The Future of Women in STEM

Alumna Amy Keesee (PhD Physics, '06) and physics graduate student Caitlin Witt discuss the value for everyone to learn more science, how COVID-19 created obstacles and unexpected opportunities for research and why we must both attract and retain underrepresented people in STEM fields. Watch a video of their conversation and read the transcript below.

Amy Keesee: Hi. I’m Amy Keesee. I’m an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Space Science Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Caitlin Witt: Hi. My name is Caitlin Witt. I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at WVU.

What made you think WVU was the right place for you to continue your STEM graduate education?

AK: So, I actually ended up at WVU because the person who is now my husband was already at WVU for medical school, and I came, and I was actually using it as sort of a transition, initially. So, I had majored in math and had taken as much physics as I could fit into my undergraduate at the time and was trying to go into something astronomy space science. But I knew I needed to catch up on some physics, so my initial plan was to take some physics classes, get a little bit caught up, and then once my husband was done with medical school, move to another place, but once I got started into research at West Virginia, I was able to do some space science research and also get involved in other plasma physics laboratory research, and it ended up being a good place to be, and then I stayed around and got my PhD at WVU, and then I actually was at WVU as a postdoc and research faculty for several years after that.

CW: So, my story's a little bit different. I was intending to do a PhD right from when I discovered that WVU existed. But when I first got started in research, I eventually started working in a different area of the collaboration I’m in now while I was an undergraduate, and I enjoyed that, and I applied to a lot of different schools because PhD applications are difficult, and it's hard to predict where you might get in, but I was hoping to stay and do something at least a little bit similar, and WVU actually has a really huge group that works within this collaboration, which is really great. And there are actually a few different faculty members that work in different areas, so that was something that really appealed to me was having that option to sort of play around and learn exactly what I wanted to do, and it worked out really well because I ended up finding my current adviser, and we have a good research relationship and personal relationships, so it's worked out really well, and it's been a very supportive environment.

What are your career goals? Where do you ultimately see your research achieving?

AK: So, I study space physics, and the overarching goal is to understand how our region of space right around Earth is affected by stuff that's coming from the sun, and it can actually affect our technology, like our satellites our power grids, and so, I’m hoping that eventually my research will have a big impact on us being able to understand what happens during those events and be able to protect our infrastructure. And some of the bigger goals I have, I do a lot of data analysis right now from satellite missions, but I’ve been working in some instrument development and would eventually like to be more involved in missions and perhaps even be a principal investigator of a NASA mission.

CW: Yeah, and as for me, I’m still a graduate student, so I think my career could easily change, but as for right now I’m hoping to stay in research longer term, and I’m a gravitational wave astronomer, which means that we're looking for really subtle changes in space itself. So while this has been detected by some other instruments, we're really hoping that our instrument, Pulsar Timing Arrays, will make a detection within the next few years, and then we'll get to the thing that I think is the most interesting, which is actually characterizing these really large scale events and the sources that make them.

Why is having women in science important? What does this teach? How do you see this evolving since you began your career in science?

AK: In general, people have different experiences and different backgrounds, and in order to be able to tackle a lot of the problems that society faces, we need lots of different ways of thinking about how to solve problems. So, it's really important to have all kinds of different people in science. And you know, having other women helps everybody else realize that you know women definitely belong in science and working on these problems, and they have amazing abilities, and so it was important not only to have them working on it, but let everybody else realize that they can do it and that they excel at it. And so, also serving as role models. And, you know, making sure when there's you know policy issues or barriers that there are ways to fix the policies and the barriers so that more people are able to participate.

CW: I would say that having women in science is important because we make up more or less half the planet. I think a lot about the Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote when she was asked when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court, and she answered, “when there are nine.” And we know that, you know, statistically, there will always be some sort of imbalance, because when you draw from an even split population you get sometimes you come up with a group that's all men, sometimes you come up with a group that's all women, and it needs to happen evenly. We shouldn't settle for we have more women than is statistically average for physics departments, because it won't be truly great until we can get as many people involved in STEM as we can. And I agree with what Amy said, this teaches that anybody can do anything they want, as long as the environment is prepared to support people.

Who, if anyone, has helped you along your journey of pursuing STEM as a woman?

AK: So, when I was at West Virginia University, I was involved with the Association for Women in Science, and there were a lot of women in that organization at varying career stages from students, all the way up to senior career women, and they were all very helpful. It was very nice to have that group of people give advice and just be there to talk about things. And more recently there were Women in Physics lunches that I was involved in. So, I just think it's nice to have lots of supportive women around to help you along every stage.

CW: I think I’ve had a similar experience. I also attend the Women in Physics lunches, and I think I actually met you there for the first time, Amy. But I also have a female academic adviser, so I have had a great mentor to look up to the whole time that I’ve been here. And, more recently, once I formed my PhD committee, we started with my academic adviser as the chair, and then there was another faculty member that was a very obvious choice to be on my committee who is also a woman, and then we were halfway to the four members, and we were like, “let's have an all-female committee. I would like that,” just because it's not something that's super common, and I wanted to have that network of mentors who I would have these regular check-ins with once a year and who would ultimately be responsible for me getting my PhD.

What would you like to see evolve or improve in STEM to retain women?

CW: Sometimes we think about diversity, be it gender diversity or racial diversity or anything else, as a recruitment problem. We need to get more people into the field, but I personally think that what's more important is retaining these people and showing them that they are welcome in this field, and they can succeed there. And then, as time goes on, more and more people will come because they see that they can succeed there. So, as for what needs to change, I think, just making sure that the field emphasizes inclusivity and has that willingness to change, I think. Some people who have been here a long time, maybe are not used to feeling uncomfortable or being willing to take a step into the unknown to make a change, but as soon as we're willing to do that, more and more people will be willing to get involved.

AK: I agree with a lot of what you said. There are definitely still some policies in effect that can make it challenging, sort of in academia in general. And some people that are not as welcoming that definitely make you feel like you don't necessarily belong, and that is a huge challenge and it's hard to change specific people's opinions. But I think if we can affect some of the policies, I think that will make a difference, and then slowly as more and more people are able to take part, then we can maybe change more people's opinions, but it may just take some aging out as well.

What can our current situation teach future generations?

AK: So, I think the opportunities that have been provided by COVID – I find it interesting that I’ve just said opportunities – but we really have learned to think about different ways to collaborate to do work, and I definitely think that some of these things are going to stay to, in some ways, help the field be more inclusive. How can we have conferences that enable people that either can't travel for physical reasons or childcare reasons or financial reasons? How can they still participate in conferences and other collaborative meetings? What other ways can we do things where before, there was a barrier to somebody participating? We've really opened up those doors quite a bit and need to make sure that we incorporate that in the future.

CW: I absolutely agree, and I think one other thing that I’ve noticed is, throughout quarantine and COVID and working from home and all of the difficulties that that's presented, one common thread among people discussing it has been resiliency. Whether it's on the behalf of whatever organization is discussing it, or of individual members or workers or students, things like that. And I think what will be important to remember is that while resiliency is good, these institutions need to make sure that they're remembering that all their members are human and not the only metric of success is their productivity. I have personally had a very hard time not getting down on myself for having days where I’m not as productive as I know that I could be. But life is different right now, we're all going through some really difficult times, and we should remember after this that anybody can go through a difficult time at really anytime and we should be accepting of that and help people succeed in whatever way they do best. Whether that's working remote, whether that's attending conferences remotely or whether that's working together in person.

What does the future of STEM look like and how has COVID affected that?

AK: So, I think there are a lot of challenges certainly in terms of early career people being able to, you know, get in the lab and do the work that they need to do. That's been a big challenge. And dealing with funding situations, making sure the funding agencies are being flexible with how we are spending our money and getting extensions and still supporting people, even when they aren't able to work at full capacity. I think there's going to be a lot of questions surrounding that for many years. And a huge challenge of course with, you know, talking about attending these conferences virtually is they haven't really figured out the best way to provide those networking opportunities that really grow out of the in-person conferences. And so, realizing that that's been a challenge and may affect a lot of early career people that have been affected by this year and how that might be a long-lasting effect for them and thinking about, especially in academia, if they’re tenure track people, how that's going to affect your decisions. I know a lot of universities have implemented tenure clock delays, which can be helpful, but that also changes your timeline for when you get raises due to promotions, and so results in loss of income over your lifetime. And so, there's a lot of challenges that are coming out of this, so just making sure that institutions and funding agencies are aware of all these implications for early career people is something that's going to be a conversation for many years.

CW: Yeah, I’ve had a few friends who are on the job market this year, and all I can say is that I’m certainly glad that I was not because it was a particularly rough year in what is a rough job market in any year. I think it's going to be difficult for a little while. There are not many jobs, and I think that with the reality of funding it's going to keep being difficult, but I certainly hope that after this year, where the whole world had to watch scientists come together and do something really incredible, which is protect all of humanity from a pandemic and come up with a vaccine or multiple vaccines on a really short timescale. Hopefully, everyone will see how important science as a whole is and how critically it needs people to get involved and have caring people who will do things on behalf of others.

Any last words?

AK: So, I want to say, I kind of said it before but, science is a lot of fun. You get to work with a lot of interesting people and it's very flexible, you know. If you like working in teams, there's a team to work on. If you're a little more productive on your own, there's a lot of independent projects that you can work on and there's a lot of flexibility in what you do. There's certainly, you know, guidelines in terms of what gets funded, but there's still a lot of freedom within that to pursue something that interests you, and as I mentioned, there's so many different fields that you can get involved in. Just explore everything that's out there, take advantage of it, and even if it doesn't end up being your career, it's really good to learn science because science affects our lives in so many ways. Just like we were talking about with understanding the vaccines and in my field understanding the implications for how it affects our technology, you know, thinking about climate change, thinking about all these things that are affecting us and affect policy decisions that have to be made, it's great to have science background. So, I think it's imperative that everybody learn some science because it will affect your life and how we run our country and all those sorts of things.

CW: I would also say that STEM is for everyone, and it needs everyone to go as far as it possibly can and for us to learn everything that we want to about the universe, be it things that are close to home or things that are far away. So, the more people we get, the more people that are going to be present who are willing to fight for others and make the changes that are necessary to make STEM an inclusive place for all types, women included.