The Physics Pipeline - Inside Higher Ed

Physics is male-dominated

Physics is among the most male-dominated of disciplines. And while commentators bandy about many possible causes — discrimination, the lifestyle tradeoffs required by graduate school or the academic workplace, and, controversially, innate aptitude — the problem seems most directly attributable to female students abandoning physics in droves between high school and college.

The screening or self selection occurs before women get to college

“For better or worse,” Ivie adds, “by that time they’ve had 18-20 years of socialization already in the perception of our society that the physical sciences are ‘what guys do,’ and physics is the most fundamental of the physical sciences.” (Her report notes, by comparison, that women receive 46 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in astronomy.)

Exit rates after age 20 are the same for

From that point in the academic pipeline on, though, women do not seem to get driven out of physics in any significant way, the AIP report finds. For instance, in 2002-3 academic year, women earned 22 percent of physics bachelor’s degrees, and the following fall, they made up 21 percent of the entering class of physics graduate students nationally.

Similarly, Ivie suggests, women do not drop out of graduate school at higher rates than men do: In 2003, women earned 18 percent of physics Ph.D.’s, and seven years earlier, 17 percent of entering graduate students were women.

And 16 percent of assistant professors of physics are women, even though women earned only 12 percent of physics Ph.D.’s awarded from 1991 to 1997, when the middle 50 percent of assistant professors earned their Ph.D.’s. That means, Ivie says, that “women are more highly represented on physics faculties at the assistant professor level than we would expect.”

Unequal pay

Just because women are represented in physics at the rates that one would expect, Ivie says, “doesn’t mean that they haven’t suffered from discrimination in other ways.” She notes, for example, that “even when working in the same employment sector with the same years of experience, women in physics and related fields on average earn less than men.”

It might be discrimination. But it might not, even with the controls mentioned (sector and experience). And what the implications for policy are.

All of this is good information. I wonder if the same sort of results would be found in economics. I bet so.