As The Toast searches for its one true Gal Scientist, we will be running a ton of wonderful one-off pieces by female scientists of all shapes and sizes and fields and education levels, which we are sure you will enjoy. They’ll live here, so you can always find them. Most recently: On What All Those Genetic Tests Actually Mean.
Fictional role-models may help increase the number of female scientists
Women are massively under-represented in physics and other STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, at all levels, firstly I will explain why this matters, then I will discuss what we can do about it.
What’s the problem?
In the UK, female students made up about 20% of all those studying A-level physics (a qualification which is needed for most university level physics courses.) More worryingly, almost half of schools have no female students who continue to study physics after the age of 16. Similar problems are found all around the world with female physics students making up about 30% of physics classes in Norway, 34% of classes in New Zealand and 38% in the USA.
The number of girls choosing to study STEM subjects before university is slowly increasing but further problems appear higher up the career ladder. In the UK, for example, only about 6% of physics professors are female, with this figure rising to about 14% in the USA. The numbers are not so low in other academic fields, with women making up about 20% of all professors in the UK. This is particularly surprising considering that women are typically paid more when working in STEM fields with a decrease in the gender pay-gap compared to other jobs.
(Image credit: ESA)
Why does this matter?
You may wonder why this is a problem; women have been allowed to study science at university since the late 1800s and they should be free to study whatever they like, given they have the qualifications. Why should we be trying to force people into careers they don’t want?
Unfortunately it’s not that simple.
Since there is no biological reason why girls and women should be less capable or interested in science, the problem is almost certainly socially constructed. This is unfair – women and men should have equal rights and opportunities, both in law and in practise – and so we should aim to find out the cause so that we can address it.
If you do not accept this argument, then consider the fact that there is a shortage of skilled scientists and engineers both in the UK and USA which effects the economy. It is estimated that an increased participation of women in STEM fields in the UK could be worth about £2 billion ($3.3 billion.)
Gender diversity can also make for better science. There are many examples of progress being held back by the assumption that ‘male’ can be used as the default model. As well as costing time and money, this also puts women in danger. Female crash-test dummies were not mandatory in car safety evaluations until 2011, for example, and women are more likely to be injured in car crashes as a result.
Why is this happening and what can we do about it?
It is not surprising that there are fewer women than men in STEM fields. Historically women have faced tremendous discrimination, with many female scientists written out of history altogether. Women were not allowed to participate in university courses in the UK until 1876 and it was almost another century before Daphne Jackson became the first female physics professor in the UK.
The academic system was designed at a time when women were expected to be housewives and this has resulted in it being ill-suited for people that work part-time or have a partner that also works.
Careers in STEM fields usually begin with a number of short-term post-doctoral positions. This means moving to a new university, and often a new country, every few years from the ages of about 25-35. This is a crucial period of time when many people would like to get a mortgage and/or start a family.
If a female scientist has a partner that works in a non-academic field then their career may be prioritised since it offers more stability. If their partner is male and also has a career in academia, then they are more likely to be paid more and so it may be more sensible for the woman to give up work, especially if they want children. This is because short term contracts may affect their entitlement to maternity leave and if they have a child between post-doc positions this may mean moving house just after having a baby, which would be stressful for anyone. A person’s academic achievements are also mainly judged by their publication history, without taking into account the fact that some people have time off or work part-time. For all of these reasons, women are more likely to give up their job than men are in these situations.
Despite the fact that both women and men have expressed an interest in changing the current system, this problem may be difficult to resolve. A UK government report issued earlier this year recommends that the government works with the higher education sector to review the situation but change may be slow due to both tradition and the competitive nature of science.
There is also strong evidence that both men and women have an unconscious bias against female scientists. Studies in both the UK and USA showed that when given identical applications for jobs in STEM fields with randomly assigned male and female names, both men and women rated the male applicants as more competent and offered them higher starting salaries. The participants were not aware of their bias until it was pointed out to them.
Results from the USA study
(Image credit: Moss-Racusin et al.)
It is no wonder that girls and women lack confidence if their work is always judged to be less competent than their male colleagues. This may be why girls are over twice as likely to study physics at A-level if they went to an all girls’ school and why women in STEM fields are less likely to apply for funding, are more likely to request smaller amounts and wait longer after rejection before applying again.
The disparity between female professors of STEM subjects and female professors in other fields may be due to the fact that scientists are trained to be objective and so are less receptive to the idea that they are acting illogically.
This problem may be reduced by making scientists aware of their own bias. The UK government report recommends that diversity and equality training should be offered to all STEM students and should be mandatory for all members of funding, recruitment and promotion panels. This would certainly be a step forward, although I would suggest that this training also be mandatory for teachers and lecturers.
This problem may also be mitigated by increasing the number of female scientists people are exposed to in fiction and by making people aware of important real-life female scientists of differing races, sexualities and lifestyles. If their work is discussed in the context of the discrimination they faced, it may make both girls and boys more aware of the fact that the lack of famous female scientists has nothing to do with ability and everything to do with discrimination.
Tags: academia, feminism, gal science, helen klus, politics, science
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YES YES YES
I tell everyone about that PNAS (hehe, penis) study because most of my peers (phd engineers) still do not believe that there is bias against women in science and academia. It is infuriating. Most journals allow reviewers to see the names of the authors of the paper they are reviewing. I would also like to see statistics on students/postdocs/profs who are married and the 1) career of their spouses, 2) percentage of housework each does, and 3) how this depends on gender.
I know I haven’t grown up because every. single. time. I encounter an article published in PNAS, i giggle :tee hee hee, penis: in my head, and have to suppress a little grin.
This rule applies even when talking to senior postdocs/my PI. I’m hopeless.
Also, I hate that I still sometimes assume a scientist is male. My advisor assumes every reviewer is a dude.
Uugh the other day my (female) advisor was emailing a guy at another university about a protocol and the exchange went something like:
Advisor: “I am cc’ing my postdoc Molly who will be working on this”
(American!) guy: “Tell him to email me directly about any questions.”
Ooooh! Did you email him questions like, How did you know I morphed into a dude before I knew? or, Did you recently emerge from a male-only underground cave?
I sincerely hope you land the tenure of your choice.
After two years of fighting for more girls in game development||STEM||code – which I mainly do ’cause I went to girl’s school and had the network to get started in it myself – I’m exhausted even looking at the statistics, and have turned into the person who will just flatly hire the woman, given any choice at all.
Oh look, a relevant toy company ad that came out today! (: http://time.com/53532/watch-new-goldieblox-ad-is-…
Can we talk about Legos too? They came out with another “girl” line like last year and of the initial 4ish sets one was a girl with a “lab.” A pastel lab, but it still had a microscope, tool bench, etc. Now I’d say more than half of the sets involve cute animals. The remainder are salons, bakeries, and swimming pools. WTF Lego?
My sister and I both have doctorates, hers in a relatively female-dominated and mine in a fairly male-dominated discipline. After finishing her doctorate, she was offered a postdoc at Harvard but ultimately turned it down because she looked around her profession and almost all the women the top level were single and/or childless workaholics and she was getting married and also wanted to have a family. Thus, she took a position that was a few steps down from Harvard in order to mitigate the extreme pressure/competitiveness. I opted out of the R1 (hardcore research) schools for similar reasons. I knew only two faculty in my department who had even remotely functional personal/family lives. There was one prof who would famously start each course by saying: “I’m divorced but it’s not because I’m a workaholic.” (He was a workaholic in addition to being a gigantic a-hole.)
It’s just such a messed up situation. A woman in my former department had heard that the tenure clock might be delayed if a woman took maternity leave and inquired about it privately. Together, the department head and dean (both women) made a point of announcing loudly and obnoxiously at a school-wide meeting that this was a very idiotic thing to even consider might be true.
THIS. The majority of high-salary/high-prestige jobs were constructed around the concept that all family options would be handled by “someone else”, allowing complete devotion of the professional. People who then built their lives around the concept are now reluctant to change because it was so challenging for them and they feel like everyone should work as hard to “deserve it”. I unfortunately think it will only really change when members of The Patriarchy decide they value family as well and refuse to conform, because otherwise it can/is easily dismissed as “reverse discrimination”
Kind of like how the Supreme Court first recognized a gender discrimination case WHEN IT AFFECTED A WHITE MAN #OrWeCould… #BurnEverythingToTheGround
This is totally true for a couple very close and dear to us. He is professor emeritus at a Very Good School. Despite having a PhD in chemistry, she walked away from a career in science to nurse his mother until she passed away, to raise their child, and to look after the house. The grand plan was that he would retire and they would travel the world together and enjoy retirement together in other ways. Within a year or so of his retirement, her health deteriorated massively. She’s now basically immobile. He’s not an emotional guy, but when we visited them recently, he waited until we were alone and grabbed me urgently by the arm and begged me not to delay having fun, visiting and traveling, because you never now when your health will fail you. To be fair to him, he was not complaining. I think he feels tremendous guilt. He cares for her in every way and without complaint. But I don’t think it makes the story any less tragic.
tl;dr: patriarchy is teh suxxors
Gender bias is definitely a huge issue, but one aspect of the gap that I think is underdiscussed is that, in order to succeed in high-level academia (& in STEM fields especially), you kind of have to be pretty monomaniacal. Like, “I AM TOTALLY OKAY WITH ONLY THINKING ABOUT MY RESEARCH TOPIC AND NOTHING ELSE FOR 20 YEARS BECAUSE SCIENCE” monomaniacal, and it seems like that lifestyle appeals to a certain type of person, and that type of person is more likely to be male (see also: hedge fund managers who have a similar insane time commitment/hyperfocus except BECAUSE MONEY). Maybe I am being just as guilty of shitty stereotyping, here! but based on conversations I’ve had with both male & female friends of varying Ishmael/Ahab phenotypes it seems pretty legit.
I’m really excited to be recognized for my monomania someday. I don’t care about having kids, I never expected a woman to be remotely interested in keeping me around for more than a few years at a time, I _really_ like working _a lot_, but… I’m not 25 any more, and I sure as shit am not seeing the money out of it. It’s really frustrating to have these supposedly AWESOME FOR WORK qualities and … still just… not interview well, or whatever.
But is that monomania truly NEEDED, or is it just a symptom of a lopsided, flawed system? The article seems to make the case for the latter, and I tend to agree. Obviously, if acting like an Ishmael is rewarded, you’re going to get lots of them. I’m not yet convinced that type of monomania is a requirement, but more of a characteristic that is currently valued, whether implicitly or explicitly.
Haha excellent point, that a more male-coded trait becomes the valued ideal (I think academic monomania is actually terrible & counterproductive when thinking broadly/long-term, but right now the people I see succeeding at top research institutions are exactly like that!) ~THE COMMENT WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE SYSTEM~
Right: prizing that trait both presents a selection bias; and I think this also fails to sufficiently ask WHY men are more likely to be hyperfocused on their research work.
I kind of think there’s a need for a big lump of arrogance (at least in my field). You have to be ok with potentially boring everyone to death (except they don’t think of it that way), and you need that inherent belief that You Are Right, in order to go for those mega competitive grants etc. But women who exhibit these behaviours get a different rep from the men, I think.
Up until about 5 years ago I would usually say “I’m bad at math.” I have only recently come to realize that that isn’t true. I got high Bs and low As in junior high and high school (except a total flameout in Algebra 1, but I totally redeemed myself in Algebra II). I got an A in the one math course (stats) that I took in college. I have always thought that since I’m not good at mental math, that means that I must not be good at math, period. I have to write it out if I’m carrying numbers or doing long division, but hell, I can do it.
I wonder at what point I picked up the idea that being “good at math” meant that I had to have above a 95 average and be able to juggle formulae in my head. I never really enjoyed math all that much, but I honestly don’t know whether my not liking math came from feeling like I wasn’t good at it. I also wonder if a guy who generally averaged around a 92 in math would feel like he wasn’t very good at it.
My general understanding is that a lot of this happens in early school years. Years ago, Ontario undertook a program to make math more attractive to girls in elementary school. I don’t know that they rewrote a lot of the curriculum, but they definitely promoted it as something that girls could do and be good at. Within a short period of time, the once-large performance gap between girls and boys on standardized tests began to close. Several years ago, the girls’ scores were indistinguishable from the boys’ and on a trajectory to surpass them.
Requisite anecdote: I had a substitute teacher in third grade who told a female classmate next to me, ‘don’t worry about that advanced math worksheet — when you grow up you’ll have a husband who can handle the numbers for you.’
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t explicitly remember this except for my mom’s extreme outrage, but if my mom hadn’t immediately set out to make sure I knew that wasn’t true, it might have sunk in.
(for context, this was 1995.)
I’d always thought of myself as bad at math for the same reason– the whole mental math thing. My mother has a math degree though, so I guess I might have been comparing myself to her too.
Anyways, I took a condensed 5 week long College Algebra class a couple of summers ago and at the end the instructor asked me to consider a math minor along with my english major. Everything I’d thought about my math performance was turned on it’s head!
I do research on computer science education and in that field, it’s definitely true that women drop out of the major (in undergrad) with higher grades than men who stay. don’t know if it’s true in other STEM areas, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
That’s fascinating – do you have access to any links or articles that delve into this further?
Yeah let me poke around in my stuff, I’m sure I can find it. Whatever it is will probably be behind a paywall but I can send you a PDF if you’re interested!
So here are a few articles, let me know if you want any of them you don’t have access to.
Beyer, S. Gender differences in the accuracy of self-evaluations of performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59, 5, 960-970.
Beyer, S., Rynes, K., and Haller, S. Deterrents to women taking computer science courses. Technology and Society Magazine 23, 1 (2004), 21-28.
Cohoon, J.M. Toward improving female retention in the computer science major. Association for Computing Machinery 44, 5 (2001), 108-114.
And if you’re interested enough to read a book, Margolis & Fisher’s Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing is supposed to be great although I haven’t gotten around to reading it myself. There’s also an edited volume from MIT Press called Women and information technology: Research on under-representation.
Hope that’s useful!
Thanks so much! The book looks really interesting.
Yeah it’s supposed to be awesome!
This is interesting. I mean, I’m terrible at arithmetic in my head (I can’t keep the first number in my head by the time I get to the second or third one), but that’s a memory issue, not a limit on my reasoning ability. And really no one does complex calculus in their heads.
Funny story:
I always thought I was bad at math, until I had a female math teacher for trig in high school. I, too, averaged a high B/low A in math classes, but in her class I had a strong 96 average. This teacher also scolded me when she heard me say I was bad at math, and pushed/encouraged me throughout the academic year.
I left trig feeling like a math whiz, until of course I moved on to pre-calc with a male teacher and went right back to my B-average.
The moral of this story: MORE FEMALE MATH TEACHERS IN HIGH SCHOOL, PLEASE. Ones who understand that young women need to be encouraged and maybe even pushed a little.
It’s amazing how the issues compound each other. In junior and senior high school, I watched as all of my girl friends but one slowly dropped out of advanced math courses – not for lack of academic ability, as far as I could tell. They just…. stopped. So there were literally only two of us in my graduating class (very small school, obv) who even remotely had a shot at getting into a STEM-type degree program. And we both had a mountain of opportunities, so there was little incentive to go after a degree that offered the type of post-graduation instability which is so aptly described in this piece.
I’m fascinated by the concept of a Trailing Spouse (where the assumption is that the partner who picks up and moves around the country after the Academic is more often female). I was speaking with 4 female scientists lately, and they were introducing themselves by saying how they ended up in this city. 3 out of 4 said they moved here for their husbands’ jobs. 2 of the 4 had non-scientist husbands. It was a tiny sample size, but I was surprised that the Academics still had to trail their (often) non-Academic spouses.
I worked in a lab run by an academic couple where the husband had followed, and was working for, his professor wife. He was so outraged by the fact that he was taking a career hit to follow her, he kept talking about applying at other universities hours away and visiting her and their two children on the weekends (because of course she would keep the kids). The weirdest part was that the other faculty seemed to agree that it was a terrible thing that he had to endure, when I’m sure lots of them had moved their female partners around for positions. It was a fascinating view into gender politics in academia.
UGH. That’s gross. What a jerk.
Have you seen “Particle Fever”, the documentary? I was very glad to see that two of the main physicists the film followed were women, and realized in a dramatization of the same events, the cast would be all men (unless we’re talking about a James Bond film, of course).
I am doing a master’s right now and have picked up a newfound love for statistics, and have thought briefly about pursuing a PhD. I’m introverted and enjoying spending time working out problems, so I think it would fit my personality better than some office jobs. I just don’t want the lifestyle of an academic, though. I don’t want to be broke and moving around through my childbearing years, I don’t want to lack control over where I live and work. So I think I’ll just stop with my professional master’s and Be a Person Who Does Stats Things in an Office instead of a statistician.
If you’re doing stats, my guess would be that there could be plenty of non-academic research positions available for a PhD holding person – although those can also probably affect your options re living and working as well. But I bet you can probably get a good job with a masters too. Wish I loved stats as much as I love qualitative research! Qual takes too long for most non-academic organizations.
“…there is a shortage of skilled scientists and engineers both in the UK and USA which effects the economy.”
This is the only part of this article that I really disagree with. It is a really pervasive and consistent narrative, but it’s not really borne out by the evidence. If this were true, physical scientists would not be facing career bottlenecks and relatively high risk of unemployment upon graduation at all degree levels, and both globally and in most western countries, they are. That’s not just a product of the recent recession, either: it’s a long-term trend where more people are going for and earning advanced physical/natural science degrees without a significant increase in the demands of the job market. There is no lack of qualified scientists to hire for almost any job I’m aware of; in fact, applicant pools are usually extremely competitive, even in industries that have historically hired the largest numbers of scientists.
As someone who is job hunting: you speak the truth.
Yeah, to me this seems to be specific areas (ie, computer security and programming jobs) and not ‘all science and STEM jobs ever’ the way it’s often portrayed in the media.
I think it would be more accurate to say that there is a shortage of funding that leads to a shortage of positions, which in turn limits the number of STEM graduates working in-field, and that LOOKS like a shortage to anyone who cares about science and thinks we need moar of it being done.
I’m doing a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, and am very happy to be working in the lab of a professor who is very committed to improving the gender equality situation in our (very male-dominated, old-boy’s clubbish) field, and it’s been awesome. But when I graduate? I’m not optimistic about my chances of getting a good postdoc. I sometimes wish I had published as “X. Lastname” rather than as “${Identifiably_Female_Firstname} Lastname”, but of course it is too late for that now! I’ve heard that medical journals now use a double-blind peer review system, where the reviewers are not told the names and institutional affiliations of the authors of the paper, and that when they made the switch to this system, papers authored by women started somehow magically getting much more positive reviews. I wish my field would do the same.
Please someone also talk about the lack of mentorship! One of the few things I really strongly agree with Sheryl Sandberg about is the harmful lack of male mentors for many young women. When there are so few female professors, male professors have to help out some of the female students too! Having a mentor can so easily make or break a career and the gender divisions can be particularly strong.
After all, the two-body problem of married academics is only a problem if both partners can find jobs in their fields.
Can somebody talk about the number of female scientists in Russia/the former Soviet Union?????? Because I feel that is very relevant to this discussion.