Sunday, June 9, 2019
By:
I am interviewing a very accomplished woman tomorrow. She is the lead author on a paper which has good odds to solve a problem plaguing the energy industry for decades. This groundbreaking research required a suite of bespoke methods and instruments, computer modeling, and experimentation, all of which was done a team of her and nine other scientists peppered across the globe.
I looked those nine up—all men.
That surprised me, though I do have a skewed view. I had the privilege to have a college education in the gender-diverse environment of Sarah Lawrence, which also boasts a majority of female-identifying teachers.
Women even outnumber men in teaching the sciences at Sarah Lawrence—a rarity. According to data on APS’ website, the only field in which female-identifying PhD candidates outnumber their male-identifying peers is in biology, which they do by about five percent. In the remaining fields for which APS has data, the disparity ranges from 40% in Earth Sciences to 18%. The latter percentage is in physics, which sees the fewest women graduate with a PhD—352—than any other hard science field in 2017.
I was also shocked to see so few people of color in the building with us. Though, as a fellow intern reminded me, I shouldn’t have been. Physics is a historically white field. 2017 saw 19 African Americans receive doctorate degrees in physics. Statistics on specifically African-American female involvement are damingly poor: there are fewer than 100 Black female-identifying people who hold PhDs in physics.
Take a broad view for a moment: according to APS’s data, 1,967 people graduated with physics PhDs in 2017. Two years ago, the physics graduates outnumbered all the Black, female-identifying physics PhDs throughout all history twenty to one.
There are, currently, 99 Black female-identifying physics PhDs. The physics community plans to award that last milestone degree later this year. There was a steep hike—percentage-wise—in PhDs awarded to that group since 2017, when only 90 Black female-identifying people had been afforded that honor since 1972. In that same 45-year time span (1972 to 2017), 59,894 people were awarded PhDs in physics. Of the people who earned a physics PhD over the last 45 years, 0.002% of them were Black womxn. A Black, female-identifying, PhD-holding American physicist is one in five hundred.
The woman I am interviewing tomorrow is not Black. She is not a Native American, nor Hispanic, nor Pacific Islander, nor any other ethnicity for which the physics PhD data are also dismal. She did, however, overcome the (admittedly easier) odds and join the slim ranks of female physics PhDs worldwide. As much as a human being can or should be held up as a symbol, she is a testament to the indisputable power of inclusivity. So are Ellen Fetter and Margaret Hamilton, mathematicians who helped program the computer that spat out the first proof of chaos theory. So is Sau Lan Wu, a particle physicists who currently heads a team using Large Hadron Collider data to make something out of the shambles of Standard Theory after the discovery of the Higgs Boson. The list goes on.There are no statistics on LGBT+ physics PhDs readily available. Since those statistics are currently collected by a government which has targeted swathes and members of that community, it’s for the best that there isn’t a federal database. We don’t need stats to know the story of Alan Turing, or Sir Francis Bacon, or Sally Ride.
Physics is act of listening to the clockwork of creation tick. We all hear that tick equally well.
Jeremiah O'Mahony