Janis McKenna

Attracting Girls Into Physics

We discuss goals and strategies to ensure access to and participation in physics for young girls and women, to build confidence in their abilities as scientists, and to continue to support them via networking, mentoring, and climate assessment as they advance to more senior stages in their careers.

The Canadian Challenge: Attracting and Retaining Women in Physics

Canada continues to face a challenge in attracting women and retaining them in physics related positions. The challenge will remain as long as there are so few female role models to influence girls and young women in schools and universities. A decade ago, an international study on Gender distribution in Physics Departments (1) showed that the representation of women in North American Physics Departments was of the order of 4% compared to 23-47% in Western and Eastern Europe. In 1995, the Committee to Encourage Women in Physics (CEWIP) of the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) sponsored a survey of Canadian Physics Departments in Colleges and Universities to survey women in physics. The findings (2) showed that although women obtained 18% of the B.Sc. degrees in physics and 13% of the Ph.D. degrees, only 5 % of Faculty members and 2% of tenured Faculty members were women. At the time, 11% of Faculty positions were tenure-stream positions and women held 28% of these positions. The numbers gathered six years ago painted a rather bleak picture in which 80% of the 40 Canadian Universities that responded to the survey had either one or no woman on faculty while 45% had none at all. The results of a new survey being conducted in 2001-2002 show some substantial improvement, with women now holding 8% of all physics faculty positions, 5% of the tenured positions and 21% of the tenure-track positions. The fraction of physics departments with one Period 1993-1995 1995-1998 1998-2001 B.S. grads 18 % 21 % 22 %

Topic 6: Balancing Family and Career

The considerable challenges involved in balancing family and career have been identified as critical factors in the underrepresentation of women in physics worldwide. We review what were seen in discussion groups at the International Conference on Women in Physics to be the dominant issues for balancing family and career. We summarize the discussions and possible solutions (when possible solutions were found).

Women in physics in Canada

While the overall climate for women physicists both in academia and industry has improved significantly over the past decade in Canada, it will be some time before women are well represented. Numbers of women in physics at all academic levels have increased, but are less than ideal at the full professor level. Organizations such as the Canadian Association of University Teachers and local initiatives are striving to minimize the socio-economic and professional gaps between women and men. The Canadian Association of Physicists, through its Committee to Encourage Women in Physics, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council are supportive and serve as catalysts, bringing together men and women to discuss and address issues concerning women in physics across Canada.

Women Physicists in Canada

In recent years the overall climate for women in academia in Canada has improved. Efforts are being made to attract girls to science at a young age. The enrollment of women across undergraduate and graduate programs in the physical sciences has increased gradually in the past decade, with a sharp increase at the graduate level. In light of a large number of upcoming retirements in academic positions, the presence of women in academia will continue to grow, supported by efforts to ensure equity in academia made by government agencies, academic institutions, and faculty associations.

Women in Physics in Canada: Progress and Shortcomings

In the past decade, significant progress has been made in attracting and retaining women in physics in Canada. The fraction of women at all stages in the pipeline, from undergraduate students to tenured faculty, has increased dramatically—yet we remain far from a reality where half of all physicists in Canada are women! In several other similarly demanding professions, this discrepancy between men and women is greatly diminished or nonexistent. In Canada most medical students (59%) are women [1] and slightly over half of all law students are women. The Supreme Court of Canada is led by a female Chief Justice, and four of the nine judges of the Supreme Court of Canada are women. Have women in those professions figured out something we have yet to learn? What are we doing wrong in physics, where only 22% of undergraduate students are women and 8% of faculty and 5% of tenured faculty are women? [2] Progress is slow! In this paper we briefly review three areas where serious improvements are sought—(1) dual-career couples, (2) balancing family and career, and (3) outreach—and discuss the perceived obstacles that we have yet to surmount.