Why a women's section in the Cuban physics society?

After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the island's government has systematically developed laws and social programs to guarantee women's rights and promote the incorporation of women in work and civil life alongside men. Six decades later, 48% of Cuban scientists and more than half (68%) of the highly qualified workforce in Cuba are women. However, this is far from being the situation in the field of physics, where women represent only about 20% of the country's physicists. This shows that, beyond their good intentions and relative success, social policies alone are not enough to completely eradicate inherited patterns of gender roles, which tend to be perpetuated in private life and individual beliefs. The thought that physics is a career for men, together with other ideas related to the traditional perception of how a woman should be and our economic context, discourages girls from studying this science and Cuban female physicists from pursuing postgraduate studies and academic careers. With this work, we propose to discover and analyze all these factors to better understand and address them. To do this, we start with a brief discussion from a gender perspective of the history of the struggle for women's civil rights in Cuba, as well as the history of physics in our country up to the present time. Later, we analyze the main barriers that Cuban women in physics encounter in pursuing their careers and outline some ideas of how to overcome them through the recently created Women's Section of the Cuban Physical Society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]