Promoting the Image of Women Physicists in China-Beijing

Abstract

In the 1950s in China, equality between the genders seemed an accepted fact because of government-decreed policies which were strictly enforced. Then, in the 1980s, with the relaxing of centralized enforcement, some old habits and even feudal traditions began to creep back. At the same time, education, science, and technology advanced at an unprecedented rate, opening up new opportunities for all sectors of society. In Chinese higher education the natural sciences have always enjoyed a larger enrollment than the social sciences, attracting both men and women, but physics has always had the lowest ratio of women. Since the establishment of the IUPAP Working Group on Women in Physics, there has been an increasing awareness in China that women physicists now face certain difficulties and prejudices that have resurfaced, and that something should and can be done about this. After the First IUPAP International Conference on Women in Physics in 2002, the Chinese Physical Society (CPS) in Beijing set up a Working Group on Women in Physics with 13 representatives, including two men, from research institutions, universities, high school, and industry. We meet every year at the CPS Annual Meeting, and informally whenever we have the chance, networking with other women in physics. On the basis of collected data and discussions, we began to assess the status of women in physics at all levels and to identify the key issues that need to be addressed. One prominent point is the gradual decrease of women at the top in research positions (see “New Challenges for Women Physicists in a Rapidly Changing China,” by Ling-An Wu, in the Plenary Papers section of these Proceedings). This is a relatively complicated problem that cannot be solved in the short term because it involves government and institutional policies, as well as funding agencies. We therefore decided to begin by doing whatever was possible within our own means, and to progress step by step. We had interviews with the press, gave talks to other women, and took part in other women-in-science activities, such as the 2002 Sino-Italian Conference on Women in Science, and a Cafe Scientifique on the topic “Why don’t women win more Nobel Prizes?” in conjunction with the debut of the Chinese translation of the biography of Dorothy Hodgkin in 2004. We wrote articles, organized women physicists to give talks to schoolchildren, and did our best to promote in general the image of women physicists to the public. The media also helped substantially with their coverage of Fang-Hua Li’s winning of the L’OREALUNESCO Prize in 2003 for her contributions to electron microscopy (Figure 1). In the annual physics competition for high school students, certain provinces have now started to award a special prize for the highest-scoring girl participant. These efforts have served as a timely prelude to the 2005 World Year of Physics (WYP), which we hope will be reaching out to an increasingly larger number of girls across the country. A major undertaking of the CPS for 2005WYP has been the design and printing of 700 sets of 52 posters on physics for the public. Of these, two posters honor the contributions of women physicists, one for those in China (Poster No 27; Figure 2) and one for those in foreign countries including Madame Chien-Shiung Wu (Poster No 21). One of the first features of the year was the March issue of Physics, the popular journal of the CPS. Articles about the experiences of women physicists were commissioned from an experimentalist in a research institute, a university professor, a graduate student, and an undergraduate student. In commemoration of March 8, International Women’s Day, every March issue will contain articles by and about women physicists. FIGURE 1. Fang-Hua Li, winner of the 2003 L’OREAL-UNESCO Prize for material science.