Academia

Diversity in Academia

Approximately 20% of physics undergraduates in the UK are women. This is low compared to some other countries, for example in France this figure is 33%, whilst in Turkey it is 37%. In the UK, physics is far less popular amongst female university students than maths or chemistry. In addition to this, the number of postgraduate women physicists is greatly increased by international students2 .

A widespread problem that is not just constrained to the field of physics is the ‘leaky pipeline’ phenomenon: there are fewer women in prominant positions, with each successive level up the academic ladder. This is evident across many different disciplines: although 33.3% of the assistant professors in all subjects in the UK are women, this figure drops to 8.5% for full professors. However, the situation is particularly bad in physics, where only 3% of professors are women.

A Graph to Show the percentage of female physics undergraduates in different countries (Data IUPAP 2002)

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