Factors Affecting Women in Science

Differences might be a consequence of the government and not the genes

The other chief explanation for women's lower likelihood of success in science emphasizes deep-rooted differences in the outlook and goals of women and men.

women may be more likely than men to be socialized with general orientations and attitudes that reduce the drive toward professional success in any field. From early on, for example, girls tend to be discouraged from developing a strong motivation for achievement.

Moreover, in science education and careers, as well as in many areas of life, it has been shown that men and women interpret exactly the same behavior differently, and do so in ways that have important implications for their decisions and their own behavior.

particular attitudes about science may define it as a "male field" and thus encourage males and discourage females to participate. Many scientific textbooks, for instance, have until recently reinforced this notion by mentioning and picturing men almost exclusively and by showing the few women who do appear in gender-stereotypical roles.

deep-seated epistemological gender differences may make science not sufficiently compatible with women's ways of thinking. For instance, the current science is said to embody a masculine type of objectivity and rationality, and hence is "androcentric;" a female way of doing science would be more intuitive, synthetic and holistic.

It affects the way the brain is organized and how it functions

In many colleges, young women with scientific aspirations are viewed as odd; peer pressure and the desire to be popular may deter them from taking the first steps in science. Women's colleges may be more hospitable to women's science aspirations, at least according to some authors, whereas others have taken a skeptical view.

Women taking science courses may encounter a classroom atmosphere in which they face varying degrees of neglect or outright hostility from both their co-students and the faculty.

At this stage, too, women face a wide array of gender-specific obstacles, ranging from insufficient financial support and lack of research assistantships to more subtle factors, such as an aggressive and hostile milieu and a lack of encouragement as well as a lack of--or lower quality--mentoring.

During school age, especially during secondary school, females may also experience a subtle distancing from academic achievement in general and from achievement in the sciences in particular. Both teachers and peers appear to contribute to the process; there also seems to be an effect of female role-models--or lack thereof. Whereas girls and boys have been found to perform fairly evenly in the lower grades, a critical juncture occurs in middle school.

In a study of factors affecting the choice of majors, more women than men reported that a lack of encouragement from teachers or counselors had been a serious problem for them; women undergraduates in mathematics and physics at a major research university were significantly less likely than their male peers to report that a professor had taken a special interest in them as a student.

Gender segregation in workforce

In addition to this "horizontal" segregation into different subspecialties, a "vertical" segregation exists along the professional hierarchies in science. Women have been found to be scarcest in the top controlling for professional age. In sum, women have successfully increased their overall numbers in the science community, but significant patterns of gender-segregation have become prominent in the process.

Gender discrimination is perhaps the most evocative term to explain disparities in this context, but the concept is used in so many different ways that it needs clarification. Here we understand it to reflect the fairness of the process. In this view, discrimination denotes the use of criteria irrelevant to scientific competence, such as gender, in hiring and promotions.

In one review of research in this area, investigators discerned four major causes of discrimination: absence of information about an individual's scientific qualification, ambiguity of the evaluation standards for scientific performance, a low degree of consensus about the basic theories and methods in a discipline and secrecy about decision-making.

Due to sex differences in brain

as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers

Crucial processes distancing females from science careers starts in the family. Moreover, research has shown that differences in basic outlook--for instance, in achievement orientation and self-confidence--are to a considerable extent formed at an early stage and may influence men's and women's later career and life choices.

In addition to the science-internal difficulties during the journey through the pipeline, there may also be science-external problems that originate in the domestic sphere. Many married women scientists face the challenge of synchronizing the often conflicting demands of three clocks, their own career clock, their partner's career clock and their biological clock.

Boys were more fond of sciences and mathematics while girls were attracted to languages

The range of career options for young women has been widening, and science has to compete with an array of attractive professional career choices. Even though few professional fields are entirely free of gender-related obstacles, the balance of potential rewards and difficulties offered by non-science fields may appear preferable to many young women.

Within the long-standing social system of science that has been shaped by such definitions, women tend to remain marginal--in the "outer circle." They are more likely than men to drop out and less likely to join the influential clique of scientific powerbrokers. Even in the absence of any intentional exclusion, women's minority position in a male-dominated field by itself may carry with it the adverse effects of "tokenism."

Typically women scientists confronting this problem are in a less advantageous position than their husbands in terms of being sought after by potential employers--not only because of potential gender biases, but also because they are often younger and at an earlier career stage.

Moreover, if the husband's career prospects are considered more promising than the wife's, the couple may conclude that, as a unit, they will be better off by giving preference to the husband's career development.