Chiara Mariotti, an Italian physicist with the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Turin, works on the CMS experiment at the LHC (Image: Sophia Bennett/CERN)
What place do women have in science? Have things really changed? To mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, female physicists, engineers and computer scientists at CERN share their own experiences of building a career in science, and their opinions on how women are treated and perceived in their discipline.
Chiara Mariotti:
“When I was studying at university, one of our professors told us that women couldn’t make it as physicists. And she was a woman herself! She recently admitted to me that, thanks to successful female physicists like us, she’s changed her mind.”
Chiara Mariotti, a physicist in the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, has been working in experimental particle physics for 25 years. She has led numerous study groups, notably a prestigious group searching for the Higgs boson. She defended her thesis in the early 1990s in Italy, when particle physics was an almost exclusively male field.
“I felt that I had to work harder, make more effort to earn the same recognition as the men,” she recalls. “I put up with comments and suffered prejudice, but, in general, these things happened less once I worked with the people directly.”
“We have to explain to young people that science changes their daily life”
Chiara thinks that the field has changed for the better. “There are a lot more female physicists and physics students nowadays. I also hear fewer offensive comments among young people,” she stresses.
Nonetheless, the imbalance still needs to be addressed. Chiara often takes part in awareness-raising initiatives because she feels it’s increasingly necessary to explain the importance of scientific careers to young people.
“We have to show them that science is fascinating, that it opens up interesting career options. We also have to make them understand that science is essential for humanity, that it changes their daily life.”
via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.cern/about/updates/2017/02/naturally-im-scientist
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