Bias in life and physics (sexism)

My thesis advisor (Prof. Betsy Beise) was a woman physicist, as were both of my postdoctoral supervisors  (Prof. Olga Botner and Prof. Catherine De Clercq), as was one of the co-leaders of my primary experiment as a professor in Chile (Prof. Debbie Harris). Despite this, and the progress it represents, I think that there is a bias that women face and not just societal imbalances relating to parental leave, parental responsibilities and expectations.

My experience in physics is that a bias exists. I have heard numerous male physicists express in private that women physicists were good or acceptable as lecturers, colleagues and even administrators but not as thought leaders or researchers. This wasn't just from elderly physicists, but also from ones from my generation.

Also, being an active and involved father of two young girls has opened my eyes to some of the bias that exists in this world and in myself. My girls always want the story to be about girls or assume that anyone not given a gender is a girl. My observation is that many of the stories give a male gender for the character (unnecessarily) and my own bias comes through in my discussion of stories without explicit gender where I tend to give characters a male gender if an explicit female gender is not given.

It is clear that an explicit effort to attract female talent to physics is necessary and appreciate those such as Prof. Kim (University of Chicago) who do this. Also necessary is a societal rebalancing towards parenting which has started in Sweden (and other places in Europe) and which some in the United States would like to implement here. Part of this rebalancing must include a rebalancing of expectations and responsibilities, like in Sweden, where men have parental leave.

I think a step that hasn't been made anywhere is to make some minimal amount of parental leave (6 months) required.