On the Rarity of a Female Physicist
January 11, 2012
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A Grateful Reader, who is female, writes:
Having spent fifteen years in physics departments surrounded by physics and engineering students, I never met a single female student who was motivated to work with machinery and who was as mechanically competent as the average male student. Most of the female students whom I knew became theoretical, not experimental, physicists because they enjoyed the mathematics (and were often quite capable of solving textbook problems). The few women who professed interest in working with the machinery and became experimentalists were simply mediocre in their abilities, perhaps because they did not spend much time “working with machines;” in fact, they seemed to be there because they sought to prove that they could do what a man could do, and some admitted this. The same is true of the female professors. Also, even with preferential treatment and quotas for female students, less than ten percent of the students were women (in any of those physics departments which I observed.)
Note that I am not speaking of the ability to make electrical or plumbing or carpentry repairs around the house (which some women have), but skills with machines like lasers and nuclear accelerators (or airplanes) which require years of intense time invested in lonely work and frequently heavy lifting and other great physical exertion. My limited experience would not lead me to conclude that women who are highly competent mechanically and who spend most of their days playing with complicated machines do not exist, but rather, that they, (if they do exist – like the hypothetical female runner who wins the marathon or the Amazon who can qualify as a Navy Seal), are so few, that should extraordinary measures be taken to accommodate their interests, the benefits would not be not worth the costs.
