There’s progress on women’s representation in the sciences, but not fast enough or significant enough. That’s the overarching message of a new Newsweek article and a recent talk by North Carolina State University professor Mary Wyer. The Newsweek article looks at the rising number of female faculty members in the UC Berkeley physics department, but notes that they still only account for 10 percent of professors. The article sees signs of hope in the 20 percent of physics undergrad and grad students who are female. (Although one thing that jumped out at me when I was co-editing essays for She’s Such A Geek was the fact that many women made it to grad school, at the top of their classes, and then found massive barriers suddenly in their way. The article goes on to say:

To women in other professions—law, publishing, even politics—academic science can sometimes seem like the world that time forgot. Decades after women began scaling the corporate ladder, female physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers are still struggling to find their place at the nation’s major research universities. Although women now earn about half the graduate degrees in math and chemistry, for example, they hold only about 10 percent of the faculty jobs in those fields. “The U.S. needs as much scientific and technologic brain power as it can get,” says Georgia Tech’s Sue Rosser, author of “The Science Glass Ceiling.” “It makes no sense to exclude half the population.”

The article also talks about the “biological clock” and steps that some universities have taken to allow for women scientists to have children. It also talks about a study that found women professors were making less than men in the sciences, and steps some institutions have made to counteract that bias. And then there’s my favorite quote in the article, from Berkeley physics grad student Lorraine Sadler:

“The biggest obstacle I’ve had is brute force,” says Sadler. “Most of the things in this lab are heavy, so I started lifting weights.” She looks proudly around the sophisticated equipment that records her experiments. “I built this entire lab from an empty room,” she says.

Meanwhile, Wyer blamed biases against women for keeping them out of the sciences. She ran a study at NC State which divided a required ecology course into three groups. One group had a lot of material about women’s contributions to science and bias against women incorporated into the course, complete with quizzes. A second group had less material from women’s studies classes. A third group had no extra material about women. She surveyed each group at the start and end of the semester, and found that each group’s attitudes to women in science had changed commensurate with the amount of material it studied. (The group that had no extra material showed no change in its attitudes.)

Actually, I’m not sure what lesson we’re supposed to take away from that study, except maybe that talking about women in science, and educating people about women’s potential in the sciences, is a Good Thing.