Theodore Hodapp

Women continue to be significantly underrepresented in physics. Despite slow gains over the past 50 years, we still only see a roughly 20% participation rate at the undergraduate, graduate, and entry-level academic positions. As a community, we have worked to address this in many ways, and yet we are stilling falling short. We have come to understand that efforts at the post-secondary level will not be sufficient to address this issue.

Women face a multitude of messages starting from birth that integrate into an ever-present undercurrent of discouragement for their participation in certain areas – physics is one of those areas. Overcoming this can be daunting for a community dedicated to equity.

Daunting, however, does not mean impossible. John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” We are taking his advice: we need to try the “hard” things to overcome a serious challenge and one reason the APS has decided to venture into a territory that we don’t typically inhabit: high school classrooms.

The STEP UP project, beginning its third year, recognizes the significant impact we can have on women’s participation in physics by enlisting high school physics teachers to give lessons in careers and underrepresentation – two topics that have been shown to impact women’s persistence to majoring in physics as an undergraduate. Our first two years have been absorbed in developing and testing, in a controlled study, the effectiveness of these interventions. I am happy to report that we have seen a substantive effect. Our next step is to invite teachers to share these lessons with their students. This will begin the important work that cannot be accomplished in other settings: attracting substantially more women to join the community – women who would have otherwise turned away from further studies in physics.