Some months ago I met with a sociology professor at my current university who specializes in the study of stereotyping and prejudice in society. She had done some work on how situational power was used by white males to maintain gender and ethnic imbalances in the workplace. The studies interested me, and I wanted to talk to her about the statistical study I was doing of Fermilab data that showed that junior females and non-whites were far less likely to receive critical career-advancement perks at the lab than their white male peers. I wanted to get her perspective on the study.
We talked about my study and a bit about my situation that had led me to be back in graduate school. She said that her only personal experience with physics had led her to believe that in virtually every way it was a field designed to exclude women.
She told me a story about how one of the senior male physics professors at the university had asked her last year to meet with him and his 14 year old daughter because the girl had expressed interest in a career in sociology. So, she set up the meeting, and she recounted to me that it was one of the most bizarre experiences of her life. The physics professor kept haranguing her to give advice on how to "fast-track" his daughter towards her career goal, because if the girl just took the usual amount of time to get the degree(s), that wasn't good enough. In his opinion, if his daughter wasn't at the top of her chosen career by her mid-20's, she was a failure.
The sociology professor told me that in her field what counted was depth, breadth, and length of experience, not how fast you rocketed through undergraduate and graduate school. But the physics professor clearly saw things in a completely different light. I told the sociologist that indeed, it is true that youth rules in physics, and what matters most is how fast you made it to the top. For women who might want to have a family, the entire system of physics works against them. Also, a system that denies junior women critical career-advancement perks (like conference presentations) also serves to ensure that the women cannot in general meet the "rocket up the career ladder" criterion for "success" in physics, whether they have children or not. Physics is a perfect example of the old adage "those who have power do not willingly share it".
The sociologist professor told me she thought I was better off having left physics. You said it sister.
