At our current moment in United States history, efforts to increase diversity in science have gone into retreat as the political environment has turned against them. But a half-century ago, the situation was the opposite, with political changes encouraging the proliferation of initiatives to combat discrimination and increase representation. One major research project that is ongoing here at AIP is to better understand the history spanning from that moment to our own, charting how it unfolded in the physical sciences community. Material from this project will ultimately be systematically presented in history guides on our website.

A rising tide of action and the American Physical Society

In the early 1970s, scientific societies set up programs to promote diversity within their professions. This occurred amid not only popular demand for action, but also a legal environment that increasingly required it, with the federal government moving from bans on discrimination toward mandating “affirmative action” to create equal opportunities. Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, required government contractors to document their actions to ensure equal treatment according to “race, creed, color, or national origin,” and in 1967 Executive Order 11375 extended that protection of equality to the sexes. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 increased protections in the broader economy, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 mandated efforts to relieve unequal access to education at the primary and secondary level.

Scientific societies—the American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union, American Astronomical Society, and many others—developed their own approaches to making scientific institutions into more hospitable and supportive environments for those who weren’t able-bodied white men. To inform their changes, societies sought to understand the situation and needs of different groups as well as the persistent challenges they faced in accessing science education and successful careers.

Then, there were members of the scientific community who had firsthand experience in combating inequality. Individual cases were accumulating where, for example, women scientists had fought for their careers against employers, sometimes in court. These and other women also increasingly advocated for change through their societies, who in turn gave them a platform to assess their situation through questionnaires sent to society members, with results collected in qualitative and statistical reports on underrepresented groups’ “status.”

In August 1971, the American Physical Society issued a call for “names, addresses, comments, and recommendations” that was published in Physics Today, Spectrum, and Science. The goal was to begin to collect data for the newly formed Committee on Women in Physics. Responses to this questionnaire became the basis for the committee’s work to address challenges women physicists experienced at all stages of career, from first-year college students to well-established researchers.

The latter group knew a lot about the then-status of women in American science. They were of the generation whose career options, if any, were largely limited to three main categories: choose the profession, choose a scientist partner, or luck into being born to the right family.

Choosing the profession for that generation generally meant becoming an “academic spinster.” Having a family and a scientific career tended to be unsustainable given social role stereotypes, lack of financial independence, and no accommodations for women in academia, to name a few reasons. Choosing a scientist for a husband could sometimes result in a career path for “academic couples” to follow, though anti-nepotism rules, which were finally falling in the face of the new laws, had to that point presented a serious barrier for the advancement of women in that situation.

The origins of the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics

Vera Kistiakowsky, chairwoman of the first committee on women at APS, had been dealt the third option. Vera’s father was the physical chemist George Kistiakowsky—Harvard professor, Manhattan Project scientist, and President Eisenhower’s science adviser. She cultivated her interests in science in early childhood, visiting his laboratory at Harvard and spending summers at Los Alamos. She grew up around scientists and becoming one wasn’t an outlandish dream.

Still, in an oral history interview conducted in 1976, Kistiakowsky laid out in vivid detail the barriers to a scientific career path for an American woman of her generation. Having experienced a lot of them, in the 1960s she became active in women’s organizations. In the interview, she also recalled the origins of the APS committee:

“…one of my friends, [University of Pennsylvania nuclear physicist] Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, ran [a panel on women in physics at the February 1971 APS meeting], and afterwards I said that this was a great idea, and I thought that there should be a committee of the American Physical Society to pursue the problem of women in physics further. She said, “That was a great idea, and why don’t you organize one?” And I said, “Well, that was not quite what I had in mind. I had thought that you would be an ideal person to organize one.” She said, “No, I have done my bit by running the panel, and why don’t you go ahead? I will give you my enthusiastic support.” And she did, as a matter of fact. So, I contacted fifteen other women physicists that I knew, and we all signed a letter to the American Physical Society Council, requesting they set up a committee to study the status of women in physics. The letter was delivered, and they voted to set up a committee and made me the chairwoman.”

Though largely composed of women, the committee did include three prominent men. Its full membership was: Vera Kistiakowsky, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, Margaret Alston-Garnjost, Betsy Ancker-Johnson, Noemi Benczer-Koller, Esther M. Conwell, Gloria B. Lubkin, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Allan M. Sachs, Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber, Mary L. Shoaf, Charles P. Slichter, Mary Beth Stearns, Katharine Way, and Steven Weinberg.

Kistiakowsky also recalled that she received strong support for the effort from MIT President Jerome Wiesner, who connected her with private philanthropic foundations:

“In fact, he not only pointed me in the direction of the right foundations; he phoned up the foundations for me, and the result was that I got a $10,000 Sloan Foundation grant. The American Physical Society nearly keeled over in a dead faint, because I was the first committee that had ever come in with money of its own. But in any case, it made all the difference in the world, because it really truly meant that we had money to do things like send out questionnaires, and the committee did, in fact, manage in a very short time to get a report together that was based on data collection.”

The report offered the beginnings of a statistically informed approach to the matter, but it also collected illuminating, anonymized testimony about women’s experiences, grouped into categories

• Isolation, not being accepted—“I was the only woman in the physics department in a faculty or research position.”
• Social attitudes discourage women from entering the profession—“These poor females have never touched a tool or a soldering iron in their life.”
• If a woman is unemployed, it’s difficult to remain professional—“There is no one to talk physics with.”
• Discrimination in graduate school—“…higher admission standards, no money, and the man you want to work with doesn’t take women.”
• Women are discharged because of pregnancy—“…during which time I married and had two children (for whom my termination was required).”
• Industry discriminates against women—“Industrial firms in this area usually advertise for physicists in the help wanted men column.”
• There is discrimination against women in hiring—“Why don’t you take a year off and… well… learn to cook.”
• A woman must be better than a man to achieve equivalent success—“…it appears a woman must do well above average to be accepted at all.”

Kistiakowsky recalled the satisfaction of completing the report:

“I had the great pleasure of going to the January meeting in 1972 of the American Physical Society Council, and plonking down in front of each council member a document that was this thick. [Several inches]. It was a report plus appendices plus a roster of women in physics. And it created quite a stir.”

In the wake of that initial effort, APS transitioned the committee on women into a permanent status, and the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics continues its work today.

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Anna Doel
American Institute of Physics
adoel@aip.org

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