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"Woman teaching geometry"
Illustration at the beginning of a medieval translation of Euclid's Elements (c. 1310 AD)
Women have made significant contributions to
science from the earliest times. Historians with an interest in
gender
and science have illuminated the scientific endeavors and
accomplishments of women, the barriers they have faced, and the
strategies implemented to have their work
peer-reviewed and accepted in major scientific journals and other publications. The historical, critical and
sociological study of these issues has become an academic discipline in its own right.
The involvement of
women in the field of medicine occurred in several early civilizations, and the study of
natural philosophy in
ancient Greece was open to women. Women contributed to the
proto-science of
alchemy in the first or second centuries AD. During the Middle Ages,
convents
were an important place of education for women, and some of these
communities provided opportunities for women to contribute to scholarly
research. While the eleventh century saw the emergence of the
first universities, women were, for the most part, excluded from university education.
The attitude to educating women in medical fields in Italy appears to
have been more liberal than in other places. The first known woman to
earn a university chair in a scientific field of studies, was
eighteenth-century Italian scientist,
Laura Bassi.
Although gender roles were largely defined in the eighteenth
century, women experienced great advances in science. During the
nineteenth century, women were excluded from most formal scientific
education, but they began to be admitted into learned societies during
this period. In the later nineteenth century, the rise of the
women's college provided jobs for women scientists and opportunities for education.
History
Cross-cultural perspectives
In
the 1970s and 1980s although many books and articles about women
scientists were appearing, virtually all of the published sources
ignored women of color and women outside of Europe and North America.
One of the few exceptions was Derek Richter's 1982 book about women
scientists.
Most work on women scientists has focused on the personalities and
scientific subcultures of Western Europe and North America, and
historians of women in science have implicitly or explicitly assumed
that the observations made for those
regions will hold true for the rest of the world.
Koblitz has said that these generalizations about women in science often do not hold up cross-culturally. For example,
A scientific or technical field that might be considered 'unwomanly'
in one country in a given period may enjoy the participation of many
women in a different historical period or in another country. An
example is engineering, which in many countries is considered the
exclusive domain of men, especially in usually prestigious sub-fields
such as electrical or mechanical engineering. There are exceptions to
this, however. In the former Soviet Union all subspecialties of
engineering had high percentages of women, and at the Universidad
Nacional de Ingeniería of Nicaragua, women made up 70% of engineering
students in 1990.
Ancient history
The study of
natural philosophy in
ancient Greece was open to women. Recorded examples include
Aglaonike, who predicted
eclipses; and
Theano,
mathematician and physician, who was a pupil (possibly also wife) of
Pythagoras, and one of a school in
Crotone founded by Pythagoras, which included many other women. A passage in Pollux speaks about those who invented the process of coining money mentioning Pheidon and
Demodike from Cyme, wife of the Phrygian king, Midas, and daughter of King Agamemnon of Cyme. Tradition recounts that a daughter of a certain Agamemnon, king of
Aeolian Cyme, married a Phrygian king called Midas.
This link may have facilitated the Greeks "borrowing" their alphabet
from the Phrygians because the Phrygian letter shapes are closest to the
inscriptions from Aeolis.
During the period of the Babylonian civilization, around 1200 B.C., two perfumeresses named
Tapputi-Belatekallim
and -ninu (first half of her name lost) were able to obtain the
essences from plants by using extraction and distillation procedures. If
we are to argue chemistry as the use of chemical equipment and
processes, then we can identify these two women as the first chemists.
Even during the time of the Egyptian dynasty, women were involved in
applied chemistry, such as the making of beer and the preparation of
medicinal compounds. A good number of women have been recorded to have made major contributions to
alchemy. Many of which lived in
Alexandria around the 1st or 2nd centuries AD, where the
gnostic tradition led to female contributions being valued. The most famous of the women alchemist,
Mary the Jewess, is credited with inventing several chemical instruments, including the
double boiler (
bain-marie); the improvement or creation of distillation equipment of that time.
[ Such distillation equipment were called
kerotakis (simple still) and the
tribikos (a complex distillation device).
Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350–415 AD), daughter of
Theon of Alexandria, was a well-known teacher at the Neoplatonic School in Alexandria teaching astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics. She is recognized to be the first known woman mathematician in history through her major contributions to mathematics. Hypatia is credited with writing three major treatises on
geometry,
algebra and
astronomy; as well as the invention of a
hydrometer, an
astrolabe, and an instrument for
distilling water. There is even evidence that Hypatia gave public lectures and may have held some sort of public office in Alexandria. However, her fruitful life was cut short in 415 AD by Christian Zealots, known as
Parabalani, who stripped her, dismembered her, and the pieces of her body burned. Some scholars even say her death marked the end of women in science for many hundreds of years.
Medieval Europe
The early parts of the European
Middle Ages, also known as the
Dark Ages, were marked by the decline
of the Roman Empire. The
Latin West
was left with great difficulties that affected the continent's
intellectual production dramatically. Although nature was still seen as a
system that could be comprehended in the light of reason, there was
little innovative scientific inquiry.
The Arabic world deserves credit for preserving scientific
advancements. Arabic scholars produced original scholarly work and
generated copies of manuscripts from
Classical periods.
During this period, Christianity underwent a period of resurgence, and
Western civilization was bolstered as a result. This phenomenon was, in
part, due to monasteries and nunneries that nurtured the skills of
reading and writing, and the monks and nuns who collected and copied
important writings produced by scholars of the past.
Female physician caring for a patient
As it mentioned before,
convents
were an important place of education for women during this period, for
the monasteries and nunneries encourage the skills of reading and
writing, and some of these communities provided opportunities for women
to contribute to scholarly research. An example is the German
abbess Hildegard of Bingen
(1098–1179 A.D), a famous philosopher and botanists, known for her
prolific writings include treatments of various scientific subjects,
including medicine,
botany and
natural history (c.1151–58). Another famous German abbess was
Hroswitha of Gandersheim (935–1000 A.D.)
that also helped encourage women to be intellectual. However, with the
growth in number and power of nunneries, the all-male clerical hierarchy
was not welcomed toward it, and thus it stirred up conflict by having
backlash against women's advancement. That impacted many religious
orders closed on women and disbanded their nunneries, and overall
excluding women from the ability to learn to read and write. With that,
the world of science became closed off to women, limiting women's
influence in science.
Entering the 11th century, the
first universities emerged. Women were, for the most part, excluded from university education. However, there were some exceptions. The Italian
University of Bologna, for example, allowed women to attend lectures from its inception, in 1088.
The attitude to educating women in medical fields in Italy
appears to have been more liberal than in other places. The physician,
Trotula di Ruggiero, is supposed to have held a chair at the
Medical School of Salerno in the 11th century, where she taught many noble Italian women, a group sometimes referred to as the "ladies of Salerno". Several influential texts on women's medicine, dealing with
obstetrics and
gynecology, among other topics, are also often attributed to Trotula.
Despite the success of some women, cultural biases affecting
their education and participation in science were prominent in the
Middle Ages. For example, St.
Thomas Aquinas, a Christian scholar, wrote, referring to women, "She is mentally incapable of holding a position of authority."
Scientific Revolution (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)
Margaret Cavendish,
a seventeenth-century aristocrat, took part in some of the most
important scientific debates of that time. She was however, not inducted
into the English
Royal Society, although she was once allowed to attend a meeting. She wrote a number of works on scientific matters, including
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) and
Grounds of Natural Philosophy.
In these works she was especially critical of the growing belief that
humans, through science, were the masters of nature. The 1666 work
attempted to heighten female interest in science. The observations
provided a critique of the experimental science of Bacon and criticized
microscopes as imperfect machines.
In Germany, the tradition of female participation in craft
production enabled some women to become involved in observational
science, especially
astronomy. Between 1650 and 1710, women were 14% of German astronomers. The most famous female astronomer in Germany was
Maria Winkelmann.
She was educated by her father and uncle and received training in
astronomy from a nearby self-taught astronomer. Her chance to be a
practicing astronomer came when she married
Gottfried Kirch, Prussia's foremost astronomer. She became his assistant at the
astronomical observatory operated in Berlin by the
Academy of Science.
She made original contributions, including the discovery of a comet.
When her husband died, Winkelmann applied for a position as assistant
astronomer at the Berlin Academy – for which she had experience. As a
woman – with no university degree – she was denied the post. Members of
the Berlin Academy feared that they would establish a bad example by
hiring a woman. "Mouths would gape", they said.
Winkelmann's problems with the Berlin Academy reflect the
obstacles women faced in being accepted in scientific work, which was
considered to be chiefly for men. No woman was invited to either the
Royal Society of London nor the
French Academy of Sciences
until the twentieth century. Most people in the seventeenth century
viewed a life devoted to any kind of scholarship as being at odds with
the domestic duties women were expected to perform.
A founder of modern botany and zoology, the German
Maria Sibylla Merian
(1647–1717), spent her life investigating nature. When she was
thirteen, Sibylla began growing caterpillars and studying their
metamorphosis into butterflies. She kept a "Study Book" which recorded
her investigations into natural philosophy. In her first publication,
The New Book of Flowers, she used imagery to catalog the lives of plants and insects. After her husband died, and her brief stint of living in
Siewert, she and her daughter journeyed to
Paramaribo for two years to observe insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. She returned to Amsterdam and published
The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, which "revealed to Europeans for the first time the astonishing diversity of the rain forest." She was a
botanist and
entomologist
who was known for her artistic illustrations of plants and insects.
Uncommon for that era, she traveled to South America and Surinam, where,
assisted by her daughters, she illustrated the plant and animal life of
those regions.
Overall, the
Scientific Revolution
did little to change people's ideas about the nature of women - more
specifically - their capacity to contribute to science just as men do.
According to Jackson Spielvogel, 'Male scientists used the new science
to spread the view that women were by nature inferior and subordinate to
men and suited to play a domestic role as nurturing mothers. The
widespread distribution of books ensured the continuation of these
ideas'.
Eighteenth century
Laura Bassi, the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe
Although women excelled in many scientific areas during the
eighteenth century, they were discouraged from learning about plant
reproduction.
Carl Linnaeus'
system of plant classification based on sexual characteristics drew
attention to botanical licentiousness, and people feared that women
would learn immoral lessons from nature's example. Women were often
depicted as both innately emotional and incapable of objective
reasoning, or as natural mothers reproducing a natural, moral society.
The eighteenth century was characterized by three divergent views
towards woman: that women were mentally and socially inferior to men,
that they were equal but different, and that women were potentially
equal in both mental ability and contribution to society. While individuals such as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
believed women's roles were confined to motherhood and service to their
male partners, the Enlightenment was a period in which women
experienced expanded roles in the sciences.
The rise of salon culture in Europe brought philosophers and their
conversation to an intimate setting where men and women met to discuss
contemporary political, social, and scientific topics.
While Jean-Jacques Rousseau attacked women-dominated salons as
producing ‘effeminate men’ that stifled serious discourse, salons were
characterized in this era by the mixing of the sexes.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu defied convention by introducing
smallpox inoculation through
variolation to Western medicine after witnessing it during her travels in the
Ottoman Empire. In 1718 Wortley Montague had her son inoculated and when in 1721 a smallpox epidemic struck England, she had her daughter inoculated. This was the first such operation done in Britain. She persuaded
Caroline of Ansbach to test the treatment on prisoners. Princess Caroline subsequently inoculated her two daughters in 1722. Under a pseudonym, Wortley Montague published an article describing and advocating in favor of inoculation in September 1722.
After publicly defending forty nine theses in the Palazzo Pubblico,
Laura Bassi was awarded a doctorate of Philosophy in 1732 at the
University of Bologna. Thus, Bassi became the second woman in the world to earn a philosophy doctorate after
Elena Cornaro Piscopia in 1678, 54 years prior. She subsequently defended twelve additional theses at the
Archiginnasio, the main building of the University of Bologna which allowed her to petition for a teaching position at the university.
In 1732 the university granted Bassi's professorship in philosophy,
making her a member of the Academy of the Sciences and the first woman
to earn a professorship in physics at a
university in Europe
But the university held the value that women were to lead a private
life and from 1746 to 1777 she gave only one formal dissertation per
year ranging in topic from the problem of
gravity to
electricity.
Because she could not lecture publicly at the university regularly, she
began conducting private lessons and experiments from home in the year
of 1749.
However, due to her increase in responsibilities and public appearances
on behalf of the university, Bassi was able to petition for regular pay
increases, which in turn was used to pay for her advanced equipment.
Bassi earned the highest salary paid by the University of Bologna of
1,200 lire.
In 1776, at the age of 65, she was appointed to the chair in
experimental physics by the Bologna Institute of Sciences with her
husband as a teaching assistant.
According to Britannica,
Maria Gaetana Agnesi is "considered to be the first woman in the Western world to have achieved a reputation in mathematics." She is credited as the first woman to write a mathematics handbook, the
Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana,
(Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth). Published in
1748 it "was regarded as the best introduction extant to the works of
Euler."
The goal of this work was, according to Agnesi herself, to give a
systematic illustration of the different results and theorems of
infinitesimal calculus.
In 1750 she became the second woman to be granted a professorship at a
European university. Also appointed to the University of Bologna she
never taught there.
The German
Dorothea Erxleben was instructed in medicine by her father from an early age and Bassi's university professorship inspired Erxleben to fight for her right to practice
medicine. In 1742 she published a
tract arguing that women should be allowed to attend university. After being admitted to study by a
dispensation of
Frederick the Great, Erxleben received her
M.D. from the
University of Halle in 1754. She went on to analyse the obstacles preventing women from studying, among them housekeeping and children. She became the first
female medical doctor in
Germany.
In 1741-42
Charlotta Frölich became the first woman to be published by the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with three books in agricultural science. In 1748
Eva Ekeblad became the first woman inducted into that academy. In 1746 Ekeblad had written to the academy about her discoveries of how to make flour and alcohol out of
potatoes.
Potatoes had been introduced into Sweden in 1658, but had been
cultivated only in the greenhouses of the aristocracy. Ekeblad's work
turned potatoes into a staple food in Sweden, and increased the supply
of
wheat,
rye and
barley
available for making bread, since potatoes could be used instead to
make alcohol. This greatly improved the country's eating habits and
reduced the frequency of famines. Ekeblad also discovered a method of bleaching cotton textile and yarn with soap in 1751, and of replacing the dangerous ingredients in cosmetics of the time by using
potato flour in 1752.
Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze and her husband
Antoine Lavoisier rebuilt the field of
chemistry, which had its roots in
alchemy and at the time was a convoluted science dominated by
George Stahl’s theory of
phlogiston.
Paulze accompanied Lavoisier in his lab, making entries into lab
notebooks and sketching diagrams of his experimental designs. The
training she had received allowed her to accurately and precisely draw
experimental apparatuses, which ultimately helped many of Lavoisier's
contemporaries to understand his methods and results. Paulze translated
various works about phlogiston into French. One of her most important
translation was that of
Richard Kirwan's
Essay on Phlogiston and the Constitution of Acids,
which she both translated and critiqued, adding footnotes as she went
along and pointing out errors in the chemistry made throughout the
paper. Paulze was instrumental in the 1789 publication of Lavoisier's
Elementary Treatise on Chemistry,
which presented a unified view of chemistry as a field. This work
proved pivotal in the progression of chemistry, as it presented the idea
of conservation of mass as well as a list of elements and a new system
for chemical nomenclature. She also kept strict records of the
procedures followed, lending validity to the findings Lavoisier
published.
Science personified as a woman, illuminating nature with her light. Museum ticket from late eighteenth century
The astronomer
Caroline Herschel was born in Hanover but moved to England where she acted as an assistant to her brother,
William Herschel.
Throughout her writings, she repeatedly made it clear that she desired
to earn an independent wage and be able to support herself. When the
crown began paying her for her assistance to her brother in 1787, she
became the first woman to do so at a time when even men rarely received
wages for scientific enterprises—to receive a salary for services to
science. During 1786–97 she discovered eight
comets, the first on 1 August 1786. She had unquestioned priority as discoverer of five of the comets and rediscovered
Comet Encke in 1795. Five of her comets were published in
Philosophical Transactions,
a packet of paper bearing the superscription, "This is what I call the
Bills and Receipts of my Comets" contains some data connected with the
discovery of each of these objects. William was summoned to Windsor
Castle to demonstrate Caroline's comet to the royal family. Caroline Herschel is often credited as the first woman to discover a comet; however,
Maria Kirch
discovered a comet in the early 1700s, but is often overlooked because
at the time, the discovery was attributed to her husband,
Gottfried Kirch.
Early nineteenth century
Science remained a largely amateur profession during the early part
of the nineteenth century. Women's contributions were limited by their
exclusion from most formal scientific education, but began to be
recognized by admittance into learned societies during this period.
Scottish scientist
Mary Fairfax Somerville carried out experiments in
magnetism, presenting a paper entitled 'The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum' to the
Royal Society
in 1826, the second woman to do so. She also wrote several
mathematical, astronomical, physical and geographical texts, and was a
strong advocate for women's education. In 1835, she and
Caroline Herschel were the first two women elected as Honorary Members of the
Royal Astronomical Society.
English mathematician
Ada, Lady Lovelace, a pupil of Somerville, corresponded with
Charles Babbage about applications for his
analytical engine. In her notes (1842–3) appended to her translation of
Luigi Menabrea's
article on the engine, she foresaw wide applications for it as a
general-purpose computer, including composing music. She has been
credited as writing the first computer program, though this has been
disputed.
Other notable female scientists during this period include:
Late 19th century in western Europe
The
Crimean War (1854–6) contributed to establishing
nursing as a profession, making
Florence Nightingale
a household name. A public subscription allowed Nightingale to
establish a school of nursing in London in 1860, and schools following
her principles were established throughout the UK. Nightingale was also a pioneer in
public health as well as a statistician.
Annie Scott Dill Maunder was a pioneer in astronomical photography, especially of
sunspots. A mathematics graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, she was first hired (in 1890) to be an assistant to
Edward Walter Maunder, discoverer of the
Maunder Minimum, the head of the solar department at
Greenwich Observatory.
They worked together to observe sunspots and to refine the techniques
of solar photography. They married in 1895. Annie's mathematical skills
made it possible to analyse the years of sunspot data that Maunder had
been collecting at Greenwich. She also designed a small, portable
wide-angle camera with a 1.5-inch-diameter (38 mm) lens. In 1898, the
Maunders traveled to India, where Annie took the first photographs of
the sun's corona during a solar eclipse. By analysing the Cambridge
records for both sunspots and
geomagnetic storm,
they were able to show that specific regions of the sun's surface were
the source of geomagnetic storms and that the sun did not radiate its
energy uniformly into space, as
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin had declared.
In
Prussia
women could go to university from 1894 and were allowed to receive a
PhD. In 1908 all remaining restrictions for women were terminated.
Alphonse Rebière published a book in 1897, in France, entitled
Les Femmes dans la science (Women in Science) which listed the contributions and publications of women in science.
Other notable female scientists during this period include:
Late nineteenth century Russians
In
the second half of the 19th century a large proportion of the most
successful women in the STEM fields were Russians. Although many women
received advanced training in medicine in the 1870s,
in other fields women were barred and had to go to western
Europe—mainly Switzerland—in order to pursue scientific studies. In her
book about these "women of the [eighteen] sixties" (шестидесятницы), as
they were called,
Ann Hibner Koblitz writes:
To a large extent, women's higher education in continental Europe was
pioneered by this first generation of Russian women. They were the
first students in Zürich, Heidelberg, Leipzig, and elsewhere. Theirs
were the first doctorates in medicine, chemistry, mathematics, and
biology.
Among the successful scientists were
Nadezhda Suslova (1843–1918), the first woman in the world to obtain a medical doctorate fully equivalent to men's degrees;
Maria Bokova-Sechenova
(1839–1929), a pioneer of women's medical education who received two
doctoral degrees, one in medicine in Zürich and one in physiology in
Vienna;
Iulia Lermontova (1846–1919), the first woman in the world to receive a doctoral degree in chemistry; the marine biologist
Sofia Pereiaslavtseva
(1849–1903), director of the Sevastopol Biological Station and winner
of the Kessler Prize of the Russian Society of Natural Scientists; and
the mathematician
Sofia Kovalevskaia
(1850–1891), the first woman in 19th century Europe to receive a
doctorate in mathematics and the first to become a university professor
in any field.
Late nineteenth century in the United States
In the later nineteenth century the rise of the
women's college provided jobs for women scientists, and opportunities for education.
Women's colleges produced a disproportionate number of women who went on for PhDs in science.
Many
coeducational
colleges and universities also opened or started to admit women during
this period; such institutions included just over 3000 women in 1875, by
1900 numbered almost 20,000.
Early twentieth century
Europe before World War II
- Marie Skłodowska-Curie,
the first woman to win a Nobel prize in 1903 (physics), went on to
become a double Nobel prize winner in 1911, both for her work on radiation. She was the first person to win two Nobel prizes, a feat accomplished by only three others since then.
- Alice Perry is understood to be the first woman to graduate with a degree in civil engineering in the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1906 at Queen's College, Galway, Ireland.
- Lise Meitner
played a major role in the discovery of nuclear fission. As head of the
physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin she
collaborated closely with the head of chemistry Otto Hahn on atomic physics until forced to flee Berlin in 1938. In 1939, in collaboration with her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner derived the theoretical explanation for an experiment performed by Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin, thereby demonstrating the occurrence of nuclear fission.
The possibility that Fermi's bombardment of uranium with neutrons in
1934 had instead produced fission by breaking up the nucleus into
lighter elements, had actually first been raised in print in 1934, by
chemist Ida Noddack (co-discover of the element rhenium),
but this suggestion had been ignored at the time, as no group made a
concerted effort to find any of these light radioactive fission
products.
- Maria Montessori was the first woman in Southern Europe to qualify as a physician.
She developed an interest in the diseases of children and believed in
the necessity of educating those recognized to be ineducable. In the
case of the latter she argued for the development of training for
teachers along Froebelian lines and developed the principle that was also to inform her general educational program,
which is the first the education of the senses, then the education of
the intellect. Montessori introduced a teaching program that allowed
defective children to read and write. She sought to teach skills not by
having children repeatedly try it, but by developing exercises that
prepare them.
- Emmy Noether
revolutionized abstract algebra, filled in gaps in relativity, and was
responsible for a critical theorem about conserved quantities in
physics. One notes that the Erlangen program attempted to identify invariants under a group of transformations. On 16 July 1918, before a scientific organization in Göttingen, Felix Klein read a paper written by Emmy Noether, because she was not allowed to present the paper herself. In particular, in what is referred to in physics as Noether's theorem, this paper identified the conditions under which the Poincaré group of transformations (now called a gauge group) for general relativity defines conservation laws.
Noether's papers made the requirements for the conservation laws
precise. Among mathematicians, Noether is best known for her fundamental
contributions to abstract algebra, where the adjective noetherian is nowadays commonly used on many sorts of objects.
- Mary Cartwright was a British mathematician who was the first to analyze a dynamical system with chaos. Inge Lehmann, a Danish seismologist, first suggested in 1936 that inside the Earth's molten core there may be a solid inner core. Women such as Margaret Fountaine continued to contribute detailed observations and illustrations in botany, entomology, and related observational fields. Joan Beauchamp Procter, an outstanding herpetologist, was the first woman Curator of Reptiles for the Zoological Society of London at London Zoo.
- Florence Sabin was an American
medical scientist. Sabin was the first woman faculty member at Johns
Hopkins in 1902, and the first woman full-time professor there in 1917. Her scientific and research experience is notable. Sabin published over 100 scientific papers and multiple books.
United States before World War II
Women moved into science in significant numbers by 1900, helped by
the women's colleges and by opportunities at some of the new
universities. Margaret Rossiter's books Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 and Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972 provide an overview of this period, stressing the opportunities women found in separate women's work in science.
In 1892,
Ellen Swallow Richards called for the "christening of a new science" – "
oekology"
(ecology) in a Boston lecture. This new science included the study of
"consumer nutrition" and environmental education. This interdisciplinary
branch of science was later specialized into what is currently known as
ecology, while the consumer nutrition focus split off and was
eventually relabeled as
home economics., which provided another avenue for women to study science. Richards helped to form the
American Home Economics Association, which published a journal, the
Journal of Home Economics,
and hosted conferences. Home economics departments were formed at many
colleges, especially at land grant institutions. In her work at MIT,
Ellen Richards also introduced the first biology course in its history
as well as the focus area of sanitary engineering.
Women also found opportunities in
botany and
embryology. In
psychology, women earned doctorates but were encouraged to specialize in educational and
child psychology and to take jobs in clinical settings, such as hospitals and social welfare agencies.
In 1901,
Annie Jump Cannon first noticed that it was a star's temperature that was the principal distinguishing feature among different spectra.
This led to re-ordering of the ABC types by temperature instead of
hydrogen absorption-line strength. Due to Cannon's work, most of the
then-existing classes of stars were thrown out as redundant. Afterward,
astronomy was left with the seven
primary classes recognized today, in order: O, B, A, F, G, K, M; that has since been extended.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt made fundamental contributions to astronomy.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt first published her study of variable stars in 1908. This discovery became known as the "period-luminosity relationship" of
Cepheid variables. Our picture of the universe was changed forever, largely because of Leavitt's discovery.
The accomplishments of
Edwin Hubble,
renowned American astronomer, were made possible by Leavitt's
groundbreaking research and Leavitt's Law. "If Henrietta Leavitt had
provided the key to determine the size of the cosmos, then it was Edwin
Powell Hubble who inserted it in the lock and provided the observations
that allowed it to be turned", wrote David H. and Matthew D.H. Clark in
their book
Measuring the Cosmos.
Hubble often said that Leavitt deserved the Nobel for her work.
Gösta Mittag-Leffler
of the Swedish Academy of Sciences had begun paperwork on her
nomination in 1924, only to learn that she had died of cancer three
years earlier (the Nobel prize cannot be awarded posthumously).
In 1925, Harvard graduate student
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin demonstrated for the first time from existing evidence on the spectra of stars that stars were made up almost exclusively of
hydrogen and
helium, one of the most fundamental theories in stellar
astrophysics.
Canadian born
Maud Menten worked in the US and Germany. Her most famous work was on enzyme kinetics together with
Leonor Michaelis, based on earlier findings of
Victor Henri. This resulted in the
Michaelis–Menten equations. Menten also invented the azo-dye coupling reaction for
alkaline phosphatase, which is still used in histochemistry. She characterized bacterial toxins from
B. paratyphosus,
Streptococcus scarlatina and
Salmonella ssp., and conducted the first
electrophoretic separation of proteins in 1944. She worked on the properties of
hemoglobin, regulation of
blood sugar level, and kidney function.
Women in other disciplines looked for ways to apply their expertise to the war effort. Three nutritionists,
Lydia J. Roberts,
Hazel K. Stiebeling, and
Helen S. Mitchell, developed the
Recommended Dietary Allowance
in 1941 to help military and civilian groups make plans for group
feeding situations. The RDAs proved necessary, especially, once foods
began to be
rationed.
Rachel Carson worked for the United States
Bureau of Fisheries,
writing brochures to encourage Americans to consume a wider variety of
fish and seafood. She also contributed to research to assist the Navy in
developing techniques and equipment for submarine detection.
Gerty Cori
was a biochemist who discovered the mechanism by which glycogen, a
derivative of glucose, is transformed in the muscles to form lactic
acid, and is later reformed as a way to store energy. For this discovery
she and her colleagues were awarded the Nobel prize in 1947, making her
the third woman and the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in
science. She was the first woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine. Cori is among several scientists whose works are
commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp.
Later 20th century
At
the Saving the Web: The Ethics and Challenges of Preserving What's on
the Internet at Room LJ-119, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of
Congress, at the Kluge Center, on June 14, 15, and 16 2016, Dame Wendy Hall
At
the Saving the Web: The Ethics and Challenges of Preserving What's on
the Internet at Room LJ-119, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of
Congress, at the Kluge Center, on June 14, 15, and 16 2016, Ms. Allison
Hegal, a computer scientist and data scientist.
Nina Byers
notes that before 1976, fundamental contributions of women to physics
were rarely acknowledged. Women worked unpaid or in positions lacking
the status they deserved. That imbalance is gradually being redressed.
In the early 1980s, Margaret Rossiter presented two concepts for
understanding the statistics behind women in science as well as the
disadvantages women continued to suffer. She coined the terms
"hierarchical segregation" and "territorial segregation." The former
term describes the phenomenon in which the further one goes up the chain
of command in the field, the smaller the presence of women. The latter
describes the phenomenon in which women "cluster in scientific
disciplines."
A recent book titled Athena Unbound provides a life-course
analysis (based on interviews and surveys) of women in science from
early childhood interest, through university, graduate school and the
academic workplace. The thesis of this book is that "Women face a
special series of gender related barriers to entry and success in
scientific careers that persist, despite recent advances".
The
L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science
were set up in 1998, with prizes alternating each year between the
materials science and life sciences. One award is given for each
geographical region of Africa and the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Europe,
Latin America and the Caribbean, and North America. By 2017, these
awards had recognized almost 100 laureates from 30 countries. Two of
the laureates have gone on to win the Nobel Prize,
Ada Yonath (2008) and
Elizabeth Blackburn
(2009). Fifteen promising young researchers also receive an
International Rising Talent fellowship each year within this program.
Europe after World War II
- South-African born physicist and radiobiologist Tikvah Alper(1909–95),
working in the UK, developed many fundamental insights into biological
mechanisms, including the (negative) discovery that the infective agent
in scrapie could not be a virus or other eukaryotic structure.
- French virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi
performed some of the fundamental work in the identification of the
human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS, for which she
shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
- In July 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered evidence for the first known radio pulsar, which resulted in the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for her supervisor. She was president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010.
- Astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge was a member of the B2FH
group responsible for originating the theory of stellar
nucleosynthesis, which explains how elements are formed in stars. She
has held a number of prestigious posts, including the directorship of
the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
- Mary Cartwright was a mathematician and student of G. H. Hardy. Her work on nonlinear differential equations was influential in the field of dynamical systems.
- Rosalind Franklin was a crystallographer, whose work helped to elucidate the fine structures of coal, graphite, DNA and viruses. In 1953, the work she did on DNA allowed Watson and Crick
to conceive their model of the structure of DNA. Her photograph of DNA
gave Watson and Crick a basis for their DNA research, and they were
awarded the Nobel Prize without giving due credit to Franklin, who had
died of cancer in 1958.
- Jane Goodall is a British primatologist considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees.
- Dorothy Hodgkin
analyzed the molecular structure of complex chemicals by studying
diffraction patterns caused by passing X-rays through crystals. She won
the 1964 Nobel prize for chemistry.
- Irène Joliot-Curie, daughter of Marie Curie, won the 1935 Nobel Prize for chemistry with her husband Frédéric Joliot for their work in radioactive isotopes leading to nuclear fission.
- Palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the first skull of a fossil ape on Rusinga Island and also a noted robust Australopithecine.
- Italian neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of Nerve growth factor (NGF). She was appointed a Senator for Life in the Italian Senate in 2001 and is the oldest Nobel laureate ever to have lived.
- Zoologist Anne McLaren conducted studied in genetics which led to advances in in vitro fertilization. She became the first female officer of the Royal Society in 331 years.
- Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995 for research
on the genetic control of embryonic development. She also started the
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation (Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Stiftung), to aid promising young female German scientists with
children.
- Bertha Swirles was a theoretical physicist who made a number of contributions to early quantum theory. She co-authored the well-known textbook Methods of Mathematical Physics with her husband Sir Harold Jeffreys.
- Bessa Vugo was a physiologist and collaborator of Jacques Monod, whose work helped to understand the structure of taste buds, and some psychological aspects of taste.
United States after World War II
- Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman were six of the original programmers for the ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer.
- Linda B. Buck is a neurobiologist who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Richard Axel for their work on olfactory receptors.
- Biologist and activist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a work on the dangers of pesticides, in 1962.
- Eugenie Clark,
popularly known as The Shark Lady, was an American ichthyologist known
for her research on poisonous fish of the tropical seas and on the
behavior of sharks.
- Ann Druyan is an American writer, lecturer and producer specializing in cosmology and popular science. Druyan has credited her knowledge of science to the 20 years she spent studying with her late husband, Carl Sagan, rather than formal academic training. She was responsible for the selection of music on the Voyager Golden Record for the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 exploratory missions. Druyan also sponsored the Cosmos 1 spacecraft.
- Gertrude B. Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for her work on the differences in biochemistry between normal human cells and pathogens.
- Sandra Moore Faber, with Robert Jackson, discovered the Faber–Jackson relation between luminosity and stellar dispersion velocity in elliptical galaxies. She also headed the team which discovered the Great Attractor, a large concentration of mass which is pulling a number of nearby galaxies in its direction.
- Zoologist Dian Fossey worked with gorillas in Africa from 1967 until her murder in 1985.
- Astronomer Andrea Ghez received a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2008 for her work in surmounting the limitations of earthbound telescopes.
- Maria Goeppert-Mayer
was the second female Nobel Prize winner in Physics, for proposing the
nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. Earlier in her career, she
had worked in unofficial or volunteer positions at the university where
her husband was a professor. Goeppert-Mayer is one of several scientists
whose works are commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp.
- Sulamith Low Goldhaber and her husband Gerson Goldhaber formed a research team on the K meson and other high-energy particles in the 1950s.
- Carol Greider and the Australian born Elizabeth Blackburn,
along with Jack W. Szostak, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by
telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.
- Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper developed the first computer compiler while working for the Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation, released in 1952.
- Deborah S. Jin's team at JILA, in Boulder, Colorado in 2003 produced the first fermionic condensate, a new state of matter.
- Stephanie Kwolek, a researcher at DuPont, invented poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide – better known as Kevlar.
- Lynn Margulis is a biologist best known for her work on endosymbiotic theory, which is now generally accepted for how certain organelles were formed.
- Barbara McClintock's studies of maize genetics demonstrated genetic transposition in the 1940s and 1950s. She dedicated her life to her research, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983. McClintock is one of several scientists whose works are commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp.
- Nita Ahuja
is a renowned surgeon-scientist known for her work on CIMP in cancer,
she is currently the Chief of surgical oncology at Johns Hopkins
Hospital. First woman ever to be the Chief of this prestigious
department.
- Carolyn Porco is a planetary scientist best known for her work on the Voyager program and the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn. She is also known for her popularization of science, in particular space exploration.
- Physicist Helen Quinn, with Roberto Peccei, postulated Peccei-Quinn symmetry. One consequence is a particle known as the axion, a candidate for the dark matter that pervades the universe. Prof. Quinn was the first woman to receive the Dirac Medal and the first to receive the Oskar Klein Medal.
- Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, best known for her work on the Randall–Sundrum model. She was the first tenured female physics professor at Princeton University.
- Sally Ride
was an astrophysicist and the first American woman, and then-youngest
American, to travel to outer space. Ride wrote or co-wrote several books
on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging them to study
science. Ride participated in the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) project, which provided more evidence that the predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity are correct.
- Through her observations of galaxy rotation curves, astronomer Vera Rubin discovered the Galaxy rotation problem, now taken to be one of the key pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She was the first female allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory.
- Sara Seager
is a Canadian-American astronomer who is currently a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and known for her work on
extrasolar planets.
- Astronomer Jill Tarter is director of SETI.
- Rosalyn Yalow
was the co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
(together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of
the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique.
Australia after World War II
- Amanda Barnard, an Australia-based theoretical physicist specializing in nanomaterials, winner of the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year.
- Isobel Bennett, was one of the first women to go to Macquarie Island with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE). She is one of Australia's best known marine biologists.
- Dorothy Hill, an Australian geologist who became the first female Professor at an Australian university.
- Ruby Payne-Scott,
was an Australian who was an early leader in the fields of radio
astronomy and radiophysics. She was one of the first radio astronomers
and the first woman in the field.
- Penny Sackett, an astronomer who became the first female Chief Scientist of Australia in 2008. She is a US-born Australian citizen.
- Fiona Stanley, winner of the 2003 Australian of the Year award, is an epidemiologist noted for her research into child and maternal health, birth disorders, and her work in the public health field.
- Michelle Simmons, winner of the 2018 Australian of the Year award, is a quantum physicist known for her research and leadership on atomic-scale silicon quantum devices.
Israel after World War II
- Ada Yonath,
the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel prize in the
sciences, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for her
studies on the structure and function of the ribosome.
Latin America
- Maria Nieves Garcia-Casal, the first scientist and nutritionist woman from Latin America to lead the Latin America Society of Nutrition.
Nobel laureates
The Nobel Prize and Prize in Economic Sciences have been awarded to women 49 times between 1901 and 2017. One
woman,
Marie Sklodowska-Curie, has been honored twice, with the 1903 Nobel
Prize in Physics and the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This means that
48 women in total have been awarded the Nobel Prize between 1901 and
2010. 18 women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry,
physiology or medicine.
Chemistry
Physics
Physiology or Medicine
- Maryam Mirzakhani (12 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
Statistics
Statistics are used to indicate disadvantages faced by women in
science, and also to track positive changes of employment opportunities
and incomes for women in science.
Situation in the 1990s
Women
appear to do less well than men (in terms of degree, rank, and salary)
in the fields that have been traditionally dominated by women, such as
nursing. In 1991 women attributed 91% of the
PhDs in nursing, and men held 4% of full professorships in nursing. In the field of
psychology, where women earn the majority of PhDs, women do not fill the majority of high rank positions in that field.
Women's lower salaries in the scientific community are also
reflected in statistics. According to the data provided in 1993, the
median salaries of female scientists and engineers with doctoral degrees
were 20% less than men. This data can be explained
as there was less participation of women in high rank scientific
fields/positions and a female majority in low-paid fields/positions.
However, even with men and women in the same scientific community field,
women are typically paid 15–17% less than men. In addition to the
gender gap, there were also salary differences between ethnicity:
African-American women with more years of experiences earn 3.4% less than
European-American women with similar skills, while Asian women engineers out-earn both Africans and Europeans.
Women are also under-represented in the sciences as compared to
their numbers in the overall working population. Within 11% of
African-American women in the workforce, 3% are employed as scientists
and engineers.
Hispanics made up 8% of the total workers in the US, 3% of that number are scientists and engineers.
Native Americans participation cannot be statistically measured.
Women tend to earn less than men in almost all industries, including government and academia.
[citation needed] Women are less likely to be hired in highest-paid positions. The data showing the differences in salaries, ranks, and overall success between the genders is often claimed
to be a result of women's lack of professional experience. The rate of
women's professional achievement is increasing. In 1996, the salaries
for women in professional fields increased from 85% to 95% relative to
men with similar skills and jobs. Young women between the age of 27 and
33 earned 98%, nearly as much as their male peers.
In the total workforce of the United States, women earn 74% as much as
their male counterparts (in the 1970s they made 59% as much as their
male counterparts).
Claudia Goldin, Harvard concludes in A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter
– "The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish
altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately
reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours."
Research on women's participation in the "hard" sciences such as
physics and
computer science
speaks of the "leaky pipeline" model, in which the proportion of women
"on track" to potentially becoming top scientists fall off at every step
of the way, from getting interested in science and maths in elementary
school, through doctorate, postdoctoral, and career steps. The leaky
pipeline also applies in other fields. In
biology, for instance, women in the United States have been getting
Masters degrees in the same numbers as men for two decades, yet fewer women get
PhDs; and the numbers of women
principal investigators have not risen.
What may be the cause of this "leaky pipeline" of women in the sciences?
It is important to look at factors outside of academia that are
occurring in women's lives at the same time they are pursuing their
continued education and career search. The most outstanding factor that
is occurring at this crucial time is family formation. As women are
continuing their academic careers, they are also stepping into their new
role as a wife and mother. These traditionally require at large time
commitment and presence outside work. These new commitments do not fare
well for the person looking to attain tenure. That is why women
entering the family formation period of their life are 35% less likely
to pursue tenure positions after receiving their PhD's than their male
counterparts.
In the UK, women occupied over half the places in science-related
higher education courses (science, medicine, maths, computer science
and engineering) in 2004/5. However, gender differences varied from subject to subject: women substantially outnumbered men in biology and
medicine, especially nursing, while men predominated in maths, physical sciences, computer science and engineering.
In the US, women with science or engineering doctoral degrees
were predominantly employed in the education sector in 2001, with
substantially fewer employed in business or industry than men. According to salary figures reported in 1991, women earn anywhere between 83.6 percent to 87.5 percent that of a man's salary.
An even greater disparity between men and women is the ongoing trend
that women scientists with more experience are not as well-compensated
as their male counterparts. The salary of a male engineer continues to
experience growth as he gains experience whereas the female engineer
sees her salary reach a plateau.
Women, in the United States and many European countries, who succeed in science tend to be graduates of single-sex schools. Women earn 54% of all bachelor's degrees in the United States and 50% of those are in science. 9% of US physicists are women.
Overview of situation in 2013
The
leaky pipeline, share of women in higher education and research
worldwide, 2013. Source: UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030, Figure
3.3, data from UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
In 2013, women accounted for 53% of the world's graduates at the
bachelor's and master's level and 43% of successful PhD candidates but
just 28% of researchers. Women graduates are consistently highly
represented in the life sciences, often at over 50%. However, their
representation in the other fields is inconsistent. In North America and
much of Europe, few women graduate in physics, mathematics and computer
science but, in other regions, the proportion of women may be close to
parity in physics or mathematics. In engineering and computer sciences,
women consistently trail men, a situation that is particularly acute in
many high-income countries.
Share
of women in selected South African institutions in 2011. Source: UNESCO
Science Report: towards 2030, based on a 2011 study by the Academy of
Sciences of South Africa on the Participation of Girls and Women in the
National STI System in South Africa.
Women in decision-making
Each
step up the ladder of the scientific research system sees a drop in
female participation until, at the highest echelons of scientific
research and decision-making, there are very few women left. In 2015,
the EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas
called attention to this phenomenon, adding that the majority of
entrepreneurs in science and engineering tended to be men. In Germany,
the coalition agreement signed in 2013 introduces a 30% quota for women
on company boards of directors.
Although data for most countries are limited, we know that women
made up 14% of university chancellors and vice-chancellors at Brazilian
public universities in 2010 and 17% of those in South Africa in 2011.
In Argentina, women make up 16% of directors and vice-directors of
national research centers and, in Mexico, 10% of directors of scientific
research institutes at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
In the US, numbers are slightly higher at 23%. In the EU, less than 16%
of tertiary institutions were headed by a woman in 2010 and just 10% of
universities. At the main tertiary institution for the English-speaking
Caribbean, the University of the West Indies, women represented 51% of
lecturers but only 32% of senior lecturers and 26% of full professors in
2011. Two reviews of national academies of science produce similarly
low numbers, with women accounting for more than 25% of members in only a
handful of countries, including Cuba, Panama and South Africa. The
figure for Indonesia was 17%.
Women in life sciences
In
life sciences, women researchers have achieved parity (45–55% of
researchers) in many countries. In some, the balance even now tips in
their favour. Six out of ten researchers are women in both medical and
agricultural sciences in Belarus and New Zealand, for instance. More
than two-thirds of researchers in medical sciences are women in El
Salvador, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, the Philippines, Tajikistan,
Ukraine and Venezuela.
There has been a steady increase in female graduates in
agricultural sciences since the turn of the century. In sub-Saharan
Africa, for instance, numbers of female graduates in agricultural
science have been increasing steadily, with eight countries reporting a
share of women graduates of 40% or more: Lesotho, Madagascar,
Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.
The reasons for this surge are unclear, although one explanation may
lie in the growing emphasis on national food security and the food
industry. Another possible explanation is that women are highly
represented in biotechnology. For example, in South Africa, women were
underrepresented in engineering (16%) in 2004 and in ‘natural scientific
professions’ (16%) in 2006 but made up 52% of employees working in
biotechnology-related companies.
Women play an increasing role in environmental sciences and
conservation biology. In fact women played a foremost role in the
development of these disciplines.
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson proved an important impetus to the conservation
movement and the later banning of chemical pesticides. Women played an
important role in conservation biology including the famous work of Dian
Fossey, who published the famous
Gorillas in the Mist and
Jane Goodall
who studied primates in East Africa. Today women make up an increasing
proportion of roles in the active conservation sector. A recent survey
of those working in the Wildlife Trusts in the U.K., the leading
conservation organization in England, found that there are nearly as
many women as men in practical conservation roles.
Women in engineering and related fields
Women
are consistently underrepresented in engineering and related fields. In
Israel, for instance, where 28% of senior academic staff are women,
there are proportionately many fewer in engineering (14%), physical
sciences (11%), mathematics and computer sciences (10%) but dominate
education (52%) and paramedical occupations (63%). In Japan and the
Republic of Korea, women represent just 5% and 10% of engineers.
In Europe and North America, the number of female graduates in
engineering, physics, mathematics and computer science is generally low.
Women make up just 19% of engineers in Canada, Germany and the US and
22% in Finland, for example. However, 50% of engineering graduates are
women in Cyprus, 38% in Denmark and 36% in the Russian Federation, for
instance.
In many cases, engineering has lost ground to other sciences,
including agriculture. The case of New Zealand is fairly typical. Here,
women jumped from representing 39% to 70% of agricultural graduates
between 2000 and 2012, continued to dominate health (80–78%) but ceded
ground in science (43–39%) and engineering (33–27%).
In a number of developing countries, there is a sizable
proportion of women engineers. At least three out of ten engineers are
women, for instance, in Costa Rica, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates
(31%), Algeria (32%), Mozambique (34%), Tunisia (41%) and Brunei
Darussalam (42%). In Malaysia (50%) and Oman (53%), women are on a par
with men. Of the 13 sub-Saharan countries reporting data, seven have
observed substantial increases (more than 5%) in women engineers since
2000, namely: Benin, Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique
and Namibia.
Of the seven Arab countries reporting data, four observe a steady
percentage or an increase in female engineers (Morocco, Oman, Palestine
and Saudi Arabia). In the United Arab Emirates, the government has made
it a priority to develop a knowledge economy, having recognized the
need for a strong human resource base in science, technology and
engineering. With just 1% of the labor force being Emirati, it is also
concerned about the low percentage of Emirati citizens employed in key
industries. As a result, it has introduced policies promoting the
training and employment of Emirati citizens, as well as a greater
participation of Emirati women in the labour force. Emirati female
engineering students have said that they are attracted to a career in
engineering for reasons of financial independence, the high social
status associated with this field, the opportunity to engage in creative
and challenging projects and the wide range of career opportunities.
An analysis of computer science shows a steady decrease in female
graduates since 2000 that is particularly marked in high-income
countries. Between 2000 and 2012, the share of women graduates in
computer science slipped in Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of
Korea and USA. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the share of women
graduates in computer science dropped by between 2 and 13 percentage
points over this period for all countries reporting data.
There are exceptions. In Denmark, the proportion of female
graduates in computer science increased from 15% to 24% between 2000 and
2012 and Germany saw an increase from 10% to 17%. These are still very
low levels. Figures are higher in many emerging economies. In Turkey,
for instance, the proportion of women graduating in computer science
rose from a relatively high 29% to 33% between 2000 and 2012.
The Malaysian information technology (IT) sector is made up
equally of women and men, with large numbers of women employed as
university professors and in the private sector. This is a product of
two historical trends: the predominance of women in the Malay
electronics industry, the precursor to the IT industry, and the national
push to achieve a ‘pan-Malayan’ culture beyond the three ethnic groups
of Indian, Chinese and Malay. Government support for the education of
all three groups is available on a quota basis and, since few Malay men
are interested in IT, this leaves more room for women. Additionally,
families tend to be supportive of their daughters’ entry into this
prestigious and highly remunerated industry, in the interests of upward
social mobility. Malaysia's push to develop an
endogenous research culture should deepen this trend.
In India, the substantial increase in women undergraduates in
engineering may be indicative of a change in the ‘masculine’ perception
of engineering in the country. It is also a product of interest on the
part of parents, since their daughters will be assured of employment as
the field expands, as well as an advantageous marriage. Other factors
include the ‘friendly’ image of engineering in India and the easy access
to engineering education resulting from the increase in the number of
women's engineering colleges over the last two decades.
Share
of female researchers by country, 2013 or closest year. Source: UNESCO
Science Report: towards 2030, data from UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
Regional trends as of 2013
The
global figures mask wide disparities from one region to another. In
Southeast Europe, for instance, women researchers have obtained parity
and, at 44%, are on the verge of doing so in Central Asia and Latin
America and the Caribbean. In the European Union, on the other hand,
just one in three (33%) researchers is a woman, compared to 37% in the
Arab world. Women are also better represented in sub-Saharan Africa
(30%) than in South Asia (17%).
There are also wide intraregional disparities. Women make up 52%
of researchers in the Philippines and Thailand, for instance, and are
close to parity in Malaysia and Vietnam, yet only one in three
researchers is a woman in Indonesia and Singapore. In Japan and the
Republic of Korea, two countries characterized by high researcher
densities and technological sophistication, as few as 15% and 18% of
researchers respectively are women. These are the lowest ratios among
members of the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The Republic of Korea also has the widest gap among OECD members in
remuneration between men and women researchers (39%). There is also a
yawning gap in Japan (29%).
Latin America and the Caribbean
Latin
America has some of the world's highest rates of women studying
scientific fields; it also shares with the Caribbean one of the highest
proportions of female researchers: 44%. Of the 12 countries reporting
data for the years 2010–2013, seven have achieved gender parity, or even
dominate research: Bolivia (63%), Venezuela (56%), Argentina (53%),
Paraguay (52%), Uruguay (49%), Brazil (48%) and Guatemala (45%). Costa
Rica is on the cusp (43%). Chile has the lowest score among countries
for which there are recent data (31%). The Caribbean paints a similar
picture, with Cuba having achieved gender parity (47%) and Trinidad and
Tobago on 44%. Recent data on women's participation in industrial
research are available for those countries with the most developed
national innovation systems, with the exception of Brazil and Cuba:
Uruguay (47%), Argentina (29%), Colombia and Chile (26%).
As in most other regions, the great majority of health graduates
are women (60–85%). Women are also strongly represented in science. More
than 40% of science graduates are women in each of Argentina, Colombia,
Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay. The Caribbean paints a
similar picture, with women graduates in science being on a par with
men or dominating this field in Barbados, Cuba, Dominican Republic and
Trinidad and Tobago.
In engineering, women make up over 30% of the graduate population
in seven Latin American countries (Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica,
Honduras, Panama and Uruguay) and one Caribbean country, the Dominican
Republic. There has been a decrease in the number of women engineering
graduates in Argentina, Chile and Honduras.
The participation of women in science has consistently dropped
since the turn of the century. This trend has been observed in all
sectors of the larger economies: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia.
Mexico is a notable exception, having recorded a slight increase. Some
of the decrease may be attributed to women transferring to agricultural
sciences in these countries. Another negative trend is the drop in
female doctoral students and in the labour force. Of those countries
reporting data, the majority signal a significant drop of 10–20
percentage points in the transition from master's to doctoral graduates.
Eastern Europe, West and Central Asia
Most
countries in Eastern Europe, West and Central Asia have attained gender
parity in research (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia
and Ukraine) or are on the brink of doing so (Kyrgyzstan and
Uzbekistan). This trend is reflected in tertiary education, with some
exceptions in engineering and computer science. Although Belarus and the
Russian Federation have seen a drop over the past decade, women still
represented 41% of researchers in 2013. In the former Soviet states,
women are also very present in the business enterprise sector: Bosnia
and Herzegovina (59%), Azerbaijan (57%), Kazakhstan (50%), Mongolia
(48%), Latvia (48%), Serbia (46%), Croatia and Bulgaria (43%), Ukraine
and Uzbekistan (40%), Romania and Montenegro (38%), Belarus (37%),
Russian Federation (37%).
One in three researchers is a woman in Turkey (36%) and
Tajikistan (34%). Participation rates are lower in Iran (26%) and Israel
(21%), although Israeli women represent 28% of senior academic staff.
At university, Israeli women dominate medical sciences (63%) but only a
minority study engineering (14%), physical sciences (11%), mathematics
and computer science (10%). There has been an interesting evolution in
Iran. Whereas the share of female PhD graduates in health remained
stable at 38–39% between 2007 and 2012, it rose in all three other broad
fields. Most spectacular was the leap in female PhD graduates in
agricultural sciences from 4% to 33% but there was also a marked
progression in science (from 28% to 39%) and engineering (from 8% to
16%).
Southeast Europe
With
the exception of Greece, all the countries of Southeast Europe were
once part of the Soviet bloc. Some 49% of researchers in these countries
are women (compared to 37% in Greece in 2011). This high proportion is
considered a legacy of the consistent investment in education by the
Socialist governments in place until the early 1990s, including that of
the former Yugoslavia. Moreover, the participation of female researchers
is holding steady or increasing in much of the region, with
representation broadly even across the four sectors of government,
business, higher education and non-profit. In most countries, women tend
to be on a par with men among tertiary graduates in science. Between
70% and 85% of graduates are women in health, less than 40% in
agriculture and between 20% and 30% in engineering. Albania has seen a
considerable increase in the share of its women graduates in engineering
and agriculture.
European Union
Women
make up 33% of researchers overall in the European Union (EU), slightly
more than their representation in science (32%). Women constitute 40%
of researchers in higher education, 40% in government and 19% in the
private sector, with the number of female researchers increasing faster
than that of male researchers. The proportion of female researchers has
been increasing over the last decade, at a faster rate than men (5.1%
annually over 2002–2009 compared with 3.3% for men), which is also true
for their participation among scientists and engineers (up 5.4% annually
between 2002 and 2010, compared with 3.1% for men).
Despite these gains, women's academic careers in Europe remain
characterized by strong vertical and horizontal segregation. In 2010,
although female students (55%) and graduates (59%) outnumbered male
students, men outnumbered women at the PhD and graduate levels (albeit
by a small margin). Further along in the research career, women
represented 44% of grade C academic staff, 37% of grade B academic staff
and 20% of grade A academic staff.11 These trends are intensified in
science, with women making up 31% of the student population at the
tertiary level to 38% of PhD students and 35% of PhD graduates. At the
faculty level, they make up 32% of academic grade C personnel, 23% of
grade B and 11% of grade A. The proportion of women among full
professors is lowest in engineering and technology, at 7.9%. With
respect to representation in science decision-making, in 2010 15.5% of
higher education institutions were headed by women and 10% of
universities had a female rector.
Membership on science boards remained predominantly male as well,
with women making up 36% of board members. The EU has engaged in a
major effort to integrate female researchers and gender research into
its research and innovation strategy since the mid-2000s. Increases in
women's representation in all of the scientific fields overall indicates
that this effort has met with some success; however, the continued lack
of representation of women at the top level of faculties, management
and science decision making indicate that more work needs to be done.
The EU is addressing this through a gender equality strategy and
crosscutting mandate in
Horizon 2020, its research and innovation funding programme for 2014–2020.
Australia, New Zealand and USA
In
2013, women made up the majority of PhD graduates in fields related to
health in Australia (63%), New Zealand (58%) and the United States of
America (73%). The same can be said of agriculture, in New Zealand's
case (73%). Women have also achieved parity in agriculture in Australia
(50%) and the United States (44%). Just one in five women graduate in
engineering in the latter two countries, a situation that has not
changed over the past decade. In New Zealand, women jumped from
constituting 39% to 70% of agricultural graduates (all levels) between
2000 and 2012 but ceded ground in science (43–39%), engineering (33–27%)
and health (80–78%). As for Canada, it has not reported
sex-disaggregated data for women graduates in science and engineering in
recent years. Moreover, none of the four countries mentioned here have
reported recent data on the share of female researchers.
South Asia
South
Asia is the region where women make up the smallest proportion of
researchers: 17%. This is 13 percentage points below sub-Saharan Africa.
Of those countries in South Asia reporting data for 2009–2013, Nepal
has the lowest representation of all (in head counts), at 8% (2010), a
substantial drop from 15% in 2002. In 2013, only 14% of researchers (in
full-time equivalents) were women in the region's most populous country,
India, down slightly from 15% in 2009. The percentage of female
researchers is highest in Sri Lanka (39%), followed by Pakistan: 24% in
2009, 31% in 2013. There are no recent data available for Afghanistan or
Bangladesh.
Share
of women among researchers employed in the business enterprise sector,
2013 or closest year. Source: UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030,
Figure 3.4, data from UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
Women are most present in the private non-profit sector – they make
up 60% of employees in Sri Lanka – followed by the academic sector: 30%
of Pakistani and 42% of Sri Lankan female researchers. Women tend to be
less present in the government sector and least likely to be employed in
the business sector, accounting for 23% of employees in Sri Lanka, 11%
in India and just 5% in Nepal. Women have achieved parity in science in
both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh but are less likely to undertake research
in engineering. They represent 17% of the research pool in Bangladesh
and 29% in Sri Lanka. Many Sri Lankan women have followed the global
trend of opting for a career in agricultural sciences (54%) and they
have also achieved parity in health and welfare. In Bangladesh, just
over 30% choose agricultural sciences and health, which goes against the
global trend. Although Bangladesh still has progress to make, the share
of women in each scientific field has increased steadily over the past
decade.
Southeast Asia
Southeast
Asia presents a different picture entirely, with women basically on a
par with men in some countries: they make up 52% of researchers in the
Philippines and Thailand, for example. Other countries are close to
parity, such as Malaysia and Vietnam, whereas Indonesia and Singapore
are still around the 30% mark. Cambodia trails its neighbors at 20%.
Female researchers in the region are spread fairly equally across the
sectors of participation, with the exception of the private sector,
where they make up 30% or less of researchers in most countries.
The proportion of women tertiary graduates reflects these trends,
with high percentages of women in science in Brunei Darussalam,
Malaysia, Myanmar and the Philippines (around 60%) and a low of 10% in
Cambodia. Women make up the majority of graduates in health sciences,
from 60% in Laos to 81% in Myanmar – Vietnam being an exception at 42%.
Women graduates are on a par with men in agriculture but less present in
engineering: Vietnam (31%), the Philippines (30%) and Malaysia (39%);
here, the exception is Myanmar, at 65%. In the Republic of Korea, women
make up about 40% of graduates in science and agriculture and 71% of
graduates in health sciences but only 18% of female researchers overall.
This represents a loss in the investment made in educating girls and
women up through tertiary education, a result of traditionalviews of
women's role in society and in the home. Kim and Moon (2011) remark on
the tendency of Korean women to withdraw from the labour force to take
care of children and assume family responsibilities, calling it a
‘domestic brain drain’.
Women remain very much a minority in Japanese science (15% in
2013), although the situation has improved slightly (13% in 2008) since
the government fixed a target in 2006 of raising the ratio of female
researchers to 25%. Calculated on the basis of the current number of
doctoral students, the government hopes to obtain a 20% share of women
in science, 15% in engineering and 30% in agriculture and health by the
end of the current
Basic Plan for Science and Technology in 2016.
In 2013, Japanese female researchers were most common in the public
sector in health and agriculture, where they represented 29% of
academics and 20% of government researchers. In the business sector,
just 8% of researchers were women (in head counts), compared to 25% in
the academic sector. In other public research institutions, women
accounted for 16% of researchers. One of the main thrusts of
Abenomics,
Japan's current growth strategy, is to enhance the socio-economic role
of women. Consequently, the selection criteria for most large university
grants now take into account the proportion of women among teaching
staff and researchers.
The low ratio of women researchers in Japan and the Republic of
Korea, which both have some of the highest researcher densities in the
world, brings down Southeast Asia's average to 22.5% for the share of
women among researchers in the region.
Arab States
At
37%, the share of female researchers in the Arab States compares well
with other regions. The countries with the highest proportion of female
researchers are Bahrain and Sudan at around 40%. Jordan, Libya, Oman,
Palestine and Qatar have percentage shares in the low twenties. The
country with the lowest participation of female researchers is Saudi
Arabia, even though they make up the majority of tertiary graduates, but
the figure of 1.4% covers only the King Abdulaziz City for Science and
Technology. Female researchers in the region are primarily employed in
government research institutes, with some countries also seeing a high
participation of women in private nonprofit organizations and
universities. With the exception of Sudan (40%) and Palestine (35%),
fewer than one in four researchers in the business enterprise sector is a
woman; for half of the countries reporting data, there are barely any
women at all employed in this sector.
Despite these variable numbers, the percentage of female
tertiary-level graduates in science and engineering is very high across
the region, which indicates there is a substantial drop between
graduation and employment and research. Women make up half or more than
half of science graduates in all but Sudan and over 45% in agriculture
in eight out of the 15 countries reporting data, namely Algeria, Egypt,
Jordan, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. In
engineering, women make up over 70% of graduates in Oman, with rates of
25–38% in the majority of the other countries, which is high in
comparison to other regions.
The participation of women is somewhat lower in health than in
other regions, possibly on account of cultural norms restricting
interactions between males and females. Iraq and Oman have the lowest
percentages (mid-30s), whereas Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Palestine and Saudi
Arabia are at gender parity in this field. The United Arab Emirates and
Bahrain have the highest rates of all: 83% and 84%.
Once Arab women scientists and engineers graduate, they may come
up against barriers to finding gainful employment. These include a
misalignment between university programmes and labour market demand – a
phenomenon which also affects men –, a lack of awareness about what a
career in their chosen field entails, family bias against working in
mixed-gender environments and a lack of female role models.
One of the countries with the smallest female labour force is
developing technical and vocational education for girls as part of a
wider scheme to reduce dependence on foreign labor. By 2017, the
Technical and Vocational Training Corporation of Saudi Arabia is to have
constructed 50 technical colleges, 50 girls’ higher technical
institutes and 180 industrial secondary institutes. The plan is to
create training placements for about 500 000 students, half of them
girls. Boys and girls will be trained in vocational professions that
include information technology, medical equipment handling, plumbing,
electricity and mechanics.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Just
under one in three (30%) researchers in sub-Saharan Africa is a woman.
Much of sub-Saharan Africa is seeing solid gains in the share of women
among tertiary graduates in scientific fields. In two of the top four
countries for women's representation in science, women graduates are
part of very small cohorts, however: they make up 54% of Lesotho's 47
tertiary graduates in science and 60% of those in Namibia's graduating
class of 149. South Africa and Zimbabwe, which have larger graduate
populations in science, have achieved parity, with 49% and 47%
respectively. The next grouping clusters seven countries poised at
around 35–40% (Angola, Burundi, Eritrea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique
and Rwanda). The rest are grouped around 30% or below (Benin, Ethiopia,
Ghana, Swaziland and Uganda). Burkina Faso ranks lowest, with women
making up 18% of its science graduates.
Female representation in engineering is fairly high in
sub-Saharan Africa in comparison with other regions. In Mozambique and
South Africa, for instance, women make up more than 34% and 28% of
engineering graduates, respectively. Numbers of female graduates in
agricultural science have been increasing steadily across the continent,
with eight countries reporting the share of women graduates of 40% or
more (Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone, South
Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe). In health, this rate ranges from 26%
and 27% in Benin and Eritrea to 94% in Namibia.
Of note is that women account for a relatively high proportion of
researchers employed in the business enterprise sector in South Africa
(35%), Kenya (34%),
Botswana
and Namibia (33%) and Zambia (31%). Female participation in industrial
research is lower in Uganda (21%), Ethiopia (15%) and Mali (12%).
Lack of agency and representation of women in science
Social pressures that repress femininity
Beginning in the late twentieth century
to present day, more and more women are becoming involved in science.
However, women often find themselves at odds with expectations held
towards them in relation to their scientific studies. For example, in
1968 James Watson questioned scientist Rosalind Franklin's place in the
industry. He claimed that "the best place for a feminist was in another
person's lab", most often a male's research lab. Women were and still are often critiqued of their overall presentation. In Franklin's situation, she was seen as lacking femininity for she failed to wear lipstick or revealing clothing.
Women believed that in order to gain recognition, they needed to hide
their feminine qualities, to thus appear more masculine. For example,
women in the sixties often wore male clothing, which often did not fit
for the pant's inseam was sized for a man and not a woman's leg. This
conformity had little benefit besides men demoralizing them for lack of
femininity.
Since most of their colleagues in science are men, women also
find themselves left out of opportunities to discuss possible research
opportunities outside of the laboratory. In Londa Scheibinger's book, Has Feminism Changed Science?,
she mentions that men would have discussed their research outside of
the lab, but this conversation is preceded by talk of sports or other
“masculine” topics that excluded women from the conversation.
Consequently, this act of excluding women from the after-hours work
discussions produced a more separate work environment between the men
and the women in science; as women then would converse with other women
in science about their current findings and theories. Ultimately, the
women's work was devalued as a male scientist was not involved in the
overall research and analysis.
According to Oxford University Press, the inequality toward women
is “endorsed within cultures and entrenched within institutions [that]
hold power to reproduce that inequality”.
There are various gendered barriers in social networks that prevent
women from working in male-dominated fields and top management jobs.
Social networks are based on the cultural beliefs such as schemas and
stereotypes.
According to social psychology studies, top management jobs are more
likely to have incumbent schemas that favor “an achievement-oriented
aggressiveness and emotional toughness that is distinctly male in
character”.
Gender stereotypes of feminine style set by men assume women to be
conforming and submissive to male culture creating a sense of
unqualified women for top management jobs. However, when the women try
to prove their competence and power, they often faced obstacles. They
are likely to be seen as dislikable and untrustworthy even when they
excel at “masculine” tasks. In addition, women's achievements are likely to be dismissed or discredited.
These “untrustworthy, dislikable women” could have very well been
denied achievement from the fear men held of a woman overtaking his
management position. Social networks and gender stereotypes produce many
injustices that women have to experience in their workplace, as well
as, the various obstacles they encounter when trying to advance in
male-dominated and top management jobs. Women in professions like
science, technology, and other related industries are likely to
encounter these gendered barriers in their careers.
Based on the meritocratic explanations of gender inequality, “as long
as the people accept the mechanisms that produce unequal outcomes,” all
the outcomes will be legitimated in the society.
When women try to deny the stereotypes and the discriminations by
becoming “competent, integrated, well-liked”, the society is more likely
to look at these impressions as selfishness or “being a whiner”.
However, there have been positive attempts to reduce gender
discrimination in the public domain. For example, in the United States,
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 provides opportunities for
women to achieve to a wide range of education programs and activities by
prohibiting sex discrimination.
The law states "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of
sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be
subject to discrimination under any educational program or activity
receiving federal financial assistance."
Although, even with laws prohibiting gender discrimination, society and
social institutions continue to minimize women's competencies and
accomplishments, especially, in the workforce by dismissing or
discrediting their achievements as stated above.
Underrepresentation of queer women in STEM fields
Cisgender
heterosexual women are underrepresented in STEM fields and there has
been a push to encourage more women to join the sciences.
Due to the lack of data and statistics of LGBTQ members involvement in
the STEM field, it illustrates that lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
women are even more repressed and underrepresented than their straight
female peers. Reasons for underrepresentation of queer women in STEM fields include lack of role models in
K–12, the desire of some transgender girls and women to adopt traditional heteronormative gender roles,
employment discrimination, and the possibility of sexual harassment in
the workplace. Historically, women who have accepted STEM research
positions for the government or the military remained in the closet due
to lack of federal protections or the fact that LGBT expression was
criminalized in their country. A notable example is
Sally Ride, a physicist, the first American female astronaut, and a lesbian.
Sally Ride chose not to reveal her sexuality until after her death in
2012; she purposefully revealed her sexual orientation in her obituary.
She has been known as the first female (and youngest) American to enter
space, as well as, starting her own company, Sally Ride Science, that
encourages young girls to enter the STEM field. She chose to keep her
sexuality to herself because she was familiar with “the male-dominated”
NASA's anti-homosexual policies at the time of her space travel.
Sally Ride's legacy continues as her company is still working to
increase young girls and women's participation in the STEM fields.
In a nationwide study of LGBTQA employees in STEM fields in the
United States, queer women in engineering, earth sciences, and
mathematics reported that they were less likely to be out in the
workplace.
In general, LGBTQA people in this survey reported that, when more
female-identified people worked in their labs, the more accepting and
safe the work environment.
In another study of over 30,000 LGBT employees in STEM-related federal
agencies in the United States, queer women in these agencies reported
feeling isolated in the workplace and having to work harder than their
cisgender male colleagues. This isolation and overachievement remained
constant as they earned supervisory positions and worked their way up
the ladder.
Queer women in physics, particularly trans women in physics programs
and labs, felt the most isolated and perceived the most hostility.
Reasons to why women are disadvantaged in science
Margaret Rossiter,
an American historian of science, offered three concepts to explain the
reasons behind the data in statistics and how these reasons
disadvantaged women in the science industry. The first concept is
hierarchical segregation.
This is a well-known phenomenon in society, that the higher the level
and rank of power and prestige, the smaller the population of females
participating. The hierarchical differences point out that there are
fewer women participating at higher levels of both academia and
industry. Based on data collected in 1982, women earn 54 percent of all
bachelor's degrees in the United States, with 50 percent of these in
science. The source also indicated that this number increased almost
every year.
There are fewer women at the graduate level; they earn 40 percent of
all doctorates, with 31 percent of these in science and engineering.
The second concept included in Rossiter's explanation of women in science is
territorial segregation.
The term refers to how female employment is often clustered in specific
industries or categories in industries. Women stayed at home or took
employment in feminine fields while men left the home to work. Although
nearly half of the civilian work force is female, women still comprise
the majority of low-paid jobs or jobs that society considered feminine.
Statistics show that 60 percent of white professional women are nurses,
daycare workers, or schoolteachers.
Territorial disparities in science are often found between the 1920s
and 1930s, when different fields in science were divided between men and
women. Men dominated the chemistry, medical sciences, and engineering,
while women dominated the fields of botany, zoology, and psychology. The
fields in which the majority of women are concentrated are known as the
"soft" sciences and tend to have relatively low salaries.
Researchers collected the data on many differences between women
and men in science. Rossiter found that in 1966, thirty-eight percent of
female scientists held master's degrees compared to twenty-six percent
of male scientists; but large proportions of female scientists were in
environmental and nonprofit organizations.
During the late 1960s and 1970s, equal-rights legislation made the
number of female scientists rise dramatically. The statistics from
National Science Board (NSB) present the change at that time.
The number of science degrees awarded to woman rose from seven percent
in 1970 to twenty-four percent in 1985. In 1975 only 385 women received
bachelor's degrees in engineering compared to 11,000 women in 1985,
indicating the importance of legislation to the representation of women
in science.
Elizabeth Finkel claims that even if the number of women participating
in scientific fields increases, the opportunities are still limited.
Jabos, who worked for NSB, reported the pattern of women in receiving
doctoral degrees in science: even though the numbers of female
scientists with higher-level degrees increased, they still were
consistently in a minority.
Another reporter, Harriet Zuckerman, claims that when woman and man
have similar abilities for a job, the probability of the woman getting
the job is lower.
Elizabeth Finkel agrees, saying, "In general, while woman and men seem
to be completing doctorate with similar credentials and experience, the
opposition and rewards they find are not comparable. Women tend to be
treated with less salary and status, many policy makers notice this
phenomenon and try to rectify the unfair situation for women
participating in scientific fields."
Contemporary advocacy and developments of women in science
Efforts to increase participation
A
number of organizations have been set up to combat the stereotyping
that may encourage girls away from careers in these areas. In the UK
The WISE Campaign (Women into Science, Engineering and Construction) and the
UKRC
(The UK Resource Centre for Women in SET) are collaborating to ensure
industry, academia and education are all aware of the importance of
challenging the traditional approaches to careers advice and recruitment
that mean some of the best brains in the country are lost to science.
The
UKRC
and other women's networks provide female role models, resources and
support for activities that promote science to girls and women. The
Women's Engineering Society, a professional association in th UK, has been supporting women in engineering and science since 1919. In computing, the
British Computer Society group
BCSWomen is active in encouraging girls to consider computing careers, and in supporting women in the computing workforce.
In the United States, the
Association for Women in Science is one of the most prominent organization for professional women in science. In 2011, the
Scientista Foundation
was created to empower pre-professional college and graduate women in
science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), to stay in the
career track. There are also several organizations focused on
increasing mentorship from a younger age. One of the best known groups
is
Science Club for Girls,
which pairs undergraduate mentors with high school and middle school
mentees. The model of that pairs undergraduate college mentors with
younger students is quite popular. In addition, many young women are
creating programs to boost participation in STEM at a younger level,
either through conferences or competitions.
In efforts to make women scientists more visible to the general public, the
Grolier Club in
New York
hosted a "landmark exhibition" titled "Extraordinary Women in Science
& Medicine: Four Centuries of Achievement", showcasing the lives and
works of 32 women scientists in 2003. The
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) developed a video series highlighting the stories of female researchers at NIOSH.
Each of the women featured in the videos share their journey into
science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM), and offers
encouragement to aspiring scientists.
NIOSH also partners with external organizations in efforts to
introduce individuals to scientific disciplines and funds several
science-based training programs across the country.
Women scientists in the media
In 2013, journalist
Christie Aschwanden
noted that a type of media coverage of women scientists that "treats
its subject's sex as her most defining detail" was still prevalent. She
proposed a checklist, the "
Finkbeiner test", to help avoid this approach. It was cited in the coverage of a much-criticized 2013
New York Times obituary of rocket scientist
Yvonne Brill that began with the words: "She made a mean beef stroganoff".
Notable controversies and developments
A study conducted at
Lund University in 2010 and 2011 analysed the genders of invited contributors to
News & Views in
Nature and
Perspectives in
Science. It found that 3.8% of the Earth and environmental science contributions to
News & Views were written by women even while the field was estimated to be 16–20% female in the United States.
Nature
responded by suggesting that, worldwide, a significantly lower number
of Earth scientists were women, but nevertheless committed to address
any disparity.
In 2012, a journal article published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reported a gender bias among science faculty.
Faculty were asked to review a resume from a hypothetical student and
report how likely they would be to hire or mentor that student, as well
as what they would offer as starting salary. Two resumes were
distributed randomly to the faculty, only differing in the names at the
top of the resume (John or Jennifer). The male student was rated as
significantly more competent, more likely to be hired, and more likely
to be mentored. The median starting salary offered to the male student
was greater than $3,000 over the starting salary offered to the female
student. Both male and female faculty exhibited this gender bias. This
study suggests bias may partly explain the persistent deficit in the
number of women at the highest levels of scientific fields. Another
study reported that men are favored in some domains, such as biology
tenure rates, but that the majority of domains were gender-fair; the
authors interpreted this to suggest that the under-representation of
women in the professorial ranks was not solely caused by sexist hiring,
promotion, and remuneration.
In April 2015 Williams and Ceci published a set of five national
experiments showing that hypothetical female applicants were favored by
faculty for assistant professorships over identically-qualified men by a
ratio of 2 to 1.
In 2014, a
controversy over the depiction of pinup women on
Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor's shirt during a press conference raised questions of sexism within the European Space Agency.
The shirt, which featured cartoon women with firearms, led to an
outpouring of criticism and an apology after which Taylor "broke down in
tears."
In 2015, stereotypes about women in science were directed at
Fiona Ingleby, research fellow in evolution, behavior, and environment
at the
University of Sussex, and Megan Head, postdoctoral researcher at the
Australian National University,
when they submitted a paper analyzing the progression of PhD graduates
to postdoctoral positions in the life sciences to the journal
PLOS ONE. The authors received an email on March 27 informing them that their paper had been rejected due to its poor quality.
The email included comments from an anonymous reviewer, which included
the suggestion that male authors be added in order to improve the
quality of the science and serve as a means of ensuring that incorrect
interpretations of the data are not included. Ingleby posted excerpts from the email on
Twitter on April 29 bringing the incident to the attention of the public and media.
The editor was dismissed from the journal and the reviewer was removed
from the list of potential reviewers. A spokesman from PLOS apologized
to the authors and said they would be given the opportunity to have the
paper reviewed again.
On June 9, 2015, Nobel prize winning biochemist
Tim Hunt spoke at the World Conference of Science Journalists in
Seoul.
Prior to applauding the work of women scientists, he described
emotional tension, saying "you fall in love with them, they fall in love
with you, and when you criticise them they cry." Initially, his
remarks were widely condemned and he was forced to resign from his position at
University College London.
However, multiple conference attendees gave accounts, including a
partial transcript and a partial recording, maintaining that his
comments were understood to be satirical before being taken out of
context by the media.
In 2016 an article published in
JAMA Dermatology
reported a significant and dramatic downward trend in the number of
NIH-funded woman investigators in the field of dermatology and that the
gender gap between male and female NIH-funded dermatology investigators
was widening. The article concluded that this disparity was likely due
to a lack of institutional support for women investigators.
Problematic public statements
In January 2005,
Harvard University President
Lawrence Summers
sparked controversy at a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce. Dr.
Summers offered his explanation for the shortage of women in senior
posts in science and engineering. He made comments suggesting the lower
numbers of women in high-level science positions may in part be due to
innate differences in abilities or preferences between men and women.
Making references to the field and behavioral genetics, he noted the
generally greater variability among men (compared to women) on tests of
cognitive abilities,
leading to proportionally more men than women at both the lower and
upper tails of the test score distributions. In his discussion of this,
Summers said that "even small differences in the standard deviation
[between genders] will translate into very large differences in the
available pool substantially out [from the mean]". Summers concluded his discussion by saying:
So
my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the
largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's
legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power
and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering,
there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the
variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by
what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing
discrimination.
Despite
his protégée, Sheryl Sandberg, defending Summers’ actions and Summers
offering his own apology repeatedly, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences passed a motion of “lack of confidence” in the leadership
of Summers who had allowed tenure offers to women plummet after taking
office in 2001.
The year before he became president, Harvard extended 13 of its 36
tenure offers to women and by 2004 those numbers had dropped to 4 of 32
with several departments lacking even a single tenured female professor.
This controversy is speculated to have significantly contributed to
Summers resignation from his position at Harvard the following year.
_and_Marie_Sklodowska_Curie_(1867-1934),_c._1903_(4405627519).jpg)
