Gender, Race & Physics
Last post 01-10-2004, 9:33 PM by Random. 136 replies.
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 01-10-2004, 9:33 PM |
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Anais
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Joined on 02-20-2003
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( ) USA
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Posts 4,246
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Researcher Mia Ong: Physics 'glass ceiling' intact
Women, minorities, and the sciences
By Beth Potier
Harvard News Office
Ask most people to pull up a mental image of a physicist, and they'll likely present a wild-haired amalgam of Albert Einstein and Bill Gates wearing Buddy Holly glasses, a lab coat, and yesterday's lunch on his shirt. After all, it hardly matters what you look like if you're doing great science, right?
Wrong, says Graduate School of Education (GSE) researcher Maria "Mia" Ong, and wrong again. If you're a longhaired Latina in heels or a well-groomed young black man in dreads - if you're anything other than a middle-aged white guy - it matters profoundly.
Ong, who is a lecturer and holds a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the GSE, is conducting a longitudinal study of the experiences of women and underrepresented minorities pursuing the hardest of the hard sciences, physics. Trained in sociology and anthropology, she's turned an ethnographic lens on 40 young physicists who studied at the same undergraduate university. For women and minorities in particular, success in physics takes far more than brainpower and solid science.
"You take your body with you when you do science," says Ong. "You can't check it at the door. I'm sure some students would if they could."
Ong presented some of her early findings in her doctoral dissertation, and she's now fine-tuning them into a manuscript for a book that looks closely at the experiences of women of color in physics. What barriers do they face? How do those who are successful overcome them? Ong believes that a better understanding of how women and minorities make their way through careers in science will ultimately help the United States maintain its scientific and technical dominance in the world, and will open opportunities for thousands of young physicists who don't look like Albert or Bill.
It's not the science, but the skin tone
Ong's research emerged from a much larger study of physics undergraduates and graduates at a large research university. While conducting interviews with these students, she was struck by common themes.
"Women would say, 'I'm not sure, I think it's just me, but ...'," she recalls. "And then they'd all give the same stories." Their comments during class weren't taken seriously, they told her. They weren't asked to join study groups. If they expressed any doubt whatsoever, they felt as if their ideas were dismissed as being dumb. Minorities who are traditionally underrepresented in physics told her of similar experiences.
In 1996, Ong began tracking nearly 40 subjects from the larger group when they were freshmen or sophomores in college, and she has continued to follow them ever since. Most are now in graduate school in physics or other science-related programs such as medicine or engineering.
Over the eight years of the study, Ong has identified three themes that distinguish the academic and career experiences of women and minorities in physics from those of their white male scientist-peers. The themes have far less to do with scientific excellence than they do with the more relational aspects of the field: looking the part of an accomplished physicist, gathering a supportive community, and managing their oddly simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility.
She found that the myth that scientific brilliance outshines one's appearance doesn't hold up under scrutiny. For students who don't fit the stereotypical image of a physicist, looks - what Ong calls "organizing an appearance of competence" - do matter. "[Women and minorities] don't look like a 'real scientist'," she says. "People do double takes." She describes a black male in her study who, when he tells people he studies physics at a prestigious graduate school, must often correct their assumption that he means "physical education."
"Appearance" goes beyond skin tone or gender to more subtle aspects, such as ways of speaking and presenting ideas, Ong found. One Latina woman told Ong that in her all-female study group, women feel comfortable voicing their uncertainties and hunches with language like "I'm not really sure about this, what do you think?" However, they have found that those same phrases, in a mixed-gender group, more likely would be coded as "I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm really dumb," and so women who persisted in physics have learned to speak with more assertion when working with male peers.
The woman told Ong she found an irony in this approach: Good scientists never claim to know something absolutely, but instead deal in degrees of uncertainty. Says Ong, "She taught me that, in fact, her own inclination to speak with this degree of doubt is more scientific, but she gets punished for it" by the physics community.
Female and minority physicists also contend with what Ong calls "in/visibility": being both singled out and overlooked because of their uniqueness. Many students tell her about not being called on in class or included in activities; one Chicana woman recounts her male colleagues ignoring her completely in a desperate search for a fourth poker player. She may not have cared about the poker game, says Ong, but she knew that she was missing important social opportunities. "Physics gets spoken, connections get made, bonds are strengthened, ideas are passed around," Ong says.
Hurdling the obstacles
Ong is also interested in how women and minorities negotiate these barriers to achieve career success. She describes how one black woman in the study manipulated her visibility to her advantage. When Ong met her as a sophomore, she was very concerned with "fitting in." During her studies, however, the student adopted a stereotyped persona Ong identifies as "the loud black girl." With this pose she began to attract the attention of her classmates and professors, who pointed her toward fellowships and other opportunities.
Whether embracing such a caricature is positive or negative is debatable, says Ong, "but for her, in the moment she was a student, to get through physics, it ... really helped her confidence, it really helped her progress through school."
Similarly, many women and minorities overcome the obstacle of community - the important but elusive cultural capital that's amassed by assembling with one's scientific peers - by creating their own communities at the margins of the field. Groups targeted specifically to women in physics or minority physicists become powerful resources for mentoring, coaching, and normalizing experiences that might otherwise seem isolated and discouraging. From understanding how to make the right contacts to learning what to wear at conferences, such communities provide "an alternative education that ends up being quite crucial," Ong says.
Politics and equity
Despite these coping techniques, physics remains a field largely devoid of women and minorities. In 2000, the National Science Foundation reported that the community of working Ph.D.-level physicists was 93 percent male and 84 percent white, rooting that Bill Gates/Albert Einstein stereotype in truth.
Over the past few years, Ong has made a political case for removing the barriers these nontraditional physicists face. Smoothing the career paths of any would-be physicist would fully utilize our domestic pool of potential scientists, something Ong says is needed as increased security concerns and scrutiny of immigration put the squeeze on foreign scientists working in the Unied States.
For Ong, however, equity and opportunity are more powerful motivators than national security. "If [women and minorities] come in loving science, they have a passion for learning physics, and they have an aptitude for it, why can't they? What prevents them?" she asks.
She acknowledges that it's a tricky issue, one that is easier to study than to solve. Many have tried to solve it: Academia, private workplaces, and the federal government have taken strides to recognize and eradicate gender inequalities in science, bringing salaries, office sizes, and lab allocations for women into line with their male peers.
"What they couldn't figure out how to do, and still can't, is how to make behaviors change," Ong says. Female physicists at some institutions might now earn the same junior-level salaries as men, but they are often excluded from joint grant applications or invitations to present at prestigious conferences, meaning that they still miss out on important career advancements.
"How do you change the peer structure? How do you change the culture?" says Ong. "I don't think it's impossible, but I think it's very hard." Ong is up for the challenge. Her work seeks to bring to light the importance of race and gender in the pursuit of scientific truth. "If I can make some administrators and some instructors acknowledge that, that profoundly affects the experience," she says.
Anais
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
Anais Nin
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| 01-10-2004, 11:10 PM |
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| 01-12-2004, 5:18 PM |
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| 01-12-2004, 7:46 PM |
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Лисичка
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Joined on 11-13-2003
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Atlanta (Georgia) USA
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Posts 210
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quote:
Originally posted by KGBMan:
Ye, those white racist phisicist should be all ashamed of themselfs. Affirmative action for Hard Science - rules forever !
 I know what you're saying, and I agree that Affirmative Action is probably NOT the way to go... we've had this conversation before and I think I was pretty clear that I'm not an advocate of that!
HOWEVER, this is a real problem... not just one imagined by people looking for an easy way out. I know I've experienced similar things in Computer Science.
No one ACTIVELY discriminates women - or at least I never ran into anyone who would say stuff like "women can't program" "girls should stay out of CS". (There probably are one or two guys out there who are that bad, but THEY aren't the real problem.)
What I ran up against was this. We'd have a group assignment. Of course, with a ratio like we have in the CS department at GA Tech, I would end up either the only girl or one of two in the group. The guys just *assumed* I would be the one in charge of organizing the meetings, taking the notes, etc and just *assumed* I wouldn't be doing any of the real programming. It wasn't like they were saying "You're a girl so you can't" and they weren't thinking it in so many words (subconsciously definately)... but that was the effect. I always set them straight -- yes, I usually ended up taking notes and organizing; but I usually was one of the lead programmers in the group too. In a situation where we were all equals (students) that is relatively easy to do - you just take on the responsibility that you CAN handle whether someone suggests it or not. But when you are the subordinate to the guys with that subconsious attitude it's much more difficult -- you may not even HEAR about the opportunities for challenges until they've been assigned to someone else.
So what am I saying? I guess that yes, I agree Affirmative Action is the wrong response to discrimination (notice, I didn't even call it a solution -- that's because it creates way more problems than it has ever solved) But just because AA doesn't solve the problem, that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist, so don't make fun of it too much. 
(Btw, I haven't changed any of my views. If you don't see how this fits in with what I've said before I'd be happy to explain.)
"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes."
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"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes." --
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| 01-12-2004, 8:25 PM |
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| 01-12-2004, 8:42 PM |
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AHTOH
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Joined on 08-19-2003
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(Florida) USA
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Posts 4,435
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skin tone, gender, race...blah blah blah...same old song...does it ever get too old for you, liberals? I don't see any Asian minorities complaining about this. Right! Because they ain't got time for this BS, they are busy doing things like reading books, studying and accomplishing their goals. While, on the other hand, we have the lineup of the "usual suspects" expecting to ride the "race/gender" bandwagon into Physics...LOL!
I actually find this one very funny - Physics are a clearly racist field, because most of the great scientists of the past were white males...I suggest we "correct" this by, say, re-naming a few things, like we usually do here in America .
Behold the American "pc" version of physics:
1. Martin Luther King's Law of Gravity.
"I had a dream...In the dream, I have fallen off my bed. WTF?"
2. Rosa Park's Law of Conductivity.
"When a bus conductor aks you fo a tiket, ya betta git one."
3. "Gay Pride" Optical Properties of Light Refraction.
"We-are-fa-mi-ly...I got all my colors with me..."
4. An Urban introduction into gravitational acceleration.
"That "G" will drop ya, dawg...Niggas ain't callin it "G" fo nothin'"
5. Chakeewokee tribal Law of Relativity.
"Relative to the mountain, Chakeewokee Tribe is faaaar. But if a car you drive, the Tribe is neeeeear."
советская империя утратила свой стиль раньше, чем потеряла свою власть
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| 01-12-2004, 9:01 PM |
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Лисичка
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Joined on 11-13-2003
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Atlanta (Georgia) USA
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Posts 210
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I don't think there should be any give aways for the minorities or women and have proven that those aren't just words with my actions.
True story: Right before I started at Tech, I was offered a scholarship by a group. Those b*stards had the audacity to write IN THE LETTER that they were giving me this scholarship BECAUSE I WAS FEMALE! As if my scholastic record wasn't good enough on its own! I was offended (and frankly, don't understand why the recipients of AA aren't offended as well) and turned down the "scholar"ship -- then went on to pay my way with REAL scholarships thank you very much.
I can't say anything about the minority issue. I'm not a minority so I can't speak from experience. But as far as the gender issue goes, there IS a difference in the way a man is treated and a woman. It isn't "discriminatory" per se. It's just that men and women ARE different; they react to things differently, they phrase things differently, they ___ differently. Until they become the same, which (thank GOD!) they never will, they will always be treated differently... and "different but equal" isn't really possible in my opinion. So the point is: It's good to bring this stuff up, not so that legislation will be passed to save women from "evil discriminators"; but because it keeps in the forefront of people's minds the realization that that difference EXISTS... and even more importantly, so someone who genuinely wants to be fair (and I, possibly naively, think that most people DO fall in this category) don't act in a certain way because it never crossed his/her mind.
Give aways SUCK! The only thing they do is perpetuate, or worse CREATE, a belief that the people recieving those give aways are somehow inferior to everyone else. What good does that do to anyone?
"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes."
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"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes." --
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| 01-12-2004, 9:13 PM |
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AHTOH
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Joined on 08-19-2003
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(Florida) USA
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Posts 4,435
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Well, let me tell you another personal story...Nothing major, but kinna funny...
Back in the good old days of college, I was lucky enough to be a recipient of the "Outstanding Student of the Year Award" in our school of business. The last time I visited the school a few months ago, I've noticed the new award - "The Outstanding Female Student of the Year". I could not help but laugh...I mean, isn't it degrading to all women studying at the school? Are they not able to compete on the same level as everyone else? In the past, there were both male and female award holders. Now I guess, there is one award for everyone, and then there is one just for females...Well, why not blacks then? Or Puerto-Ricans? Or, perhaps, lesbian students? Or maybe those who prefer to shop in GAP? Or how about "white trash students"? WTF?
советская империя утратила свой стиль раньше, чем потеряла свою власть
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| 01-12-2004, 9:20 PM |
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| 01-12-2004, 9:24 PM |
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| 01-12-2004, 9:27 PM |
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Alina
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Joined on 05-11-2002
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quote:
Originally posted by AHTOH:
Well, let me tell you another personal story...Nothing major, but kinna funny...
Back in the good old days of college, I was lucky enough to be a recipient of the "Outstanding Student of the Year Award" in our school of business. The last time I visited the school a few months ago, I've noticed the new award - "The Outstanding Female Student of the Year". I could not help but laugh...I mean, isn't it degrading to all women studying at the school? Are they not able to compete on the same level as everyone else? In the past, there were both male and female award holders. Now I guess, there is one award for everyone, and then there is one just for females...Well, why not blacks then? Or Puerto-Ricans? Or, perhaps, lesbian students? Or maybe those who prefer to shop in GAP? Or how about "white trash students"? WTF?
I agree on that. :o)
Even back in that "soviet" school like 15 years ago we had boards with pics of outstanding sudents. And they never divided us into "male students" and "female students".
As for the steropytes (that it should be a girl who's gonna take notes or organize everyhting) - yes. They still exist. Unfortunately.
But it's up to you - either "to accept the rules" or to say "no" once in order to avoid taking notes for the rest of your life. And it works perfectly well. Prooved. And everybody is happy at the end - nothing is wrong with that.
"If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?"
Lilly Tomlin.
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| 01-12-2004, 9:31 PM |
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| 01-12-2004, 9:48 PM |
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