Marie who?

Another of those serendipitous things, I guess. David spent some time this past weekend doing First Person Historical Re-enactment at the American Physical Society's annual meeting, playing Erwin Schrödinger for a bit of money, a crack at the open bar, and the chance to hang with some physicists. He explains it much better than I could in his blog entry. But he did mention that Leah and Lori, playing Non-Marie-Curie-Female-Physicists got to mutter a lot about having the credit for their work consistently going to men.

But, meanwhile, we have actual news from the world of physics. It seems that Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, in what he considered the free exchange of ideas and what many other people considered an opportunity for him to polish his apologizing skills made some remarks about women in the sciences. If I recall correctly (and I probably don't) he said something to indicate that there are more men active in science because men's brains were just better set up to excel in the sciences than women's. And launch uproar.

Well, as it turns out, the wife of one of my co-workers, recently finished a study on that very topic. (The paucity of women in science, not the natural science ability of men over women.) Rachel released her findings, Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2005, and has been interviewed by the New York Times , Inside Higher Education, and Talk of the Nation. It seems that women in physics are hired at the rate at which they receive their Ph.Ds.

As I understand it, if 18% of the doctoral degree recipients in physics are women, 18% of the faculty hires are women as well. The same is not true in chemistry and biology, where the number of degrees received is much higher than the hiring. It is also noted that there is still a sharp drop off over the high school to doctorate period for women in physics as well as other sciences, from 46% to the aforementioned 18%.

Coming next - we send David undercover to the American Musicological Society so we can find out what really happend to the score for Thespis.