Women in Physics

Women+ continue to face obstacles at each step along the way of pursuing a scientific career, and physics has one of the lowest gender diverse participation of all STEM subjects. This is a tremendous waste of potential that can only be reversed with a significant cultural change by all participants.

Helen Gleeson is an experimental physicist working in soft matter. She has held leadership positions in both the University of Manchester and the University of Leeds where she is currently the Cavendish Professor of Physics. The focus of her research is in the physics of liquid crystals, both from a fundamental and applied perspective.

Flavia de Almeida Dias is an experimental particle physicist who has been a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider since 2013 and has had leading contributions in analyses involving pairs of vector bosons, searches for extra Higgs bosons and dark-matter mediators. She is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and at Nikhef—the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics. She was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the University of Edinburgh.

Tanusri Saha-Dasgupta is a Professor and Director at S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, India. Her research focuses on computational condensed matter physics and the study of the optical, electronic, and magnetic properties of materials from first principles. Tanusri has been widely engaged in working groups, meetings, and other activities to promote gender parity in Indian academic institutions.

Lyndsay Fletcher is a Professor of Astrophysics, specialising in solar physics, in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow and the Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics, University of Oslo.

Sharona Gordon is a biophysicist, who applies the tools of physics to understand the fundamental principles of life. Her work combines biochemistry, electrophysiology, and fluorescence spectroscopy to understand how chemical signals get converted to electrical signals at cell membranes. She is a full professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Urbasi Sinha is a Professor of Light and Matter Physics at the Raman Research Institute, India. Her research is in the field of quantum technologies, where she uses experimental methods to investigate quantum information processing, precision tests of quantum mechanics, photonic quantum computing as well as quantum communications including quantum key distribution (QKD) in free space, fibre and integrated photonics.

The long term and persistent challenges faced by women and other minorities in science requires dedicated strategies. Here the authors share the example of “Parité sciences”, game changer initiative deployed in Québec to address gender disparity.

Many ways of assessing gender gap in citations have been proposed, and many explanations for such gap advanced. Here the authors analyze the gender difference in citations in physics, and claim that timing is one of the main driving forces of the gender difference in citations.

While gender disparities in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines are widely noted, the citation gap is still understudied and awareness remains low. Here, we address citation inequity in physics and describe individual and collective mitigation initiatives, including the citation diversity statement.

Improving the position of minority groups in networks is important, but it is unclear which interventions are effective to achieve this goal. We propose a model to examine network growth interventions and find that even extreme quotas are not enough to increase minority representation in rankings unless they are coupled with the right type of behavioural intervention.

Göttingen is home to the Third Infinity conference, a biennial event organized by Ph.D. candidates that aims, beyond discussing complex systems physics, at providing a platform to discuss themes central to doctoral life and education. As part of the organizing committee of Third Infinity 2020, in this comment we would like to raise attention on the main issues faced by today’s European interdisciplinary Ph.D. students as we learnt them from direct experience during the organization process, as well as from discussion with our peers during the event.