Forty Years of Women at Wadham

I had a lovely experience as an undergraduate at Oxford University, and my college was Wadham College (founded by Dorothy Wadham in 1610). Wadham was proud of having been amongst he first Oxford colleges to admit women in 1974, and this year is celebrating 40 years of women at Wadham.

I was invited to participate in these celebrations, and you might spot me profiled among the women on the news item about Forty Years of Women at Wadham.

There's a page of Wadham Women's Voices , with an entry from me about studying Physics at Wadham in 1997-2000 (shockingly - for me - not too long after the halfway point of the history of women at Wadham).

As I was in touch with the alumni office, they also invited me to do a longer interview about my involvement with the Galaxy Zoo project, which is led out of the Oxford Physics Department. I guess they couldn't resist the pun: Masters of the Galaxies.

They also took this nice photo of me in the Wadham back quad during my visit.

Sadly Physics at Wadham is still struggling to attract women, with none listed in the recent yearbook I was sent. I hope 20 years from now I'll be able to tell a different story.

Talking about Girls in Physics on BBC News Channel

Last night I was invited to talk about girls in physics on the BBC News Channel. It was an interesting experience - driving to Southampton for just a couple of minutes on screen, but I felt well worth it to help highlight this important issue.

Thanks to @billkeck2 for tweeting this screen shot of me mid flow!

A report (It's Different for Girls) was published yesterday by the Institute of Physics which showed that almost half of all state schools in England do not send any girls to study physics A-level.

This has been picked up very widely in the UK, following an excellent article by Pallab Ghosh: "State Schools Failing Girls in Physics". It was also covered by the childrens news show "Newsbeat": A-level physics turns off girls from studying subject.

 I was interviewed as a "talking head" by Joanna Gosling about the subject. She started by asking me if I was surprised by the findings (not really, although it's disappointing it's not getting any better), then we talked about what might be the reason. I thought there'd been too much teacher  bashing about this, and so instead I brought up the early gender labelling we apply to children (using my daughter as an example) which must contribute to girls thinking they shouldn't want to study physics. We then talked about good ways to encourage children to be interested in science, and finally she asked me why I went on to study physics - I talked about getting hooked by being able to explain things you can see in the night sky with physics. 

Edited to include the below clip of the interview: 

Madame Wu - The First Lady of Physics

Ann Martin has started the blog Speaking Up  to hi-light the amazing women who are not being honoured by Google Doodles. Ann tells us that in the USA to date Google has honoured 15 individuals, and not a single woman. She says internationally, they have honoured 50 men, and 6 women in 2012.

Here in the UK Doodles in 2012 have honoured 17 men, and 0 women (count them for yourself at the link I have, it actually is quite amazing). We're even trailing the USA.

Ann's blog each month hi-lights some of the amazing women with birthday's that month who could have been honoured.

From her May article, I was particularly struck by the last entry - that of Chein-Shiung Wu (or Madame Wu, sometimes called the First Lady of Physics). She would have been 100 years old yesterday (born May 31st 1912).

Chien-Shiung Wu. Photographer unknown.

Chien-Shieng Wu is one of the 16 women profiled in a book I own called "Nobel Prize Women in Science", by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne. The edition I own was published just after the 1995 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to German Scientist Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and included a new chapter on her (the 16th). Those 16 women at the time included all 11 women to have won a Nobel Prize in science at that time (compared to around 500 men), plus 5 other women who played a critical role in a Nobel Prize winning piece of research but for some reason were not included in the honour.

Wu is one of these latter women. She was heavilly involved in the research which won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics (granted to Tsuang-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang) for demonstrating that parity is not conserved in interactions involving the weak force. Simply explained Lee and Yang proposed the experiement and Wu provided the experimental expertise to actually do it. That distinction was the justification the Nobel Committee gave for ignoring her contribution.

She did however win many other honours, in a time when it was doubly difficult for her as both a female physicist and a Chinese-American during a time of significant anti-Asian sentiment in the USA. She was the first Chinese-American elected to the National Acadamy of Sciences, the first female lecturer in Physics at Princeton among many other firsts.

Definitely a women we should all remember on the occasion of her 100th birthday!

Astronomers on Twitter (who happen to be women)

On Friday I was honoured to discover that Ken Hudson, who blogs at Share Astronomy included me in a list of women astronomers (who he follows on Twitter) that he thinks are excellent role models for girls (in his post "Girls Speak Out on Physics Education").


He was motivated to make the list after watching a video on teachers.tv in which girls at a school in London are interviewed (by young women working in Physics related fields) about what they think about physics: Physics Girls Speak Out (teachers.tv)

It's an excellent and interesting video, and I encourage anyone working with young women in science to watch it.  Ken's conclusion was that the girls needed more role models - hence his list of women astronomers.