Women in Physics Representation in Malaysian Universities

Globally, there has been a general increase of women in physics. However, they are still under-represented as compared to the other sciences. As to date, only three women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics out of 51 female Nobel Laureates since 1901. The percentage of women laureates has roughly doubled in the 21st century. In Malaysia, national policies that aimed to have women holding at least 30% of decision-making roles by 2020 were put into place since 2011. This has been quite successful in increasing gender diversity in Malaysia. Furthermore, Malaysia's education system is different because of the secondary education system style of rote learning that could be better suited for females and the system is gender blind. Taking a case study of entrants in a Bachelor's degree programme in Physics in Universiti Malaya, the average gender parity index (GPI) over the past 5 years is 0.89. This is lower than the national GPI of 1.27-1.37 for Bachelor's degree entrants in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in public universities. At the PhD level in STEM, the GPI drops to 0.77-0.95. The average GPI for faculty members in Department/School/Programme of Physics of 11 Malaysian universities is 0.80.