Crosspost: Assessing the status of women in physics in the 1970s

Today's crosspost is by Anna Doel from the American Institute of Physics, posted on aip.org on May 1, 2026.

Vera Kistiakowsky, at right, at a public hearing on nuclear weapons and disarmament organized by the World Council of Churches in 1981. 

Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, National Archives of the Netherlands. CC-BY-SA.

In August 1971, the American Physical Society issued a call for “names, addresses, comments, and recommendations” that was published in Physics Today, Spectrum, and Science. The goal was to begin to collect data for the newly formed Committee on Women in Physics. Responses to this questionnaire became the basis for the committee’s work to address challenges women physicists experienced at all stages of career, from first-year college students to well-established researchers.

The latter group knew a lot about the then-status of women in American science. They were of the generation whose career options, if any, were largely limited to three main categories: choose the profession, choose a scientist partner, or luck into being born to the right family.

Read Doel's full article "Assessing the status of women in physics in the 1970s" at

https://www.aip.org/history/status-women-physics-1970s

The AAS convened a Special Committee in 1972 to review the status of women in astronomy. This committee published a report in 1973 recommending the formation of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, which was formalized in 1979. Read about the history of the CSWA at

https://aas.org/comms/cswa/history

Crosspost: Celebrating Women in the Physical Sciences

This month AIP is highlighting achievements and challenges for women in the physical sciences community at aip.org. Today we're crossposting these articles to draw more attention to women in science for Women's History Month.

"Zoe Adams, a graduate student at the University of Maryland and 2025 intern at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, is on a mission to ensure the contributions of women in science are never lost. In the video below, Zoe discusses her work processing the papers of Gloria Lubkin, a pioneering physicist and longtime editor of Physics Today, and why making these historical materials accessible is vital for the future of science. 

Young women conducting an experiment in the Physics Laboratory, Wellesley College. Photo: AIP Archives, Emilio Segre Visual Archives General Collection.

AIP is also featuring stories from its site celebrating women scientists, like this 2024 post "Women Leaders in Astronomy" and this 2025 one, "How AIP Is Giving A Name To Mrs. Scientist." Find more posts like these for Women's History Month at aip.org/womens-history-month.

Crosspost: Dorothy Tang - Meet the Archives Fellow Enriching the Historical Record of Women in the Physical Sciences

Dorothy Tang is an Archives Fellow at AIP, focusing on improving the documentation of women in the physical sciences through conducting new oral histories for the Niels Bohr Archives and highlighting interesting narratives within existing collections. The AIP publishes its findings bimonthly on Ex Libris Universum.

Today we're sharing Dorothy Tang's recent post about her work, and her intentions to blog about interesting stories from the archives throughout the next year. To follow her posts, sign up for the newsletter at Ex Libris Universum.

Meet the Archives Fellow Enriching the Historical Record of Women in the Physical Sciences

In July 2025, AIP started an initiative to improve the documentation and contributions of women in the physical sciences. With the help of the Henry Luce Foundation, the project is underway and I’m very excited to be working with the Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBLA) team as the newly minted Archives Fellow.

As the fellow, I’m tasked with improving the historical record of women in the physical sciences across a variety of areas. I am conducting archival research and identifying stories that forefront women scientists’ experiences in their professional, academic, and personal lives. This will take the form of blog posts and social media posts, highlighting themes and through lines across NBLA’s oral history and archival collections. I am also enhancing the oral history collection by conducting new oral history interviews with scientists at various stages in their careers. Lastly, I am supporting NBLA’s ongoing outreach endeavors, such as participating in Wikipedia edit-a-thons to improve and promote historical information about women in the physical sciences and their discoveries in the field.

A bit about me

I recently completed my Master of Library and Information Science program at the University of Maryland, with a focus in Archives and Digital Curation. An enduring dimension of my work has been audio storytelling, as I come from a community archives background and specialize in oral histories. Prior to entering archives, I worked in independent broadcast journalism.

As an archivist, some of my interests include people-centered narratives, information and power, digital cultural memory, scent and memory, and reparative archival work. I’m deeply fascinated with the past, meaning making, and how structures of power and knowledge shape our realities and how we relate to each other and ourselves.

What I’m excited about

With the guidance of AIP historians Anna Doel and Jon Phillips, I’m learning more about interviewing scientists and history of science approaches to storytelling. I’ve interviewed a variety of people such as activists, humanities professors, authors and more, yet somehow I’ve never done an oral history with a physicist, so I’m eager for the opportunity to do so!

I’ve also started doing some research by going through AIP’s existing collection of over 1500 oral history transcripts and looking for threads across interviews or over an individual scientist’s life. I’m especially interested in personal narratives and themes such as mentorship and peer networks, motherhood and family building, philosophy and science, and other motifs that give insight to women scientists’ interior lives, in addition to their intellectual contributions.

I’m also particularly interested in archival research and understanding the past through the lens of scent. We live in an ocularcentric and text-heavy world, and I’m really curious about the kind of information we can glean from engaging with our other senses such as smell and touch. What can we learn by smelling with intention? How can an olfactive lens enrich our understanding of human experiences within the archival record? I’d like to bring this sensorial approach to information gathering into my research and oral history interviewing—I can’t wait to see where it goes.

Current musings

One of the first oral history interviews I delved into was that of renowned astrophysicist Sandra Faber. She is one of the few women scientists that AIP was able to interview repeatedly over the years. Over her career, AIP interviewed her three times—in 1988, 2002 and 2020. I am especially interested in seeing if upon reflection, there were any major changes in how she understood her experiences in grad school and various institutions, as each interview was conducted across various stages in her career.

Read the rest of Dororthy Tang's post at AIP.org and follow along her with her journey into the research archives. 

Faber Works at Telescope Controls.
 

Credit: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection

Crosspost: Groping, Derision, Bias, Threats: Women in Science Face It All

Written by Arianne Cohen for Bloomberg

Credit: Daphné Geisler for Bloomberg Businessweek

Two decades ago, Rachel Ivie attended a conference for women in astronomy in Pasadena, Calif. During a panel on gender demographics, she presented a series of charts depicting the dismal truth: Only 14% of astronomy faculty were female—a little more than half the rate for science and engineering overall. After the panel, several participants approached her to discuss why those numbers were so low when 60% of young astronomers at the time were women. “The question was, what’s going to happen to this big group?” says Ivie, a senior research fellow at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). “Why do women drop out?”

That question continued to nag Ivie, and a few years later she started a long-term study of gender roles in the field, sponsored by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and the AIP. She and her team have followed 1,300 graduate students since 2007, checking in again in 2013 and 2016, with further rounds possible. Some respondents now work outside academia, so the study sheds light on women’s experience beyond the confines of university astronomy or physics departments.

The initial idea was to investigate the myriad reasons women might ditch science careers. But when the data came back, Ivie and her collaborators were riveted by the responses to a question about sexual harassment and discrimination. “We felt that it was important to report on the nuance about where harassment happens, who’s doing it, and what power structure is being reinforced,” she says.

Learn more about Ivie's detailed breakdown of the types of harassment and inappropriate behavior women in physics and astronomy experience at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-19/why-aren-t-there-more-women-in-science-harassment-looms-large 

And read the full AIP Harassment report here: https://aas.org/press/aip-harassment-report 

Crosspost: Astronomy Decadal Survey Reckons with Demographic Disparities, Societal Impacts

Written By Andrea Peterson for the American Institute of Physics

Indigenous Hawaiian activists protest the development of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano sacred to native Hawaiian culture. Image credit: Occupy Hilo.

Released last month, the National Academies’ latest decadal survey of astronomy and astrophysics includes an intensive assessment of the “state of the profession” and its “societal impacts” for the first time in the survey’s 60-year history.

A dedicated survey panel was tasked with gathering community input and data on demographic trends, as well as with developing “actionable suggestions” to promote the health of the workforce and improve the diversity of the field. The panel also proposed that astronomers re-envision their approach to outreach and “broader impacts,” including by deepening their consultation with local communities over the placement of telescopes — a major issue confronting the proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii.

Based on the panel’s input, the full survey committee presents 10 recommendations to improve the “foundations of the profession,” spanning matters such as expanding demographic data collection and diversity programs to adopting a “Community Astronomy” model of engagement and reducing astronomy’s environmental impacts. While the recommendations are not binding, they will carry considerable weight with NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, which sponsored the survey.

Read the rest of the article and learn more about trends in racial and gender diversity in astrophysics at: https://www.aip.org/fyi/2021/astronomy-decadal-survey-reckons-demographic-disparities-societal-impacts

First the Facts

Today's guest blogger is Annika Peter.

I am a dark-matter and gravitational-dynamics junkie, currently finishing up a postdoctoral position at UC Irvine, and moving to a faculty position in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy at The Ohio State University. My husband is also an astrophysicist, currently a professor of astrophysics at Caltech. He is taking a professorship at OSU, too, so we have successfully found an excellent solution to our two-body problem! My two favorite aspects of my job are thinking deeply about and trying to solve some of the major mysteries of the universe, and working with undergraduate and graduate students. I am also a practical problem solver, which means I spend some time scheming about how to improve the scientific enterprise and university education.

Before jumping into a discussion of women in science, I thought it would be useful to provide some references and numbers. Not only do I think that these data are good for anyone in our field to be familiar with, but it will be a good jumping off point for some of my future posts.

Participation of women in physics and astronomy in an academic setting: We all know that there are few women in physics and astronomy, but what does “few” mean? There are several good databases with numbers on this subject. The first place I would recommend looking is the NSF, which maintains a set of tables on graduates and employment by field, sex, disability, race and ethnicity, citizenship, and year. The American Astronomical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women maintains an extensive set of links to various studies and informational resources. The American Physical Society has some useful information on its website.

Permanent Jobs Elusive for Recent PhDs

As someone who just graduated from my PhD and went through an extensive job search, I was interested in the results from two recent studies by the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics. These studies looked at the initial employment of physics doctorates as well as a follow up with these same doctorates one year later.

The studies found that around 30% percent of newly minted PhDs (20% for astronomy/astrophysics) are accepting potentially permanent positions, down from an eight-year high of 34% in 2008, while more than 60% (70% for astronomy/astrophysics) are taking post-doc positions, up from a low in 2008 of about 55%.

According to the follow-up survey, 13% took post-doc positions because they “could not obtain a suitable permanent position,” up from 7 percent for the graduating classes of 2007 and 2008.  An additional 34% took post-docs, not because they desired the additional research experience, but because they felt it was a "necessary step into obtaining a future position."  Of the graduates who obtained potentially permanent positions, only 25% were at colleges and universities.  The rest were at government labs (16%) and in the private sector (59%).

Private sector potentially permanent positions had the highest median starting salary at $90,000, while potentially permanent government workers earned a median of $85,000. Perhaps surprisingly, the starting salary for a potentially permanent spot at a university is only marginally better than for a post-doc, about $50,000 per year compared with $45,000 per year. Post-docs at government institutions took in a median starting salary of about $63,400 per year.

I find it particularly interesting that astronomy/astrophysics is the subfield with the lowest number of doctorates going directly into potentially permanent positions.  I found that when approaching my own job search, there was very little mentorship / guidance available about alternative career paths for astrophysicists outside of post-docs / academia.  Perhaps this, along with the fact that there are less obvious industrial applications for astrophysics (compared to material science or condensed matter) explains why so few of us are getting permanent jobs after graduation.

For more information please visit the AIP Statistical Research Center.