I saw an interesting article published on the website of Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is the top physics institute in China. The title of the article is More Chinese women engaged in physics.

In the article, they show that the proportion of women in their graduate students grows up to 30% last year. China once experienced a prosperity period (in the early 1970s) when one third of its physics students from some top universities were women, but the proportion of women in physics major declined to below 10% through 1990's (That is my college time!).

Will this then improve the representation of women in physics in China tomorrow? They said a positive answer to this query at present seems still too optimistic.

Women physics majors suffer a continuing straggle from the main group at later stages of career. Often the gender discrimination is blamed for the consequent women under-representation in physics, but the actual rationale may be much complicated-- there are many other distressing snags on the career path of women physicists. "I don't think there is any
discrimination against us women," cited Professor JIN Kuijuan, one of the few women senior-researchers of the Institute of Physics in Beijing. "Under-representation of women in physics is rather a problem of physics itself, and lies in the distinctions between men and women. Physics becomes a highly competitive field today. For everybody, man or woman, an interruption in career for a while may imply retreating from the research frontier forever. But the early- and mid-career periods (roughly up to 35 years old) overlap the golden times for a woman who has to finish the transition from a young girl to a responsible, caring mother. How can we expect girls in love and young women in pregnancy or holding a small baby in arms to equally concentrate on physics as their male colleagues do? Even after giving birth, a woman has to devote more time to the family, which unavoidably disadvantages her competition for senior position. Many promising women are then steered out of physics."

What does women participation profit science?

They not only provide more intuitions into the problems with their precious brains of other nature and contribute to laboratory works that require extraordinary dexterity and patience, but simply a healthy working environment of mixed genders is also beneficial.

Some practical measures are under consideration now in China for the promotion of women physicists.

Accordingly, the National Natural Science Foundation of China promises more funds and special programs for women researchers, especially the beginners. Moreover, the lady-first-principle in recruiting staffs into the fields that suffer crucial gender imbalance also becomes a topic of serious discussion in the research institutions and universities.