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Re: PHYS-L Digest - 24 Aug 2000 - Special issue (#2000-296)



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Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 19:23:38 -0600
From: Jim Green <JMGreen@SISNA.COM>
Subject: Re: How To Recruit Women to Tech and IT Classes


Unless you think that phys-l serves no useful purpose in the physics
community, then the fact that you have almost no women posting ever -
and certainly I'm the only one I've seen so far who is silly enough
to stick my head up out of the trench on this thread - has to say
something about the culture of physics?

And the point is????

Jim Green
mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen

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OK, I'll bite - briefly, because it's my day off work, and I have the shopping to do
and kids to pick up, after having spent an unscheduled hour at work to do something
that couldn't be done from home...

True, there is no God-given rule that you need to have equal numbers of women
physicists, or even of women physics faculty members. In principle, you can even run
the discipline on monastic lines if you like (ex-physicist Margaret Wertheim, in
"Pythagoras' Trousers" has a bit to say about this).

However, think about this. You not only train physicists, you also teach physics to
engineers, doctors, astronomers, ..., or at least I hope you do. A goodly proportion
of those students are female. But if the way you teach physics, or the way the
physics community is structured, doesn't make many of the female science students, at
least, want to go on to become physicists *or* discourages them from doing so down the
track, then is it really likely that the female non-physics students are relating well
to the physics courses they take? (There is probably lots of research on this, I
know.)

And if those female students, on average, are not having a good experience studying
physics, are they learning well? Presumably we think that engineers, doctors,
astronomers, etc need to understand physics well to do their professions well,
otherwise we wouldn't teach it to them?

But don't pay attention to my single opinion - do some scientific research. Discuss
this with your female physicist colleagues (but be careful, because we are a biased
sample - we made it through the hoops), or better still, get a psychology colleague to
conduct a focus group with some of your undergraduate female students who study
physics, and also with postgrad. female students. See what they say, publish it, get
an NSF grant ... But for heavens sake, don't be so complacent as to think that a
bunch of guys can solve this one in a vacuum (or on a listserver!)

Off to take care of the rest of my life,
Cheers,
Margaret