To deprive ourselves of the intellectual potential represented by half of the population is simply appalling . . . the words of Edith Cresson, the member of the European Commission responsible for research, innovation, education, training and youth. Speaking at a recent seminar on women and science in Brussels, the former French prime minister is referring to the dearth of women in science, technology and engineering.
More than half of European higher education graduates are women but science and technology subjects are taken by only one quarter of female students. The seminar threw up a variety of fascinating but fragmented statistics.
For instance, in 1996, six per cent of European students in engineering were women while women represent barely five per cent of full professors of science in Ireland, Britain and the Netherlands.
In France, 24 per cent of physicists and 20 per cent of mathematicians are women. In the Scandinavian countries, where one-third of members of parliament are women, four per cent of university chairs are held by women in Denmark and Sweden and six per cent in Norway. However, detailed comparative statistics on gender issues and the sciences in EU member states are not readily available.
Cresson proposed the establishment by the European Commission of an "observatory" to establish statistics on the position of women and science. It will also evaluate the presence of women in European research projects and "sensitise politicians and members of the scientific community, within the Commission and member states to the equal opportunities issue."
Hilary Rose, professor emerita social policy at the University of Bradford, says "we know that the distribution of recognition and reward is skewed towards men nationally and internationally. We know that chairs, directorships of research institutions, the honours and the memberships of elite scientific societies are still predominantly awarded by men to other men. There are some welcome signs of change, not least in the gender of the commissioner of DG12."
Britain has a unit for women in the Office of Science and Technology and Sweden is appointing 30 women chairs in a research system were the professoriat has considerable influence. Rose, who presented a paper entitled Hypatia's Daughters: Why Are There So Few (Hypatia was a fifth century Alexandrine polymath) at the conference, says that the ultimate accolade of international scientific recognition, the Nobel Prize, has been awarded to 11 women scientists against 441 men.
She criticised the statistics available on women and science nationally and internationally because they only represent the gender breakdown of the academic labour market and there are no readily available statistics on the expanding industrial sector.
"Inadequate statistics carry their own highly negative message: the state or supra-state organisation does not see the problem as needing effective policy, administrative action and monitoring. Increased pressure for adequate gender statistics from the OECD as the oldest international provider of research policy data and from Eurostat is required."
Explanations for the lack of women in science fall into three general categories: historical and cultural explanations, psychological explanations and biological explanations. The psychological explanations can be crudely summed up as focusing on women's "deficiencies" in a blame-the-victim type scenario while biological explanations tend to "explain" women's "natural inferiority". Rose says "the available comparative statistics raise fascinating and difficult to answer questions concerning the relative presence and absence of women in the sciences." The former communist countries were significantly better than liberal democratic countries. Turkey's higher education figures for many years led the world, according to Rose, and her guess is that as the secular influence of Ataturk declines, there will be a deterioration. More Scandinavian women enter engineering than in the US or Britain and in Britain more women than men enter medical and veterinary schools.
Southern and usually Catholic countries are rather friendlier to women doing science than Northern Protestant countries. "Fundamentalist Islam is bad news for women's education generally and not least in the sciences, whereas traditionalist Islam was less hostile to women's scholarship."
Cresson's proposals, arising out of the conference, may go some way to redressing the lack of statistics and the lack of women scientists, technicians and engineers. The fifth research framework programme has been agreed, with an approved budget of ECU 14 billion. It is proposed that equal opportunities in the fifth framework can be accomplished by "facilitating information and participation of women in research projects; proposing mixed teams, particularly within evaluation panels; developing a network which will associate a large number of individuals and organisations active in the EU member states; focusing on research fields that interest women more directly and creating a women and science observatory at European level."
