Session S4 - Keeping Girls/Women in Science I.
INVITED session, Wednesday afternoon, March 24
517C, Palais de Congres
In 1990 at a conference of physics department chairs the participants issued a call for help in increasing the representation of women in physics. This led to the establishment of a program (sponsored first by NSF and then by APS) that sends teams of senior female physicists to physics departments to evaluate the climate for women in the department and to suggest improvements that could be made. The accumulated experience of these visits has produced a number of observations about what makes a physics department friendly to female graduate students, and therefore what a department can do to help recruit and retain them. I will recount these observations and describe “warm” and “chilly” climates for women observed in the site visit program. It is worth noting that changes that make a department more comfortable for female students tend to make it more comfortable for all members of the department.