This is a post about what it is like to be a woman in physics (particularly a woman with kids), because I am pretty sure that most of the world has no idea how screwed up a field physics is, yet the perennial question is "why are there so few women in physics".
A big part of the problem in physics is that women have babies, and the field has some really screwed up notions about what that implies about a woman's ability as a physicist. Don't get your knickers in a twist thinking that I assume that all women could/should/will have babies. I don't. But a significant fraction of us do, and if we happen to also be physicists, we often run into some very serious discrimination problems on top of the already serious discrimination problems we face just because we are females in an almost completely male dominated field. So serious in fact that it is pretty much guaranteed that if you are a untenured and not-on-tenure-track-yet female physicist and you have children, you are unlikely to get to a point in your career where you are on tenure track, let alone getting tenure. So, a not insignificant fraction of women are culled from the physics career-advancement pool simply because they have kids. The few women who do make it to the top are often by-necessity-for-survival childless.
A lot of people blame the lack-of-senior-women-physicists-with-kids phenomenon on the difficulties they assume women have managing their career and family life. Maybe that is true in some cases, but I really don't think that is the main reason.
For instance, let's look at my experiences: here is an example of what it is like to be a female graduate student in physics with kids. And here is an example of what it is like to be a female postdoc in physics with kids. For more on how physics views women who have babies, see here.
My experiences are not unique. In 2004, with the help of some friends in high places, I posted a career satisifaction survey to the male and female physicists based at Fermilab as as an added part of a conference registration procedure. The survey results? Of the women who had *not* had children in the past 15 years, 25% said they had experienced gender discrimination at the lab. Of the women physicists who *had* had children in the past 15 years, over 60% said they had experienced gender discrimination at the lab. Of the women who were within 5 years post-phd (a very critical time in your career where you either make it or break it as a particle physicist) 40% said they had experienced gender discrimination.
With respect to the 60% discrimination rate against mothers at the lab...that's just the women who are still able to work there, and the statistic doesn't tell the tale of all the women who were culled just because they chose to have kids. I know several women in my field who were essentially fired after having children. Either the women simply disappeared from the field altogether ("to spend more time with their families", as the Bush administration likes to say when they fire someone), or they worked for free, sometimes for years, before someone finally threw some salary their way. What is even scarier is that these women who worked for free (like me when I was working on my PhD) felt that it was their only option. It was these precedents for using women with kids as slave labor at the lab that led a couple of my friends to suggest it as a "viable" option for me after it was clear my career prospects had been destroyed after I had a baby. After all, those other women seemed "happy" working for free until some kind of dead-end low-paying job finally came their way. This occassional slave labor of females with kids has actually become kind of an unquestioned part of the culture of the lab. I am not joking when I say that the working environment at national labs (like Fermilab) is totally screwed up in a way that is incredibly obvious to people in the outside world (when they hear about it), but apparently not so obvious to the people who are actually working there.
An example of a woman who worked for free at Fermilab can be found in the March 2006 issue of Symmetry , Fermilab's propaganda rag about how great particle physics is. Read the article "Breaking for Families". The tone and topic of the article aren't what really bother me (although, if you actually read between the lines of some portions of that article, it paints a scary picture). What really steams my clams is that the article doesn't explicitly mention that Elizabeth, a competent physicist, worked for free with the theory group at Fermilab for years while working side jobs to make enough money to put her kids in daycare so she could have time to do research at Fermilab (gee, that situation rings a bell, doesn't it?). And then the article goes on to gush about how great it was that she went forth and got her own grant money to pay herself (what the article doesn't point out is that the poor woman would still be working for free if she wasn't bringing in her own friggin' grant money...meanwhile, her male peers of similar competence are of course all getting paid from theory group grant money). It makes Absinthe want to puke. Especially since Fermilab actually has the gall to friggin' advertise the whole pathetic situation (leaving key details out of course, like the fact they effectively used the woman as slave labor for several years).
I should mention here that I know a lot more male physicists than female ones (for obvious reasons), yet not once have I seen a male physicist being asked to work for free for any reason. Trust me, no male at Fermilab is put through that kind of crap, then asked to pose for a publicity rag with their kids to show how "welcoming" the lab is to people of their ilk, when in fact the lab has been grievously abusing them for years.
Anyway, that is Absinthe's two cents worth on why physics is such a screwed up field when it comes to promoting women. Until *all* women are welcome in the field, regardless of whether they have kids, physics is going to continue to be a boys only club (with a few childess females thrown in for decoration (at least from the boys' point of view)).
