SO BITE ME, Lawrence Summers!

You mysogenist bastard.

(edited to change title..)

[Senior citizen]

18. LOL! Summers may be a good fund raiser,

but he certainly hasn't done anything to enhance Harvard's reputation and prestige. If enough alumni withhold donations in protest, they'll have to get rid of him. So now we'll just have to sit back and see what quality of person Harvard has been graduating. Dubya got through Yale, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

We've got welfare for corporations, affirmative action for rich white males, and radioactive wastes being disposed of by being used in weapons that harm our own troops and their families as much as they harm the "enemy." If there already was a genius of the caliber needed to solve the world's problems, she or he was probably kidnapped and sold to a sex slave ring as a child, and is now too emotionally disturbed to care. "As ye sow....."

[Triana]

20. He ought to be removed...

...from his position - should have been the very next day...Duhbya probably bought his 'C's...

[Senior citizen]

21. I'd like to know how a dipshit like that ever got his position.....

....probably the same way Gannon/Guckert got his White House press pass.

[Triana]

27. Haaa..

Probably so! Amazing how many of these twits were artificially elevated into our midst in the most prominent places in society, innit?

Keep givin 'em Hell, Senior Citizen!

[drthais]

19. HAHAHA -and one of this year's Nobel Prizes goes to....

my friend, Linda Buck
and guess what
she is a physicist

nuf said,. I do believe

[rayofreason]

26. She won it in medicine....

....which only goes to show what a physicist can do.

[MARALE]

22. I think women need confidence

My parents made my brother and I do everything, not divide it up because of gender. They gave us a great sense of worth, not holding us back. I went on to become and electrical engineer and my brother a mechanical engineer. I remember in a programming class, I got a better score on a test than the guy beside me. He told me women could do the book work, but weren't smart enough in the field to do better then men. That really hurt my feelings that someone could think that way, because I wasn't used to it. I got used to it after I got a job. It is still very hard for a female science-based proffesional to get much respect in the work place. I hope things are easier for my daughter. It seems like many in this country are fighting women in places of equality, I just don't get it.

[Demeter]

25. Please! Don't Confuse Summers With Facts!

The data is out there, and has been for 40 years now--let the man come out of his cave and smell the Revolution.

[ElectroPrincess]

28. Yes, someone *up there* must love him (Summers) ...

Any other mere mortal would have been unseated. What's up with that?