“The world is more volatile, the world is more unpredictable, and in many respects the world is a more dangerous place than it has been for a long time.”

In his opening speech at the 20th Appleton Space Conference on 5 December, UK Space Agency (UKSA) deputy chief executive Chris White-Horne seemed determined to out-gloom the leaden skies above the ESA conference centre in Harwell, Oxfordshire. Speaking to an audience of academics and industry professionals, White-Horne ticked off a long list of ways that this more dangerous world might affect the space sector and the people who rely on it.

“We have built an almost insidious dependence on space,” he observed. Severe space weather, accidents, system failures or deliberate damage by an adversary could all trigger a loss of satellite-based position, navigation and timing services. Even a single day without modern essentials like GPS would wreak havoc on the economy, while a longer outage would be devastating. “A day without space is just the beginning,” he warned, adding that the real challenge would start on the second or third day, when supply chains would be disrupted worldwide. “We saw in COVID how very fragile some of these systems are.”

While some might prefer to leave contingency planning to military officials, White-Horne argued that the vulnerability of space infrastructure makes it a challenge for the entire sector – government, academia, and manufacturers and operators of space systems and applications alike. “Very few people can say, ‘It’s not my problem’,” he said.

A changing sector

In his keynote speech later in the day, White-Horne’s boss, UKSA chief executive Paul Bate, struck a more hopeful note by focusing on changes in the space sector since 2004, when the first Appleton Space Conference was held. In that year, the world managed just 54 orbital launches, including 18 by Russia and 16 by the US. By 2024, the number had risen to 225 – and counting. This figure includes 118 launches by a private company, SpaceX, which did not achieve its first orbit until 2008. “How we get into space has changed dramatically,” Bate said.

Another positive change Bate highlighted is the industry’s demographics. At the start of the conference, Sarah Beardsley, who leads the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory’s space division (STFC RAL Space), displayed a photo of the organizers of the first Appleton Space Conference. The photo showed a smiling group of around a dozen men in dark suits and ties. “We let women in now,” she quipped, to general laughter.

The UKSA’s own demographics bear this out. According to Bate, 46% of the agency’s staff are women, while a fifth come from ethnic minorities. Still, Bate, who is white, acknowledged that the agency needs to do more to attract diverse talent to higher-level roles: “I spend time in far too many meetings with people who look just like me.”

Taken as a whole, Bate said that the UK space sector remains 86% white and 64% male, while the percentage of space-sector workers who were eligible for free school meals as children is half the national average. While some may see this as irrelevant, Bate argued that the opposite is true. Space, he said, is “a team sport” that needs to draw talent from everywhere, and its leaders must embrace diversity of thought and experience if they want to solve big, difficult problems. “It’s very tempting to see science as aloof from societal change,” he said. “The opposite is true.”

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The 2024 Nobel prizes in both physics and chemistry were awarded, for the first time, to scientists who have worked extensively with artificial intelligence (AI). Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton and physicist John Hopfield shared the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics. Meanwhile, half of the chemistry prize went to computer scientists Demis Hassabis and John Jumper from Google DeepMind, with the other half going to the biochemist David Baker.

The chemistry prize highlights the transformation that AI has achieved for science. Hassabis and Jumper developed AlphaFold2 – a cutting-edge AI tool that can predict the structure of a protein based on its amino-acid sequence. It revolutionized this area of science and has since been used to predict the structure of almost all 200 million known proteins.

The physics prize was more controversial, given that AI is not traditionally seen as being physics. Hinton, with a background in psychology, works in AI and developed “backpropagation” – a key part of machine learning that enables neural networks to learn. For the work, he won the Turing award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 2018, which some consider the computing equivalent of a Nobel prize. The physics part mostly came from Hopfield who developed the Hopfield network and Boltzmann machines, which are based on ideas from statistical physics and are now fundamental to AI.

While the Nobels sparked debate in the community about whether AI should be considered physics or chemistry, I don’t see an issue with the domains and definitions for subjects having moved on. Indeed, it is clear that the science of AI has had a huge impact. Yet the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, which was awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their work in microRNA, sparked a different albeit well-worn controversy. This being that no more than three people can share each science Nobel prize in a world where scientific breakthroughs are increasing highly collaborative.

No-one would doubt that Ambros and Ruvkin deserve their honour, but many complained that Rosalind Lee, who is married to Ambros, was overlooked for the award. She was the first author of the 1993 paper (Cell 75 843) that was cited for the prize. While I don’t see strong arguments for why Lee should have been included for being the first author or married to the last author (she herself also stated such), this case highlights the problem of how to credit teams and whether the lab lead should always be given the praise.

What sounded alarm bells for me was rather the demographics of this year’s science Nobel winners. It was not hard to notice that all seven were white men born or living in the UK, the US or Canada. To put this year’s Nobel winners in context, the number of white men in those three countries make up just 1.8% of the world’s population. A 2024 study by the economist Paul Novosad from Dartmouth College in the US and colleagues examined the income rank of the fathers of previous Nobel laureates. It found, instead of a uniform distribution, that over half come from the top 5% in terms of wealth.

This is concerning because, taken with other demographics, it tells us that less than 1% of people in the world can succeed in science. We should not accept that such a tiny demographic are born “better” at science than anyone else. The Nobel prizes highlight that we have a biased system in science and little is being done to even out the playing field.

Increasing the talent pool

Non-white people in western countries have historically been oppressed and excluded from or discouraged from science, a problem that continues to be unaddressed today. The Global North is home to a quarter of the world’s population but claims 80% of the world’s wealth and dominates the Global South both politically and economically. The Global North continues to acquire wealth from poorer countries through resource extraction, exploitation and the use of transnational co-operations. Many scientists in the Global South simply cannot fulfil their potential due to lack of resources for equipment; are unable to attend conferences; and cannot even subscribe to journals.

Moreover, women and Black scientists worldwide and even within the Global North are not proportionally represented by Nobel prizes. Data show that men are more likely to receive grants than women and are awarded almost double the funding amount on average. Institutions like to hire and promote men more than women. The fraction of women employed by CERN in science-related areas, for example, is 15%. That’s below the 20–25% of people in the field who are women (at CERN 22% of users are women), which is, of course, still half of the expected percentage of women given the global population.

AI will continue to play a stronger and more entangled role in the sciences, and it is promising that the Nobel prizes have evolved out of the traditional subject sphere in line with modern and interdisciplinary times. Yet the demographics of the winners highlight a discouraging picture of our political, educational and scientific system. Can we as a community help reshape a structure from the current version that favours those from affluent backgrounds, and work harder to reach out to young people – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds?

Imagine the benefit not only to science – with a greater pool of talent – but also to society and our young students when they see that everyone can succeed in science, not just the privileged 1%.

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Ask the average person in the street to describe a physicist and they will probably outline an eccentric older man with grey wiry hair wearing a lab coat or tweed jacket with elbow patches and a pair of glasses. While some members of the physics community do look like that – and there’s nothing wrong with it if they do – it’s certainly not representative of the whole. Indeed, since the 1960s researchers have been regularly testing children’s perceptions of scientists with the “draw-a-scientist test”. This has seen a decrease in “masculine-coded” results from 99.4% in the 1970s to 73% in 2018. That figure is still high, but the drop is a welcome development that is likely due to an increase in female scientists being featured in both traditional and social media.

Despite such progress, however, physics still comes across as a cisgender-heterosexual-dominated subject. Some may claim that science doesn’t care about identity and, yes, in an ideal world this would be true – you would leave identity at the lab door and just get on with doing physics. Yet this is a classic example of inequity. While treating everybody the same sounds great in practice, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t create a conducive atmosphere for work and study. So how do we encourage the queer community into science and make them feel more comfortable?

To find out, we surveyed 160 students and staff at UK universities who identify as queer about their experiences and inspirations. When asked to rate how comfortable queer people feel in different scenarios between one (“completely uncomfortable) and 10 (“completely comfortable”), respondents’ average score was 7.96 when it came to how they felt among their peers but just 5.66 in an academic setting. This difference was even starker with people who identify as transgender, who reported a score of 8.0 with peers and as low as 4.96 within academia.

We also did follow-up interviews with respondents who left contact information to get a more detailed picture. From these interviews, the idea of “belonging” came up a lot. Participants stated that if they don’t see people like them at a job interview, they will think twice about accepting a position in that organization. Almost half of transgender respondents say they will have difficulty getting into a science-related career compared with just 8.9% of queer cisgender respondents.

The lack of role models in science is a critical factor. Over three-quarters of respondents generally disagreed with the statement “there are enough queer role models in STEM”, with some saying it is “severely lacking” while also acknowledging how complicated it can be for queer people to put themselves “out there”.

While teachers are an important inspiration for both transgender and cisgender people, fictional role models play a greater role for transgender people. On a scale from one (being no influence) to seven (most influence), transgender people were slightly more inclined towards fictional role models than cisgender people (at 4.25 versus 3.52). This is an important avenue for transgender people through the “queer coding” of traditionally cisgender heterosexual characters. One of the survey responses explained how as a child they interpreted The Doctor from TV’s Doctor Who as a queer role model.

Targeted schemes

Queer people clearly do not feel well represented in science, neither within their institutions nor in the media. The solutions to both issues are intertwined. The media will not see an increase in queer scientists until we have more queer scientists, and we won’t have more queer scientists until queer people can see science as a safe and welcoming career option. Time magazine’s top 100 influential people for 2020, for example, contained 17 scientists, but the Guardian’s list of LGBTQ+ influencers for 2024 contained no scientists at all.

There are things we can do to make science more accepting on a personal level such as displaying pronouns as standard in all communication, and signposting to queer networks within or beyond our organizations. One interviewee suggested queer people wear something like a Pride pin badge to create more visibility within the science community so that newly recruited queer people feel like they belong.

We also need targeted outreach to queer audiences in a similar way to how schemes have been created to increase women’s participation in science. Local Pride events or queer youth group meetings could be a good way to reach queer people without making them feel singled out and “othered”. The Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World, regularly attends Pride events, for example, and this type of activity should be encouraged in other physics and science-based groups and industries to show they are actively seeking and welcoming connections and talent from the queer community.

As well as increasing access to real-life role models, fiction could be used to create accessible role models, especially for the transgender community. More scientific characters in films, books and TV series who identify as queer would help to give future queer scientists people they can relate to and help them feel they belong in science. By making these small but meaningful changes in institutions and supporting related cultural initiatives, we can show that science can indeed be for everybody and not just a select few.

• This article is based on the results of a final year BSc project by Artemis Peck.

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Join us for an insightful webinar based on Women and Physics (Second Edition), where we will explore the historical journey, challenges, and achievements of women in the field of physics, with a focus on English-speaking countries. The session will dive into various topics such as the historical role of women in physics, the current statistics on female representation in education and careers, navigating family life and career, and the critical role men play in fostering a supportive environment. The webinar aims to provide a roadmap for women looking to thrive in physics.

Laura McCullough is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Her PhD from the University of Minnesota was in science education with a focus on physics education research. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including her university system’s highest teaching award, her university’s outstanding research award, and her professional society’s service award. She is a fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Her primary research area is gender and science and surrounding issues. She has also done significant work on women in leadership, and on students with disabilities.

About this ebook

Women and Physics is the second edition of a volume that brings together research on a wide variety of topics relating to gender and physics, cataloguing the extant literature to provide a readable and concise grounding for the reader. While there are many biographies and collections of essays in the area of women and physics, no other book is as research focused. Starting with the current numbers of women in physics in English-speaking countries, it explores the different issues relating to gender and physics at different educational levels and career stages. From the effects of family and schooling to the barriers faced in the workplace and at home, this volume is an exhaustive overview of the many studies focused specifically on women and physics. This edition contains updated references and new chapters covering the underlying structures of the research and more detailed breakdowns of career issues.

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