Review of the double bind in physics education

I have been in love with physics since the 1980s, for its beauty, its relentless logic, its fundamental ambiguity. Physics takes us outside ourselves and reminds us that our universe is both orderly and inexplicable.

An understanding of physics has also been fundamental to my economic well-being. The rigorous thinking skills I developed, and the social capital I gain with every casual “oh, I majored in physics,” have garnered me jobs and status.

My experience majoring in physics at a women's college was not, however, typical for women physics majors, to say nothing of women of color. Women make up around 20% of the students who complete undergraduate physics degrees in the United States; women of color are about 4%; and out of every 100 people completing a physics degree, in an average year one is a Black woman and one is a Latina (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2023). Most women of color complete physics degrees at research-intensive predominantly White institutions, where the most typical experience is that there is not another woman of color in their graduation cohort; perhaps there is one a year or two ahead or behind them, if they are fortunate (Johnson et al., 2020).

This would not necessarily be a problem if these women felt both a strong connection to physics itself and also a strong sense of belonging in their physics department. But this is not the case for most women of color in physics (Herrera et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 2017; Ko et al., 2014; Quichocho, 2020; Quichocho et al., 2019, 2020; Rosa & Mensah, 2016; Schipull et al., 2019). Maria (Mia) Ong's new book, The Double Bind in Physics Education, lays out why. It is a 25-year dive into the experiences of 10 women of color who completed undergraduate degrees in physics and (mostly) went on to physics-based careers. In it, Ong explores what it means to belong (or not) in physics settings, the culture of those settings, and common experiences her participants have had around being seen as physicists as well as being harassed in physics settings. She also describes common strategies her participants used to persist and help others do so, and ends by laying out what it would take to create a “culture of belonging” in physics.

Ong has been writing about women of color in physics, engineering, astronomy, and computer science for decades. Her 2005 article, Body projects of young women of color in physics (Ong, 2005), broke open a whole new field of study. She has written several metasyntheses, in particular the 2011 Inside the double bind: A synthesis of empirical research on women of color (Ong et al., 2011), in which she and her coauthors tracked down virtually every article written on women of color in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) from 1970 through 2008 to report on trends and lay out an agenda for future research. She was part of the American Physical Society's TEAM-UP Task Force, leading a group of physicists and social scientists to identify common factors among physics departments where Black students thrive (TEAM-UP Task Force, 2020). The impact of the TEAM-UP report has been profound. I may be more likely than most to be in settings where something like this would come up, but truly for the last 3 years it seems like someone (possibly me!) brings it up every time I am in a group of two or more physicists and physics-adjacent professionals. In addition to these career highlights, Ong has published a series of articles laying out new, important concepts that further illuminate the particular experiences and persistence strategies of women of color in STEM: visibility/invisibility strategies, career–life balance challenges, seeking out (or creating) counter-spaces where they can experience belonging, using altruism as a way to stay in physics. Her persistent use of sociological methods and concepts has yielded fresh new insights that are different from (and frequently more powerful than) more mainstream analyses of why women of color are so underrepresented in physics.

Because of this history, I was excited to hear that Ong was writing a book, but I was also a bit perplexed: What could she possibly add, given the contributions she has already made? Reader, I have great news: In The Double Bind in Physics Education, Ong has written a how-to book on how physics departments can go about turning themselves into places “in which everyone is welcome and can belong.”

Ong's central argument is that “the solution to underrepresentation in physics is not located in ‘diversity efforts’ or the striving of marginalized groups. Instead, it is found in recognizing the enduring whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity of physics culture and in dismantling those institutional norms and replacing them with a culture of belonging” (p. 18). She argues that while physics styles itself as, in the classic words of Sharon Traweek, the “culture of no culture” (Traweek, 1988), in fact physics has cultural norms which may be “opaque and obscured under ideas about scientific objectivity and neutrality,” but that “become highly visible when challenged, questioned, or broken” (p. 23). These norms make it easier for some kinds of students (male, white-passing, affluent, neurotypical, heterosexual, US-born, cis-gender) to feel like they belong in physics, while hindering the belonging of other kinds of students (in the case of her participants, minoritized due to gender, race, immigration status, sexuality, poverty).

She describes four obstacles that her participants encountered that interfered with their ability to belong: (1) failure for instructors and fellow students to recognize them as legitimate physicists; (2) experiencing identity-based harassment in physics settings; (3) instructors and fellow students demonstrating low expectations of them; and 4) conflicts between the demands of the typical physics career trajectory and demands connected to being low-income women of color.

To understand what it looks like when a woman of color is not recognized, Ong describes an encounter Irene (a Filipina-American woman) and her lab partner Kyle (a White man) had with a professor. Irene asks the professor a question. “The professor listens intently as Irene poses the question. He nods in understanding and speaks the first sentence of his response while making eye contact with her. Then, suddenly, he breaks eye contact, turns his head away from Irene and looks directly at Kyle, who had been standing silently next to her, and delivers the rest of the explanation. Kyle only nods, acknowledging the reply. When Irene poses another question, the professor again replies briefly to her, and then delivers the rest of his explanation to Kyle” (pp. 41–42).

In a chapter on identity-based harassment in physics, Ong reporters that “all 10 participants in my study related that they experienced identity-based harassment that was due to their race, ethnicity, learning differences, immigrant status, or gender, or a combination of these identity markers”—a finding that is congruent with other studies of harassment in physics (Aycock et al., 2019; Barthelemy et al., 2016). She illustrates this with the story of Elena, a Latina phostdoc, who received an invitation from an established scientist in which the man (whom Elena had hoped to cultivate as a mentor) invited Elena to meet with him and told her “I would not mind at all if you dressed up a bit; for example, wore a short skirt or dress for the occasion” (p. 72).

Observations of another participant, Kendra, help readers understand what low expectations look like in practice. Kendra, a high-performing African American sophomore, was enrolled in the discussion section of a physics teaching assistant whose pedagogical skills were so weak that many students, including Kendra, quit attending his sessions. He later told Ong that Kendra was “bright but lazy,” never even realizing she had started attending not one but two other weekly discussion sessions when she realized she was not getting any help from his. On another occasion, Ong observed Kendra working in a group in which she was the only Black woman. “When Kendra asks a question, her peers provide seemingly eager, overlong explanations in patronizing tones that sharply contrast with the succinct, matter-of-fact interactions they have with one another” (p. 85).

Finally, to understand how conflicts between physics career trajectory demands and other demands played out in the lives of her participants, Ong told the story of Laura, a Latina PhD student who was helping support her mother, who was uninsured and had crushing medical debt. Laura's goal was to graduate quickly and pursue a well-paying job in industry; to her PhD advisor, this goal was “closing off her future choices” (p. 119); he felt she should take her time in graduate school, working into the night pursuing unpaid or low-paid side projects in addition to her dissertation research, to make a name for herself. Laura did not want to make a name for herself before graduating; she she felt she was “being forced to take my time” when “you can put it in money really fast how much this PhD is costing me and my mother” (pp. 118, 120).

Ong's participants responded to these obstacles with intelligence, creativity and resilience, using both individual strategies (like passing as white or performing superiority, a strategy I myself have used but that always left a nasty taste in my mouth) and collective strategies (like finding counterspaces outside of their physics departments, where they experienced a sense of belonging that allowed them to persist in physics). However, while praising their resilience, she argues that it should not have been the responsibility of these women to find ways to persist. “Because of their gender and race or ethnicity, each participant received pervasive and persistent signals from peers, faculty, and others that they did not belong in physics. After every instance, they expended precious time and energy processing, strategizing, reconfiguring, and responding to these signals, on top of an already challenging academic load …. The enduring irony, understood by all the women of color in the study, is that these messages about their not-belonging were rooted in social components—cultural norms of maleness, whiteness, middle-class status, and heteronormativity—in a field supposedly known for its extreme objectivity” (p. 188).

This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the cultural dynamics of a setting (physics) in which a particular sort of person (male, White) is preposterously overrepresented despite a purported cultural value of meritocracy. It will be of great value to physicists seeking to create a culture of belonging within their physics settings, and a rich source of case studies for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Finally, it will be a source of solace and insight to people who are trying to persist in settings where it is difficult to belong–women of color in physics, but also people experiencing isolation, invisibility, low expectations, or identity-based harassment for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of settings. Ong's message is clear: You are not responsible for not being included; the responsibility lies with the people in power in your institution to hold themselves accountable to create a place where you belong.