Worldwide, women hold few top jobs in academic research. At public research institutions and universities in the US and France, women occupy only about 14 percent of senior positions. That is about as good as it gets: the figure drops to 11 percent for Italy, 7 percent in Japan, and 5 percent in Germany and the Netherlands.
Moreover, the higher an institution's prestige, the lower the proportion of women: at Cambridge University, for example, 6 percent of professors are women, compared to the British national average of 8 percent. What is new and interesting is that nowadays no one -- deans, presidents of universities, national legislators -- is happy with this situation.
Germany and Japan are calling for 20 percent of full professorships to be held by women by 2005 and 2010, respectively. The French, too, have traded their faith in liberty, and fraternity, for the politics of parity. Since the EU established its "Women and Science Commission" in 1998 and began investing heavily in the project, member states have been scrambling for high scores in the women-in-science game.
Democratic societies also invest heavily in the stock of individual merit and the related principle that unfettered competition promotes excellence -- an ideal that often conflicts with government reforms to promote equality.
For example, the German government's proposal to create quotas for women in publicly funded scientific research has provoked widespread criticism -- familiar from "affirmative action" debates about racial equality in the US -- that hiring standards will be lowered. More charitably, critics charge that quotas devalue the accomplishments and undermine the authority of women who would have been hired without them. But has science ever been a meritocracy? Have its standards ever been gender neutral?
In 1910, the prestigious Academie des Sciences in Paris denied membership to Marie Curie -- the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice -- rather than violate its male-only tradition. The world-renowned German physicist, Lise Meitner, was relegated to the cellar of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in Berlin because no women, except putzfrauen, were allowed upstairs. Barriers today are often merely subtler: a recent study in Sweden, for example, documented that women must publish significantly more influential articles than men in order to receive funding from the Swedish Medical Research Council.
Opponents of quotas, indeed, tend to ignore how governments, universities, and research labs used quotas in the past -- to benefit men. The rise of democracy was a two-edged sword: while it established a male meritocracy, influential aristocratic women were removed from the public sphere into the home, and all were barred from the professions, ruling out careers in science.
They were not accepted at research universities until the late 19th century, and leading institutions maintained strict quotas on the admission of women until the 1930s. Even in the 1950s, advertisements for science positions in the US frequently stated: "women need not apply."
Fortunately, the US Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972, and similar statutes elsewhere in the world swept away formal legal barriers to women's advancement in science. But universities did evolve institutionally to fit men's lives.
To take just one glaring example, dozens of women at the University of Thbingen's developmental biology institute have had abortions because they feared that maternity would end their careers.
Worse still, science's institutional gender bias extends to scientific research itself, endangering women's lives and well-being. Large and influential US medical studies -- including major research on the effects of high blood pressure, smoking, and cholesterol on coronary and vascular disease -- have excluded female subjects altogether. In 1992, it was discovered that only half the drugs commonly used in the US had been analyzed for sex differences. It was subsequently shown that acetaminophen, an ingredient in many pain-relievers, is metabolized by females at only about 60 percent the rate for males. On what basis, then, were dosage recommendations for women previously formulated?
Incredibly, discovery of sex-biased research did not lead to the immediate redesign of key studies. Science's supposedly neutral mechanisms of self-correction were jolted into motion only by legislative action.
In 1986, the US National Institutes of Health issued guidelines requiring that a representative sample of female subjects be included in all relevant federally funded research. The guidelines were reissued in 1987 and again in 1990 -- to no avail. Ensuring appropriate inclusion of female subjects in basic medical research required a federal law, enacted only in 1993. Just as our ancestors were not afraid to legislate against women, so we should not be afraid to legislate for women. Undoing centuries of public policy aimed at keeping women out of science will require reforms designed by experts and approved by accountable officials. After all, science's research establishment cannot and should not be expected to solve on its own problems that are deeply cultural.
This does not let universities and research laboratories off the hook. On the contrary, they must remain open to the fundamental institutional and intellectual changes that the goal of increasing women's role in science implies.
Londa Schiebinger is Edwin E. Sparks professor of history of science at Pennsylvania State University.
copyright: Project syndicate
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