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As an African-American woman, a physicist and a current employee of NASA, Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures: the Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race both excited and moved me.

While many physicists care about improving the success of women in physics, research on effective intervention strategies has been meager. What research that does exist focuses largely on the dynamics of under-representation: the factors that discourage women from choosing and remaining committed to the physics community. Rather than focusing on these deficits, this workshop set out to provide tools physicists can use to produce, analyze, and apply evidence about what works for women.

The maximum storage density in magnetic media is limited by the superparamagnetic size of the grains that make up the bits. The superparamagnetic size can be reduced by increasing the anisotropy of the grains; however, in conventional media, in which the anisotropy of the grains is uniform, this leads to a proportionate increase in the switching field. The switching field, however, is limited by the maximum magnetization of the core material in the write head. Recent calculations have shown that the switching field can be significantly reduced relative to the thermal stability of the grains if the anisotropy is made to vary appropriately from the bottom to the top of the grain. In this project we propose to test this concept by fabricating and characterizing anisotropy graded films. We will use the hcp CoPtX system, with X = Cr or Ru, where the anisotropy gradient is obtained by grading the composition. Both sheet films and granular films will be fabricated. The anisotropy gradients will be determined by ...

As minority women physicists, we stand at the intersection of race and gender. We are physicists to be sure, but we are also women of Native, African, Hispanic, and Asian descent. We are colleagues, mothers, sisters, friends and wives, as are our white counterparts, but our experiences cannot be distilled to only gender or race. As Prudence Carter (2005 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association) and Scott Page (“The Logic of Diversity,” private communication, 2004) remind us, women of color emerge from the interaction between race and gender. This distinction is important because most researchers who study American women’s participation in science focus exclusively on the participation of white American women. Of those who acknowledge the existence of non‐white women, most do so by disclaiming the exclusion of women of color because the numbers are so small or the experiences are different from white American women. There are some important differences, however. While American women are 15% of all scientists and engineers, black American women are 60% of all black scientists and engineers. Yet an average of less than 3 black women and less than 3 Hispanic women earn PhDs in the U.S. each year, out of about 1100. As Rachel Ivie and Kim Nies Ray point out in AIP Publication R‐430.02, “Minority women especially represent a great, untapped resource that could be drawn on to increase the size of the scientific workforce in the U.S.” Donna Nelson’s (University of Oklahoma) study of diversity in science and engineering faculties further finds that (with the exception of one black woman in astronomy) there are no female black or Native American full professors. In physics, there are no black women professors and no Native American women professors. Despite such a bleak picture, there is hope. Of the 18 departments that award at least 40% of bachelors degrees to women, 7 are in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Black women are earning degrees from HBCUs at rates above equity, and many singles and firsts at predominantly white institutions continue to persevere despite the obstacles.

In essentially all countries, responsibilities for child care, cooking, cleaning, and other homemaking tasks fall predominantly on the wife and mother. In addition, the childbearing years come during the period when a physicist must study hard, work long hours on research, and take temporary positions, often abroad. Thus, balancing family and career has long been one of the major barriers to women’s participation in science and engineering fields, including physics. While many young women believe that they must choose between having children and having a science career, the fact is that the majority of women physicists in both developing and developed countries have successfully done both. This paper summarizes some ideas and recommendations raised in discussions, especially focused on easing the challenges of having children while in temporary jobs, returning to physics after a career break, the need for “family‐friendly” working conditions, and the dual‐career problem facing couples where both are scientists.

1 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; 2 Duke University; 3 Louisiana State University; 4 Carleton College; 5 Heritage University; 6 University of Texas, Austin; 7 The CNA Corporation; 8 University of Alabama; 9 American Institute of Physics; 10 Barnard College, Columbia University; 11 University of Maryland; 12 Boston University; 13 Harvard University; 14 Argonne National Laboratory; 15 Johns Hopkins University; 16 Colorado College; 17 Shaw University; 18 Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering