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Published online 23 April 2008 |
452,
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(2008)
| doi:10.1038/452918a
Corrected online: 30 April 2008
News
Data show extent of sexism in physics
Experiment at Fermilab gave women fewer opportunities to present at conferences.
Women are poorly represented in physics, making up just 10% of faculty in the United States, for example, but the reasons for this have proved contentious. Now a particle physicist claims to have hard data showing institutional sexism at an experiment at one of America's highest-profile physics labs.
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My experience as a physicist working with the occasional female colleagues leads me to a subjective impression that women really think differently. Female thinking seems to be more lateral then vertical. By that I mean, women in physics are generally harder working than male colleagues and are great co-workers in terms of encouragement, diligence, and backup support. They do not, however, contribute a great deal of original ideas and rigorous logical analysis to the research. Female judgment seems to more emotionally biased.
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An ironic aspect of sex discrimination is that awareness of sexual harassment has made it extremely difficult for a senior researcher to have a normal working relationship with a younger colleague of the opposite sex. It is normal human nature for a person to choose someone whose work and thinking they are familiar with to represent their group at a conference, and so it it is not surprising that the data reflect this (I am not defending sexual discrimination here, just describing what I see). I have also worked in a department where the top researchers were all female, and as a male, I could tell that I was not among the "in crowd." So until we are able to reach a critical mass of senior female researchers who have female proteges, the situation is not likely to change.
My dad was a solid state physicist and president of a prominent university. He claimed throughout my life that women did not have the innate ability to perform well in math, and were inferior in analytical thinking. Many of his colleagues thought in these absolute terms. When I declared my major as mechanical engineering at Stanford, my dad discouraged me, claiming that I did not have the innate ability. He argued that my brother did instead, despite my higher math SAT scores (~+200 points) and more advanced training in math (beyond calculus). Also, I inherited his brain, while my brother ended up with the fuzzy non-linear thinking of my mother. Now I am a professor at a prominent university, and my brother is a tech. My dad did concede that he was wrong before passing away.
From reading these comments about it appears that there is a large degree of "us versus them" mentality. I think, like some areas of Information Technology, there is along way to go before woman have the same standing as men within the physics community. I am glad that Sherry Towers performed this study - I personally don't believe that men or woman are innately more suited to certain areas of achievement. But that is another debate that may never end! I will conclude with this quote I read somewhere (source lost in the mists of time) : "Men are from earth, woman are from earth - Deal with it!"
Alas female physicists are disappeared people in the history of physics. Many of their results are well known but it is generally unknown that that those discoveries ( theoretical and experimental)were made by women. See, e.g., OUT OF THE SHADOWS:contributions of 20th century women to physics, Cambridge University Press 2006, for documented examples of original and important contributions made by 40 women.
Sexual discrimination is a demonstrated fact that takes place in every (not only) scientific endeavour. Despite some open-minded declarations (and not that many, as the list of comments on this page shows), the major problem, in my opinion is that the will to change is lacking in the institutions. This is not surprising, as most governing bodies of scientific institutions are composed mostly of males, who are not happy to 1) admit the bias and 2) give up some power, and especially to a group with whom they don't feel comfortable. The situation seems locked, males have the power to decide who will get next power (presentations, publications, authorship, positions, career advancements, grant money...), and they distribute it in a biased way, perpetuating the situation. The solution in my opinion must be twofold: from the top and from the bottom. Form the top there should be a system that forces universities, research institutes and granting bodies to distribute resources on a 50 /50 basis (we could allow for some graduality, but following another line of reasoning we might also ask for a reversed distribution to allow for compensation). This only requires ruling, at no additional cost, but for some unknown (!) reason the idea seems to be unacceptable. Form the bottom, as the early work of Nancy Hopkinks at MIT has demonstrated, it is necessary that women demand for equity, because male-dominated institutions are not prepared to 'concede' it spontaneously. Also, a proper non-biased education at the school level (from pre-school to university) should make the forcing system from the top not necessary in the long run (if ever). Thanks, once again, to Tower for raising the issue, once again. But we have had enough discussion of whether a bias exists (yes), on why it is so (many reasons under the same umbrella), and how it might be possible to adjust the situation (few suggestions, and only rarely implemented). It is now time to act: the responsibility is on the managers. What are they doing?
I am not surprised. Its the old mentality which prevails in our society. All manner of stereo types and phobias affect how we interact with each other. Patience and understanding are out of the window or maybe they never got in the door. I have to say that this is partially the reason young minds are turned off by science in general. Why would I want to walk into a room and "feel" literally the hate, jealousy, animosity, anger, and resentment just for being who I am. I been to a few conferences and all of these aforementioned things hit me like a tidal wave or a tsunami. I am a patient man however so I shrugged off the feelings and said to myself "they really don't know better". They really don't know that ANYONE can learn given the opportunity. Some of us learn faster than others. Applying the knowledge is another issue. I gues there are those humans not on the evolutionary chain *hint hint*. For me, being a physicist is like being an artist, creativity and imagination go hand in hand. Gender to a lesser degree may affect how a person would imagine something and be able to create that what was imagined through formulation. More so it is the environment we were brought up as children, religion, and social skills that play a major part in how we think and act. I will say to any female physicist or scientist for that matter who reads my comment to keep at it, ignore the negativity and remain positive. But as a back up have a punching bag hanging in your living room or basement if applicable so you can vent because you will need to vent! p.s. I had to buy another bag XD.
Descrimination on any basis is ugly. Really, it puts an extra burden while performing in any field. I am a postdoc, in physics and a woman, and this combination really makes life struggleful if one wants to perform better. Sometimes people think as if there are only humans with 'XY' who can have scientific and analytical abilities. We are sorry, guys, if you think so, but 'XX' are doing well too in science and just open your eyes and accept the truth. Change the views soon now. And I hope women who are facing descrimination, never give up and continue the journey to their goals.
Adding statistics to Tanja Schmidt's comment (see above), here are the facts: Nobel prizes in physics (1901-2006): Total awarded = 178, No. of females = 2 (Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer). Last 20 years (1987-2006): Total awarded = 50, No. of females = 0. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_Nobel_Prize_laureates
So, if I were a female physics student, preparing to take a course from an individual who believes that females do not create original ideas or apply rigorous analytical thinking, I could then expect, most logically, to earn a grade that was sub-par to my fellow male students'. I think that Dr. Kantorek's beginning comment beautifully illustrates the problem that female scientists, and indeed all females, face. Indeed, it makes the article's point nicely. I would only disagree with Dr. Tower in one way. I think that sometimes there is a conscious bias going on, and Dr. Kantorek comment certainly lends weight to that hypothesis.
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Because I'm not a physicist I read the comments with special interest. I've sat in lots of meetings where issues of diversity became a central focus - and sometimes reared their ugly head. How, I wondered, do physicists handle it? Well, right out of the box Dr. Kantorek tosses off what must surely have been a poorly considered response, because what his position really seems to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Dr. Kantorek said at the outset that he has only worked with a few women physicists, and acknowledged that the opinions that he developed as a result of these experiences were purely subjective. Based on these subjective experiences, he concludes that women really do think differently from men and that their judgment seems to be more emotionally biased. He says also that they don't contribute so much in the way of original ideas or rigorous logical analysis - as if that followed logically from his first statement. It might turn out that way, but it isn't a natural logical progression. He just makes it sound as if it were. But what I thought was actually nasty, as opposed to just careless) was to offer faint praise about how women are such wonderful, supportive colleagues (kind of like wives, eh?) and that they do work harder than men (but alas, to so little purpose, bless their fluffy little feminine hearts!). I don't know if he meant this to sound nasty or patronizing (but Paul, trust me, it set my teeth on edge), but I don't think I'm alone in feeling that cold thread of fear at the thought of a sentence like that appearing in - say - a performance review. It's the thing that cuts both ways at tenure or other reviews. It can mean you're a team player, but can easily be twisted to show that you really should just get back in the kitchen. Or teach kindergarten at best. But the real reason I think he's like the pot calling the kettle black (maybe! I haven't seen a woman do this here yet, though I think Dr. Schmidt's comments were slightly tangential at a couple of points) is because he didn't stop at drawing a huge generalization from a small sample. He also didn't acknowledge his rather dubious logic. But the worst - in my opinion, the most unforgivable sin for a scientist - he just ignored the empirical data and plowed on ahead telling everybody how things are, making some very broad statements about the innate capacieties of about half the population of the world as if those comments were based on anything other than his own experiences - which are not necessarily representative of anything other than what he wants to experience (Isn't this the moment to invoke Heisenberg's Principle?). Well, this fuzzy-minded social scientist is rapidly losing her physics envy, because I was taught that we never form our opinions until after all the data are in. We can develop a null hypothesis to either prove or disprove, but we'd better not get to liking it very much because that is the sure path to making costly scientific and/or clinical errors. Incidentally, I see that later he tried to support his arguments by pointing out that only two women have won Nobel Prizes in physics. I'm not sure this helps much, since one of them was also the only PERSON to win two Nobel prizes in scientific fields. Which may balance that out some if you accept Nobel prizes as a criterion, though that seems really little silly for a ton of reasons, of which I'll limit myself to two: First, I'm not sure we can accept that the selection process for Nobel Prizes is unbiased. After all, it's not exactly a blind peer review, is it? Even if blind peer reviews were really blinded . . . Second, I think that's a little to stringent a criterion for "original contribution to research," don't you? If that's the cutoff, then I don't suppose any of us has ever had an orignal thought in our heads. This is similar to a statistical barrier to demonstrating validity and reliability called "restriction of range." You know, the more I think about it, the more I think I should take back what I said about Dr. (Is it Dr.???) Kantorek's arguments. He 'accused' women of "lateral" thinking and made it pretty clear that he thought this was inferior to male's tendency towards "vertical" thinking. I was wrong when I implied that this was exactly what he he had done; because there is some evidence that women think differently from men (but not that they MUST!). There is no scientifically valid reason to believe that these approaches to cognition are inferior or less effective than the ways that boy and men approach cognitive tasks, and it's certainly not true that these approaches are illogical. I cannot say the same of Dr. Kantorek's arguments. I am sure that the research discussed above doesn't tell the whole story of gender disparities in physics - no one study ever can. So I would like to pose the following challenge directly to Paul Kantorek: We all know how you feel about women and women who try to be physicists, But what about this study? You're going to have to dispose of Dr. Tower's evidence if you want to maintain both your theoretical position and your credibility. If you can't tell us why her data is irrelvant, then we're all going to call you a male chauvinist pig and I'm afraid you're going to have to let us. That's my semi-clinical opinion as a fuzzy minded non-physicist. Or is that just feminine logic?
Actually when I read Dr. Kantorek's second comment about the dearth of female Nobel prize winners, I didn't read the author and thought he was bringing this up as an example supporting that women get overlooked for honors. Ultimately we have to make people who are blatantly sexist and refuse to critically examine the evidence of sexism to become irrelevant, ideally because their colleagues stop listening to them and stop putting them in leadership positions. But it isn't much use arguing with - or about - a brick wall. Better to just walk around it. I am in a heavy ion experiment with over 500 collaborators and a publication policy similar to D0's. I started examining data from our experiment and I saw a similar trend. Most large experiments of this size have a similar publication policy, and many have data going back for years. I think we can bolster this analysis by reviewing data on other experiments. That's the best way to respond to the arguments that this isn't a significant effect, or that it only happened in this one case. I think it is also important to make it clear that revisiting talks policies would help men too. At least in my collaboration, the same people keep getting nominated for high profile talks, even when there are other people working on the same subject who are equally good and sometimes better speakers. No one benefits from the wide-spread use of the buddy system in the allocation of talks. Ultimately these things retard the progress of science. Not only do good people miss the opportunity to speak at and attend conferences and get much needed exposure, but our conferences aren't as interesting as they could be and the speakers aren't as good. We should push for double-blind abstract decisions for conferences and constant monitoring of the allocation of talks for any type of bias (not only gender bias) when the decision can't be made double-blind. Until the best candidates are chosen to give talks (and get papers published and get jobs,) we all lose.
I am amazed at the furious response to my comment. I have presented (above) the objective statistics regarding the Nobel prize awards for original research and discoveries. Nevertheless, being called "an idiot", "fool", and "male chauvinist pig" only confirms my point about female emotional reaction to the presented Nobel prize award evidence. In my honest opinion, male-female team is the best combination for original and fruitful research, as demonstrated by Marie and Pierre Curie. Unfortunately, due to the emotional animosity (see above) it is a rare occurrence. I truly wish to see more enlightened female colleagues to collaborate on scientific projects and discoveries.
Dr. Kantorek, you should recognize that the comments in response to your comment are emotional because you accused all female scientists of being dumber and less productive than men and generally inferior scientists on what you even admit is your own limited experience and not objective data. If you make a personal attack on about 15-20% of your colleagues, you have to expect them to defend themselves, just as you yourself are doing when you feel attacked. I suggest you look at the arguments made by other people and the data used to support those arguments instead of ranting.
My experience makes me see the results of Dr. Tower as credible. It is not surprising. Also, the bias against females is not the only bias in operation in physics; you could probably find similar results for a variety of groups - racial, religious, ethnic and so on. I have personally observed discriminatory actions against Hispanic individuals and against individuals who practice a religion, in job searches, work assignments and fellowship grants. Sometimes it is so genteel, the "nice guy" faculty member who talks about some discriminatory action with a charming smile and a wisecrack.
"I have presented (above) the objective statistics regarding the Nobel prize awards for original research and discoveries. Nevertheless, being called "an idiot", "fool", and "male chauvinist pig" only confirms my point about female emotional reaction to the presented Nobel prize award evidence." I'm not a woman, and you're "an idiot" because you rely on generalizations forged from limited personal contact with female physicists. It's also asinine to imagine that you'll enlighten an audience reading Nature with a Wikipedia article on Nobelists. How so? For example, based on your surname, you, also, are incapable of vertical thinking based on the lack of Nobels for Czech physicists. Who ever heard of these losers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Czech_physicists Of course, it'd be easier to just say that anyone who says, "female judgment seems to more emotionally biased," and finds it an original contribution to a discussion is thinking backwards and not just horizontally.
"female judgment seems to more emotionally biased," It's not even wrong. :)
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"If I was a Nature editor, I would at least make an effort to identify the user Kantorek and if he is employed by some academic institution make a print out of this comment list and send a nice letter." You could do this yourself. A HUGE caveat: someone could be impersonating him or using the name as a pseudonym; there's only one published P Kantorek, and here's his Dean (http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/people/Boctor.html) and a Women in Engineering group at his University (http://www.discoverengineering.ryerson.ca/Home/Home.html).
This discussion based on "political correctness" and disregarding reality is amusing. Has the dim person hiding behind the name "Anon" (or is it miss-spelled Anus) ever heard of the freedom of academic expression ?
This is not a discussion based on political correctness. This shouldn't be a discussion about Dr. Kantorek, although he has successfully made himself the center of the discussion. This is a discussion about data indicating that a large fraction of the scientific community is not being evaluated on an objective basis. Would you like some more data? Let's talk about data. (I apologize but the form doesn't let me put in white space.) 1. When women and men successfully complete the same task, women's success is attributed to luck while men's success is attributed to skill. (Kay Deaux and Tim Emswiller, "Explanations of successful performance on sex-linked tasks," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1974, Vol. 29, No. 1, 80-85) 2. Job applicants with identical resumes are rated as more qualified if the name on the resume is recognizably male rather than female. (Rhea Steinpreis, Katie Anders, and Dawn Ritzke, "The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Cirricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study," Sex Roles, 1999, Vol. 41, No. 718) 3. Women's letters of recommendation say they are "nice" and "work hard" while men's say they are "smart" and "talented." (Frances Trix and Carolyn Psenka, "Exploring the Color of Glass: Letters of Recommendation for Female and Male Medical Faculty," Discourse Society, 2003, Vol. 14, 191) 4. When a major ecology journal switched from a single blind to a double blind review of papers, the proportion of papers accepted went from a lower proportion of women than the population of researchers to equal or slightly above the proportion of women. (Budden, A. E. /et al/. Trends Ecol. Evol. 23, 4–6 (2008).) This means graduate admissions committees, people hiring post docs, and people on faculty search committees are, on average, not hiring the most qualified applicants. The next question is how are we going to fix this? I made some proposals above. Any response to those? Any other proposals?
"The next question is how are we going to fix this? I made some proposals above. Any response to those? Any other proposals?" ... as evident from my previous posts, a first step is to encourage faculty, students, and administrators in research departments to confront and report abject sexual discrimination in the workplace. Dr. Pitts' statement in the article hints that he's seen this sort of thing first hand; I'd bet many people here have as well. The sort of systematic issues like those at the DZero project are an inevitable results of a system in which people sharing Dr. Kantorek's views are allowed to play a role in hiring/publishing/funding. And, no, spinning your experience with women into a general statement on women's abilities in science is not covered under "freedom of academic expression." Don't conflate genuine, if controversial, areas of academic interest (the kinds of questions that Summers took heat for, efforts in genetics/cogsci/etc to see what separates gender) with the ignorance on display here. A PhD isn't a license for chauvinism.
Looks like the anonymous dim-wit Anon follows up on Tanja Schmidt's suggestion to silence her opponent. She is obviously a great "scientist". Is that the way we want to go in academia? Just make sure to eliminate your adversary? Sounds more like Hitler's or Stalin's idea to me.
If you are going to use nobel prize statistics you need to normalize for the age of the recipient. If a 70-year old wins this years physics prize then the winner is likely to be male since 50 or so years ago when he was doing his degrees there would have been very few, if any, women in the classes.
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So reporting to a university that a professor is making inflammatory comments about women - when he is likely evaluating women in his classes and evaluating the work of women - is morally equivalent to genocide? That is one of the most repugnant comparisons of people to Hitler or Stalin that I have ever heard.
The problem is: how does one act against discrimination inside an academic institution? (a) Sometimes the institution has no mechanism of its own for seeking accountability. How many faculty members have regular evaluations of their supervisors (chairs etc.)? (b) Suppose there is a mechanism in place, will the institution do anything about a complaint? I.e., is the institution outside the department PART of the same problem? Has it institutionalized its own version of pc that allows complaints by some groups but not by others? (c) Can a lawyer along the way defuse all by classifying the problem as "political" -- as in faculty politics. (d) How does one avoid nuking the institution by calling in the plaintiff bar? That would be last resort.
Some are 'justifying' the discrimination by stating that women really lack some abilities (somehow they state it as if that is proven and its kind of knowledge they got from their studies around them). Well, everybody seems to accept that there is a discrimination against women (although some argue that it is ok). So, after confirming this by statistical analysis, the further step should be 'how to stop it'? It is yet not proven by any science that women lack any ability to perform well in science and so they are behind, however, in contrast, there are data to support the fact that society is biased, and as a result there are not enough women given enough opportunities at the first place. so before anyone makes broad comments on any ability of women, they should go and prove it on the basis of some valid science (eg genetics) first of all.
Insist on Title IX.
Due to a certain amount of inappropriate language in this otherwise interesting string of comments, the editor has made it such that posts will have to be reviewed before publication. This will create a delay before your submitted comment appears online. Thank you.
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Does any one see the irony of arguing about equality, when even we can not get along? One comment that did not get nearly enough attention was the third one by Clay Malinek. "I have also worked in a department where the top researchers were all female, and as a male, I could tell that I was not among the "in crowd." So until we are able to reach a critical mass of senior female researchers who have female proteges, the situation is not likely to change." I do not think for a moment, that these female professors were exercising a conscious bias and had they been accused of bias, they would be indignantly defensive - much as we see some of reactions here. Perhaps, the reality of, or the consciousness of workplace problems with the opposite sex lead to (to borrow a phrase) 'non-zero interaction terms' between both genders. If it is unconscious, it will much harder to eliminate. Notice there have been some evidences suggested on this thread that could be used by either side, depending on your biases.
I am sorry to hear of the experience of Sherry Towers. Over the course of a 25 year career as a male researcher I have collaborated with many professional females, from physicists to physicians, and I would be very sorry indeed to lose an opportunity to learn from any of those very intelligent and talented researchers. However, in the uncommon circumstance that I have come across a professional with a negative attitude, I steer clear of them. It doesn't matter if they are male or female. There are plenty of great researchers to work with, both male and female, so why take a risk with someone who expresses a "agree with my perceptions or I'll seek to damage your career" attitude? Such an attitude (whether sexism or racism doesn't matter) creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy of discrimination and lost opportunity, doesn't it? If so, then assessing how confident and safe the researchers feel with each other is far more important than assessing whether the ratio of female presenters to female researchers is less than the ratio of male presenters to male researchers.
Sadly, it's not just physics. As a biochemistry undergraduate, as a graduate student, even as a faculty member, I have been exposed to sexism on numerous occasions. It may be better than it was - after all, 10 years before I attended college, I would have been forced to obey a curfew while the men on campus would have been free to roam about. A few decades before that, I would not have been accepted, at least not in my discipline. Sexism is very, very real. And Dr. Kantorek does not stand alone in his biased assumptions about intellect and ability.
As a Mexican astronomer I have been always amazed by the gender problem in countries like US. On the public imagination Mexico is known, among other things by a "macho country", nevertheless we have about a 50-50 male-female relation among astronomers. The statistics are no so good in physics but every year there is an increasing percentage of women enrolling on scientific careers. I have never been subject of arrassement, and I don't know any women in science that has had that problem with Mexican scientists. My gender-biased experience has been to be hired in a tenure track position, for being a women! This was part of an effort at the National University to increase the number of women working as scientists on what are called the "hard sciences". My advice: come to Mexico and learn from a Third World country what is to be respected as a scientist regardless your gender, religion or skin color.
I think there's one point that most of the above commentary has so far not examined, which is discussed quite thoroughly in the book "Women don't ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide" by Babcock and Laschever. It turns out that on average, in a wide variety of careers, women are consistently less likely to ask for raises, promotions, and so on. Women tend to assume that if they out-perform their colleagues, they will be rewarded proportionally. While many of us would love to believe this is true in the sciences, in practice -- as in any work environment -- people who ask for opportunities are more likely to receive them. I do not wish to contend that there is no gender bias in people's evaluations of their colleagues, and it is certainly important that those on the senior end of these collaborations reflect on how objective they are in their assessments. But it's important for women to acknowledge that no selection of this type (presenting at a conference, getting a raise, etc.) is made on the basis of merit alone. What appears at first glance to be institutional discrimination, which is very difficult for any individual woman to overcome, may to a large extent be simply a reflection of the fact that she is less likely than her colleagues to ask for important career advancing opportunities -- something which she certainly can (and should!) change.
It seems that the Western civilization is blossoming for last 800 years solely thanks to the universities. So bringing the politics into campus put the academy (and the whole Western world!) into a great danger.
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Thank you Antigona for pointing out that affimitive action can make a big difference. That is what I was advocating when I mentioned Title IX. The is an option that is explored by WISE (women in science and engineering. Title IX in USA law allowed more women to particpate in collegiate sports by equalizing the spending on female and male sports activities at colleges that receive federal money. As I understand it this anti discrimination law could be applied more widely to university spending. Lets all thank Larry Summers and James Watson for bringing to our attention that there is no extrodinary evidence to back up extrodinary claims for genetic discrimination.
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To F. B. Whether or not your view is correct, the award of prizes and the choice of person to be invited to give a plenary or keynote lecture is not something that a person can "simply ask for". For example, here is a Correspondence to _Nature_ by Prof Dolphin, published on 24 August 2006 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7105/full/442868a.html), from which I quote here: There have been three meetings of the Biochemical Society in the new annual meeting format (Biosciences 2004, 2005 and 2006) and at these 1 of 10, 0 of 10 and 0 of 7, respectively, of the plenary lectures were given by a woman. Some of these plenary lecturers were recipients of prizes and medals, and I was so shocked by these statistics that I made a rough count of the proportion of women who have received these prizes over the years, as published on the society’s website at http://www.biochemsoc.org.uk. Recipients’ initials, rather than first names, are given, so I may conceivably have misattributed the male gender to some of the earlier names. The prizes include the annual Colworth medal, given to a promising scientist under 35: only one has been awarded to a woman, out of 44 recipients, between 1963 and 2007. The statistics for the other prizes, up to 2007, are the Novartis medal, 2 of 39; Jubilee lecture, 1 of 23; Wellcome Trust award for research in biochemistry related to medicine, 1 of 11; AstraZeneca prize, 1 of 5; Frederick Gowland Hopkins memorial lecture, 0 of 24; Keilin memorial lecture, 0 of 21; Morton lecture, 0 of 14; Biochemical Society medal, 0 of 3; and GlaxoSmithKline medal, 0 of 2. This translates into 3.2% of the prizes being given to women, a truly lamentable record. Furthermore, the statistics have not improved. In the past ten years, none of the Colworth medals has been awarded to women — and it is prizes such as these, given to scientists early in their career, that influence their future success.
If we look at the human history, it is filled with discrimination against women and it was always practiced by many different societies. The social structure and mental setup itself was like that. Now certainly, it cannot be just switched off just because it is 21st century, but many efforts are needed to stop this. Starting from some families to organizations, the doubt on the abilities of women and the discriminating behavior of certain level exist till date. The root cause is our mental setup of old time. Till date, many all over the globe, including scientists, believe that some particular subjects like Match/Physics/Eng. are 'male subjects' !! It was a big shocking surprise to me when I came across the news of such belief to be common in many countries. I wonder, what about their daughters (the next generation of such believers) if the daughter has talent in these subjects? Why not highlight the contributions of women in different fields to make aware people (also includes scientists) that women can have great talents too. The talent is distributed in humans irrespective of gender and let us just encourage the talent to flourish without any biasing. Most people of this century must start believing that the science is not an exception to one particular gender of humans.
I'm not in physics, but in my experience women make just as good scientists as men. In fact, most of my mentors have been women. I'd also say that percentage-wise I've met as many intelligent women as I have men. I say percentage-wise because yes, unfortunately there do appear to be less absolute numbers of females in science than males. I don't know enough about the reason for this to expand on the topic further, but I can say with certainty that it is not because women are inferior to men in their ability to "think vertically".
I am not a physicist but have guided 22 students for Ph.D in Biochemistry. I can say confidently that female students are the best and the best student I had in my entire career is a female. It is the male domination and jealousy that does not allow them to come up.
Something else nobody has mentioned. On our societies we are all, women and men, subjects of the idea of "what we should be". Men should be strong, women should be sweet. Men are under a lot of pressure too in order to show they are "manly enough". I think that fighting against all those preconceptions will help to build a better society.