Committee to Encourage Women in Physics(CEWIP)
Comité pour encourager les femmes ŕ la physique (CEFEP)
Barbara L. WHITTEN
Colorado College
What Works for Women in Undergraduate Physics?
The participation of women in physics has increased in recent years, but the percentage of women in undergraduate physics is still less than half that in mathematics and chemistry This is due in large part to the “leaky pipeline”-women become more scarce in physics with every step up the academic ladder. The largest decrease occurs between high school physics and college graduation, so it is worthwhile to look at how undergraduate physics departments try to make women comfortable. With a team of women physicists, I visited nine undergraduate physics departments in the US. We compared those that are successful in producing a large percentage of women majors (about 40%) with those that are more typical of the national average (about 20%). We found that the most important factor is a warm and female-friendly department culture that reaches out to introductory students. I’ll discuss the factors that make up a female-friendly culture, and describe other results of our research.