LETTER OF THE MONTH

Women and physics

After reading your article on women and physics (June, p42), I kept thinking about my own experience. My physics teacher was a woman, and she inspired me to study physics at Nottingham University. After becoming an engineer, I began to realise I was working in a man’s world. The only other women I met at work were secretaries, or worked in the typing pool. Once my younger child was in junior school, I retrained as a teacher and started working at a local comprehensive, where I hoped to inspire my pupils to study physics. For the 12 years I worked there, I was the only female physics teacher. I was promoted to head of science and longed to appoint another female physics teacher, but it was difficult to find any candidates (male or female), so much of physics had to be taught by non-specialists. I think that if we want to encourage more pupils, especially girls, to study physics, then we need to encourage more physics graduates, especially girls, to become teachers. There is a general feeling that physics is a difficult subject, usually studied by boffins. If physics is taught by enthusiastic, specialist physicists, more pupils might choose to study the subject and this, in turn, would help to stop this fear of physics being ‘hard’.

Perhaps the answer is to allow more subjects to be studied at A-Level. More pupils might decide to ‘give physics a go’, while still studying ‘safer’ subjects, so they are more confident of achieving the points required for further study.

Barbara Atkinson, East Sussex