Earlier this month, Donna Strickland won the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics, making her the third woman and first Canadian woman to ever receive the award.
Along with Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou, Strickland was awarded this honour for the invention of chirped pulse amplification (CPA). CPA is a technique to amplify a pulse of laser light, which is composed of many different frequencies.
By breaking it down into these various frequencies and stretching the length of its path before recombination, a high-powered laser can be amplified safely, avoiding damage to the amplifier medium.
Previously, lasers could only operate at a gigawatt level. Thanks to Strickland, Ashkin, and Mourou, they now can operate up to on the scale of petawatts.
The last time a woman won the Nobel Prize in Physics was in 1963—55 years ago. Maria Goeppert-Mayer was a German physicist who helped develop the nuclear shell model for an atom’s nucleus, changing the way we understand the structure of atoms completely.
However, the first woman to ever win the award was Marie Curie in 1903, whose name I hope you’ve heard before.
Not only did Curie win the Nobel Prize in Physics, but the Nobel Prize in chemistry as well, for her seminal work on radioactivity by discovering the radioactive metals, radium and polonium.
Furthermore, Curie is not only the only woman to receive two Nobel Prizes but the only person to be awarded two in different scientific disciplines. That’s right—a woman received one of the highest awards in two of the most mathematic and male-dominated sciences.
According to a study published by the American Institute of Physics in 2005, only 10 per cent of faculty members of physics departments were women.
So, why are women so underrepresented in physics? Clearly it’s not due to a lack of ability, if Curie proved anything. There are various historical, social, biological, and cultural considerations one must take into account when trying understand why there aren’t more women in this field.
There is no shortage of data regarding how stereotypes affect the standardized test scores of female students. Despite doing better in math classes on average, female students often underestimate their capabilities relative to their male counterparts, which unfortunately translates to their test scores.
Not to mention that it was only in the 1920s that women earned the right to vote in Canada, and were still heavily underrepresented in the workforce for another 40 to 50 years.
It was only just this century that another Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Tim Hunt, came under fire for his comments about his female peers. Albeit perhaps jokingly, Hunt claimed women were bad in lab environments because they made men fall in love with them and would cry when criticized. This sparked the conversation of workplace harassment and its ability to impair or discourage female participation in science.
Richard Dawkins, a biology professor at Oxford University, has never been one to shy away from voicing controversial views of feminism. It’s no wonder many women might feel uncomfortable working in a male-dominated field.
Nonetheless, according to a 2014 study by Arizona State University, women make up about 60 per cent of undergraduate biology students and that number only inflates as you progress into graduate school. More often, women will pursue work dealing with aesthetics and living things, while men tend towards careers involving synthetic and moving things, regardless of how mathematical or scientific they may be in nature. Scholastic environments are relatively agreeable with many women and when we encourage women to enter STEM fields, and challenge stereotype threat and workplace harassment, they absolutely flourish.
While I’m inclined to say women have confidently inserted themselves into scientific professions with as much opportunity as men, it would be neglectful of me not to note that even in biology, women only make up roughly 40 per cent of tenured professors in Canada.
The Nobel Prize is one of, if not the most coveted award for scientists, and Canadian Donna Strickland now joins the ranks of Albert Einstein in her contribution to physics.
Graphic by Paloma Callo
