A friend of mine have sent me this link almost a month ago, but it’s just now that I got to writing about this article in The Guardian.
I liked it a lot; the most important thing it is stressing – women are already doing science, so there may be less need at this point “to encourage girls to do science” The statistics show the actually in many areas of science there are more women that man!
Then the question comes – why in this case there are less women being published?
The New Scientist blames the “choice” to have a family. It points to a study in this month’s American Economic Review that shows women incurring earnings penalties in science if they have children. A recentHouse of Commons science and technology committee report goes into more detail, saying that scientific research careers are dominated by short-term contracts with poor job security – at the very time of life that women need to have children (if they want them). The female postdoctoral scientist faces difficult decisions while stuck on fixed-term contracts before tenure, with very little in the way of institutional support. Women should not have to choose between career and family, says the science magazine. But surely male scientists face similar choices?
Turns out – not. And what follows is something we all knew for a very long time. I remember how may years ago, when I was a consultant at the City of Chicago my single-mom-consultant co-worker used to say: I need stay at home wife!
Not a husband mind you :). So, here is how the article goes:
Apparently not. European social science research shows that male and female scientists often have different types of partners: male scientists more frequently have a stay-at-home partner looking after the children, while female scientists are more likely to have another scientist as a spouse. So male scientists might not need family-friendly working practices to have a successful career but female scientists do. Hence the loss of women in the “leaky pipeline” of scientific careers. And that is to say nothing of the research that found scientists perceived job applicants to be less competent when they had female names.
Sad, but true.
You know what it made me to think about? At ICDE and other conferences of the similar caliber the organizers usually report the submissions and accepted papers stats by countries and regions. Why not to report by gender? Some of my friends have already asked me looking at the pictures from the conference – why there were so little women?!
I understand, that it’s not always easy to derive gender from the name, and I also understand, that you can’t mandate people to submit their gender. But I was thinking that at least when you register for the conference, you might be ask – specify your gender (and you might “prefer not to answer”, there should be always be this option).
Ideally though I would love to see the stats on something like: how many women among the authors how may are the main authors, how many are registered for the conference, how many actually come and who is presenting:)
The World of Data 