Monday, June 22, 2020
By:
Although my blogs the first two weeks were not very insightful, I do actually have a real job at APS. My job for the summer was to update the APS Top Educators lists and Physics Graphs & Statistics. All in all, lots of working in Excel. This was intended to be my job for the entire summer, but with a combination of luck, hard work, and having wonderful prior interns laying out the roadwork for me, I am on track to have both of these done within the next week.
After these last few weeks, I am a lot more familiar with the demographic breakdowns of people in physics, and by extension other STEM fields and the United States. Although my job is ostensibly just to update these graphs, my mentor and I have worked to also make sure the data is presented accurately, impactfully, and honestly. People use the things I’m making, and people learn from it. I’m really proud to be contributing to that.
I’m very proud to be a physicist, and I love being a part of the physics community. I am not proud of how behind we are when it comes to inclusivity. When I was a freshman physics major, I didn’t notice this discrepancy at first: my university is exclusively engineering, so I already went into it expecting poor representation for women. Then Physics Today posted Gender Matters. In it I saw a graph showing a breakdown of the percent of women in various STEM fields, and I saw physics at the absolute bottom of that graph. I also saw the comments on that article, many of which asserted there was no problem because ‘physics is a meritocracy’ and ‘women just aren’t interested in it.’ As I got farther into my major-specific classes, I noticed that the higher-level the physics, the lower the ratio between women and men got. The farther into physics I have personally gotten, the more I have experienced blatant sexism.
And that’s just being a woman. The number of black people graduating with a PhD in physics every year is so low every year that we cannot give a table of top schools by average student per year, it has to be summed over 3 years. The 9,000 undergraduate degrees awarded in physics every year dwarfs the 20 awarded to Native Americans and the 200 awarded to Black students, making a discrepancy so large that it barely makes sense to compare. I have been vaguely aware of this issue as I’ve been an undergrad, but working in this internship and seeing the raw data really drives home how important this is, and how far we have yet to come as a physics community. The graph I saw on Physics Today years ago is one of the graphs I just updated. This kind of work is only going to become more important as more people start taking a vested interest in who gets to do physics and who doesn’t, and I’m proud to be a part of that learning.
Madison Swirtz