When it comes to science, it seems women are second-class citizens. They win few of the major prizes, they hold a small proportion of professorships, and they are poorly represented in the world's academies of sciences.
The first step towards tackling sexism in science is the collection of accurate statistics but, unfortunately, the statistics that are available are fragmentary. Using the available data, the European Technology Assessment Network on Women and Science (ETAN), in a new report, paints a bleak picture of the status of women in science.
Just 11 of the 457 Nobel science prizes have been given to women since the awards were established in 1901. In fact, there are only 10 female recipients as Marie Curie's features twice.
There are only three living female Nobel prize-winners in the sciences: Rita Levi Montalcini, a 90-year-old Italian neuro-biologist, Rosalyn Yalow, a 78-year-old American biophysicist and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, a 57-year-old German developmental biologist.
Several major prizes have never been given to a woman. These include the the Lemelson-MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) award, the Japan prize and the Jung prize for medicine. And women are only occasionally represented among the winners of other major prizes.
Whatever about top-level prizes, what about pay for women scientists? Recently, MIT in the US admitted they had given less space, resources and lower salaries to their 15 tenured female professors then to their 197 male counterparts. Once the issue was highlighted, MIT responded by raising salaries to equal men's, giving increased research money and space and awarding key committee seats to women.
At Cambridge University, in England, 64 per cent of teaching and research staff are on fixed-term contracts. Women make up 40 per cent of these but only 14 per cent of tenured staff. In a list ranking the proportion of women professors in 21 countries, Ireland comes near the bottom, in 15th place, with women comprising 4.9 per cent of full professorships and 6.5 per cent of associate professorships.
Rosaella Palomba, a social demographer and ETAN committee member, said that if the hypothetical situation where 50 per cent of professorships are held by women was to come about, 10,000 male professors would have to abdicate their positions in Italy. In France, more than 1,500 male professors of physics and chemistry would have to leave their seats, as would more than 1,300 male maths professors and 496 professors of medicine and biology.
Often, discrimination can be subtle and difficult to quantify. Christine Wenneras told the now apocryphal story of how she and Agnes Wold studied the criteria for obtaining research funding from the Swedish Medical Research Council. They identified three factors: scientific productivity, male gender and nepotism (as in affiliation with the evaluator/s). "We were able to quantify the male gender bonus as equivalent to 20 extra scientific papers in good journals," she said. Wenneras and Wold published their findings in Nature and the situation has since been addressed.
The committee chair Mary Osborn (a cell biologist) said women were not yet involved in shaping scientific policy in the EU. One measure of the influence of women in the Commission is the proportion of women in A grades (administrative positions). Only 9.5 per cent of A grades in DGXII (the Science, Research and Development Directorate) are held by women. At the highest level, there is no woman among the 14 individuals in grades A1 and A2 and only one out of the 40 in the A3 grade.
The ETAN report (a report of the European Commission), which was presented at a meeting in Brussels last week, notes that there is "ample evidence that gender is a significant determinant in the organisation and funding of science in the EU. This is deleterious for the EU's twin agenda of economic growth and competitive and the avoidance of social exclusion . . . time alone will not redress the situation. The position of women in science is now an urgent issue that needs a strategic policy approach at a number of levels."
ETAN calls for a new Directive to ensure that organisations publish systematic and reliable data, disaggregated by gender, for monitoring and evaluating their policies and practise. This Directive would ensure that legislation will be introduced in member states and would apply to all employers of 50 people or more and should cover employment and pay. These statistics should then be collected and published in a standardised form throughout the EU so that comparisons can be easily made between member States.
Other legal measures proposed include member-State law on gender balance on public bodies and member State law on access to public records, thus allowing citizens to test the "rigour of peer review in awards of grants and fellowships, and in appointments".
A series of mainstreaming and positive action programmes are also proposed. Gender mainstreaming should be a key priority of the Sixth Framework Programme, according to the report. ETAN also proposes a minimum of 30 per cent of both genders on key scientific committees in the EU and member states by 2002 and 40 per cent by 2005.
Science Policies in the European Union: promoting excellence through mainstreaming gender equality, a report from the ETAN Network on Women and Science, was published by the European Commission Research Directorate-General last Tuesday.
