Gender balance in physics

Studying the results for physics published in Chancengleichheits-Monitoring 2024 by DFG

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In April, the DFG has published its latest report on equal opportunities “Chancengleichheits-Monitoring 2024” (link), which reviews the proportion of women within different programmes and specific subject areas. This report is published annually since 2013 (in German only, link). 
 
Studying the report results for the natural sciences and specifically for physics, it becomes evident that we have by far not yet reached gender equality. Women are underrepresented in all programmes and all status groups. Based on data from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt) evaluating the quota of women in different scientific discipline, physics has been on rank 12 out of 14 over the last two reports (covering data from years 2020 and 2022). Only in two disciplines within the engineering sciences, one of which is “informatics, systems engineering and electronical engineering” (hereafter referred to as informatics), there is a smaller percentage of women among Ph.D. students, professors and researchers in general in Germany. 
“Gender equality and diversity are a long-standing issue in physics - and even more so in scientific computing and data management within the physical sciences. We are fully aware of this, and we have installed several measures in the PUNCH4NFDI consortium to improve the situation”, says Thomas Schörner, PUNCH4NFDI spokesperson. Among these measures are
  • a mentoring service within the consortium to support young scientists and especially women in planning their career in academia.
  • best practices to be considered for hiring processes in order to decrease unconscious bias (link).
  • a working group Women4PUNCH to discuss further steps which we can take within the consortium to support (gender) equality.
Merely the facts, that i) the quota of women in physics and informatics is increasing slowly but steadily and that ii) the drop-out rate, i.e. the number of female researchers leaving academia before reaching a professorship, in both disciplines is the lowest among all evaluated scientific disciplines give some hope towards an improvement of this situation.