Celebrating women at CERN

9 February 2010

A high proportion of women in the Control Room (courtesy of Doris Chromek-Burckhart)


Women have come a long way since the first International Women’s Day in 1911, achieving suffrage, rights in the workplace, and recognition as intellectual equals.  And while women still have much to fight for around the world, here at CERN, March 8th will be a day for celebrating progress. 

As part of this celebration, female physicists and engineers are encouraged to take shifts in the accelerator and experimental control rooms, and take their posts as experts on call, making the contributions of women at CERN more visible.

“It’s a great thing to celebrate women in physics and celebrate how far they’ve come, we’ve come,” says graduate student Sarah Heim. She’s been working with Sandra Ciocio of ATLAS on making sure that the presence of women in the control room is at its maximum in this special day.

According to Sandra, Run Coordinator for the ATLAS SCT, we have a lot to celebrate on ATLAS. “We have a woman Spokesperson, we have women Project Leaders, Run Coordinators for subsystems, physics analysis team leaders, and in various other places of great responsibility.” The trick is to make all this obvious.

“What we really want to accomplish is to give a positive image, to say to the young girls that they can do physics,” says Chiara Mariotti, CMS Higgs group convenor, who is helping to coordinate the event for her experiment.

Highlighting the female physicists here at CERN shows that it’s not only possible, but very usual for women to succeed in technical fields. “The more women there are, the more natural it becomes to have women around and in important positions,” says Chiara.

She explains that having female professors at university made a big difference in her perception that high energy physics was a natural career for her, even though she recalls: “When I first came, 20 years ago, we [women] were very few.”


On the rise: Among ATLAS physicists under 50, women account for 21.3%, almost double the fraction of women in the population over 50. (plot courtesy of Pauline Gagnon)


“I started to be involved in this project, mostly because I heard there was this idea of running the experiment with as many women as possible.  I wanted to be part of that,” says Sandra.

Also, there are plans to show video of the control rooms on public screens and as webcasts. Sarah says: “Just sticking all the women into the control room is not that exciting if we can’t see them.” Despina Hatzifotiadou of ALICE is working on this aspect in collaboration with Paola Catapano of the CERN media team. The webcasts may be as simple as linking up the control room webcams with existing outreach pages, or possibly a dedicated Women’s Day website.

In addition, Paola and a camera person will interview women on shift in each of the five control rooms. The footage will be used for a video news release that morning and also a “Spotlight on Women in Science” video to be published on March 15th.

Pauline Gagnon, who proposed the International Women’s Day celebration at CERN, suggested posters that will show the progress of women at CERN in images as well. Sandra is exploring this project with a few other women of ATLAS – Doris Chromek-Burkhart, Isabel Pedraza, Kerstin Perez – also in collaboration with Laetitia Pedroso (a student journalist from the CERN press office) and Fabienne Marcastel, the CERN graphic designer. Of course, the ATLAS photographer, Claudia Marcelloni, will help too.

While the event is about women, men have a role to play. Run coordination is allowing the block schedule to be flexible for this day, so a man with a daytime or evening March 8 shift can either give up just the shift or the whole block.

There’s no intention to make the control rooms women-only zones. Some men will keep their shifts, helping to keep the day inclusive. The experts on-call will be brought in if needed during the run, no matter their gender. “As always, a successful run is the primary goal,” says Sandra.

Other laboratories have been invited to join in the celebration; Fermilab and INFN Torino will be taking part.  Also, together with Equal Opportunities at CERN, the celebration will be followed by a special seminar on another day.

The preparations for the March 8th event are still very much in progress, and women and men all around CERN are welcome to join the effort.  The best way for women to get involved is to sign up for shifts on March 8th, day time and evening.  For ATLAS, contact Christophe Clement or Benedetto Gorini.  Men should also contact run coordination if they wish to give up a shift or block.

If you want to do more, you can sign up for the mailing list (cern-march8(at)cern.ch, through e-groups) or come to the next planning meeting (Feb 18th, 14:00-16:00). For more on Women's Day, check out the CERN Bulletin.

Contacts by experiment:
ATLAS: Sarah Heim and Sandra Ciocio
ALICE: Despina Hatzifotiadou and Wisla Carena
CMS: Sara Bolognesi, Marta Felcini, Chiara Mariotti
LHCb: Paula Collins
LHC: Markus Albert
IT: Maite Barroso Lopez, Catherine Delamare
Press Office: Antonella Del Rosso
Radioprotection: Isabel Brunner
Visit Service: Mick Storr
Contact with Outside labs: Katie Yurkewicz
Special Seminar: Doris Chromek-Burckhart
Overall Coordination: Pauline Gagnon

 

Katie McAlpine

ATLAS e-News