This study investigated gender differences in perceived recognition as a physicist and its relation to physics identity. We surveyed 688 physics majors (228 women, 460 men) at a research-intensive university in the UK at both the lower and upper undergraduate levels with items measuring perceived recognition and physics identity. Similarly to other studies, we find that women report lower recognition as a physicist from their instructors, families and friends compared to men. In contrast, there were no gender differences in students' perceptions of friends asking them for their advice/input in physics-related problems. Perceived recognition from instructors was lower than recognition from family and friends for both men and women. We find that both perceived recognition from instructors and physics identity are significantly lower for upper level students compared with lower level students. Multiple linear regressions for men and women individually found that both perceived recognition from instructors and from family/friends predicted students' physics identity. These results may indicate a shift in students' understanding of what it means to be a physicist as they progress through the degree program. The results point to further research being needed to understand better the mechanism by which students form perceptions of instructors seeing them as physics people.

The social cure is the concept that strong connections and social bonds are good for wellbeing and physical health. Having strong social support makes hardship easier to cope with. We hypothesize that we could apply the relationship to educational contexts, with a sense of belonging as part of the cohort or community helping students to cope with educational hurdles, resulting in greater wellbeing. We examined the case of women in physics. Previous research has suggested that women in physics classes report a lesser sense of belonging than men. We aimed to replicate this finding and examine how a sense of belonging relates to wellbeing. We surveyed 310 physics students (205 men, 105 women) from a small research-intensive university in the UK. The survey measured students’ physics identity, sense of belonging to the physics community, self-efficacy (belief in ability to complete physics-based tasks), and general wellbeing. We found that women and men reported similar levels of belonging and wellbeing, although women reported less physics identity and self-efficacy. Self-efficacy explained a significant fraction of the variance in wellbeing for both men and women. Additionally, belonging explained variance in wellbeing over and above self-efficacy and physics identity for men, but not for women. These results indicate that for men there is a stronger association between belonging and wellbeing, compared to women, but that it does not result in women having an overall lower sense of wellbeing.