ZapperZ is a physics blogger who worries about people believing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, that ghosts are real and evolution isn’t; and in short, that the public knowledge of and interest in science is thin as a dime. He met a scientist, a woman, who said the only way to explain science to politicians so they’ll fund it was to be “shallow, perky, and superficial.” ZapperZ knows a wake-up call when he hears one, so he’s adopted “shallow, perky, and superficial” as his watchword and has declared a contest for the cutest physicists, men and women both, and began with the women. He wasn’t sure anyone would be nominated.
In first place, neither science nor academia in general encourages its denizens to be cute. I digress to make a point: a math department hired a young man who then had surgery and showed up for classes as a young woman with badly-cut hair, no makeup, baggy t-shirt worn over a long full skirt, and hose that gathered around her ankles. The point is, her default was neither male nor female but mathematician. In the second place, women physicists are rare and always have been; they’re even rarer than women mathematicians. Girls and boys take math and science in equal numbers and with equal competence but women get only a fifth of the college degrees in physics and by the time they’re on the faculty, they’re somewhere just above a tenth.
Anyway, in spite of ZapperZ’s uncertainty, he got 13 nominations – true, one of them’s been dead for 38 years – and they’re all cute, makeup or no makeup. I digress again and the point will be obvious: the nominee who is dead is Maria Goeppert Mayer, a physicist married to another physicist who, in 1930, followed him to his job at Johns Hopkins. “This was the time of the depression, and no university would think of employing the wife of a professor,” says an official biography. “But she kept working, just for the fun of doing physics.” No university hired her until 1946; her Nobel Prize was in 1963.
Back to ZapperZ: the comments on the contest are fairly predictable, given a certain level of education. They range from “Very successful physicists can be as attractive as non-physicists” to “Congratulations on promoting gender bias and heterosexual hegemony.” The best comment is from someone I guarantee is a graduate student: “Would I be strange if I found the most attractive thing to be all the tangled, but ordered, mess that are the valves & cables in the photo of #13?? I’m way too far down into the rabbit hole.” And since the rabbit hole is where all physicists, male and female, have to go to do physics, I’d say ZapperZ has his work cut out for him.
I don’t think he’s entirely serious about it though.
Next contest: the cute men physicists.
Photo credits:
Beauty contest, 1920: Wikimedia Commons
Maria Goeppert Mayer: Wikimedia Commons
Physicists, London, 1952: GF Hund
