Data show extent of sexism in physics

from Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080423/full/452918a.html


Women are poorly represented in physics, making
up just 10% of faculty in the United States,
for example, but the reasons for this have proved
contentious. Now a particle physicist claims to
have hard data showing institutional sexism
at an experiment at one of America’s highestprofile
physics labs.
Sherry Towers claims that female postdocs
worked significantly harder than their male
peers but were awarded one-third as many conference
presentations proportionally. “There
was this shocking difference,” says Towers, who
now studies statistics at Purdue University in
West Lafayette, Indiana. “Particle physics really
hasn’t moved forward in 30 years.”
Towers used data from publicly available work
records to chart the careers of 57 postdoctoral
researchers, including nine women, who worked
on the ‘DZero’ particle detector at Fermilab in
Batavia, Illinois, between 1998 and 2006. Towers
herself worked as a postdoc on the project
between 2000 and 2005. The findings of her
survey were striking, she says. She claims that
women did 40% more maintenance work
than their male counterparts, and that female
postdocs produced significantly more ‘internal
papers’ per year. But based on that productivity
they were only one-third as likely to be allocated
conference talks as their male peers, she claims
(http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2026).
Conference presentations are critical to a
young particle physicist’s career. Papers from
collaborations such as DZero have hundreds
of authors in alphabetical order. Being given
the chance to present results at a meeting is a
major way for young researchers to stand out.
“It’s important,” says Pauline Gagnon, a physicist
with the ATLAS detector at CERN near Geneva,
Switzerland. “Being able to give
talks is a way of rewarding individuals
for their work.”
Most particle detectors have
internal committees that allocate
conference presentations
to researchers. These committees
are frequently male-dominated,
and Towers believes this
lies behind the discrimination.
“I don’t think for a second that
there is a conscious bias going
on,” she says. But the committees
“are in danger of being
prone to patronage and cronyism”.
Male committee members are more likely
to nominate male protégés to receive presentation
time, she claims.
Some are sceptical of the findings. “I wasn’t
convinced that the effect she has found is real,”
says Kevin Pitts, a particle physicist at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Internal
papers are not necessarily a direct measure
of productivity, he argues, and the small number
of physicists surveyed is not enough to prove
systematic bias. But Pitts is quick to add that he
has little doubt that females do suffer gender discrimination:
“In fact,” he says, “I have personally
observed this on more than one occasion.”
Female physicists contacted by Nature said
Towers’s data matched their personal experiences
of institutional sexism in physics. “You often see a
young guy with an older guy gossiping and having
coffee, but never a woman,” says Freya Blekman, a
physicist on the CMS experiment at CERN. “I’m
convinced,” agrees Gagnon. “There is absolutely
no shadow of a doubt in my mind.” She says the
ATLAS collaboration is thinking about how to
address the problem in its own
speakers’ committee.
After Towers complained,
Fermilab launched an internal
review in autumn 2006,
says Bruce Chrisman, the
lab’s chief operating officer.
An edited copy of the review
obtained by Nature found that
the collaboration “followed
its policies correctly”. But the
investigator, a senior female
physicist, added that complaints
of gender discrimination
in the group “should not
be summarily dismissed”. There was a general
feeling that females were being “passed over”
for leadership roles, the report says.
DZero’s leaders counter that bias, if it ever
existed, is not plaguing the current collaboration.
A survey of data between August 2006 and
2007 showed that women gave 17% of all talks
despite making up just 12% of the collaboration,
says DZero spokesman Dmitri Denisov.
Powers says the investigation didn’t focus
on postdocs and hasn’t led to real changes at
DZero. She wants the conference allocation system
to be made more transparent and balanced.
“The changes that need to be made are simple,”
she says. “It wouldn’t cost them a dime.”
And Towers says gender discrimination ultimately
forced her out of particle physics. She
adds that in 2004 her former employer, a prominent
northeastern public university, tried to terminate
her contract after she complained that
she wasn’t given adequate maternity leave. She
has since filed a lawsuit against the university. ■
Geoff Brumfiel