On an individual level, this will work fine for a few people. It makes a difference, though, if everyone tries that specific strategy. The strategy will lose its effectiveness quickly, and the overall effect on the gender divide will not be very large.
Trying to bring more women into the relevant spheres is clearly a big part of the answer. However, simply moving women from one low-density area to another doesn’t seem very productive to me.
It is true that you receive dimishing marginal returns whenever you try to import people. Even if we were to use the largest available population sink, eventually we’d run into limits. The larger the population sinks you use, the less it has been filtered, so while your returns diminish more slowly, the effort required at the outset is larger.
Given the small size of our group, physics departments are more than large enough population sinks for the forseeable future.
On an individual level, this will work fine for a few people. It makes a difference, though, if everyone tries that specific strategy. The strategy will lose its effectiveness quickly, and the overall effect on the gender divide will not be very large.
Trying to bring more women into the relevant spheres is clearly a big part of the answer. However, simply moving women from one low-density area to another doesn’t seem very productive to me.
It is true that you receive dimishing marginal returns whenever you try to import people. Even if we were to use the largest available population sink, eventually we’d run into limits. The larger the population sinks you use, the less it has been filtered, so while your returns diminish more slowly, the effort required at the outset is larger.
Given the small size of our group, physics departments are more than large enough population sinks for the forseeable future.