Women in Physics, Part I

Laughter pours out from a room deep in Willamette Hall. Inside, a handful of women sit around, eating lunch and swapping stories. One’s curly brown hair bounces on her shoulders as her eyes light up. Another, mousy and freckled, cleans her thin glasses on her blouse. It’s a casual affair, but the women are confident that they’re making a difference, simply by being there.

The mousy girl is Alice Greenberg, a graduate student. She’s running this meeting and the group that is holding it, Women in Physics (WiP). She and two other graduate students all founded the group last year with the intention of providing a space for women in the department to come and talk with each other about the difficulties they face being a minority in the field and just life in general.

“Our sort of motto, if you want to call it that, is ‘We (female physics students) are here and we’re supporting each other,’” Greenberg said. “That’s what we want people to know.”

The formation of the group reflects the ongoing issues stemming from the intersection of science and gender. Physics, like many scientific disciplines, has been struggling to improve its male/female ratio in recent years. Despite this, physics has consistently had some of the lowest rates: on average, physics has been roughly 20 percent women. For comparison, disciplines like biology or chemistry often feature rates closer to 50/50.

These figures and others like it have lead to the opinion that women are flocking towards other fields. That is a perfectly valid and well supported opinion. But that’s not how WiP and Greenberg see it. The group is determined to keep the female physics students the department has in the department, to give them an inclusive space. And f the current students feel included, then perhaps they will invite their friends into the major, spurred on by the community.

As such, the key message of WiP is its presence. While it does hold research fairs and mentorship programs, WiP’s main goal is simply to be, to provide for the female students. It telegraphs to the world and to women in the department that there is in fact a place for them, that they are welcome and that they belong.

“Just the fact that this group exists is really encouraging [for me],” said Samantha Johnson, a physics student who recently returned to the UO. “There used to be this pressure for me to be perfect and after talking with WiP members, some of that pressure is gone now.”

But WiP isn’t providing its members with only support and a sense of belonging, however important those may be. Research shows that groups like WiP can also can provide members with tangible benefits, such a a boost in confidence.

Brandy Todd, a researcher at the UO who focuses on women and girls in STEM, says that a key piece of a student’s confidence is vicarious learning, in which a student gains confidence by watching someone else do the task that they are assigned.

“It’s all about peers,” Todd said.

But, Todd says, who that peer is not only matters, but changes on a case by case basis, so that a student who may be a peer in English class may not serve the same function in chemistry.

“In heavily gendered or lab subjects like physics, it’s not good enough for a girl to watch a boy do the experiment. That just won’t cut it,” Todd said, noting that the expectations that boys can do science means that seeing a boy do science doesn’t prove anything in the girl’s mind.

Charity Woodrum, the girl with the curly hair, agrees with Todd’s assessments. Coming from a nursing school (read: majority women), Woodrum says she faced a difficult transition to a school that lacked that sort of built in peer network.

Woodrum is a senior and because of that, WiP did not even exist during her first two years. When it finally came into being, she says that it gave her the peer group she felt she needed.

“The first couple of years I didn’t know anyone in my classes,” Woodrum said. “It’s been really nice to have that community of similar people.”

Charity Woodrum is set to graduate this spring with a degree in physics. She’s spent the past four years doing lab work, taking tests and studying hard– the typical science student life. In her junior year though, Woodrum bore witness to an on campus development that not only benefited her but represented a shift in the sciences as a whole.

The fall of Woodrum’s junior year, the WiP student group was founded by University of Oregon graduate students in an effort to create a more inclusive environment for female students in the field. The group has both social and professional purposes and Woodrum says that the group was immensely helpful to her.

Woodrum’s comments echo a larger whole. Physics has been traditionally viewed was one of the largest boy’s clubs science, handing out fewer than one fifth of its degrees to women in 2015, according to data analysis by the rate for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) as a whole was nearly double, at 36 percent. The formation of WiP is part of a larger trend in both physics and STEM to increase the gender parity in the fields.

There are numerous ways by which this parity could be achieved, but a critical component of many strategies focuses on making sure that women understand that there is a place for them in their chosen discipline. If they don’t feel welcome, research shows they will simply abandon their pursuing a STEM degree and groups like WiP are seeking to prevent that abandonment.

The research proves the group’s worth.

In addition to the social aspect, the WiP group also provides female students those crucial vicarious learning experiences by pairing up students through its peer mentoring program. Woodrum said that the program was one of the most useful things that she had access to during her time at the UO.

“You’re paired with someone who recently went though what you’re going through, but they got through it,” Woodrum said. “It shows you that it is possible to get through whatever it is you’re struggling with.”

While WiP seeks to alleviate that struggle by creating a welcoming environment outside the classroom, Elly Vandegrift seeks to create that environment in the lecture hall through the Science Literacy Program.

The program, with Vandegrift as Associate Director, works with science faculty at the UO to promote teaching styles that has students be engaged with the class and the teacher, encouraging them to ask questions and interact with lectures in a way that forces them to truly think about what’s being taught instead of passively writing down notes.

“We’re trying to support students, to tell them that making mistakes is okay,” Vandegrift said. “We are trying to make sure that every student has a sense of belonging.”

Through their combined efforts, Vandegrift and WiP have created that sense of belonging, at least according to Samantha Johnson. Johnson, who has recently returned to the UO after taking some personal time, notes that already her experience is different than in the past, before WiP was founded.