Barriers to women's education and employment in Europe and the United States in the 19th century made it unlikely that any women would be among the few physicists whose ideas are taught in high school and college courses. This paper explores the social settings in which three influential physicists worked--James Clerk Maxwell, Robert Millikan, and…

The introductory physics classroom has long educated students about the properties of the atom and the nucleus. But absent from these lessons has been an informed discussion of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its parent science nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Physics teachers should not miss the opportunity to instruct upon this highly…

In the last several decades the image of the leaky pipeline has become commonplace as a metaphor for the loss of women and minorities to the physics enterprise at every stage, from high school to the most advanced positions in academia. At the 2007 Winter AAPT meeting in Seattle, however, the AAPT Committee on Women in Physics sponsored a session…

Results of an experiment offering single-sex and mixed-sex physics classes in a private secondary school indicated that girls in single-sex classes participated more frequently; students overall experienced greater learner satisfaction; and single-sex classes had a statistically significant, positive influence on girls' interest in physics-related…