Women, the Nobel Prize and physics (accidentally wrote about this but I'm just going to leave it up)

Image source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/canadian-nobel-physics-prize-winner-girls-women-stem-1.4847839

One of the major things I believe we can do is bring up representations of the successes achieved by different genders and other underrepresented groups of people in the field we teach. Along with the representations and explanations of those prominent people, we need to be meaningful in the way we present this information. For example, if we simply stated "Donna Strickland is the third women ever to have received a Nobel prize in Physics out of over 200 recipients of the prize in that field," we may be trying to highlight how impressive Strickland's achievement is, but might unintentionally send a message to our female students that success in physics isn't easily attainable for women. As Shohini​ Ghose says,"This is not a problem that can be fixed by women. It's more of a structural, systemic problem, and unless we get everybody involved we're not going to be able to deal with it" (https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/nobel-prizes-women-gender-1.4847608). I think stereotypical portrayals of physicists/mathematicians at an early age contribute to this systemic problem which continues on as children grow older and doesn't change unless they are exposed to the wide range of people who are contributing to a field. If this continues, those children become the adults who eventually end in positions of authority or decision-making and if they don't check their implicit biases, they allow those biases to affect their decisions on who is more qualified for a job or who should be accepted into a program etc. As teachers, we have a responsibility to be those role models who are aware of their biases, are continuously trying to break that cycle, and empower all of our students to choose which path they would like to take. Some of the suggestions Donna Strickland made for teaching physics included examples that are catered towards traditionally feminine or culturally diverse ideas such as the use of dance, spinning wool, cooking, and involving nature when introducing physics concepts. These examples are less explicit and don't necessarily show women in physics or culturally diverse physicists, but they help make the subject more accessible and relatable to different groups of people. In this way, I see the importance of introducing implicit as well as explicit representations to better engage all of our students in the subject we are teaching.