WHEN we were 16 years old, my friend Karen and I were interviewed for an educational video. With our hair thick with styling mousse, pale blue eyeliner and misplaced teen swagger, we explained why we had chosen to study physics. We were the only two girls in our school that year who had. Our video was going to inspire other girls to do the same. We were going to change the world.

Thirty years on, it is safe to say our ambition failed. In 2016, in almost half of the schools in England that admit girls. In the same year, just one-third of schools had two or more girls taking the subject. It is a similar picture across much of the world. Despite all the initiatives to attract more girls into physics, the proportion remains stubbornly low.

Physics and sexism has been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks by the incendiary comments made by theoretical physicist Alessandro Strumia. At a workshop on gender in physics, of all places, at CERN near Geneva in Switzerland, he claimed that women were less capable than men at physics research. The day after he was suspended by CERN, Donna Strickland became only the third woman to receive the Nobel prize in physics in its 117-year history, sharing this year’s award for her pioneering work on lasers.

All this paints a picture of physics as a career that is unwelcoming to women to start with and isolating for many of those who do make it. But why is this still the case in 2018 – and what can we do about it?

Let’s get one thing straight. Girls are just as capable as boys at physics. You don’t need brain scans to tell you, just look at the exam results. “Girls perform at least as well, if not better,” says Charles Tracy, head of education at the Institute of Physics in the UK. This year, achieved the highest two grades at A level – typically taken by 16 to 18-year-olds – compared with 29.5 per cent of boys. And it isn’t that girls don’t study the subject. In 2018, just over at A level, compared with around 6000 who picked French.

The problem is that this is minuscule compared with the 29,400 boys who chose it (see “Graph”). Physics was the second most popular subject for boys at A level, yet the for girls. “Many girls who could have had careers in physics are dropping out. It’s a terrible shame that we’re losing that amount of talent,” says Julia Higgins, president of the .

Something seems to be happening around the age of 16. Up until this point, most girls who have studied science have physics in their top four grades. But then they quit. Why?

For almost 20 years, the Institute of Physics has been trying to find out. “When we started looking for reasons why, we found that there was little evidence,” says Higgins.

At first, the institute thought it was to do with sexism and stereotypes within physics teaching. Initiatives to address these issues had some success, . But then the improvements shuddered to a halt. The institute began to suspect that the problem wasn’t with physics teachers or even science departments, but a problem with the entire school.

What followed was exploring the issues. Starting in 2014, 26 schools took part in a two-year study that took four different approaches. The first group of schools worked on improving the confidence of 13 and 14-year-old girls. A second group focused on working with physics teachers. A third worked on tackling the culture of the schools as a whole by involving teachers, governors and students from every subject, not just science. The final group of six schools took part in a pilot project funded by the Drayson Foundation that blended these three approaches and tailored them to fit an individual school’s needs.

The results were positive in all cases, but what really stood out were the outcomes from the Drayson schools. The number of girls starting A level physics more than trebled in two years, soaring from 16 to 52. “We looked at physics and it’s not the physics, it’s the environment,” says Higgins. The Institute of Physics now plans to roll out a larger version of the Drayson pilot to 100 schools in England, starting in March 2019.

Even if we tackle the problem of getting girls to opt for physics at school, they still face issues as they progress further through their careers. Karen and I parted ways when we left school. She studied geology and I went to study physics at the University of Glasgow. While men outnumbered women, I certainly wasn’t alone. About 20 per cent of the undergraduates were female, a number that is typical in other countries, including the US.

One exception is Iran, where 60 per cent of physics undergraduates are women. “Some of the Middle Eastern countries provide well-balanced opportunities with segregated education,” says Gillian Butcher, who chairs the . “But the opportunities post-education are then limited, restricting women to be the educators for the next generation of women.”

Most countries have issues somewhere along the line, says Butcher. These can include limited career prospects or a hostile environment at work. “Women face a massive set of obstacles at every stage of their career,” says , a Royal Astronomical Society fellow at Imperial College London.

For instance, research shows that women in science are more likely than men to have their about potential PhD positions. And, on average, they need to have published than men to get the same academic job. And they are . These issues aren’t unique to physics: women face them across science.

To find out more about physicists’ everyday experiences, the American Institute of Physics surveyed 15,000 people from 130 countries. It was the first survey of its kind to they need to carry out research and present their results. Without adequate funding, lab space, travel budget and students to help with research, for example, a researchers’ career can stall. Meanwhile, experiences, such as being invited to speak at a conference or serving as editor of a journal, can help to advance a career.

The survey revealed that women were worse off than men on every single measure. And while there were differences between highly developed countries and those lower down the scale, the brakes are being put on female physicists all over the world. In the UK, for example, just 17 per cent of physics lecturers are women and that drops to just 7 per cent of professors. In Italy, only 8 per cent of physics professors are women.

This adds up to a constant battle for women trying to forge a career in the field. “It’s the isolation women feel, it’s the unconscious biases, being made to feel you’re inadequate,” says physicist Jess Wade at Imperial College London. “Fighting diversity battles on top of your research, it’s exhausting.”

In September, Wade spoke at a workshop held at CERN for women at the start of their physics careers. The event focused on recent developments in theoretical high-energy physics and cosmology, such as dark matter, black holes and neutrinos. There were also talks dedicated to research on gender in academia with the aim of developing an action plan to support women in physics.

However, the workshop was overshadowed by the talk by Alessandro Strumia, who argued that the main reason there are more men in theoretical physics is that women are inherently less capable of physics research than men. What’s more, he claimed that the biases in physics worked in the favour of women, and against men.

“How do we steer away from advertising physics as the place for genius?”

His arguments have been branded “morally reprehensible” in an . The letter debunks each of Strumia’s claims. For example, he argued that men are intrinsically better at physics because they have written the papers that are most frequently referred to in work by other researchers. This is an absurd proxy for quality, particularly in particle physics where the number of authors on a paper can easily reach into the thousands due to the practice of listing every member of a collaboration. The paper that detailed the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, for example, . Many of them will have contributed little towards that particular analysis.

The other issue is that Strumia ignored research showing that there is a bias in the way that authors reference other researchers’ work. Papers by female authors are routinely ignored in favour of ones written by men, .

In the spotlight

Women who called out Strumia’s talk, such as Wade, found themselves the target of online abuse. A common call was for women to provide evidence that Strumia was wrong.

This kind of retaliation is also why so many women in physics who are on the receiving end of sexual harassment are unlikely to formally complain about it, according to a review by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine this year. Several cases have come to light recently of male physicists sexually harassing their female students, and of universities being atrociously slow to act. The review also found that of female lecturers and staff at academic institutions have been sexually harassed.

Despite the grim headlines, particle physicist at Brunel University in London believes that the problems in physics are no worse than in any other male-dominated subject.

And times are changing for the better, says Cole. Spotlights are being shone on issues that were once covered up and these issues are now being dealt with. “These days, people are more aware of diversity issues in physics. People are taking it more seriously.” All of the collaborations working on the four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN have a diversity committee, and in 2010 CERN introduced its first code of conduct that all staff, including visiting scientists, are expected to follow.

Funding organisations are starting to take bullying and harassment seriously, too. In the biomedical sciences, the Wellcome Trust, for example, requires the organisations it supports to have clear policies in place and will withdraw funding from organisations and individuals found guilty of bullying.

For women working in physics, finding female mentors who might have gone through the same challenges can be a huge help, says Samaya Nissanke at the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. “Feeling that you are not alone and that you can discuss the challenges that you face on a day-to-day level has made the world of difference to me,” she says. Men too can make powerful advocates.

“My own success would not have been possible without my fantastic mentors, most of whom have been men,” says theoretical physicist Tracy Slayter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She encourages male colleagues to speak up when women are treated or discussed in ways they disagree with. “Your voice has power, in part because of your gender,” she says.

We also need to shake off the idea that physics is a place for the lone genius, says Ágnes Mócsy, at the Pratt Institute in New York.

Given the challenges, why would girls thinking about a career in physics stick it out? Simply because the rewards can be huge. “I often get feedback from young people saying that meeting me and hearing about my job made them realise that this subject could be for them too – to be part of something big that will improve our future, to travel the world, to make a difference,” says Ceri Brenner, a laser physicist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK. “You can have a fulfilling life. Of course this comes with a little bit of compromise, but which career doesn’t?”

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What can we do about it?

Some views from women in physics on how to tackle the problems facing the field

• We need more role models, and we need to support each other.

• I begin and end a lot of my outreach talks with a message that I borrowed from Albert Einstein – “imagination is more important than knowledge” – with the intention of raising discussions about the role of creativity and imagination in physics, as I really believe these are our core skills. And in highlighting these as being as important as technical skills and knowledge, then we will attract and retain a more diverse, proactive, progressive and effective physics community.

• There are various studies showing ways of increasing diversity in physics hires, including having objective criteria defined in advance, having a diverse hiring panel and hiring a group of people at once instead of one by one.

• It isn’t enough to just increase the number of women and think that is the problem solved. We also need to change our unconscious attitudes. Bring the unconscious biases into the conscious. This process takes effort and it can be uncomfortable, but it is necessary.

• Talk to women about their science – not the biases they face. After all, they are in physics because they are good at it and enjoy it. Credit their work, amplify their voices and don’t steal their ideas!

• We need to ensure that girls and boys are brought up in a gender neutral way all through their lives, so that girls are just as likely to be given toys that require them to think about shape and geometry (and boys given toys that bring out their interpersonal skills), and encourage them to build and create, to use their imagination.

• Addressing systemic problems such as sexual harassment is a must.

• We need UK schools to delay decision time about discipline choices and to enable a broader range of subjects to be studied till 18. By the time students start at university, we already see a grossly imbalanced sex ratio in the lecture theatres. It is hardly surprising there aren’t equal numbers at the top.

• How about we start steering away from advertising physics as the place for genius? Instead tell the true story: that we go through physics with hard work and effort, that we accomplish things through being in constant “work-in progress” mode.

• I think the question of salaries and power is much more urgent to tackle than the one about the interests of boys and girls. Today, more and more girls are encouraged to develop an interest in physics, but they will find the same career struggles as their grandmothers if we don’t consider the role of women in society at large.

• Those of us with power and influence in our field – physicists of all genders, not only women – need to be willing to push back when our colleagues or institutions reinforce harmful messages, deliberately or not.

• One new strategy that several groups are working on at the moment is to talk science with young parents at baby and toddler groups. By reaching out to a new audience that wouldn’t normally connect with science, we can explain that science and maths really aren’t any harder than other subjects. Science is utterly awesome and absolutely for everyone, not just for boys. These parents can then become the role models, encouraging, not discouraging their own children from fulfilling careers in science.

• Women need mentors who are truly in their corner. Women of colour need mentors who look like them. Black and indigenous women and gender minorities are for the most part denied the opportunity to have a mentor who shares their gendered and racial identities.

• Senior figures should work hard to fix legacy problems so that the weight doesn’t fall on junior scientists’ shoulders. Both men and women need to do this – it isn’t a women’s problem for women to fix.

• More discussion about bullying and harassment, which are still not openly discussed in the physics community, is needed to increase awareness and develop official methods to tackle them, where the burden doesn’t lie on women who are making the complaints.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Why are there so few women in physics?”

We spoke to you in 2013 at the launch of the Breakthrough prize. What’s your verdict so far?
We have a long way to go. The idea of the Breakthrough prize is to raise awareness of fundamental science. A simple test is to ask someone in the street to name a living scientist. They can name plenty of entertainers, but still no scientists.

Why are you so keen to promote fundamental science?
It’s important to remember that everything around us came from scientists, not engineers. Twenty-five per cent of the world’s GDP originates from quantum mechanics, which was aĚý very abstract theory 100 years ago. If you go far enough into the future, a fundamental discovery leads to some new technology.

How do you turn scientists into heroes?
There are many different ways, and one of these is our prize-giving ceremony. The Oscars and Emmys play a big role in popularising the field of acting. We are trying to do the same with our prize, though we apply a rigorous scientific process to it too.

Tell me about the prize ceremony.
It was at the NASA Ames Research Center, hosted by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane. For the first time it was broadcast live on National Geographic, so more people will see it. If we can eventually reach 50 to 100 million viewers that would inspire young people.

Who selects the winners?
Previous winners pick this year’s winners.

All 1300 people who worked on neutrino oscillation experiments were awarded a share in this year’s fundamental physics prize. Will they all get a say in future winners?
No, that would be too difficult. But the heads of the five experiments will.

Is it a coincidence that this year’s Nobel prize in physics is also for neutrino oscillations?
Yes. We chose our winners in August, well before the Nobel prizes were announced. Inevitably, comparisons are made with the Nobel prizes, but our prize recognises that science is a collective effort and not restricted to three winners at most.

This year you introduced a . What was your rationale?
These children have no experience of scientific research yet, so we asked 13 to 18-year-olds to make a short video that communicates a complicated idea in science, such as general relativity, in a simple way. It’s challenging. The prize will change the winner’s life and reward their teacher and school too, but the main message is very important: if someone is interested in science at school, it’s cool. Their friends might not think it is at the moment. But it is.

This article will appear in print under the headline “Star maker”

Taking shape

Tomorrow’s stars

It may be going too far to say this year’s Nobel prize in physics will save the world – but it will certainly make it more efficient.

The prize has gone to three semiconductor physicists who invented the blue LED (light emitting diode). Their invention has transformed the way we light our world, watch movies and store data.

Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura at the University of California in Santa Barbara, share the prize of 8 million Swedish kronor (ÂŁ0.7 million).

LEDs as we know them were invented in the late 1950s, but only came in one colour: red. Green followed later, but although both were fine for indicator lights and digital watches, researchers really wanted a white LED. These are replacing traditional incandescent bulbs, which lose much of their energy as heat.

“Lighting currently consumes 20 per cent of all electricity,” says at the University of Cambridge. “Switching to LEDs could save 50Ěýper cent, or over ÂŁ2Ěýbillion in the UK alone.”

Colour addition

The key to producing white light was to make a blue LED and shine its light through a thin layer of yellow-emitting phosphor. This combination of yellow and blue makes white light much more efficiently than incandescent bulbs.

But blue LEDs had stymied researchers until the Nobel trio made their breakthrough in the late 1980s. The reason is to do with the way the devices are made. LEDs are made from multiple layers of semiconductor sandwiched together, one with an excess of electrons and the next with an excess of positively charged holes. Applying a voltage to the device drives the electrons and holes together into the “filling layer”, where they combine to emit light. The colour of this light depends on the semiconductor material. Red LEDs, for example, are made from gallium arsenide crystals.

Researchers realised that gallium nitride with a smattering of indium had the perfect quantum properties to emit blue light. But no one was able to make a semiconductor sandwich with a gallium nitride filling. That’s because the crystal structure of the gallium nitride needs to match that of the surrounding layers to prevent defects from forming that wreck the light-emitting properties.

In 1986, Akasaki and Amano succeeded in finding a match. Their trick was to add an extra layer to the sandwich. They grew their gallium nitride on top of a sapphire covered with a layer of aluminium nitride. Meanwhile Nakamura found his own way to create a gallium nitride crystal by growing a thin layer at low temperatures, then subsequent layers at higher temperatures. Nakamura had to work on his idea in secret after bosses at the Japanese company he worked for, Nichia, stopped his research because of lack of progress. Nakamura later sued Nichia and won more than $7Ěýmillion compensation.

Blu movies

The trio went on to turn their blue LEDs into blue lasers, found in Blu-ray players. Because the wavelength of blue light is shorter than that of red LEDs, the beam can be focused to a small spot. This lets you cram more information on to a disc and read it out, giving Blu-rays a better picture quality than regular DVDs.

As well as saving money, LED lights can reduce pressure on Earth’s resources. Lights made from LEDs last for 100,000 hours, 10 times longer than fluorescent lamps and 100 times longer than incandescent bulbs. “The electronic circuits that control them give out before the LED,” says Humphreys.

He predicts many more advances to come.

Smart lighting that adapts to its surroundings could reduce energy bills by another 5Ěýper cent. And by changing the phosphor coating on a blue LED it should be possible to produce lighting that mimics sunlight, which plays a key role in the human body clock. “This could be the end of jet lag and could improve the health of shift workers, who have been shown to have a higher risk of cancer.”

Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura will receive their award at the Nobel ceremony in December.

Video: Mountain blast lays ground for massive telescope

A mountain in Chile blew its top for science yesterday. The telescope that will live on the flattened summit of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama desert will be the largest of its kind in the world, a formidable hunter of alien planets – and a ghost, remotely controlled by astronomers from a nearby mountain.

The , shown in the illustration, has been in the works for years. Yesterday, the European Southern Observatory took a dramatic step towards its construction, creating an explosion that tore off the summit of the mountain (see video, above).

Chile’s desert mountains are perfect for astronomy. Few clouds give an uninterrupted view of the heavens and the thin atmosphere at high altitudes means the stars twinkle less. Twinkling comes from turbulence in the atmosphere and messes detailed observations.

It’s not the first time a mountain-top has been blown up to make way for a telescope. Nearby Cerro Paranal was levelled off to make way for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 1994, for example, but there are many things that are unique about E-ELT, most importantly the size of its mirror.

Quantum of Solace

Other have 11-metre-wide mirrors: the E-ELT’s will be a whopping 39 metres wide. Being so large, the mirror will be able to pick up light from faint, distant objects and its images will be so sharp that it will be able to take the first photographs of small, rocky worlds orbiting other stars. It will even be able to spot signs of alien vegetation, says Isobel Hook at the University of Oxford.

Another thing that is unusual about Cerro Armazones is that it will be a ghost mountain – astronomers won’t actually be at the E-ELT making observations. They will operate it from the VLT site. That’s because mountain living isn’t easy. By contrast, at Cerro Paranal the lodgings include a swimming pool, and even featured in the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace.

The dust poses other challenges too. The dirt road leading up to the E-ELT site needs to be covered in concrete, which is easier said than done because the water will need to be shipped in to the Atacama desert.

The hundreds of hexagonal mirror segments that will fit together to make the 39-metre mirror also need to be kept dust-free – and this will be done by continuously re-coating them in aluminium. So the mountain will also have a re-coating plant next to the telescope.

Researchers have already started building instruments and prototype mirrors. The first starlight is expected to hit the mirrors in 2023.

(Image: NASA, Holland Ford (JHU), the ACS Science Team and ESA)

Galaxy catalogues call it UGC 10214, but to everyone else this is the tadpole. Located 420 million light years away in the constellation Draco, its most dramatic feature is its 280,000-light-year-long tail.

The tadpole spawned its tail of debris when two galaxies collided, ripping each other apart over the achingly slow span of cosmic time. The smaller of the two galaxies is still visible on the upper left side of the larger one, which forms the tadpole’s head. Material torn from the larger galaxy spreads out into the tail, which swarms with young blue stars formed from collapsing gas and dust, older stars clumped together in clusters and new-born dwarf galaxies.

The tadpole and other galaxies like it might help to explain an outstanding mystery about our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Cosmology predicts there should be thousands of dwarf galaxies sprinkled randomly all around it. Yet observations show that just 26 dwarf galaxy companions orbit the Milky Way in a thin disc. Collisions like this one in our galaxy’s distant past might be an alternative mechanism that explains the discrepancies.

Just like the real thing, the tadpole galaxy will lose its tail. Eventually all the debris will be mopped up into satellite galaxies orbiting the grand giant.

Journal reference:

(Image: Advanced Imaging and Visualization Lab, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Here we remember the pioneering in its heyday as the world’s deepest-diving vehicle. Sadly, Nereus (rhymes with serious) is now in pieces, crushed by the immense pressure in the fathomless depths of the , north-east of New Zealand.

Researchers lost contact with Nereus on 10 May at a depth of 9990 metres. It had just collected a sea cucumber. If contact is lost, the craft was designed to ascend to the surface automatically. Instead, only debris bobbed up, indicating a catastrophic implosion. The sub’s controllers hope that the fragments will provide clues as to exactly what went wrong.

Nereus was built in 2008 at the . For surveys of large areas, it operated as an autonomous, free-swimming robot. For close-up investigation and sampling of rocks and organisms on the sea floor, it was controlled via a tether to a support ship.