Heresy on physics and diversity
By Thoreau
There’s an interesting article on gender issues in the physical sciences in the New York Times. There’s a lot that can be said about this, a lot of excuses to offer and axes to grind and dead horses to flog and all sorts of other things that have been said by lots of people who are willing to offer uninformed speculation on touchy topics. I’ll steer clear of that, and instead just offer an observation on how physicists talk about expanding the number of physics majors:
Whether we’re talking about getting more women, more minorities, or just more students overall, we almost always talk about a physics education as a step to basic research. The difficulties of a basic research career, and the disparate impacts that these difficulties have on various groups, are inevitably cited. People talk about the difficulty of being an assistant professor and raising a family. All of these things are important, of course, but the biggest problem is that even if we triple our numbers by getting more women and minorities into a major sold as a path to basic research we are (1) tripling the number of students that we try to feed into a narrow pipe and (2) still among the smallest majors on campus (which has all sorts of disadvantages) and (3) ignoring the career paths that most of our students actually go into.
The reality is that the real value of a physics degree is similar to the value of a liberal arts degree: In all likelihood you won’t spend the rest of your career making direct use of the concepts and calculations mastered in physics courses. However, a physics education gives a person (1) a very fundamental view of science and technology (2) an introduction to an experimental culture that is very DIY and clever with indirect measurement, and (3) an introduction to a mathematical culture that is able to blend high-powered computing, back of the envelope estimates, very fancy pure mathematics, and the workhorses of standard applied mathematics. This sort of training generally leads to a lower starting salary than engineering graduates (fewer entry-level jobs that precisely match the major) but long-term prospects that are comparable to engineering grads (and often more flexible).
If we stop thinking about “How can we get more students to consider my career path in basic research and college teaching?” and start thinking about how to get more students to consider an educational path that leads to a wide variety of opportunities, we might get more students of all types. I offer no projections for how the relative numbers of women, minorities, etc. would change within the profession if we adopted that point of view. I don’t think anybody is in a position to make that projection, because there are so many unknowns. However, it would be healthier for the profession if we recognized that physics departments can and should do more than just teach a whole bunch of service courses while trying to prepare a handful of students for a basic research path that most of them won’t even embark on.
Yes, we pay lip service to that goal, but our seminars and curriculum do not reflect that lip service. Moreover, I’ve been in the room for those discussions where a bunch of people aged 30 and over act like the problems facing assistant professors are the real stumbling block for 18 year-olds picking a major. Um, no. All I knew when I was 18 was that I wanted to do something in advanced physics. I had no real idea whether that meant teaching, working for NASA (say what you will about NASA, but for an 18 year-old any science geek of any age it’s pretty cool to think about working at a place that sends people INTO OUTER SPACE!!!!), saving the world in some R&D lab where I’d make the Next Big Thing, or whatever. If somebody said “Don’t worry, kid, we’re going to make an assistant professorship more family-friendly” I would have been like “OK, but what if I want to be an astronaut?” Moreover, being an assistant professor is hard no matter what your field is, yet that doesn’t stop students from a variety of backgrounds from choosing other majors, because those majors aren’t sold as the first step on a long road that leads to a basic research career in a handful of institutions.
No, I’m not saying that faculty jobs (in all disciplines) shouldn’t be family-friendly. Nor am I saying that we shouldn’t worry about disparities in basic research. What I am saying is that we need to show more people more ways of pursuing and using a physics education, and see how the profession evolves from there. If we graduate a whole bunch of people with the intellectual skills that a physics education develops, and they go out and do a whole bunch of neat things in their careers, I won’t really care whether they go and do what I did. In fact, I’ll be more excited if they pursue paths completely different from mine.
Finally, in the spirit of whining less and doing more: If I’m on the seminar committee this year I’m going to push for replacing one of our basic research talks with an alumni panel, to showcase what people actually do with their physics training. And if we do this, I’ll announce it in my freshman class, to show the people not currently majoring in physics that our field offers a lot of paths.
Comment by ech —
July 15, 2008 @ 4:16 pm
I have a BA in Physics and due to the glut of astronomers at the time I was applying to grad school, there had been cuts in the number of first year students. So, I went out to get a job. I ended up in computer programming and after some part-time classwork, I went back and got a master’s in EE. This led to doing research work in artificial intelligence and robotics at a NASA center. I’m now a systems engineer on Project Orion, so I’m kinda living the science/space geek dream.
My BA in Physics prepared me to experiment, to think logically, and to question the world around me. I have since hired several Physics BAs to work in the space program, so the degree has some value in the private/public sector.
Comment by Derek Copold —
July 15, 2008 @ 5:13 pm
Engineering degrees offer almost none of the financial disadvantages that come with theoretical science degrees, yet those classes are still largely male and white/Asian.
Comment by Thoreau —
July 15, 2008 @ 6:09 pm
That’s a valid point, Derek. I would just observe that if a group of professionals decide that they want to make their course of study more attractive to more 18 year-olds, a necessary (but not sufficient!) condition is that you approach the topic with some perspective other than “Maybe you can be a professor!”
Comment by Barry —
July 15, 2008 @ 7:07 pm
The problem is too much mathematics; use more matherhermatics, and you’ll get more women
Comment by Andromeda —
July 15, 2008 @ 9:40 pm
Amen, brother.
Comment by Andromeda —
July 15, 2008 @ 9:45 pm
Also — my husband at MIT and I at Mudd both observed that, while even in these environments women were disproportionately unlikely to major in physics, the ones who did were often the smartest people in the college; whereas the less-impressive males did sometimes major in physics, the less-impressive women basically never did. Do you see this phenomenon, or was that just us and our wacky sample sets? If you do see this phenomenon, any speculation on why it might be the case, or ideas on how it dovetails with recruitment?
(Both of us, by the way, considered majoring in physics but did not, though we took several courses in our respective physics departments. He went EE/CS, I went, uh, apparently, mathermatics.)
Comment by Thoreau —
July 15, 2008 @ 11:09 pm
Certainly the women in physics that I knew as an undergrad were closer to the top of the class than the bottom, but the numbers were so small that I’m reluctant to make generalizations. If there is a pattern there, my guess is that the origin is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration–you can’t get a good grade in quantum without doing a lot of studying, and young women tend to be more organized and motivated than young men. I’m not trying to put down their innate talent by ascribing it to work ethic, just observing that brains are useless without work, and college age women are often better about that. Certainly college women play fewer video games than college men.
In grad school? Well, the sample in grad school was drawn from the top of the class, so everybody was good. Yes, some were better than others, but the women were still few and I saw women at all levels of performance.
Also, and I hope this doesn’t sound too bad, but male grad students who weren’t doing any research tended to slack off by doing nothing, while female grad students tended to fill time in those dry spells by doing more administrative, social, and maintenance (sometimes computer tech support or equipment upkeep, sometimes more menial cleaning) tasks for the lab. That activity is often described as a form of exploitation of female grad students (and I sort of saw it that way at the time, although I also resented it: she’s getting nothing done yet remaining in good graces–unfair!). Now, I see it as a strategy for at least remaining involved in the lab and quasi-productive during dry spells. It’s better than doing nothing and withdrawing.
Comment by Thoreau —
July 15, 2008 @ 11:19 pm
Correction:
When a female student assumes that role of her own accord, and when the people in the lab don’t start stepping all over her, I think it’s a fine way to remain engaged in the work during dry spells. But if the role is thrust upon her, or if she tries it out and then gets taken for granted, that’s of course unacceptable.
Comment by bad Jim —
July 16, 2008 @ 4:39 am
Majoring in math worked for me. I wound up being an engineer, and perhaps never used much beyond basic calculus on the job, but having a well-furnished mental attic turned out to be very handy indeed.
About ten years ago I toured the aisles of a Berkeley bookstore looking at the required texts for EE students, and they struck me as way out of date, teaching TTL when everyone was using CMOS. I learned the technology on the job, and though I fell asleep once reading a description of four-bit bidirectional bus drivers, it wasn’t that hard to master the material. Fluency in logic makes it trivial to pick chips from a catalog.
Comment by Doug T —
July 16, 2008 @ 8:58 am
I strongly agree with what you wrote about the broad utility of a physics degree. As a Ph.D. physicist who ended up doing operations research/systems analysis, I’ve lived it.
As a supporting piece of data, OR as a field was started mostly by physicists and mathematicians during WWII, precisely because they were the people with the broad toolkit and approach to problems that can be useful for these sorts of things. (As a tangent to a tangent, I was interested to find a reference in a paper yesterday to the “seminal study” on fragmentation patterns of munitions done by Mott. As it turns out, yes, it’s the same Mott.)
Anyway, I agree that physics is the LAS of science and engineering. And not only does it well prepare you for a variety of fields, but simple math clearly shows that the great majority of physics grad students (much less physics undergrads) aren’t going to end up as professors.
However, I’m less certain that this would be the foundation of a good marketing campaign that could specifically attract more women, or any other targetted group. I think it could expand physics in general by making it more appealing, but it doesn’t seem to be specifically more appealing to women.
I’m also not sure how much it would work to expand the number of physics majors. My memory (getting hazier every day) is that career prospects were not really the driving force for most physics majors (or majors in anything other than engineering, business, or pre-med.) Rather, people majored in physics because they thought physics is really cool and fascinating.
If anything, I think better marketing of physics would require a better communication of the things about physics that make it so much more interesting than any other major. If it’s taught right, IMO anyone who’s intellectually curious should find physics fascinating, because nothing else explains so much of the world around you.
Comment by Thoreau —
July 16, 2008 @ 11:03 am
Doug-
Yeah, I don’t predict that a marketing campaign emphasizing the variety of paths for physics majors will hold appeal to women or minorities more than any other group. This is more about how clueless we are when promoting our major to 18 year-olds, focusing on a handful of paths. If we are that clueless when talking to 18 year-olds (of any background) then that’s something we need to correct before we can hope to appeal to more 18 year-olds (of whatever background).
“Hey, ladies, we’re working hard to make it possible for you to be a professor and still have a family. So, who’s up for spending the next 10 years in school and a few more years in various temporary positions before getting a very demanding and comparatively low-paying job?”
Yeah, I’m sure the 18 year-old women will just flock to that sales pitch.
Comment by Leonard —
July 16, 2008 @ 11:19 am
That rather depends on which aspects of the world around you you care about, doesn’t it?
If you’re interested in the physical objects around you, sure, go physics.
If you’re interested in people in the abstract, acting in large groups, then you’ll want economics. This one also sets you up to make money fast!
If you’re interested in people as individuals, you’ll want biology (particularaly evolutionary psychology).
I think that women are, on average, more interested in people, while men tend to be more interested in things.
Comment by Hektor Bim —
July 16, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
The culture here is more hostile to women learning physics, so we have fewer women physicists. That is much less true in many other countries (particularly European ones). Think back to graduate school – there were usually more women among the foreign graduate students than among the Americans.
I agree with your ideas about promoting more physics majors, but that will inevitably conflict with the “sorting and polishing” of diamonds in the rough. What everyone tiptoes around is that the whole system is built for exponential expansion, and that isn’t happening anymore. See http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
Comment by Thoreau —
July 16, 2008 @ 1:29 pm
Good essay, Hektor. Thanks for the link.
Comment by HyperIon —
July 16, 2008 @ 2:01 pm
I don’t understand your assumption that being an academic is not family friendly. Families need the parents present and the flexibility of an academic teaching schedule seems to me very friendly to parents. Let’s face it, you have to teach your classes and be present during office hours and the occasional faculty meeting. But that is way less constrained than the 9-to-5 drill. Grading papers can happen at home with the kids. And travel is pretty much under the faculty member’s control…not true in the corporate world. And (as is always noted) you get the summers off! Care to name a profession that is more family friendly?
Comment by Thoreau —
July 16, 2008 @ 2:12 pm
1) You forgot the time needed to do research. Not trivial, to put it mildly. At research-intensive universities, it’s an all-consuming task.
2) Prep for new classes or classes that you’re trying to improve takes LOTS of time.
3) It’s worse for assistant professors than it is for tenured professors. Pre-tenure, a lot more is expected of us in terms of research, professional development, and curriculum innovation. After tenure, it eases off a bit, but anybody who wants to get promotions and raises and pursue interesting projects needs to remain very active.
Comment by Kolohe —
July 17, 2008 @ 4:46 am
This is the anecdote I always trot out; that the divergence starts much earlier than college.
I went to a very good majority white suburban dc high school (graduated ‘91). and the students (and their families) were center-left in that clinton (bill) washington post kind of way – not radically feminist but hardly a bastion of reactionary anti-femism either.
I took AP calc (BC) my junior year, fifteen students, two women (one who dropped out into the AB class a quarter of the way through the year – to be fair along with one guy). My senior year AP physics class had seven students, all dudes.
I cannot think that there was any systematic basis that drove women away from these classes (and trust me, those of us in the AP physics class pretty much met every stereotype, so it was not a locker-room mentality)
So it wasn’t really surprising that by the time I attended my first class in college at Va Tech, the freshman intro to engineering section I was in had 30 people – and two women. Now interestingly, as i think was mentioned above, the women in the engineering department tended to be just above average, or at the very top of the distribution curve – none were just getting by (i.e. mccaining). And they definitely were overrepresented in their numbers in various student groups like IEEE or tau beta pi, especially in the leadership positions.
My question for Dr. T. is, if he knows: has this changed? Is there still a wide diverergence in the interest in science and math, esp in honors courses, between males and females at the high school level?
Comment by Kolohe —
July 17, 2008 @ 4:54 am
note to self: first read tfa, then post
“While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses”
Comment by Capri —
July 17, 2008 @ 5:34 pm
My daughter just graduated with a Chemical Engineering degree from MIT. She never wanted to be a chemical engineer, but when she was shopping for majors it was sold to her as the one that would allow her to do the most with it – it would teach her the scientific method and “how to think.” She’s glad she majored in it. However, within the department, there was a not-so-subtle looking down on students who “wasted” their engineering degrees if they pursued non-engineering careers. So, your department can give all the lip service it wants to attracting a wider spectrum of students, but you should be prepared to walk the walk by being welcoming and open the entire time they are with you.
Comment by Idi Amin's Last Meal —
July 18, 2008 @ 10:55 pm
[whistles low]
[bites tongue]
I will say, though: Thoreau, don’t worry about trying to be an astronaut, ’cause you’re already lost in space.