Women In Physics, Part II

The summer between her first and second years of graduate school, Alice Greenberg attended the Pacific Northwest Women in Science retreat with two of her friends. It was a typical sort of conference, filled with team building activities, goest speakers and workshops. Greenberg recalls that there were about 100 or so people at the retreat that year. She also recalls that out of those 100 people exactly four were physicists: Greenberg and her two friends, plus one woman from the University of Washington.

For Greenberg, the conference attendance ratio was just another small slight against her by the discipline she so passionately enjoyed. Physics, like many scientific disciplines, has been working to increase its gender parity in recent years. Still, physics’ female enrollment remains low: out of all the physics degrees awarded in 2015, barely a fifth went to women.

In the weeks following the retreat, Greenberg ruminated on why physics was so deprived of women. She came to the conclusion that at the heart of the matter was a communications issue: physics departments weren’t communicating that there was a space for women within them and female physics students were having a hard time finding communicating with each other, there being so few of them.

“It’s not that the department is hostile,” Greenberg said. “It’s just that if you’re not thinking about representation as something that needs to be done, then you probably won’t make choices to encourage (representation).”

Greenberg wanted to remedy this communications issue and with some help from her friends, Greenberg founded the Women in Physics (WiP) group at the University of Oregon. WiP is the first of its kind at the university, for while there are other women in STEM (science, technology engineering and math) groups on campus, they often have low physics enrollments or are focused on a broader area than just physics.

Greenberg founded WiP to provide female physics students with a space oriented toward them, filled with people who understand all the minutiae and idiosyncrasies of the field they’ve chosen.

“The only way to address whatever issues a department has are by doing work within that department,” Greenberg said.

The physics department wholeheartedly supported Greenberg’s idea, both morally and financially, and WiP also received a $1000 grant from the American Physical society, some of which Greenberg used to help organize a research fair for undergraduate students during WiP’s first year.

The fair was the first big undertaking that WiP had done since its formation and Greenberg was understandably nervous. Not only was she debating whether or not people would come, she was contemplating whether the fair would end up doing what she wanted it to do. But sure enough, one winter afternoon, people began to trickle in and before long they were chatting and networking as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“The value of WiP is especially clear to me by the number of amazing undergraduates I’ve been able to befriend through (WiP and its events),” said Amanda Steinhebel, one of Greenberg’s friends who helped her establish WiP.

With the research fair successfully behind them, Greenberg and her friends had found a sort validation that they were on the right track. WiP would continue to grow in the coming months, establishing a joint mentorship program with the Northstar Project, another institution with similar goals of improving student experiences in STEM fields. Due to creative differences however, WiP and Northstar would come to split, though each retained its own mentorship program.

Now in its second year, WiP is still going strong, holding weekly lunch meetings and running its mentorship program. Greenberg says one of her chief goals is assuaging undergraduates’ fears that they might not belong in the major, having lived through it herself. Because of this particular flavor of impostor syndrome, Greenberg stresses that the key message of WiP is that “We (female physics students) are here and we’re supporting each other.”

Students like Charity Woodrum are grateful for the support. Before studying physics, Woodrum was a nurse and she says that the presence of a group like WiP was crucial to her success.

“In nursing school, that community [of women] is already built in, but you have to find it in physics, so it’s been really nice to have that community of similar people,” Woodrum said.

And while WiP is active now, it’s future remains obscure. Greenberg and Steinhebel both only have one more year of graduate school and then WiP will need new leaders. Greenberg hopes to hand over the reins next year, but there are no firms plans other than that.

“If people want to change how WiP works, I’m fine with that,” Greenberg said. “If they have better ideas, run with it. All I want is for it to continue to bring people together.”