Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 49 seconds

Very interesting Maha – I’m sure you’re right about the gender issue in physics and science and engineering subjects in general where female representation is usually low. On becoming admissions tutor in a UK university engineering department and finding that only about 13% of students were female I interviewed as many as I could to see what we might do to improve. The female students seemed to deal well with what little overt bias they encountered, mainly from fellow male students but had issues with the way lecturers would sometimes when explaining things assume geeky backgrounds, messing with motorbikes and so on, outside their female experience. This is a matter of educating male teaching staff who tend to have geeky backgrounds themselves! We also ran taster courses for girls around 14 yo in the hope of influencing them towards a career in engineering before other societal pressures were brought to bear but there was little evidence of increased female recruitment. This was almost 20 years ago so maybe things are changing for the better now, eg more female teaching staff, but the necessary cultural changes that would encourage more female participation in science and engineering do seem slow in coming.