Prof. Dr. Tomas Brage
Gender and Physics – what does recent research and experiences say?
Physics is often seen, by Physicists not the least, as an objective Science and we believe we are surrounded by a “culture without culture”. At the same time our history, class- and board rooms are dominated by men. This is a clear paradox that should awaken the curiosity of anyone. In this talk I will give some examples on how you can approach the question on “what does gender have to do with Physics”. There have been several studies of Physicists and I will combine a discussion of these with some general theory and personal experiences, to paint a picture on how gender transgress Physics, like all other fields. By using the three levels of change introduced by Schiebinger, I refer to studies of e.g. Anthropologists and Psychologists. The bias against women, due to the fact that Physics is stereotypically male, combined with the “myth of meritocracy” could be one key to understand the lack of women in the field.The talk is intended as a translation of results from recent progress in Gender Science to an audience of non-experts in the field, especially people within STEM-fields. The aim is to give some answers to the question in the title, but also to show that this is an extremely interesting and active research field.
Research Areas
Physics, Laboratory Astrophysics, Computational Atomic Physics
Vita
Tomas Brage is a Professor of Physics at the Lund University, Sweden, and a visiting researcher at the Fudan University in Shanghai, China. At Lund University he has led the Gender Certification project and, most recently, the Core-Value project. 2012 he has received the Gunilla Jarlbro award for important contributions to the strive for equal opportunities in academia. Brage is a stearing group member for the workgroup for Gender of the Leading European Research Universities (LERU) network, the Gender_STE COST network and the GENERA Horizon 2020 project.
References
Brage, Tomas and Lövkrona, Inger. 2016. „Core values work in the academia – with experiences from Lund University“. Lund University: Media Tryck.
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