Science: The last frontier for women's movement

Daniel Louvard does not believe in affirmative action. Time and again, the scientists in his Left Bank cancer laboratory have urged him to recruit with gender diversity in mind. But Louvard, research director at the Institut Curie and one of France’s top biochemists, just keeps hiring more women.

“I take the best candidates, period,” Louvard said. There are 21 women and 4 men on his team. The quiet revolution that has seen women across the developed world catch up with men in the work force and in education has also touched science, that most stubbornly male bastion.

Last year, three women received Nobel prizes in the sciences, a record for any year. Women now earn 42 per cent of the science degrees in the 30 countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development; in the life sciences, such as biology and medicine, more than 6 out of 10 graduates are women.

Younger women, too, are sticking more with science after graduating: In the European Union, the number of women researchers is growing at a rate nearly twice that of their male counterparts, giving rise to what some have dubbed a fledgling ‘old girls network.’

But if progress has been dramatic since the two-time Nobel physicist Marie Curie was barred from France’s science academy a century ago, it has been slower than in other parts of society — and much less uniform.

In computer science, for example, the percentage of female graduates from American universities peaked in the mid-1980s at more than 40 per cent and has since dropped to half that, said Sue Rosser, a scholar who has written extensively on women in science. In electrical and mechanical engineering, enrollment percentages remain in the single digits.

The number of women who are full science professors at elite universities in the US has been stuck at 10 per cent for the past half century. Throughout the world, only a handful of women preside over a national science academy. Women have been awarded only 16 of the 540 Nobels in science.

The tug-of-war between encouraging numbers and depressing details is in many ways the story of the advancement of women overall. Women get more degrees and score higher grades than men in industrialised countries. But they are still paid less and are more likely to work part time. Only 18 per cent of tenured professors in the 27 countries of the European Union are women. And the big money in science these days is in computers and engineering — the two fields with the fewest women.

In the 21st century, perhaps more than ever before, there will be a premium on scientific and technological knowledge. Science, in effect, will be the last frontier for the women’s movement. With humanity poised to tackle pressing challenges — from climate change to complex illness to the fallout from the digital revolution — shortages of people with the right skill sets loom in many countries.

Therein lie both opportunity and risk for women: In the years to come, the people who master the sciences will change the world — and most likely command the big paychecks. Many obstacles women face in general are starkly crystallised in scientific and technological professions. Balancing a career with family is particularly tricky when the tenure clock competes with the biological clock or an engineering post requires long stints on an offshore oil rig.

The divide

The notion that intellectual ability in men has a greater variability first arose in 1894 to explain why there were more men in mental hospitals and fewer women geniuses. It has been discredited by empirical studies, most recently in June, by Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz of the University of Wisconsin, who showed that in some countries there is no difference between men and women at the highest level. Where a difference remains, it is shrinking and correlated with gender inequality, suggesting that cultural, rather than intrinsic, factors are at play.

In India, women scientists have complained that even in science textbooks women are depicted in traditional roles. And in the US, some psychologists say that the surge in computer games marketed to boys is one explanation for the widening gap in computer sciences since the 1980s. History shows that good science alone rarely has helped women get the credit they deserved.

Take Lise Meitner, an Austrian-born physicist who was instrumental in discovering nuclear fission with Otto Hahn but who did not share his 1944 Nobel Prize for it. Or Hedy Lamarr, another Austrian, who is remembered for the nude scenes in the notorious 1933 film ‘Ecstasy’ and her Hollywood career rather than for developing a technology, with George Antheil, that became the basis for mobile telephony.

It was not until 1967 that the street outside Louvard’s office window in the Latin Quarter, named Rue Pierre Curie after Marie Curie’s physicist husband, was renamed Rue Pierre et Marie Curie. And it was not until 1995 that Marie Curie’s body was moved to the Panthéon, the monument to the French Republic’s greatest minds. The inscription above the entrance still reads: “To the Great Men.”

In a way, Pierre and Marie Curie were trailblazers. If she is still an inspiration for women scientists, it is not only because she received two Nobel prizes, one in physics and one in chemistry. She also had a longtime marriage and two successful daughters. Pierre, with whom she discovered radioactivity, refused to accept the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics that was offered to him and Henri Becquerel unless his wife shared it.

Recently, two shifts have begun to focus the thinking of politicians and companies: shortages of engineers and other highly qualified labour in the West, and rising numbers of science and technology graduates in countries like China and India, just as the economic balance of power is shifting eastward.

By 2017, a shortfall of 2,00,000 engineers is expected in Germany, and in Britain more than half a million skilled workers will be needed to satisfy the demands of the green energy, aerospace and transport industries. The United States, meanwhile, finds itself in the bottom third of the OECD international rankings of mathematical and scientific aptitude at high school level.

At the same time, developing countries have increased their share of the global researcher pool, from 30 per cent in 2002 to 38 per cent in 2007, according to Unesco. The Obama administration has made it a priority to get more women into science. Across the developed world, academia and industry are trying, together or individually, to lure women into technical professions with mentoring programmes, science camps and child care.

“This talent pool is extremely important to us,” said Kerstin Wagner, head of talent recruiting for the German electronics giant Siemens. Despite the economic slump, Siemens is having trouble filling some 600 engineering jobs in the US and more than 1,200 engineering jobs in Germany.

“Everything is in place for more women to succeed in science; now the different pieces just have to come together,” said  Dautresme at the L’Oréal Foundation. “I believe this century will see a lot more women become leaders in science.”