Speaker
Description
Gender equality in physics is a pressing issue as women continue to be underrepresented in higher education. However, one category of higher education institutions (HEIs) – namely women’s colleges – has produced a disproportionate number of female science graduates for over a hundred years. This project uses the historical institutional records of women’s colleges and other HEIs to study the networks and mobility of female physicists at educational institutions.
We selected women’s colleges in the United States as a focus because they offer a large but well-defined dataset for analysis of female physics students and faculty. Data collection is bounded from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries to maximize the availability and quality of information. We gathered data from a variety of institutional records including course catalogs, institutional annual reports, and alumnae records. Direct and indirect sampling has yielded a still-growing database of over 500 female physicists at over 200 institutions globally active in physics prior to 1940.
Next, we are conducting network analyses on the historical data supplemented with archival research. The bipartite network analyses includes people (women in physics) and institutions (the colleges they studied and worked at) as node types. The two-mode structure of the data allows for considering both co-affiliation networks of each node type and for analysing the full bipartite graph.
Preliminary results will be presented showing the mobility of female physicists from undergraduate through graduate education. These results indicate that certain single-gender HEIs had an oversized influence in producing female physicists. Successful institutions also showed a high degree centrality indicating exchange of faculty and alumnae.
