Sigh. We can fix this.

One hopeful observation. I've been involved in several national TT searches (physics department) over the past 20 years, and I have seen a massive improvement in the gender balance in applicant pools. IMO, that's a leading indicator. And it looked like a rapid shift, not a gradual increase.

That is so broken….

To be clear, it’s not about getting women & girls excited about science. We are! It’s about keeping us there.

Scientific institutions weren’t built by women or for us. Cultural norms & social mores often discourage us from staying. Retention numbers from earning a PhD to becoming a full professor are nearly identical now to when I was early career in the 2000s. /2

2069! on the other hand... how many years were universities functioning? how many hundreds? and when did they START enrolling women, i presume you are talking at professor level? maybe it's actually remarkable progress! humans change VERY SLOOOOOOWLY.

@breadandcircuses When I was a grad student, I thought we were surely headed toward parity. I was surrounded by so many bright, driven, curious & ambitious women!

But then came negotiations, bullying & harassment, bias, motherhood without institutional support, inadequate or unaffordable childcare, lack of credit, male dominated social norms - all before a pandemic. Our numbers have dwindled at every step.

Nice.

one of the reasons I always push the publisher to use my initials and not my name. Some journals are now cruelly demanding full first names and I view that as misogynistic

If current trend continues, men and women will be dead by 2069. 🗿

Chemistry is there now, right? Wonder why that is.

It won't matter by then surely. Some of the boys will be girls.

Oddly, the early days of computing programmers were disproportionately women.

Coding in machine language took persistence, precision and a lot of effort for small reward

Once higher level languages took over (and money & prestige rose) men started to dominate that field.

There are no known fields of endeavour where the achievements of smart men are creditted to women.....

I’m all for equal opportunity. But the idea that every profession should be 50% male and 50% female ignores the simple fact that women and men are biologically different.