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Why a culture of brilliance is bad for physics

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Women and people of colour are underrepresented in physics in many parts of the world, to the detriment of the field. How do academics’ beliefs about the role of ‘brilliance’ in career success contribute to these representation gaps, and what can be done to address them?

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Fig. 1: Women’s and African Americans’ representation among US PhDs across 30 fields (left), and within physics by career stage (right).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funds from the US Institute of Education Sciences (Grant R305A200355) and the US National Science Foundation (Grant BCS-1733897) awarded to A. Cimpian; by a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (under Grant DGE-2234660) awarded to S. H. Arnold; and by a Predoctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training Fellowship (supported by the US Institute of Education Sciences through Grant R305B200010 to New York University) awarded to A. Poddar.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Melis Muradoglu

  2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Sophie H. Arnold, Aashna Poddar, Adam Stanaland, Duygu Yilmaz & Andrei Cimpian

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  1. Melis Muradoglu
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  2. Sophie H. Arnold
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  3. Aashna Poddar
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  4. Adam Stanaland
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  5. Duygu Yilmaz
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  6. Andrei Cimpian
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Correspondence to Melis Muradoglu or Andrei Cimpian.

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Muradoglu, M., Arnold, S.H., Poddar, A. et al. Why a culture of brilliance is bad for physics. Nat Rev Phys 6, 75–77 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-023-00685-x

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