The year before, PLOS ONE had been forced to apologise after one of its own peer reviewers suggested that two female evolutionary geneticists who had authored a paper should add one or two male co-authors. ‘Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit faster than female doctoral students,’ wrote the reviewer.
Another problem, the extent of which is only now being laid bare, is sexual harassment. In 2015 virus researcher Michael Katze was banned from entering the laboratory he headed at the University of Washington following a string of serious complaints, which included the sexual harassment of at least two employees. BuzzFeed News (which Katze tried to sue to block the release of documents) ran a lengthy account of the subsequent investigation, revealing that he had hired one employee ‘on the implicit condition that she submit to his sexual demands’.
His case wasn’t an exception. In 2016, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena suspended a professor of theoretical astrophysics, Christian Ott, for sexually harassing students. The same year, two female students at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a legal complaint against assistant professor Blake Wentworth, who they claimed had sexually harassed them repeatedly, including inappropriate touching. This was not long after a prominent astronomer at the same university, Geoff Marcy, was found guilty of sexually harassing women over many years.
So here, in all the statistics on housework, pregnancy, childcare, gender bias and harassment, we have some explanations for why there are so few women at the top in science and engineering. Rather than falling into Lawrence Summers’ tantalising trap of assuming the world looks this way because it’s the natural order of things, take a step back. The reason for gender imbalance in the sciences is at least partly that women face a web of pressures throughout their lives which men often don’t face.
As bleak as the picture is in some places and some fields, the statistics also reveal exceptions. In certain subjects, women outnumber men both at the university level and in the workplace. There tend to be more women than men studying the life sciences and psychology. And in some regions, women are much better represented in science overall, suggesting that culture is also at play. In Bolivia, women account for 63 per cent of all scientific researchers. In Central Asia they are almost half. In India, where my family originate from (my dad studied engineering there), women make up a third of all students on engineering courses. In Iran, similarly, there are high proportions of female scientists and engineers. If women were truly less capable of doing science than men, we wouldn’t see these variations – proving again that the story is more complicated than it appears.
As with all stories, it helps to go back to the start. Since its very earliest days, science has treated women as the intellectual inferiors of men.
‘For nearly three hundred years, the only permanent female presence at the Royal Society was a skeleton preserved in the society’s anatomical collection,’ writes Londa Schiebinger, professor of the history of science at Stanford University and author of The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science.
The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660 and one of the oldest scientific institutions in the world, failed to elect a woman to full membership until 1945. It took until the middle of the twentieth century, too, for the prestigious scientific academies of Paris and Berlin to elect their first women members. These European academies were the birthplaces of modern science. Founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were forums for scientists to come together and share ideas. Later, they bestowed honours, including membership. These days they also offer governments advice on science policy. Yet for the vast majority of their history, they excluded women as a matter of course.
Things got worse before they got better. In the early days, when science was a pastime for enthusiastic amateurs, women had some access to it at least, even if only by marrying wealthy scientists and having the chance to work with them in their own laboratories. But by the end of the nineteenth century, science had transformed into something more serious, with its own set of rules and official bodies. Women then found themselves almost completely pushed out, says Miami University historian Kimberly Hamlin: ‘The sexism of science coincided with the professionalisation of science. Women increasingly had less and less access.’
This discrimination didn’t just happen high up in the scientific pecking order. It was unusual for women even to be allowed into universities or granted degrees until the twentieth century. ‘From their beginnings European universities were, in principle, closed to women,’ writes Londa Schiebinger. They were designed to prepare men for careers in theology, law, government and medicine, which women were barred from entering. Doctors argued that the mental strains of higher education might divert energy away from a woman’s reproductive system, harming her fertility.
It was also thought that merely having women around might disrupt the serious intellectual work of men. The celibate male tradition of medieval monasteries continued at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge until the late nineteenth century. Professors weren’t allowed to marry. Cambridge would wait until 1947 to award degrees to women on the same basis as men. Similarly, Harvard Medical School refused to admit women until 1945. The first woman had applied for a place almost a century earlier.
This doesn’t mean that female scientists didn’t exist. They did. Many even succeeded against the odds. But they were often treated as outsiders. The most famous example is Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, but nevertheless barred from becoming a member of France’s Academy of Sciences in 1911 because she was a woman.
There are others who are less well-known. At the start of the twentieth century American biologist Nettie Maria Stevens played a crucial part in identifying the chromosomes that determine sex, but her scientific contributions have been largely ignored by history. When the German mathematician Emmy Noether was put forward for a faculty position at the University of Göttingen during the First World War, one professor complained, ‘What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?’ Noether lectured unofficially for the next four years, under a male colleague’s name and without pay. After her death Albert Einstein described her in the New York Times as ‘the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began’.
Even by the Second World War, when more universities were opening up to female students and faculty, they continued to be treated as second-class citizens. In 1944 the physicist Lise Meitner failed to win a Nobel Prize despite her vital contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission. Her life story is a lesson in persistence. At the time when she was growing up in Austria, girls weren’t educated beyond the age of fourteen. Meitner was privately tutored so she could pursue her passion for physics. When she finally secured a research position at the University of Berlin, she was given a small basement room and no salary. She wasn’t allowed to climb the stairs to the levels where the male scientists worked.
There are others who, like Meitner, have been denied the recognition they deserve. Rosalind Franklin’s enormous part in decoding the structure of DNA was all but ignored when James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize after her death in 1962. And as recently as 1974 the Nobel for the discovery of pulsars wasn’t given to astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who actually made the breakthrough, but to her male supervisor.
In the history of science, we have to hunt for the women – not because they weren’t capable of doing research, but because for a large chunk of time they didn’t have the chance. We’re still living with the legacy of an establishment that’s just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice.
‘I’ve noted that even the best male minds sometimes become obtuse when they start talking about women – that there is something about gender as a topic that dulls otherwise discerning intellects,’ writes Mari Ruti, a professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto, in her 2015 book The Age of Scientific Sexism.
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