On October 21, the Physics Department’s own Professor Jennie Traschen hosted a public affairs radio show on WMUA titled “Women and Minorities in Physics.” I was pleased and honored to participate in this one-hour discussion with another faculty member and four undergraduate students. Particularly in light of Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy’s diversity initiative, and the ongoing under-representation of women and members of minority groups in physics and on campuses nationwide, the show was timely, and I hope, informative. You can listen to it here.
I would like to encourage you to take a moment to consider the causes of persistent under-representation of women and minority members in STEM.
To the extent that biases implicit in our culture are to blame, I encourage you to take one of the many tests that are available through Project Implicit at Harvard. I recommend particularly the gender-science implicit association test that you can get to from this page. Recognizing that there is a problem, and understanding the nature of the problem, are essential first steps in solving a problem.
We all have implicit biases: recognizing this and understanding the nature of these biases is critical to increasing diversity in physics.
In the spring of 2014, Susan Metz of the Stevens Institute of Technology spoke on “Moving Beyond Fixing the Women to Changing the Culture in Academic STEM Fields.” This excellent talk addressed directly and scientifically the impact of implicit bias on women. It was well attended, but unfortunately not by the physics faculty. Fortunately Dr. Metz’s slides are linked on the UMass College of Natural Sciences Women in Science webpage.