Women in Physics and Related Fields

WiP+ Coffee Hour:  Every other Thursday from 3-4 pm in PSB 403:

2/23, 3/9, 3/23 (cancelled, Visit Weekend), 4/6 (cancelled, Spring Break), 4/20, 5/4, 5/18

SPS WIP PowerPoint Night: 3/21 starting at 7:30 pm in Clark 701. With pizza!

Physics Visit Weekend Open House: 3/24 from 1:30-3:00 pm in Clark 294 D. Drop in to meet some of our prospective grad  students. There will be snacks!

Beyond Cornell

• "New postage stamp honors trailblazing 'First Lady of Physics.'" NBC News. 2/11/2021

• "She made the discovery, but a man got the Nobel. A half-century later, she’s won a $3 million prize." The Washington Post. 9/8/2018.

• "Three major physics discoveries and counting." Quanta Magazine. 7/18/18.

• "Dark Matter Pioneer, Rubin ’51, Dies at 88."  The Cornell Daily Sun. 12/28/16.

• "The Bright Face Behind the Dark Side of Galaxies." Science. 2.8.02.

Department contacts: 

WiP+ Organizers

• Lena Koukoutis (AEP)
• Katja Nowack (Physics)
• Jenny Wurster (Physics)

Equity advocates

• Jenny Wurster (Physics)
• SPS WiP Liaison (Abra Geiger) and Diversity Liaison (Yasmine Meziani)

Cornell University Resources:    

• Cornell Diversity and Inclusion Resources

Women in Physics Statistics

• American Physical Society (APS)

Good Practices

• APS: Best Practices for Recruiting and Retaining Women in Physics
• Empirically Validated Stratedies to Reduce Stereotype Threat

Funding sources (grant/scholarship info)

• APS listed

Conferences/workshop opportunities

• Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics

Other

• NSF Sexual Harassment Policies
• STEM Speak Your Story Project

Articles

• Tannenbaum, Melanie. “The Problem When Sexism Just Sounds So Darn Friendly….” Scientific American, 2 Apr. 2013
• Urry, Meg. “Science and gender: Scientists must work harder on equality.” Nature, vol. 528, no. 7583, 21 Dec. 2015
• Shen, Helen. “Inequality quantified: Mind the gender gap.” Nature, vol. 495, no. 7439, 6 Mar. 2013
• Serio, Tricia. “Speak up about subtle sexism in science.” Nature, vol. 532, no. 7600, 26 Apr. 2016
• McKinnon, Mika. “These 17 Women Changed The Face Of Physics.” Gizmodo, 8 Mar. 2015
• Pollack, Eileen. “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” The New York Times Magazine, 3 Oct. 2013
• Dasgupta, Nilanjana.  “ Viewpoint:  How Stereotypes impact Women in Physics.” Physics 9, 87. 1 Aug. 2016.
• Barthelemy, Ramón S., Melinda McCormick, and Charles Henderson. “Gender discrimination in physics and astronomy: Graduate student experiences of sexism and gender microaggressions.” Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 12, 020119 1 Aug. 2016.

Videos

• Maschka, Kristin. “How I Learned to Love Unconscious Bias.” TEDxPasadenaWomen, Pasadena, CA, YouTube
• Abdel-Magied, Yassmin. “What does my headscarf mean to you?” TEDxSouthBank, Brisbane, Australia, YouTube

Did you know?

• 1884 Kate Gleason is the first women admitted to study engineering at

  

  Cornell in the Mechanical Arts program
• In 1895, Carolyn Baldwin Morrison, was awarded the first Doctor of Science degree in the United States by Cornell University for her work in Physics.
• ~1910 Frances G. Wick is the first women to earn a PhD in physics from Cornell.  She went on to teach physics at Vassar and several of her female students went on to do graduate work at Cornell.  During the 1918-1919 year she took a leave of absence of absence for war time emergency during which time she was an “Acting Assistant Professor” at Cornell.
• 1944 Jane Faggen is the first women hired as a teaching assistant for the physics department.  She becomes part of a group of physics graduate students that “successfully persuaded the University to remove questions of race and religion from our application first – the first Ivy League institution to do so.
• Susan Phelps was the first woman in the world to receive laboratory instruction in physics (here at Cornell).  She later went on to biology.  The Gage fund for “unspecified costs in advancing knowledge in physics” was created in her memory by her husband Simon Henry Gage and son Henry Phelps.

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  The first woman faculty member to be hired in College of Arts and Sciences was Martha Stahr Carpenter in 1947 as a radio astronomer in the Astronomy department. She later shifted into a research associate position when starting her family.

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  1951 Vera Rubin earned her Master's degree in Astronomy from Cornell.  Famous for her work confirming the existence of dark matter, Vera was also the first woman to legally use the Palomar Observatory in 1965.

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  Millie (Spiewack) Dresselhous spends time as a postdoc at Cornell (1958-1960) before going on to become the first female tenured professor at MIT (1968) and the first president of the American Physical Society (1984). She was also the winner of many awards including National Medal of Science, the Oersted Medal, Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Enrico Fermi Award, and the Kavli Prize. In 2015, she became the first female to receive the IEEE Medal of Honor.  In 2017 she was featured in this GE add promoting women in STEM

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  1983 Barbara Cooper, a former Cornell physics undergrad, was hired as the first women in a tenure track position in the physics department.

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  Ritchie Patterson was the first women to serve a chair of the Physics Department from 2009-2011.

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  2014 Lois Pollack begins her term as the first female director of Applied and Engineering Physics.