Women in Science: Getting women to stay in the field

In 2010, a man was six times more likely to work in a SET (Science, Engineering and Technology) occupation than a woman. That’s easily explained by girls being less interested than boys in science, one might reply.

If so, then how come in that same year girls made up half of GCSE students taking SET subjects at GCSE?And it’s not just GCSE level. 42 per cent of 18 year old girls take science at A level, and an impressive 60 per cent of undergraduate biology students in the UK are women.

Contrary to the popular myth, women dolove science as much as men. The problem is that women do not stay in science.

Take the world of academia. Less than ten per cent of professorships in the UK are held by women, and we are amongst the rapidly dwindling numbers of middle-career women scientists. Over the last decade or so we’ve witnessed many of our fabulous female peers leave science, whilst most of our male peers go from strength to strength.

At the annual conferences we’ve attended since we were PhD students, we grow increasingly saddened by the shifting sex ratio amongst our peer groups. Whilst male colleagues are enjoying promotions to Reader- and Professorships, the women are just disappearing. And yet the new influx of keen graduate students continues to be highly female biased, year after year.

We are hardly the first ones to raise the issue of the low proportion of women in science; the topic has been covered many times before. Shockingly, though, nothing has changed.

Yet increasing the proportion of women in science is of central interest to everyone, not just women. Relative to men, womentendto excel in communication skills, social skills, multi-tasking, creative thinking and empathy: these traits are key to boost scientific progress and take science to the next level, especially as science becomes more and more collaborative, integrative and innovative. In short, science needs women.

This afternoon, 12 amazing women that have made major contributions to UK science, ranging from geology to software development, psychology, conservation, astrophysics and chemistry will be taking to a soapbox on London’s South Bank. With noslide show, no jargon, no artifice, they will talk first-hand with the public about the fabulous science they do, why they chose a career in science and why this was one of the best choices they ever made.

Our Soapbox Science event is a small effort to make people aware of the issue surrounding women in science, and to encourage more young women to consider careers in science.

We hope it will spark action into righting the imbalance at institutional and cultural levels. But what needs to be done to increase women’s representation in science? Our suggestions includeensuring that mechanisms are put in place for career costs of parenthood to be more equally distributed among men and women. We need to reduce the impact of career breaks on future professional advancements. We want to increase the provision and job opportunities for relocating families and partners, and providetargeted support for women in their 30s who are typically in the transition between senior postdoc and independent research positions.

Finally, we need many more visible, accessible female role models such as our 12 Soapbox speakers – people who are willing to engage, share their experiences and push for change.

Our mission is to achieve change now, in time for the young women in science today. We want to be able to guarantee that today’s young women scientists will still wearing their white coats or yielding their field binoculars in 20 years’ time, but as professors and not field-assistants!

Dr Nathalie Petorelli and Dr Seirian Sumner are Research Fellows at the Institute of Zoology. Soapbox Science has been organised by the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Programme and The Zoological Society of London. www.zsl.org/soapboxscience

Recent Posts on Science & Technology

• 'Zero Dark 24': Is animal testing really necessary?
• Twitter launches Vine - a six second video sharing service, but is that really long enough?
• Bytesize Blog: Review of Blazewear heated gloves
• Video: Five tributes to Pong
• Social selling is the creepiest retail technology invention of all

• JaneJH

  Yeah? I know what you are about. I am not a feminist and have never seen an alien or a UFO.

  Genius male scientists do exist too, such as John Hutchison and his `Hutchinson Effect’. Far smarter than either you or I.

  As for evidence, Dr Judy Wood is forensic from top down, even using creative terminology to describe an unexplained (as yet) phenomenon so as not to bias or influence her scientific evidence through language. I would say that is the mark of a true scientist. Oh, by the way – she will probably never work again conventionally as a scientist. Many of us know how the fraternities work.

  On her website -

  “To acquire knowledge, one must study;but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.”- – Marilyn Vos Savant, Writer

• Guest

  Creative Terminology? Indeed. The trick of Theologians and New Agers. As for ‘never work again as a scientist’: Try questioning the evidence for man made ‘climate change’.

• Guest

  I have just ‘googled’ John Hutchinson and read for a fair time. Pure snake oil (his work for sale at $100 a throw and lots of distinguished historical scientist’s names thrown in for impact). Tellingly; not only can others not reproduce his results but HE is unable to reproduce them in front of others. This is not even Immanuel Velikovsky (a honest mistaken eccentric): It is pure Uri Geller. If ‘Dr* Judy Wood’ is of the same stamp she is a charlatan. If not, then I am sure that you mean well by making the comparison but you are not helping her.

  * ‘Dr’ of WHAT by the way and from WHERE? I am a Dr of Physics from the University of Wales (I don’t use the ‘title’ in correspondence, those who do use such ‘titles’ are as often as not confidence tricksters). Two years ago I was involved in a similar exchange to this with an Englishman styling himself ‘Dr’ who transired to be a ‘Dr of Science Fiction’ (I kid you not!) from an ex-polytechnic.