Friday, October 5, 2018

Donna Strickland: Amazing Physicist, Amazing Canadian, Amazing Woman

Canadians, and women, have revelled in the accomplishment of the self-effacing Donna Strickland, who recently won the Nobel Prize for Physics. She is only the third woman to win the Physics prize in over a century and only the fifth Canadian ever.

Bravo Strickland!

Shame on University of Waterloo!

In the 21 years Strickland has worked there, the university has not seen fit to promote this Nobel-calibre physicist to full professor. Hmm. Could it be because she's female?

2 comments:

Rohan Jayasekera said...

She's not a full professor because she hadn't applied.

She was on the CBC's As It Happens and, per their tweet https://twitter.com/HarbordCBC/status/1047178960843563008 :
Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland just told us that she never applied to be a full professor because she didn't find it 'fun' to fill out the forms involved -- 'I'm hoping they'll just give it to me now,' she joked.

And a later As It Happens tweet at https://twitter.com/cbcasithappens/status/1048243734645760002 :
New info from @UWaterloo on Nobel winner Donna Strickland: "As an associate prof, Dr. Strickland is full-time faculty. She has tenure. There is no increase in pay. The promotion is in title only. She hadn’t applied, though was encouraged to previously.'

Lib Gibson said...

I stand corrected. I do feel it still says something about women in academia - why don't they reach for the top status? Strickland will be a role model in the future, and it would be nice to see her recognized as top class. I understand someone at the university said her resume for reaching full professorship would need to contain only one line!