Gender Research in PER: A Binary Past and Complex Future

Gender research in physics education research (PER) has become common in the last three decades. This work, however, has focused heavily on the differences between men and women in introductory physics courses. Known as gender gap research, these studies create a deficit model comparing women to men, and do not account for other identities and factors. This talk will present a “gapless” study that upends this trend by focusing on the contextualized experiences of women in graduate physics and astronomy using qualitative interviews. Data will include an exploration of their gendered experiences through the forms of microaggressions and hostile sexism. A concluding vignette will show an example of “gapless” research using quantitative methods, focused on the experiences of transgender physicists.