| Women in Science |
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by Janet Wright
As much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.
-- well-known psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim speaking at the American Women in Science and Engineering Symposium hosted by MIT in 1964
For the 1972 conference of the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), the organizer took care to invite as participants only women scientists who were also wives and mothers. From Sonnert (1998a).
We've Come a Long Way -- Or have we?
As can be seen in the 16 biographies on the website of the National Library of Canada (www.nlc-bnc.ca), Canadian women have a rich history of being involved in scientific endeavours. While contributions have been made in medicine, engineering, aeronautical, biological and agricultural sciences, women are still under-represented in the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics. (Statistics Canada, Women in Canada 2000)
There has been a significant influx of women into the sciences over the past few decades. Sonnert (1998a) reports that in 1973 only 8.7 percent of the doctoral scientists and engineers in the United States were women but by 1995 this number more than doubled to 21.6 percent. The movement of women into science has been uneven across fields. Far more women have gravitated to psychology (40.7 percent) and the biological sciences (28.2 percent) than to such other fields as computer and mathematical sciences (11.4 percent), physics/astronomy (5.1 percent), and engineering (4.3 percent).
Even within a discipline, the genders often segregate into different subspecialties. Women were awarded 79.7 percent of the doctorates in developmental psychology, compared with only 37.6 percent of those in physiological psychology. Similarly, among the 1995 Ph.D. recipients in physics/astronomy, 20.2 percent of the astronomy graduates were women followed by 15.4 percent in "solid state" and only 3.8 percent in "elementary particles". Of the 18 physicists who received their Ph.D. in the "fluids" subfield, not one was a woman.
Certain women have been acclaimed for their contributions in Science, although their number is relatively small. For example, there are women who are Nobel Prize Laureates: in Physics (2 -- 1903, 1963), in Chemistry (3 -- 1911, 1935, 1964), and in Physiology and Medicine (6 -- 1947, 1977, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1995), including Marie Curie who won the 1903 Physics prize and the 1911 Chemistry prize. Thus, ten women scientists have won a Nobel since the award was first given in 1901: if a science Nobel Prize is a benchmark of success, women as a group are lagging.
However, there are notable examples of exceptional women not being publicly acknowledged for their contributions. Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a pioneer of nuclear physics, discovering the element of protactinium, and conducting experiments that led to the fissioning of uranium. For whatever reason (whether it be Meitner's own modesty, sexism in science, her Jewish background, or her flight from Germany in 1938), chemist Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann who later joined him received the 1944 Nobel Prize, although it was Meitner who explained to Hahn what happened to the uranium when he fired neutrons at it. Similarly, Rosalyn Franklin (1920-1958) conducted the research central to the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure that led to Watson and Crick being awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize. Her X-ray photographs of crystallized DNA proved that the molecule is a helix. Known only as the bossy unfeminine "Rosy" in James Watson's The Double Helix (1968), Franklin never received the credit she was due in her lifetime. Further, the woman whom Albert Einstein called a "creative mathematics genius", Emmy Noether (1882-1935), worked for six years without pay or formal status at Göttingen University before being appointed Nichtbeamteter ausserordentlicher Professor (meaning "non-tenured irregular faculty member") and given a contract to teach abstract algebra on a modest stipend (Crawford, 2001). Noether's specialty was invariant theory and her knowledge and skills were crucial in developing the fundamental laws of physics.
Why are there so few women in science?: The "leaky pipeline"
Women are unequally represented in science and their career progression is not comparable to their male colleagues. Moreover, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has recognized the issue of women in science as a global challenge (UNESCO, 1999 a,b).
Attention has focused on the various stages in the making of a scientist, the "science pipeline", and reasons why there are "leaks" or drop-outs from this pipeline, who are disproportionately female. The following are considered to be factors that contribute to the attrition of girls and women from science: family values that do not emphasize achievement and self-confidence or encourage science as a career; teachers and peers in kindergarten through high school who fail to encourage achievements in the sciences; an absence of female role-models; peer pressure and the desire to be popular; classroom atmosphere in which women in university face varying degrees of neglect or outright hostility from both their peers and the faculty .
I always had a doubt that I'd have a career. It was a joke in my family when I was growing up, "Will Vera really ever be an astronomer?'
-- Vera Rubin, Astronomer (From Sonnert, 1998b)
The first year of university is a particularly significant stage when women overproportionally abandon plans to major in science. Gerhard Sonnert (1998c), a Harvard University professor, stresses the importance of faculty-student interaction in supporting women's commitment to the sciences but goes on to report there is evidence that women receive less encouragement from faculty than do their male peers. Moreover, according to Sonnert, in a study of factors affecting the choice of majors, more women than men reported that a lack of encouragement from teachers or counselors had been a serious problem for them.
I had no Ph.D. When I tried to get one by going to school part time, I was told by the dean of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute that if I wouldn't give up the job I loved, I obviously was not serious about a doctorate.
-- Gertrude Elion, 1988 Nobel Prize Laureate (Physiology & Medicine) (From Sonnert, 1998c)
Then there is graduate school where, once again, women leak disproportionately from the pipeline. Women face a diverse array of gender-specific obstacles, ranging from insufficient financial support, lack of research assistantships, an aggressive and sometimes hostile milieu, lack of encouragement, not being taken seriously, and frequently a lack or a lower quality of mentoring. Women graduate students have been found to have much lower self-confidence than men, even when their grades are comparable or better than the men's grades (Sonnert, 1998c).
The personal lives of women scientists can present additional challenges. A much higher proportion of women scientists than men scientists are married to scientists, often in the same field, and so the couple is faced with the "two-body problem" of finding two science jobs in the same geographical area. Typically women scientists are younger and at an earlier career stage and so are in a less advantageous position than their husbands in terms of employment marketability. As a result, a couple may decide to give preference to the husband's career development. This decision is often over-layed on the challenge of coordinating the conflicting demands of the woman's career clock, the husband's career clock, and the biological clock. A delicate juggling act indeed! As a consequence, family concerns have been documented to be a major reason for women to leave science careers (Caplan, 1993).
Do women and men "do" science differently?
Gerald Holton, a physicist and science historian, wondered about the discrepancy of career success between women and men in the sciences. For example, he noted that the Physics Department at Harvard University in the 1980's boasted nine Nobel laureates on the faculty, all male, but there had never been a tenured woman professor (Holton, 1998). To examine the gender gap in science, Holton embarked on a longterm research program called Project Access.
Project Access began with the selection of about 700 male and female scientists, all of whom showed great promise early in their careers. Holton and his colleagues compared the scientific productivity of these men and women and attempted to assess the "quality" of their research. Of the older scientists who ended up at top academic institutions, 88 percent of the men attained tenure, but only 40 percent of the women became tenured. A similar disparity in the number of published papers was found: men averaged 2.8 publications per year whereas women produced an average of 2.3 publications. This smaller rate of publications correlated with less advancement.
But is it just quantity that is important? Does quality count? To address the issue of quality, senior biologists from research universities reviewed the dossiers of biologists selected from the Project Access subject pool. The reviewers assigned quality ratings on the basis of the curriculum vitae, the bibliographies and reprints of six articles or chapters that each individual thought represented his or her best work. Using a scale from 1 to a top grade of 5, the average quality ratings given by the reviewers turned out to be significantly higher for the women than for the men, an average grade of 3.67 versus 3.27 respectively. Moreover, the women's articles had received substantially more citations that the men's (24.4 versus 14.4 citations). Therefore, it can be argued that the women's papers were more visible and influential and did contribute significantly to the furtherance of scientific thought.
So, what is it about the publications of women, on average, that yielded these good and even superior quality ratings? The publications of women reflected a greater caution and care in the methodology, more attention to details, and attempts to provide a comprehensive scope that tended to produce more complete, integrated papers. When asked, the women volunteered comprehensiveness as a goal almost twice as often as men did and they emphasized comprehensiveness as the difference between top-quality work and average work. Interestingly, when asked to characterize "bad science", women mentioned "dishonesty" almost three times as often as men (24 percent versus 9 percent). Holton and his colleagues concluded that women scientists as a group have a higher ideal of what good science is and show a tendency to linger over a problem to improve the quality of the work at the cost of quantitative output. In the words of Holton (1998),
Women are more vocal about valuing broad or comprehensive research projects that are also characterized by integrity and thoroughness, rather than cutting corners to gain career advantage by higher output of what they perceive as less serious work.
Hence, there is an explanation for the productivity gap between men and women scientists.
Unfortunately, there is also a research funding gap that may be a function of gender discrimination. Wenneras and Wold (1997) studied research funding and showed that women had to be about 2.2 times more productive than their male counterparts to be as successful in securing financial support.
Is gender bias also part of the explanation why so few women are recipients of a Canada Research Chair, a current government program to fund research chairs in Canada? Between 2000-02, 357 Canada Research Chairs were awarded in NSERC-related areas, 40 (or 11%) of which were given to women (based on information provided by Dr. Rene Durocher, CRC-Executive Director, at the Western Deans of Arts and Science Conference at Regina on September 28, 2002). In SSHRC-related areas, 37 (or 22%) of the 163 Chairs were awarded to women.
It is no longer possible to assume that an absence of women in science is due only to the women themselves. One must also consider the role of the institutional systems and organizations in this dynamic.
Are women treated differently or are they simply different?
There are two general hypotheses that address why women, on the statistical average, are less likely than men to have successful science careers. One suggests that women scientists are treated differently and the other proposes women act differently.
Women are treated differently.
According to this notion, women as a group receive fewer chances and opportunities in their careers and so have less success. Although formal discrimination on the basis of gender is illegal, there persists a number of informal barriers to the advancement of women in science. There are some unstated assumptions that tend to disadvantage women. The ideas that only a small elite is able to do science, that "true scientists" are identified when they are children, and that scientists follow a "calling", can all work against women. What it means to be a scientist, how scientists should manage their life and do their work have been defined mainly by earlier, mostly male cohorts of scientists. The role model of a woman scientist largely doesn't exist.
Significantly, people tend to appreciate and overvalue individuals who are like themselves and deny or undervalue those who are different. To minimize this tendency, explicit objective performance criteria must be used when evaluating individuals, especially for recruitment and promotion purposes and when allocating resources.
There is a rising political pressure in Europe for measures to prevent bias against women in peer-reviewed competitions for research grants. The DFG (the German counterpart agency to NSERC in Canada) conducted a longitudinal study of the relative success rates of men and women, discipline by discipline. A "persistent bias" was found, with the women's success rates significantly lower than the men's in every discipline -- success rates averaging 30% or so (NSERC Contact, Fall 2002, Vol. 27, No. 3). The story in Canada may be more encouraging: in its Fall 2002 issue of Contact, NSERC reports the percentage of grants to women applicants is almost identical to the percentage of applicants who are women, although the average grant to women recipients is about 10% smaller than average.
Neuroscientist Dr. Rhea Steinpreis has looked at the impact of gender on the review of curricula vitae of job applicants and tenure candidates. She sent one of four CVs to randomly selected psychology faculty members in the United States (Steinpreis, 1999). Two CVs were intended to be job applicants and two CVs were to be for tenure consideration. Each pair was identical except for the name at the top, "Karen Miller" or "Brian Miller". Identical questionnaires asked if Karen's or Brian's teaching, research and service records justified hiring or tenure. The questionnaires of the 238 respondents indicated "Brian" was rated as a stronger candidate than "Karen", though the CVs were identical. The respondents gave "Brian" higher scores in all three areas of teaching, research and service.
When presented as candidates for tenure, "Karen" and "Brian" received more equal consideration but more respondents were cautious about "Karen" than about "Brian". Comments included,
I would need to see evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own.
It is impossible to make such a judgment without teaching evaluations.
Interestingly, Steinpreis (1999) did not find a significant difference in the responses of the women versus men faculty who completed the questionnaire.
Women are different.
This explanation for women's lower likelihood of success in science focuses on the women themselves and emphasizes endogenous differences in the outlook and goals of women and men. The difference may be either innate or the product of gender-role socialization and cultural patterns.
In the past, women were considered less intellectually capable than men, owing to genetic differences. This notion has not been supported and, in fact, women scientists as a group were found to have a slightly higher IQ than men scientists (Sonnert, 1998b).
The difference model fares better in the context of the effects of gender-specific socialization. Compared to boys, girls tend to be discouraged from developing a strong motivation for achievement. There also are attitudes about science that may define it as a "male field" and thus serve to encourage males while discouraging females. Textbooks tend to mention and picture men and the women who do appear are in gender-stereotypical roles. Similarly, mathematics and science problems are drawn from areas in which males tend to be more familiar, such as sports and warfare. The context of a mathematical problem can determine performance, even if the same basic skills or processes are required: for example, girls may be able to calculate the appropriate measurements when increasing the servings of a recipe but may have difficulty increasing the volume of a rocket fuel mix and working out the appropriate proportions of chemicals. Then there is the terminology associated with computers -- delete, destroy, execute, purge -- terms that typically are not used comfortably or commonly by women. These are factors that may contribute to a sense of discomfort among women in science.
Women may also be put off by the combative, aggressive style where a "star" is rewarded rather than a collegial, team approach to scientific research. The emphasis on self-promotion and the "star-system" is distasteful to a number of women, who prefer a more modest approach. Significantly, those women who do assume an aggressive style may be labeled "difficult" and described by the derogatory term "bitch". Men who exhibit a similar aggressive style may be called "assertive", "confident" and praised for the same traits that are viewed as a negative when present in a woman's behaviour. The double standard is alive and well!
The "difference" explanation includes one more highly controversial pillar: Science may not be sufficiently compatible with women's way of thinking. The objectivity and rationality of science may be androcentric or masculine in character whereas a female way of doing science would be more intuitive. This is by far the most controversial element of the "difference" position and frankly offends many, including a number of women.
The "women are inherently different" explanation cannot fully explain why the prevalence and influence of women have differed widely across various science disciplines nor why the number of women in science have increased in the past twenty years or so.
The tempered approach to understanding the progress of women in science is to utilize both the "women are treated differently" model and the "women are different" argument, as instances of each can be found in the lives of women scientists. Furthermore, these two explanatory models are not necessarily mutually exclusive and may often operate together to determine the trajectory of the career of a woman in science.
Why should women be encouraged to pursue science?
Years ago, the argument for women in science centered on the unfairness of gender discrimination and equity issues. It is just the right thing to do if there is equal opportunity, and gender fairness, for men and women. Over time, the concern has evolved to include the belief that increased diversity among individual scientists leads to an improved quality of science as a whole.
From this perspective, an influx of women in science is needed to balance the "male-way" of doing science and to enrich the whole enterprise. The presence of a diverse group of researchers tends to expand the range of topics and appears to generate more varied hypotheses. Diversity presents a challenge to certain unquestioned preferences and prejudices. For example, human gender stereotypes were sometimes assigned to other animals, particularly to primates, and it was women researchers such as Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey who demonstrated the errors in applying simplistic human stereotypes to explain social constructs and dominance hierarchies.
In addition, the discussion about women in science also has become a human resource issue. Estimates (eg, by the US National Science Foundation and the UK HMSO) suggesting there will be a serious shortfall of scientists, followed by national decline, hastened discussions about how to tap into neglected talent pools, such as women and minorities, to compensate for the expected shortfall of scientists from the traditional white male middle-class population (see Lane, 1999). Encouraging women in science is simply a best practice in human resources because women represent approximately 51 percent of the talent.
What should be done?
What can be done to address the under-representation of women in science?
1. admit there is a problem
2. provide information
3. use a variety of teaching methods
4. evaluate using objective, gender-neutral performance measures
Perhaps the biggest barrier to women in science is a reluctance to talk about the issues. There is a core of militant faculty resistance to examining this topic. Gender studies are devalued and not viewed as "serious" research. Further, individuals who conduct gender research may pay a heavy price. For example, Rhea Steinpreis who is a tenured associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studying addiction in rats believes she was a respected neuroscientist until she began studies looking at the impact of gender bias on university decisions in the late 1990's. She now claims to be isolated in her department and her students report that other faculty embarrass them in class and assign them more work than their peers. Steinpreis suggests this is retaliation for her gender research (for more details, see www.k-state.edu/academicservices/equitytoolkit).
Science must be "marketed" toward women: special efforts are necessary. Talks, seminars, workshops, mentorship programs, making a course more "female-friendly" are all avenues to market science.
In addition, a distinction should be made between the teaching and the practice of science. Science professors have been found to be the most conservative and androcentric, sticking to traditional teaching techniques -- methods that may work better for those (i.e. men) who have traditionally become scientists. Innovative changes in teaching techniques (for example, computer aided interactive exercises, small group discussions) and curriculum (examples and topics that do not exclude women) may retain more women in the science pipeline. Incidentally, an evaluation of "female friendly" techniques found that they helped both women and men students (Sonnert, 1998b).
Writing in the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering (Vol. 6, Spring 2000), Steinpreis reports that it has been observed that women students receive less advising if there is a shortage of women professors. Moreover, students as well as faculty prefer same-sex advising relationships.
Improvements to science education and interventions that do not target women per se are more palatable to the general public and minimize the likelihood of the criticism that an unjustified advantage is being given to the "special interest group" known as women. It is imperative that there be genuinely equal career opportunities, not tokenism. The representation of women on decision-making bodies and the inclusion of women in the networking circles of men are additional necessary steps.
There must be equal access to office space and research resources. The criteria for awarding a research grant must be clear, objective, and gender-neutral. Women must be given salaries commensurate with qualifications and experience, as would be used when determining salaries of male colleagues. And finally, there must be an understanding and a tolerance of the fact that the career path of women may diverge from that of the traditional male scientist. A non-traditional path does not necessarily mean the work or performance is inferior.
Conclusion
Women remain a minority in the science disciplines. The "one size fits all" approach in science discourages a number of women and likely some men.
The Project Access study at Harvard documented gender differences in scientific style, something that is still little understood and research is just beginning. Women scientists were perceived as less aggressive, combative and self-promoting in the pursuit of career success, compared to the men scientists. These characteristics of the women scientists put them at a disadvantage in the highly competitive science environment and are not respected traits in this context. Together, these characteristics may make it easier to marginalize women and trivialize their contributions. Women also tend to choose relatively uncrowded "niche" fields for their scientific work where they can quietly go about the pursuit of science. This all too often leaves women in science a hidden and thus largely invisible, unacknowledged asset.
Can we let this dynamic continue?
Final Note
As a woman who holds a Ph.D. in a social science discipline, there are times when I feel a fraud when trying to represent or relate the experiences of women in the natural sciences: I can only imagine what it must be like at times (although I do have more science background than most realize, including university courses in calculus, chemistry, biology, physics, genetics, small animal surgery, etc.).
True, I was the only woman in my Masters program and I still carry the visual image of seeing the male professor disappearing with the male students into the men's room while continuing to discuss a research finding. I remember one particularly competitive fellow in my class saying, "Oh, it's because you're the woman that you have the highest grades". Did he really know what he was saying and if so, how belittling and disparaging this was to me?
I cannot recall having a woman as my professor in any of my graduate courses -- Masters or Ph.D. -- and I had only two women professors as an undergraduate.
I also have been in more than one faculty committee meeting where the chair recognized men -- any man, all men -- before he would give the floor to a woman -- any woman, all women, it seemed. The individual who did this the most consistently and blatantly in my own experience is, in fact, a main reason why I first moved into a senior administrator position. I let my name stand for the senior academic position at that institution in order to try to improve the climate for all faculty members.
REFERENCES
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