Mid-Act
Mid-career women in physics collaborations face strikingly similar challenges across different collaborations and subfields in particle physics, nuclear physics, and astronomy. UT faculty and partners have developed a pilot workshop to get to the root of these challenges and find solutions to mitigate them.
With an emphasis on recruiting at the student level there's been a slow increase in the number of early-career women in physics. As they enter the mid-career stage, however, they encounter challenges for which they have no training and often lack a professional support system.
The Mid-Act workshop will explore systemic issues that cause women to abandon leadership positions (or leave the field completely), as well as common root causes of hurdles mid-career women face in leadership roles across different physics collaborations and subfields. The project will explore potential mitigation strategies and engage social science faculty as workshop facilitators. This is the first systematic look at evaluating and documenting the issues mid-career women in physics encounter and making community recommendations.
Nadia Fomin (UT), Naoko Kurahashi-Neilson and Michelle Dolinski (Drexel University), Lauren Tompkins (Stanford) and Toyoko Orimoto (Northeastern University) developed the program. Joe Miles from UT's Department of Psychology will facilitate the workshop and analyze the findings.
This workshop is supported by a grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation.