Nancy J. Lane
In Great Britain, although science flourishes and is increasingly recognised to underpin the economy of the nation, very few women are found to be involved in it at the highest levels. Indeed, the 1993 Government White Paper on Realising our Potential stated that women were the UK's most under-valued, and hence under-utilised, human resource in science, engineering and technology (SET). This brought to the attention of the scientific community a long simmering issue which has since been particularly hotly debated and widely discussed – why are there so few women in SET?
Evidence compiled by the Higher Education Staffing Agency (HESA) indicates that although there are almost equal numbers of young women and men undergraduates reading biological sciences in UK Higher Education (HE) Institutions (HEIs), the numbers of girls studying the physical, mathematical and computer sciences, not to mention engineering and technology, are much lower than the number of young men. This small percent of women is exacerbated at graduate level, and gradually worsens as one moves up to University Teaching Officers (UTOs) at assistant lecturer, then lecturer, senior lecturer (or reader) and professorial grades. The numbers of women are so decreased, that, at this final level, records indicate that as few as 3 to 4% of UK Professors in SET are women. The same situation prevails in senior positions in industry, although precise figures there are more different to obtain. Government funded research councils or ministerial departments fare no better, and the numbers of women who have been elected to Fellowships of the Royal Society, Engineering Academy or even the Institute of Biology, are well below 10%.
It is not as though this problem is unique to the UK. It emerges that data from Europe, the Antipodes, Canada and even the USA, indicate that far fewer women are successfully engaged in scientific enterprises than would have been expected given the increasing numbers of women in the workforce over the last several decades.
As a result of the 1993 White Paper, Central Government in the UK set up a working party which I was asked to chair and we produced a report, called The Rising Tide, in February 1994. In this we asked for a Government Development Unit to focus on women in SET, and such a Unit was ultimately set up in the Office of Science and Technology (OST) in December of 1994. This has served to facilitate activities geared to increasing the numbers of women in SET in all establishments.
Further actions followed, such as a Report from the House of Lords Select Committee enquiry on graduates in SET, which called for family-friendly policies in HE institutions; the setting up of a Concordat for contract research workers in SET (many of them women on short-term contracts); the recognition of 'academic' rather than chronological age by prestigious bodies such as the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust; the specific inclusion of women in SET as a target group by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP)'s Commission on University Career Opportunities (CUCO); retraining scholarships for women returning to the workforce and the publishing of a book specifically to inform girls and women interested in SET, called Cracking It, (organised by a team of women involved in the initiatives at OST and CUCO), but these have done little to change the position.
The setting up of the Athena Project by 1998, jointly sponsored by CUCO and OST and the funding councils of England (HEFCE), Scotland (SHEFC), Wales and Ireland, is a further attempt to persuade the women in the UK that careers in SET are interesting and likely to provide an attractive career structure. Involving, as the Project does, incentives and awards to encourage HEIs to improve their record as regards the numbers of women in SET, it targets the access, participation and progression of women, encouraging establishments to monitor their progress.
Opportunity 2000, the initiative launched by the then Prime Minister in the UK in 1991, to increase the quality and quantity of women in the UK workforce, began in 1998 for the first time to publish the annual results of its members' endeavours to improve themselves. Members include industry, banks, government institutions and universities among others. Then, and again this year, the data indicate that Universities are doing less well than any other member category, and that those Universities doing a relatively successful job in the UK, are all new Universities – that is, those that had been transformed from technical colleges into HEIs, or Universities, when government had wanted to produce a rapid increase in the percentage of young people enrolled in HE in the UK.
This fact, embarrassing for the older, long established Universities, may be revealing, in that it suggests that a male-dominated culture exists in the traditional centres of HE which may mitigate against women achieving seniority or even equality. Such an 'establishment' atmosphere does not prevail to the same extent in the 'new' UK Universities. Recent reports from MIT, a highly rated and time-honoured US university, indicates that women Professors in SET are as rare there and women in general as marginalised, as in the UK. These observations suggest that women are not being given genuine equality of opportunity in ancient American bodies either and that a 'glass ceiling' acts as a barrier there too. The Betts Report, published in late May, 1999, has shown that women in HEIs in Great Britain are also paid substantially less than men in comparable jobs right across the board. For the U.K. government to rectify this inequality would, it is speculated, cost around £400m per annum.
It may come as no surprise, then, to hear that Cambridge University, top of the ratings table in the HE sector in the UK, but low in the list of ratings as regards its record for women in SET, has this March set up a new initiative for women in SET, to improve their access, participation and promotion into and within, the University. The University is also concerned to look into the performance of women to determine whether there is any gender bias that might require them to outperform men in order to win research funding or appointments.
Is this male orientation of the world of science the sole answer? It seems unlikely. Discussions over the past years range over a variety of possibilities. Disregarding the old wives' tale that women might be genetically inferior to men as regards their intellectual capacity, which argument can by now be safely ignored, there seems to be an wide-spread acceptance of a stereotyping of scientists and engineers as stolidly male. This alas, is the case not just in Universities, but also in schools, where girls are not always encouraged in the same way as the boys, to enter enthusiastically into science activities. Since there is a dearth of senior women scientists in the public arena, girls have few role models with whom to identify, and fewer female mentors to encourage them. A further, deeply ingrained problem is that a lack of self-confidence is often a feature of young women aspiring to be scientists or engineers. School Careers Advisors are themselves often ill prepared to extol the virtues of a career in SET for girls, and primary school teachers giving the science lessons are all too frequently themselves unfamiliar with science, and therefore ill at ease in communicating its excitement to both girls and boys.
There is no doubt that, as in all other professions, women as the child-bearers carry the 'burden' of child care (as well as of ageing parental care), and unless family-friendly policies are in place in any given work place, the women employees are likely to be distracted from their career in SET, or indeed even perhaps taken away from it, for sometimes considerable periods of time. Returning to the laboratory then becomes an increasingly difficult task, with time away from the lab leading to unfamiliarity with novel technologies and current 'state of the art' equipment. Retraining is an expensive and time-consuming affair, and finding the necessary financial support and laboratory facilities may prove difficult.
If these are some of the reasons as to why women are not to be found in greater numbers in SET, what can be done to address the under-representation? Clearly action has to be taken at different levels, and schools, universities, and the workplace, seem the three major areas to consider. In the first of these, more interaction with working scientists, either in schools or by visits to, or work experience in, labs, would appear to be invaluable, as would more access for girls to female role models by videos, TV series or literature.
In HE, Government and industry, it is clear that it is imperative for equal opportunities and female-friendly policies to be in place to produce the highly desirable "level-playing field". Representation of women on decision-making bodies, such as national commissions and appointment committees is also vital. Equal pay for all and recognition of time out for child rearing (most effectively by using 'academic', rather than chronological, age) are also crucial. Inclusion of women in the networking circles of the men at the centre of power would be of further great benefit.
Yet all such activities, some already put into place in certain HEIs, seem thus far failing to lead to major change. Could it be that gender bias exists? Particularly perhaps in the minds of the highly influential men who run most SET Departments or Faculties? Recent studies in Sweden, published in Nature, suggest that this can be so as far as grants are concerned. The Swedish data showed that women need to be about 2"> FACE="WP TypographicSymbols,Courier New">? times as productive as men to gain the same research grant support, or comparable promotion, as their masculine counterparts. Preliminary research in the UK by the MRC showed that the research council did not seem, in the past at least, to have such a bias in their grant-giving activities. However, given that 'in-house' research runs a risk of being prejudiced, further studies are being made by outside bodies funded by the likes of the Wellcome Trust. Clearly, if it is found that gender bias does exist, policy changes and a strategic overhaul will need to be made.
So what then needs to be done? One might argue that women should network more between themselves, such as the Association for Women in SET (AWISE) tries to encourage in regional centres in the UK and in the USA. But although this leads to support groups and new friendships, such interaction is outside the main sources of power and influence – their male scientific colleagues. It could be said that women require greater self-confidence to project themselves upwards or put themselves forward for promotion to more senior positions in SET. But would this force them to become more aggressive, more masculinized and hence, perhaps, alienated from their other colleagues, both male and female? Does the scientific system require, therefore, a radical restructuring? The current hierarchical and competitive, even combative, environment of the laboratory may well be inappropriate to bring out the best talents of women, who generally flourish in co-operational mode when a spirit of team-working prevails.
Nancy Lane is a scientist in Cell Biology at Cambridge University where she lectures and does research at the Zoology Department. Married with two children, she was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday 1994 Honours List for services to science.