“Do boys like you because you are smart?”

In 2011, I was a first year physics PhD student and new executive board member of the Society of Women in Physics (SWIP) at the University of Michigan. While I had been a member of a women in physics group as an undergraduate, I had never done public science outreach. SWIP at UM, however, had a strong history of public outreach, which I was very excited about. In addition to yearly outreach events to 8th graders and high-school students, our president at the time wanted to expand our outreach efforts to a slightly younger audience and bring two local Girl Scout troops, 4th-6th graders, to campus.

I helped organize and volunteered for this outreach event, where we brought over 30 girl scouts to campus and treated them to a day of fun, interactive physics demonstrations and liquid nitrogen ice cream. Since outreach to girls this age was new to us as a group, we asked the troop leaders to compile a list of questions that the girls wanted us to answer. This way we’d get an idea of what they wanted to learn about besides the physics of the demos we’d be presenting and could answer the questions to fill up downtime during the day when it came up. Here is the entire, unabridged, list of questions we received.

  • What is (are) your name(s)?
  • Do you like the U of M campus?
  • Do you play sports for U of M?
  • Do you like apple or pumpkin pie?
  • Do you like hot dogs or bratwurst better?
  • What exactly is physics?
  • Do you like being a physicist?
  • Is it hard to be a physicist?
  • Is it a lot of work?
  • What does it take to be a physicist?
  • Do you have to go to college to become a physicist?
  • What other schools can you go to to become a physicist?
  • How much does school cost?
  • Are there scholarships for physicists?
  • Do you have to get good grades to become a physicist?
  • How long have you been a physicist?
  • Why did you choose to study physics?
  • What made you want to be a physicist?
  • Did someone make you be a physicist?
  • Was there someone in your life that encouraged you to study physics?
  • Did you want to be a physicist when you were little?
  • What did you study when you were our age that got you ready to study physics in college?
  • Do boys like you because you are smart?
  • How did you KNOW you wanted to be a physicist?
  • What do you like most about studying physics?
  • Are there lots of cool girls studying physics?
  • What percentage of women are physicists?
  • Are your family members physicists?
  • Are you married to a physicist?
  • What kind of things do you do as a physicist?
  • Do you get to do a lot of experiments?
  • Is your job dangerous?
  • What things do you put in liquid nitrogen?
  • Have you ever hurt yourself with the liquid nitrogen?
  • Have you ever done experiments on moldy cheese?
  • What jobs do you get after you study physics?
  • Do you teach?
  • Do you work for a company?
  • Do you like your choice in jobs?
  • What is the coolest physicist job?
  • How much money does a physicist make?

While some of the questions are very straightforward (“What is (are) your name(s)?”) or downright silly (“Do you like hot dogs or bratwurst better?”), a few trends become immediately clear.

  1. As we expected, the girls did not seem to have much of an idea about what a physicist is or does (which is a significant motivator for doing outreach the first place).
  2. The girls were surprisingly curious about issues of money, with questions such as
    • How much money does a physicist make?
    • How much does school cost?
    • Are there scholarships for physicists?
  3. There seemed to be some concern about how difficult (and possibly unpleasant) being a physicist would be.
    • Is it hard to be a physicist?
    • Is it a lot of work?
    • What does it take to be a physicist?
    • Did someone make you be a physicist?
    • Do you have to get good grades to become a physicist?
  4. Finally, and perhaps most surprising to us, several of the questions centered on gender.
    • Are there lots of cool girls studying physics?
    • What percentage of women are physicists?
    • Do boys like you because you are smart?

As physicists, we were (and are) astutely aware of the gender disparity in our field, and this was already our prime motivation for starting an outreach project explicitly aimed at girls. We know that positive female role models in science are important to attract more women to the field. But we didn’t know that this type of gender inequality was already plainly evident to 8-11 year old girls.

The question “Do boys like you because you are smart?” was the most painful for us to see. It implies this young girl may have the impression (or the experience) that the opposite is true. It’s troubling that whether a boy will like her is such an important issue for a young girl at all, as if we as a society are already conditioning her to define her worth by her romantic appeal. But it’s even more troubling that being smart is seen as a barrier to this. The question about marriage may also fall into this category. “ Are you married to a physicist?” was an unexpected question for us. Did this girl scout just happen to know a couple of married physicists? The troops were from Ann Arbor, which is a university town, so it’s possible. But it may mean something else—that from the perspective of a 10 year old girl, in order for a woman studying physics to find a man who might like her romantically, that man might have to be a physicist also.

There’s been a lot of discussion about sexism in academic science after this article in the New York Times op-ed came out a couple of weeks ago entitled, “Academic Science Isn’t Sexist.” The authors discussed their own study which investigated hiring and promoting practices for male vs. female faculty. There have been several rebuttals, but I’m not going to discuss this in detail here. The point I want to make is that it doesn’t matter. If elementary and middle school girls are still asking, “Do boys like you because you are smart?” then we have much bigger problems than whether junior faculty in the academic sciences are promoted at the same rate.