This past weekend we celebrated an extremely important holiday. No, it wasn’t the Super Bowl; it was International Day of Women and Girls in Science, a globally recognized holiday day dedicated to acknowledging the gender gap in the sciences. Established by the United Nations (UN) in 2013, the goal is to create a dialogue between policymakers and female and nonbinary professionals in science, as well as advance science and technology by investing in research.
Despite the progress made in recent years, there is undoubtedly still a need for acknowledging how far we still need to go, for gender equality in the sciences. Currently, less than a third of researchers worldwide are women, and they make up less than 12% of members of national science academies. In industry, women tend to have shorter, lower-paid careers, and make up only a fifth of researchers in cutting-edge fields. Furthermore, a recent study from the American Physical Society, which broke down the percentage of doctorates in science earned year by year, found that while there was a significant improvement in the number of women earning advanced degrees in the last 20 years, women are still in the minority in most fields. Chemistry and earth science had the highest percentage of women earning PhDs, each at 40% in 2020, whereas physics and computer science had the lowest, at 21% and 23%, respectively. In physics in particular, men are predicted to outnumber women in the field for more than the next 100 years, until 2158, according to a study from Georgia Tech.
There are a few important initiatives in recent years that have increased the number of women in science, and the number of papers they are able to publish. More and more academic journals are moving towards ‘double blind’ reviews, meaning that the names, institutions, and locations of both the publishers and reviewers are kept secret. This ensures that the reputation of the author does not affect how the reviewer views the paper. This approach has been shown to increase the number of women, minorities, and early career scientists who are published, with one experiment using double blind reviews finding that it increases the percentage of women published by 8%. Furthermore, organizations like Girls Who Code, the Society of Women Engineers, and American Women in Science, have made great strides in connecting women in science and providing resources for success.
Rita Colwell, a microbiologist who worked from the 1960s to the 2000s and the first female director of the National Science Foundation, worked throughout her career to further women in science. As Coldwell points out, she published: “more than eight hundred scientific papers over the course of my career […] I had no choice: as a woman, I had to prove my findings twenty times over just to get them taken seriously […] you were always swimming against the current.” In her book A Lab of One’s Own: One Woman’s Personal Journey Through Sexsim in Science, Colwell goes on to say that “Despite having both the scientific smarts and the scientific degrees, women are still not getting ahead…It’s not for lack of interest…women have been actively excluded from science for decades.”
An important distinction Colwell makes is that she does not want women in science to be catered to, rather, she aspired to level the playing field. The point of science initiatives should not be to get women to ‘want to be’ scientists, countless women already do. The point should be to provide women with the same opportunities as their male counterparts. Colwell goes on to say in her book: “How can we achieve true equality within the scientific enterprise so that men and women can thrive and compete as equals?”
As International Day of Women and Girls in Science moves into its 9th year as a holiday, it is important to celebrate the progress that has been made, rather than dwell on the pessimistic statistics. Supporting the initiatives, organizations, and events that promote minorities in science and technology is key not only for equality but for the advancement of science as a whole.
