Gender and science

Abstract

Despite some progress in recent years, achieving gender equality in scientific research remains an important challenge for policy‐makers and the scientific community at large. Concordantly, the promotion of women at all levels of academic research has become a priority on the science agendas of many national and international political institutions. Although the number of female scientists has increased, true gender equality has not been achieved. Overall, women are still under‐represented in many research fields, generally receive lower salaries, are less likely to have full‐time contracts and have fewer opportunities to gain influential positions than their male colleagues. Together with other policy‐making institutions, EU member states and other stakeholders, the European Commission (EC; Brussels, Belgium) promotes research into the specific problems that female scientists face and suggests measures to increase the participation of women in academic science. By introducing the Gender Action Plans (GAPs) within the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the EC is pursuing two objectives: to promote the participation of female scientists in FP activities, and to ensure that gender issues are properly addressed in EC‐funded research. GAPs include specific actions to gather gender‐related statistical data about the workforce within the research networks and to monitor progress towards gender balance. A vast amount of statistical data relating to gender issues in research shows that women are still suffering from two types of discrimination: horizontal segregation—women are significantly represented only in certain fields, notably biology and medicine—and vertical discrimination, which is commonly described as the ‘glass ceiling’ or ‘leaky pipeline’ (EC, 2006). Although women and men begin their scientific careers in fairly equal numbers across Europe, the ratio of women to men gradually decreases higher up the career ladder. Although the statistics highlight the problem, the data need to be refined with comprehensive studies (Ledin et al , 2007, Martinez et …