Discourses and gender in doctoral physics: a hard look inside a hard science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada today, a gender disparity persists in the enrolment and persistence of doctoral students in physics. Scholarship on this disparity has, in the past, focused on issues of equity and difference in order to find ways to recruit and retain more women in physics. This approach offered a limited perspective on gender and relied on essentialist notions of being a man, woman or physicist. This study highlights the importance of a focus on gender as an aspect of identity construction, thus opening up possibilities for exploring how doctoral students navigate ideologies of gender at the same time that they learn how to become physicists. Doctoral physics students have stories about what kinds of actions, behaviours and ways of doing physics allow individuals to be recognized as physicists. Viewing a physics department as a case study, and individual participants as embedded cases, this study uses a sociocultural approach to examine the ways doctoral students construct these stories about becoming physicists. Through observations, photo-elicitation, and life history interviews, eleven men and women shared stories about their experiences with physics, and the contexts that have enabled or constrained their trajectories into doctoral physics. The results of this study revealed the salience of recognition in the constitution of physicist identities: individuals who saw themselves, or were seen by others, as physicists were more likely to pursue trajectories into academic physics. Further, various interchangeable forms of competence emerged as assets that can be used to achieve recognition in this physics community: technical, analytical, and academic competence were identified by participants as characteristics necessary to achieve recognition as a physicist. Additionally, achieving recognition as a competent physicist often involved a complex negotiation of gender roles and the practice of physics. The results demonstrated that a persistent tension exists betwe
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".