Feels as if the figure that matters here is not "how slow progress is in hiring because only 400 jobs a year are open" but "the number of women pursuing physics doctorates is flat". Meaning, what is making change very slow is that women are a small percentage of all people pursuing the degree and that percentage is not growing. If the number of students in graduate programs was suddenly a 50-50 ratio, unless there was active discrimination in hiring, retention and tenure, a given discipline would slowly but surely approach 50-50 in faculty. Whereas if one gender is only 20% of the people receiving doctorates, there's no way to achieve gender parity in faculty without extraordinary coordinated measures in hiring. This is why so many people thinking about DEI issues in particular disciplines focus on changing the "pipeline" first and foremost.
As far as that goes, the problem obvious extends back even into high school, but a key number is "what's the gender (or race etc.) distribution in introductory undergraduate classes" and then to track how that distribution changes for majors over time. If you see a point where the gender distribution changes dramatically and it's fairly late in the course of study, it means the most important problem to solve is in undergraduate education, and it means there is something that faculty are doing (or not doing) that is playing a fairly direct role in disfavoring the group who start to disappear from the major. If on the other hand you start off in year 1 with a bad gender imbalance, it means the most serious problem is rooted in something that precedes college. If you have a discipline where students finish with a fairly even gender balance and then suddenly one gender disappears from the "pipeline" and never applies to graduate school, the problem is downstream from college and needs to be fixed there.
I would quibble slightly with your statement, in that the NUMBER of women awarded physics doctorates has actually increased substantially; it's the percentage that has been relatively flat. That does matter in terms of ability to effect change.
I deliberately avoided using the "pipeline" language, because that is a sure path to a giant shitstorm in some social-media circles. It's been a few years since I looked closely, but the last I knew, there was no big discontinuity in the percentage of women at any of the college-and-beyond steps-- the percentage of women hired into faculty lines tracks with the percentage getting Ph.D.s, which tracks with the percentage admitted to grad school, which tracks with the percentage receiving undergrad degrees. I believe that continues on into the professoriate, as well, with the percentages of newly-tenured and newly-promoted faculty tracking the percentages at the time when they were hired, though in all of these cases there is some built-in delay.
Feels as if the figure that matters here is not "how slow progress is in hiring because only 400 jobs a year are open" but "the number of women pursuing physics doctorates is flat". Meaning, what is making change very slow is that women are a small percentage of all people pursuing the degree and that percentage is not growing. If the number of students in graduate programs was suddenly a 50-50 ratio, unless there was active discrimination in hiring, retention and tenure, a given discipline would slowly but surely approach 50-50 in faculty. Whereas if one gender is only 20% of the people receiving doctorates, there's no way to achieve gender parity in faculty without extraordinary coordinated measures in hiring. This is why so many people thinking about DEI issues in particular disciplines focus on changing the "pipeline" first and foremost.
As far as that goes, the problem obvious extends back even into high school, but a key number is "what's the gender (or race etc.) distribution in introductory undergraduate classes" and then to track how that distribution changes for majors over time. If you see a point where the gender distribution changes dramatically and it's fairly late in the course of study, it means the most important problem to solve is in undergraduate education, and it means there is something that faculty are doing (or not doing) that is playing a fairly direct role in disfavoring the group who start to disappear from the major. If on the other hand you start off in year 1 with a bad gender imbalance, it means the most serious problem is rooted in something that precedes college. If you have a discipline where students finish with a fairly even gender balance and then suddenly one gender disappears from the "pipeline" and never applies to graduate school, the problem is downstream from college and needs to be fixed there.
I would quibble slightly with your statement, in that the NUMBER of women awarded physics doctorates has actually increased substantially; it's the percentage that has been relatively flat. That does matter in terms of ability to effect change.
I deliberately avoided using the "pipeline" language, because that is a sure path to a giant shitstorm in some social-media circles. It's been a few years since I looked closely, but the last I knew, there was no big discontinuity in the percentage of women at any of the college-and-beyond steps-- the percentage of women hired into faculty lines tracks with the percentage getting Ph.D.s, which tracks with the percentage admitted to grad school, which tracks with the percentage receiving undergrad degrees. I believe that continues on into the professoriate, as well, with the percentages of newly-tenured and newly-promoted faculty tracking the percentages at the time when they were hired, though in all of these cases there is some built-in delay.