In physics, faculty role models help fill the gender gap

 

By Clint Talbott

Since she was a child, Ana Maria Rey has loved science, especially physics. She plowed through homework assignments and asked for more. She got a bachelor’s degree in physics, and then pursued her Ph.D., which meant leaving the country of her birth.

In her native Colombia, there was no doctoral program in physics. So she came to the United States. Now a research professor in CU-Boulder’s Department of Physics and JILA, she recently became the university’s eighth faculty member to win the highly prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, often dubbed the “genius grant.”

Of eight “genius grant” winners, three are in physics. All three are women.

While their numbers are increasing slowly, women are famously under-represented in physics departments at universities nationwide. CU-Boulder hews to this trend, but women compose a larger share of the physics department’s student population and faculty than average.

At CU-Boulder, the 11 women on the faculty compose just over 16 percent of the total. Nationwide, the portion of female faculty in physics-degree-granting departments is 14 percent, according to a 2010 survey released this year by the American Institute of Physics.

Further, faculty female role models, said to be a key factor in retaining women students in the sciences, have distinguished themselves. While the department is doing better than average with respect to women faculty members, it is striving, with other departments on campus, to draw and keep more women in the natural sciences and engineering.

“There are very few women who think they can do physics,” Rey said recently. “I think women tend to be more insecure about what they can achieve compared to men. I think what we have to learn is to try to ignore that, and to try to realize that there is no reason why we cannot do (physics).”


Clearly, Rey realizes this. She develops and solves theoretical models of ultracold atoms—cooled to near absolute zero. Those atoms are trapped in an “optical lattice,” described as a series of shallow wells constructed of laser light.

Atoms that are loaded into an optical lattice behave much like electrons in a solid-crystal structure. This configuration allows Rey to study phenomena that would be nearly impossible to study in a solid-crystal structure.

“We can explore quantum mechanics at the very basic level,” she said. “This is very appealing.”

Because the manipulation of supercold atoms with lasers is so precise, Rey and her colleagues explore the building blocks of better clocks, “very precise and controllable.”

Rey hopes her research will help lead to beneficial applications, such as more precise measurement devices and quantum computers, which would help improve the accuracy of GPS and navigational systems and boost our computational capabilities.

A quantum computer would operate on quantum “bits” rather than on the classical computer’s digital bits—zeroes and ones. In a quantum computer, zeroes and ones could exist as a “superposition” at the same time. Such a computer could perform computations exponentially faster.

A problem that would take the age of the universe for a classical computer to solve could be solved very fast in a quantum computer, she added. “With a classical computer, there are problems that have no solution. The quantum computer opens the possibility of solving them.”

Rey added that, to physicists, precise clocks are more than time-keepers. “Clocks are seen as an antique machine. A clock is something that allows you to measure time. However, lately, we have discovered that the precision of a clock can help you to understand many-body interactions,” an area of study in modern quantum science.

“It’s no longer a machine to just measure time. It’s a quantum simulator,” Rey said. “That I find fascinating.”

A quantum leap in representation

By pursuing a career in physics, Rey flouted her parents’ advice, the cultural norms of Colombia, and an academic discipline that has long had a dearth of women. Facing such historical and cultural inertia, women who show great promise in physics often become demoralized and change fields, experts say.



One pioneer who bucked the trends was Leona Woods Marshall Libby, who taught in the CU physics department from 1964 to 1970. Woods studied under Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi and was the only woman on the team that built the world’s first nuclear reactor. She was among a very few women who worked on the Manhattan Project and the only woman to witness the first nuclear chain reaction in 1942.

Paul Beale, physics professor and chair of the department, compared Woods to another trailblazing physicist, Marie Curie. “They had to fight an uphill battle,” he said.

Beale joined CU-Boulder’s faculty in 1984, when no women were on the physics faculty. Four years later, Patricia Rankin became the sole woman faculty member.

Rankin, now CU-Boulder associate vice chancellor for research, said she was initially unaware of some forces that discouraged women from pursuing a career in physics. In a speech in 2008, Rankin looked back on her early days in physics:

When people told her she didn’t look like a physicist, “I assumed they thought I was much better dressed than many of my colleagues and wore fashionable clothes. It was a long time before I realized they were surprised to meet a woman physicist.”

As a university student in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Rankin’s professors actively encouraged her to stay in physics, hoping she’d become a role model, she said. Once on the faculty, she was not prepared to learn that “not all women were having such great experiences.”

Similarly, she did not expect students to assume she was an administrative assistant when she showed up to give a lecture, “nor to be asked to bring a dessert to the physics Christmas party—since that was ‘expected’ of the other women coming to the party—all of whom were faculty spouses.”

Once she earned tenure, she resolved to help change the system from within.

As she noted at the time, women face unconscious bias, “and both men and women turn out to be similarly biased.”

An internal review of the CU-Boulder physics department completed in 2008 noted the improvement made in gender and ethnic diversity since the 1980s and emphasized the progress yet to be attained.

In 1990, two women were on the department’s faculty, Rankin and Anna Hasenfratz. By 2001, the number had doubled with the addition of Margaret Murnane and Deborah Jin. By 2010, nearly 17 percent of the faculty was female.

The physics department tripled the number of women on the physics faculty in 15 years through careful hiring processes and mentoring, the report said. Additionally, the department reported actively searching for qualified candidates rather than simply waiting for them to apply.

“The department recognizes that there is fierce competition among universities to hire women, and we cannot wait to attract outstanding candidates only in regular searches,” the report said.

Mentors and role models

That kind of effort may have helped to recruit Ana Maria Rey, who is also a fellow in JILA, a joint institute of the university and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. CU-Boulder’s physics department is well regarded and highly ranked, and its bragging points include four Nobel laureates.



Female faculty members are also among the top performers in their discipline. Besides Rey, Margaret Murnane and Deborah Jin have won the MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.”

Jin has been elected as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, honored as L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science, won a Presidential Early Career Award, and 10 other “extramural” awards.

Murnane has been named a member of the National Academies of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and a University of Colorado Distinguished Professor, and 10 other major awards.

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor Cindy Regal has been named a David and Lucile Packard Fellow and won a Presidential Early Career Award.

All of the other women on the physics faculty—Meredith Betterton, Heather Lewandowski, Minhyea Lee, Alysia Marino—and Kathy Perkins, have won major research awards in their fields.

Beale said having a cadre of female leadership helps to recruit and mentor junior faculty members and students.

Like other observers, Beale notes that girls’ apparent interest in physics, math and other natural sciences falters in middle school and high school. The effect is that the pool of female high-school graduates who aim to major in physics is relatively small.



Similarly, the pool of women applying to graduate school in physics is based on the number of women who earn bachelors degrees in physics. But, “The key is to retain women seeking physics degrees in order to keep moving the baseline,” Beale said.

“Moving the baseline” involves increasing the number of female graduate students who might pursue a career in the world of academe. In physics, nearly 22 percent of graduate students at CU-Boulder are women. They faced stiff competition to get here.

Each year, Beale said, the department receives 600 applications a year for 35 graduate-student openings. Each applicant is carefully reviewed, he said.

Meanwhile, 14 percent of the CU-Boulder physics department’s undergraduate students are female. The portion is slightly higher in the engineering-physics program.

While the university strives to hire highly talented women physicists and maximize the number of promising female graduate students, it also strives to improve the environment for female undergraduate students.

In 2010, for instance, researchers in CU-Boulder’s psychology and physics departments collaborated on a study that showed a simple mechanism to narrow the “gender gap” in introductory physics courses.

The study, published in the prestigious journal Science, found that women who completed a “values affirmation” writing exercise twice a semester generally raised their course grades from the “C” to “B” range.

Tiffany Ito, professor of psychology and neuroscience and co-author of the study, explained then that the common expectation that men do better in physics than do women is an “identity threat” that can undermine women’s ability to reach their full potential.

Women are aware of the stereotype and might worry that their performance in a physics class will confirm the stereotype, she said.

Women are affected by external cues, Ito said. “Those women are sitting in a class consisting of predominantly men, and they might wonder if the men buy into the stereotype and think they’re better at physics.”

However, “The research shows that if we affirm people’s self-integrity, you buffer them from other threats.”

One of the collaborators on the 2010 study (which the team has since replicated) was Steven Pollock, professor of physics and named 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Pollock noted that the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a “small piece” of a large puzzle.

Many agree. In an extended essay in The New York Times Magazine published in October, Eileen Pollack, one of the first two women to earn a bachelor of science in physics at Yale University, described a myriad of social forces that discourage young women from pursuing a career in physics or other natural sciences.

Pollack wrote: “Beyond strengthening our curriculum, we need to make sure that we stop losing girls at every step as they fall victim to their lack of self-esteem, their misperceptions as to who does or doesn’t go on in science and their inaccurate assessments of their talents.”

As a theoretical physicist, Rey notes that she does not interact with as many students as some of her experimental colleagues.

Still, she said, “I hope I am serving here as a role model.”

December 2013