Women and physics

fter reading your article on women and physics (June, p42), I kept thinking about my own experience. My physics teacher was a woman, and she inspired me to study physics at Nottingham University. candidates (male or female), so much of physics had to be taught by non-specialists. I think that if we want to encourage more pupils, especially girls, to study physics, then we need to encourage more physics graduates, especially girls, to become teachers. There is a general feeling that physics is a difficult subject, usually studied by boffins. If physics is taught by enthusiastic, specialist physicists, more pupils might choose to study the subject and this, in turn, would help to stop this fear of physics being ‘hard’. Perhaps the answer is to allow more subjects to be studied at A-Level. More pupils might decide to ‘give physics a go’, while still studying ‘safer’ subjects, so they are more confident of achieving the points required for further study.