Site Visits

Improving the Climate for Women

The APS has had a long-standing interest in improving the climate in physics departments for underrepresented minorities and women. Toward that goal, the Committee on Minorities (COM) and the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics (CSWP) both sponsor site visit programs.  In recent years, the visits have been expanded to include national labs as well as universities.  The aims of these visits are three-fold:

1. Identify a set of generic problems commonly experienced by minority and/or women physicists.
   
   
2. Intervene to solve many of these generic problems.
   
   
3. Address problems arising in the particular physics department or lab visited and help improve the climate for minorities or women (both students and faculty) in the facility.

Site visits are conducted at the request of a department chair or lab director. Members of the site visit team meet with the physics department chair/lab director, groups of physics faculty members, minority or women faculty members in physics (or related areas), administrators responsible for faculty appointments or hiring, minority or women graduate students, and minority or women undergraduates. The goal of these meetings is to provide the site visit team with the quantitative and qualitative information they need to assess the climate for women or minorities in the host facility.

Following the visit, the site-visit team writes a report to the department chair/lab director, detailing the findings of the visit and offering simple, practical suggestions on improving the climate for minorities or women. The chair/lab director is encouraged to share the report with the rest of the department/lab.  One year after the visit, the department chair/lab director is asked to respond in writing to the team, describing actions taken to improve the climate.  

The site visit program was initially developed to investigate the climate for minorities. In 1990, the APS extended site visits to investigate the climate for women in physics and the CSWP has elected to continue the program with APS and local departmental funds.

  Procedures and Costs

Suggested Reading

• Best Practices
  Suggestions to assist departments in finding and keeping women physics faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students. 

• "Before the Visit"
  Suggestions for ensuring a successful site visit.
  
  
•   "What Works? Increasing the Participation of Women in Undergraduate Physics"
  Barbara Whitten, et al., presents the results of site visits to nine undergraduate physics departments with high participation by women.
  
  
• "Improving the Climate for Women in Physics"
  Judy Franz, Executive Officer of APS and Secretary General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.
  

• Letter from CSWP Past Chair
  Laurie McNeil

Climate for Women in Physics Site Visits

* Research facilities
** Conducted with the APS Committee on Minorities in Physics