Gender Disparities In Physics

Growing up, I was never exposed to the stereotype that physics is a "man's field". There were as many girls as there were guys in my high school physics course and in my na\"ive high school days, it never occurred to me that a subject could be considered more suitable for men or women. I remember seeing a brochure for Cornell University's physics program when I was looking at schools for undergrad that boasted that 40\% of their program was female. At the time, I remember wondering why they were bragging that less than half of their program was comprised of woman. I didn't realize at that time how large the gender disparity in physics is. \par

\noindent I first started to realize something was up when I entered college, one incident in particular stands out to me. It was the first day of an Honors College seminar that all the freshman Honors College students were …show more content…
There was the professor, who once invited himself to a party my REU advisor was hosting for the group, eight hours away from where the professor lived. The professor then proceeded to send me a long list of fun activities we could do together while he visited, such as: go to dinner, go swimming, and have me teach him how to use the gym equipment at his hotel. That same professor unsolicitedly emailed me a year later to advise me against sunbathing topless when I did my REU in Arizona. There was the senior scientist and advisor in the program I was a part of, who after giving me a tour of his lab and speaking to me about astronomy for a couple hours tried to kiss me as I left saying, "[He] thought we had a connection." Lastly, there was the graduate student I worked under, who aggressively harassed me about an ex-boyfriend, before confessing his own feelings for me, that resulted in me being moved off of my senior thesis project, after having worked on the set-up for over a