Women in science

The small wonders of the natural world impressed Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya early. As a girl, growing up in Atlanta, she was encouraged by her mother to draw sketches of things she could find in her backyard—a butterfly’s wing, a peanut shell—as they appeared in her microscope. “Looking back,” she said, in a 2017 TED Talk, “I […]

Arguably the best prescription to improve the situation facing women in science is for there to be more women in science.Oleg Golovnev / Shutterstock The increasing visibility of women in leadership roles is one of the few success stories in the struggle for equality in science. But a new study, which connects how often scientists’ […]

Reprinted with permission from Quanta AbstractionsIn an interview with Quanta Magazine last fall, the eminent theoretical physicist Helen Quinn recalled her uncertainty, as a Stanford University undergraduate in the 1960s, about whether to pursue a career in physics or become a high school teacher. “There were no women in the faculty at Stanford at that time in the physics […]

Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, is “very cynical about efforts to get girls into science.”Photograph by GSK / Flickr Why should the share of women in a given occupation affect its average pay? It’s a curious inverse relationship. Census data show that when the former increases, the latter decreases—when […]