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Re: [Phys-l] Women in physics



"In fact, the gap gets progressively wider at every rung up the academic ladder. . .[as is indicated by her graph]..."

I think logic requires this, at least not a reversal.

This statistical phenomenon is known as the 'leaky pipeline,' reflecting as widely held belief that more women drop out of physics at every step along the educational path."


An apt metaphor, which is a clue to the logic above.

bc, amateur logician, and "w/ time on his hands".

On reading further my comment is, "So, what else is new?"

Eric Fromm and perhaps some ancient Greeks would predict , if my belief in the cliché on the socialization of women in western society is correct, the "leaky pipeline". Some believe it's "genetic" I hesitate to agree, but ....

Using Lakoff's metaphor of the family: women tend to be the nurturers while men tend to be the strict fathers. As long as the teaching of physics, etc. uses the strict father mode, the "pipeline will leak".

An early abbreviated version of "Moral Politics".


http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/New_School.pdf/view


About Lakoff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

A now retired JC teacher told me that that, while a beginning grad. student, the chair of the Physics dept. had told her women were unsuitable for Physics. It wasn't until I was a grad student at a second school that we had a women fellow student, and then she transferred to the maths dept. after a year! Admittedly small departments. In England there were many more women students, but that was > five years later, so one can't compare.

Richard Hake wrote:

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The thread "Winnie and Math," initiated on the CTP-L list (AAPT Committee on Teacher Preparation) by Paul Hickman, and Keith Clay's remark of 16 Aug 2007: "I'm hoping folks are familiar with Rachel Ivie's fabulous work on women in physics. . ." reminded me of a recent article by Rachel Ivie, "Deconstructing the 'Leaky Pipeline' " in the June/July 2007 issue of the new AAPT journal "Interactions." Ivie's article includes an interesting graph "Actual and Expected Percentage of Women and Men in Physics in the U.S. for 6 categories: high school students, Bachelor's degrees, PhD degrees, Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, and Full Professors.

Ivie writes: "Compared to their representation in other fields, women are underrepresented in physics, especially at the top levels. In fact, the gap gets progressively wider at every rung up the academic ladder. . .[as is indicated by her graph]. . . . .For example, women accounted for 14% of all Ph.D.s earned in physics in 2005, but far fewer women - only six percent - were full professors of physics in 2006. This statistical phenomenon is known as the 'leaky pipeline,' reflecting as widely held belief that more women drop out of physics at every step along the educational path. In contrast to the prevailing view, however, data compiled by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) show that for women in physics, these leaks only occur at specific points along the path."

Ivie's graph shows that in addition to the leak between physics Ph.D.'s and full physics professors, another prominent leak occurs between high school and university graduation: about 47% of high school physics students are women, but only about 21% of physics Bachelor's degrees are awarded to women.
Fiona McDonnell (2005), in her article "Why so few choose physics: An alternative explanation for the leaky pipeline,addressed the leak of women between high school physics and physics Bachelor's degrees shown in the data of Ivie & Ray (2005). She wrote:

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Why do so many students who enter physics with an interest in pursuing a career in science, and who experience academic success in high school physics, lose interest in science-physics most especially-as a field of study following their formal exposure to the discipline?

Part of the answer to this question, I suggest, is evident in the nature of students' responses to the instructional practices and culture of their physics classroom. In the late 1990s, I conducted a formal qualitative study to understand the images of physics and physicists held by high school physics students [Hughes-McDonnell (1996)].

The study involved seventeen students, nine boys and eight girls, drawn from nine physics classrooms in seven public high schools in the northeast. Students were enrolled in the most advanced level of physics offered by his/her respective high school. For the vast majority of students with whom I spoke, THEIR DECISION NOT TO PURSUE PHYSICS AT THE COLLEGE LEVEL OR TO TAKE ONLY WHAT MIGHT BE REQUIRED FOR ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC FIELD WAS THE RESULT OF THEIR STRONG REJECTION OF THE PRACTICES AND RITUALS ASSOCIATED WITH THEIR HIGH SCHOOL PHYSICS COURSE (my CAPS); and many distanced themselves from the worldview that they ascribed to those practices.

While these practices and belief systems do not necessarily reflect or represent those of physics or of practicing physicists, they do constitute students' introduction to the discipline. Why should students believe that physics is anything other than what they have experienced? The practices of school physics and the impact they have on students' view of physics as a potential field of study pose a barrier for some students that is both psychological and philosophical in nature. The authoritarian practices of school physics and the culture of physics that students infer from their experiences in school physics must be accounted for in efforts to understand the different choices made by similarly prepared students. I present a few examples from my own research.
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Consistent with McDonnell's alternative explanation for the leak of women between high school physics and physics Bachelor's in "Proof and Prejudice: Women in Mathematics and Physics" [Hake (2006)], I wrote:

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It would appear that the physics pipeline leak of females between high school and earning a bachelor's degree might be reduced by the incorporation of more interactive engagement strategies in introductory physics courses.

The abstract of "Reducing the gender gap in the physics classroom" [Lorenzo et al. (2006)] reads:

"We investigate if the gender gap in conceptual understanding in an introductory university physics course can be reduced by using interactive engagement . . . (IE). . . methods that promote in-class interaction, reduce competition, foster collaboration, and emphasize conceptual understanding. To this end we analyzed data from the introductory calculus-based physics course for non-majors at Harvard University taught traditionally or using different degrees of
interactive engagement. OUR RESULTS SHOW THAT TEACHING WITH CERTAIN INTERACTIVE STRATEGIES NOT ONLY YIELDS SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED UNDERSTANDING FOR BOTH MALES AND FEMALES, BUT ALSO REDUCES THE GENDER GAP. In the most interactively taught courses, the pre-instruction gender gap was gone by the end of the semester."
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Also in the June/July 2007 issue of "Interactions," Ted Hodapp (2007), Director of Education and Diversity Programs at the American Physical Society (APS), discusses a recent conference held by the APS's Committee on the Status of Women in Physics (CSWP) of department chairs, managers of national laboratories, and funding agencies, with an aim to further CSWP's long range goal of doubling the number of women in physics over the next 15 years. This would seem to require reduction in the flow of women out of the above two major physics pipeline leaks between: (A) high school physics and physics Bachelor's degrees and (B) Ph.D.'s in physics and full physics professors.

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