Nature demands action on the status of women in science planetwide
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2402
By Steven T. Corneliussen
‘Science remains institutionally sexist,’ begins Nature‘s summary blurb about a 7 March package of articles and commentaries. ‘Despite some progress, women scientists are still paid less, promoted less frequently, win fewer grants and are more likely to leave research than similarly qualified men.’
The special issue reviews the problems, many of them well known already, in some detail. But concerning the ‘dismaying extent’ of ‘this potential waste of human talent,’ as an editorial puts it, the special issue’s most important theme isn’t description or lamentation. It’s action.
The editorial, for example, ends by confronting the reader directly: ‘It’s time to get started. What are you waiting for?’ It reports how Nature itself has started:
Last November, Nature made a public challenge to itself by reporting that only 14% of its reviewers and 19% of its invited Comment and World View authors were female (see Nature 491, 495; 2012 ). We vowed to improve, and have asked our editors to try harder to engage with women. In time, we will make our progress public.
Pointing to the commentary ‘Sexist attitudes: Most of us are biased ’ by neurobiologist Jennifer Raymond, the editorial emphasizes action on the ‘insidious major problem’ of gender bias. To begin that commentary, Raymond indicts herself:
I have a bias against women in science. Please don’t hold this against me. I am a woman scientist, mentor and advocate for women in science, and an associate dean in my school’s Office of Diversity, with a budding field biologist as a daughter. Yet my performance on the Implicit Association Test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo ), which measures unconscious associations between concepts, revealed that I have a tendency to associate men with science and career, and women with liberal arts and family.
Raymond cites Jo Handelsman, a microbiologist who coauthored the 2012 scientific paper ‘Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students .’ It reported on what an article in Nature‘s women-in-science collection calls the ‘much-talked-about experiment’ that uncovered unconscious biases against women in faculty members of both sexes. Among colleagues planetwide Raymond finds ‘continued resistance to the idea that scientists, who take pride in being rational and objective, could be influenced by bias.’ But in fact ‘sufficient evidence’ now exists, she says, ‘to move us beyond the denial phase.’
Raymond adduces a counterintuitive personal anecdote to illustrate the bias problem’s insidiousness:
I tried to protect my own children from gender bias by doing things such as changing the gender of the characters in the children’s books I read to them to reverse gender stereotypes, and using the feminine pronoun wherever possible—'Look at the elephant; she is so strong.’ Despite these efforts, my daughter had a bias against women in leadership positions by the age of three. One day in the park, she announced, ‘I am the captain; I’m a girl captain,’ suggesting that she knew she had to violate a gender stereotype to assume that leadership position.
Raymond’s call to action comes at the end of her piece, where she, too, addresses the reader directly:
Denial that bias exists gives it more power. I am not proud of my unconscious bias against women in science. However, I know that I must first recognize my own bias to overcome it with deliberate practices that suppress its effects. I urge you to join me.
Handelsman herself speaks up for action in a brief commentary among a set appearing under the headline ‘Scientists of the world speak up for equality .’ She and her Yale colleague Corinne Moss-Racusin, a social psychologist, advocate gender-bias training for all scientists.
A call for imposed change resounds in the commentary ‘Research policy: Only wholesale reform will bring equality ’ by Brigitte Mühlenbruch, president of the European Platform of Women Scientists in Brussels, and Maren A. Jochimsen, managing director of the Essen College of Gender Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Because the problem is ‘systemic,’ they write, ‘changing the academic culture will take a mixture of voluntary commitments and binding regulations.’ For example:
Germany’s Programme for Women Professors, launched in 2007, is an exemplary blend of state prescription and voluntary institutional commitment. The programme funds universities for appointing women to the rank of full tenured professor. To be selected, a university must produce a coherent gender-equality plan. So far, the programme has led to more than 260 new female professorships at 109 universities.... It has also funded measures such as increasing the number of women in decision-making positions, providing career development for young female researchers and boosting the proportion of women in disciplines that have low female participation, such as engineering, computer science and physics.
Although voluntary targets can achieve much, binding regulations are the only way to effect change in some cases. Quotas, as contested as they are, are another way to counter the underrepresentation of women scientists in decision-making positions in research organizations. In the Nordic countries and Austria, for example, quotas of at least 40% of each gender are mandated in the administrative parts of research organizations.
But according to the headline on a commentary by the chair of the European Research Council’s gender-balance working group, quotas are questionable. The subhead says, ‘Measures to give women a fair chance in science should be based on evidence, warns Isabelle Vernos, or they could make matters worse.’ Quotas could overwork women scientists who are already stretched too far, Vernos says. She adds that evidence suggests that ‘a quota system for staffing evaluation panels will not lead to more grants for women.’
But Nature‘s editors, too, make a point about action via quotas. Their editorial says:
Some argue that setting a quota for women in leading academic positions such as professorships will result in mediocre female candidates being promoted. But there is a gap in reasoning here. Women and men are equally talented, so if men occupy a large majority of high-level posts, there must be an awful lot of mediocrity among their number. Is mediocrity more acceptable in men?
Mühlenbruch and Jochimsen call for action in another sector of academe. Academic publishers, they declare, ‘should publicize the number of female editors and reviewers.’ At that point in their piece, Nature inserts a suggestion to see the letter to the editor ‘Science editors: Evaluate gender equality in journals ’ by Shirin Heidari and Tom Babor, cochairs of the European Association of Science Editors’ gender policy committee. Heidari and Babor are surveying editors about scientific journals’ gender-equality policies.
The news report ‘Women in biotechnology: Barred from the boardroom ’ focuses on microbiologist Nancy Hopkins at MIT and on scientific advisory boards, or SABs. Hopkins is well known for her work on the issue of women in science. At the end, the piece highlights her view of the importance of taking action:
In academia, people used to believe that ‘time would fix things naturally,’ and that women would eventually move up the ranks, she says—and this attitude may still exist when it comes to academics moving into industry. ‘I think [the gender disparity in SABs] is what universities would look like if we hadn’t stopped, analyzed what was going on, and changed it. If you don’t put attention to it, it doesn’t happen.’
A call for action in China comes up in one of the brief commentaries under the headline ‘Scientists of the world speak up for equality. ’ Ling-An Wu of the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, observes:
In some ways, it is harder to be a woman in science in China today than it was 50 years ago, before the Cultural Revolution. Then, under the socialist system, men and women were given jobs based purely on their performance, so sex ratios were relatively fair. Now that more-capitalist principles infiltrate job placement, it has become more difficult for women to find work.
A related difficulty, she says, is discriminatory retirement rules, for which she advocates reform.
The problems span the planet, varying sometimes in particulars but never in essence. Nature‘s editors have read—and for that matter, have published—enough articles defining and lamenting. This time they’ve reached for something more.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.