Cait Gilroy-Hirst

Teacher of Physics and Assistant Head of Year 11

23 May 2025

Last summer, while reading Lessons in Chemistry (a great book if you haven’t read it), a review of the book caught my eye on one of the first pages. It mentioned that the book was ‘a great historical account of women in science’. As someone who has worked as a researcher and has had colleagues and friends who have also been researchers in science, I didn’t think that certain parts were necessarily historical.

The issue of gender parity

The Institute of Physics has long campaigned for more women in science. The campaigns have changed names over the years, yet still only approximately 24 per cent of people taking physics in the US and the UK identify as women.^[1] This number has not changed in the US since 2005 and in the UK has only increased by three percentage points. Of course, perceptions remain of physics being a challenging subject. However, this aside it is not only the attraction into physics but the retention of women in physics that I wish to address.

It is greatly believed that, when gender parity is achieved in the workplace, women will naturally be promoted, but this is not necessarily true. A report published by McKinsey showed that, even in workplaces where entry-level positions were close to 50 per cent, corporate-level positions were held by only 29 per cent of women (see the figure below).^[2]

So we know that this issue is not just limited to physics. The pursuit of STEM degrees rises higher in countries with higher gender equality. A report from the Institute of Physics states that girls in single-sex schools are two and a half times more likely to study physics at university than their co-educated counterparts, which arguably means that the leaky pipeline begins at school based on their peers’, parents’ and teachers’ perceptions and recommendations.

Hidden women

Early on in my PhD, I attended a conference where prior to my joining, the greeting the year before had been ‘lady and gentlemen’. My presence made the total number of women at the conference that year two, out of a room of more than 80 delegates. Another event during my PhD involved my male supervisor telling me that, if my PhD didn’t work out, I could always be an artist instead.

We also know that women’s achievements have historically been suppressed. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars – spinning neutron stars that produce radio waves – had her supervisor dismiss the idea as interference and then saw him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with a colleague but not with Bell herself.^[3] Bell has gone on to win many other awards and regularly donates her prize money to encourage more women into physics and to support their research.

There are numerous other female scientists. Rather famously, Lise Meitner was overlooked for the Nobel Prize despite being nominated 49 times for her discovery of nuclear fission; her colleague Otto Hahn received the prize instead. Rosalind Franklin discovered the double-helix structure of DNA – even taking the first photograph of it – yet her contemporaries Crick and Watson are credited for this discovery. Their work was published at the front of the journal and hers at the back.

Now, understandably, people don’t generally become scientists because they want to be famous. However, when women are overlooked for their discoveries, this can contribute to public perception of science – physics in particular – for being a male subject.

Am I even good at this?

Impostor syndrome should be considered when thinking about girls considering STEM as a future career. There is a large amount of research based on performance versus confidence levels in mathematics between boys and girls.^[3] They are both found to perform similarly in examinations; however, girls are much more likely to underestimate their ability and boys to overestimate theirs. You wouldn’t pick a subject that you didn’t think you were good at.

This links to the perceived difficulty of a scientific PhD. A foundation of knowledge is initially required yet a large component of the PhD is self-discipline and resilience; something not lacking in the students here at WHS. If we look at science through a lens of playful scholarship, a series of questions and discoveries through experimentation, then gender shouldn’t matter.

Can you turn the AC down?

We are in a time where there are disturbingly fast developments in artificial intelligence and other technologies, and it is important that female representation is there, otherwise we end up with bulletproof vests that don’t fit women correctly or European Union car crash testing that only uses male dummies for the five main parts of the test, but one female for the passenger one, which is just a scaled down version of the male dummy. I don’t even want to get started on the size of mobile phones!

It is difficult to control for societal factors and stereotypes, but building self-esteem, where girls objectively see themselves as being good at STEM, would help a long way towards attaining this goal. Addressing issues in misogyny from both genders is something that will potentially take much longer, especially in more male-dominated workplaces. Progress can be slow, but it would be nice to believe that Lessons in Chemistry remains a fantastical yet historical account of women being expected to be in the kitchen and instead breaking through the glass ceiling and propelling themselves to space in the future if they so desire.

References

• ^[1] Berry, T. and Mordijck, S. (2024): ‘Wasted talent: The status quo of women in physics in the US and UK’. Communications Physics, 7(1). doi:10.1038/s42005-024-01579-9
• ^[2] McKinsey & Company (ed.) (2024): ‘Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th Anniversary Report’. Lean In. Accessed 23 May 2025.

• ^[3] Walsh, L. (2020): ‘Journeys of discovery: Jocelyn Bell Burnell and pulsars’. University of Cambridge. Accessed 23 May 2025.