During my sophomore year at Barnard, I decided to look into minoring in physics. I already felt behind, since I didn’t come to college with a particularly good science background and hadn’t taken math since high school. Plus, I became interested in physics later than the linear, rigid, and time consuming minor (not to mention major) requirements expected. Because I was starting late and going to have to backtrack a little, it became clear that it was going to be difficult to seriously pursue my interest in physics while still managing to study abroad, one of my top priorities. My choice boiled down to all or nothing—base my entire college career around science, or miss out on the chance to study it. I chose nothing.

I don’t regret my choice, but I do regret that more choices weren’t available to me. Physics has not quite figured out how to include people who cannot, or simply do not want to, make the sacrifices a career in the science currently demands. Being a physicist is not a job. It’s a lifestyle. Trudging through graduate school and seemingly-endless postdocs, working 80 hours a week fine-tuning experiments, traveling all over the world for conferences, and fighting for a limited number of tenure-track faculty positions doesn’t leave physicists with much time for anything else. It is an amped-up version of the academic culture that encourages bragging about how little you sleep and how many credits you take.

Those hindered most by the notion that physics must be all-consuming are women. The prime years to start a family are also the most vital to a successful career in physics. The financial and social pressures of graduate school are often followed by a long period of uncertainty in postdoc and junior faculty positions, so by the time women physicists receive the security that tenure provides, their child-bearing years may have already passed. Starting a family requires sacrifices, which should be made by both parents. But the fact remains that from maternity leave to the constant question of day care, women often still bear a larger share of the burden.

If physicist mothers decide to return to their careers after a break to start a family, they often encounter obstacles from the male-dominated structures of the scientific establishment. An article in Symmetry, the magazine produced by Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, documented the case of Elizabeth Freeland, who found the lack of research grants for scientists who had taken more than a five-year break after graduate school to be devastating for her desire to return to physics. “If I couldn’t get a grant, I couldn’t have day care, and if I couldn’t get day care, I couldn’t do the work,” she told the magazine.

But the low number of women in physics careers is not attributable solely to problems encountered by working mothers. Science education is often seen as a leaky pipeline, with more and more women lost at every step of the way. Fewer women study science in college than in high school, even fewer go on to graduate school, and a tiny number of those will become full professors at the highest ranks of their field. The numbers have been increasing across the board, but physics is moving at a particularly slow rate. According to a study done by the American Institute of Physics, women earned 45 percent of Ph.D.s in the biological sciences in 2003, but only 18 percent of physics Ph.D.s.

The issue has been expounded upon endlessly, with people placing the blame on everything from the focus on sports and military metaphors in general physics classes to innate differences in the capacities of men and women for doing science (thank you, Lawrence Summers). The reasons are certainly social and profoundly complex, but the fact remains that women often feel a deep sense of alienation in physics.

I believe this is partially attributable to a myth about physics that I, along with most science writers and historians, am guilty of propagating—that most achievements are made by “Great Scientists,” white males with a “gift” for science who work independently of social forces. Although it makes for a good story, the myth of the Great Scientist often leaves others out. For example, Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, was also a gifted scientist and mathematician who helped her husband (who later abandoned her and married his first cousin) develop his revolutionary ideas about relativity. Due to the systematic discrimination against women in science education for hundreds of years, historical figures like Maric are unfortunately few and far between. When the few that we have are written out of scientific history, it leaves a dearth of role models for aspiring female scientists and for everyone who doesn’t consider herself or himself a white male genius.

Science, particularly physics, is about teamwork, and the more people of diverse backgrounds you have on your team, the better. Not because of any categorical difference in the science done by members of each group, but because more perspectives will catch more mistakes, posit more questions, and ensure a well-rounded approach to the problems. In order to encourage that kind of diversity in the future, we must also start to recognize that it existed in the past. Science should help everyone understand our world and also make sure everyone feels welcome in its ranks.

Elizabeth Wade is a Barnard senior majoring in comparative literature. Fear of Physics runs alternate Mondays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com.