Photonics for a Better World

Who knew … until last year: Three African-American women working — in obscurity — for NASA as mathematicians played a vital role in the mission that sent astronaut John Glenn into orbit around Earth and brought him back again, in 1962. Publication of Margot Lee Shetterly 's book Hidden Figures and the subsequent release of the acclaimed 2016 film brought the story of the important roles played by Katherine Johnson , Dorothy Vaughan , and Mary Jackson to light for the first time for many. Among key findings in a 2017 photonics industry survey, respondents cited higher percentages of men in management and senior academic positions, with the largest gaps in later career. While their story may have been little known for decades, struggles for opportunity and inclusion are familiar to many women and to members of under-represented minorities or other groups working to make a career in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field. Findings on ...

International Women's Day has been observed on 8 March for more than 100 years, and Women's History Month is celebrated variously in March (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and October (Canada) for nearly as long. (See some of that history via The Huffington Post .) Women in optics are celebrated year-round in a planner produced by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics . The 2017 version features comments from 28 women in multidisciplinary fields within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), sharing their inspirational stories, crediting influential mentors and role models, and lending valuable advice to others considering careers in STEM. (The planner is distributed at no charge; to get yours, email CustomerService at SPIE.org.) The SPIE 2017 Women in Optics Planner includes comments from women such as Irene Sterian , ReMAP, who advises, "If you are interested in STEM, have passion and dream big. Tak...

What is it like for women pursuing careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields? Clearly, the experience is different for women and for men. Salary data show global pay disparities : across the world, women in photonics, for example, earn less than men. It isn’t a quality issue. The Association of Women in Science reports that awards, patents, and funding opportunities for women are proportionately fewer -- but at the same time, women publish in higher percentages and in journals with higher impact factors, and startups with women as top executives are more successful. Noting that "the problem is not the lack of female talent," the  European Commission has quantified what it calls a “leaky pipeline.” In 2006, for example, women accounted for 45% of PhD graduates but in the same year, 82% of the most senior researchers were men and just 18% women. In the United States, women are 50% of the total workforce but 24% of the STEM wor...

Yes, this excerpt from a study on gender bias in science is from this year, 2012: “Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science." The recent study from Yale University involving several institutions investigated gender bias on the part of faculty in biology, chemistry, and physics, and found that male and female faculty were just as likely to: judge a female student to be less competent and less worthy of being hired than an identical male student offer her a smaller starting salary and less career mentoring appear to be affected by “enduring cultural stereotypes about women’s lack of science competence” that translate into biases in student evaluation and mentoring and yet … report liking the female more than the male student. “I think we were all just a little bit surprised at how powerful the results were -- that not only do the faculty express these biases quite clearly, but the significance a...