Here in Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, 50% of our named chairs are female, as are 36% of our professoriate (well above the UK average).
But… our mid-career female academics keep being poached to prestigious chairs around the world. And when we try to recruit new younger academics, we’re still not getting the female applicants pushing themselves forward from universities across the UK and abroad.
When half our undergraduates are female, and getting better grades than the men, why can we not convince them that a career in science is stimulating, rewarding, can be flexible, and is even sometimes well paid?
WHAT WE ALL NEED TO DO
action points for academia
- Monitor our numbers
- Mentor our people and make sure the best are applying
- Create a workplace that supports everyone and allows flexibility
- Reclaim the meaning of feminism
2 Comments
Rachel Evans
August 9, 2013There appears to be a mindset that “science” only happens in Academia. What is happening in thousands of R&D laboratories in industry? Maybe the women are moving there because there is less discrimination in an environment where the bottom line is profit not number of papers and citations.
Laban
August 13, 2013Didn’t a Harvard chap called Larry Summers make a speech a few years back addressing this very issue, for which he became an Unperson ?
http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php
As the father of a daughter about to embark on A-level Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Biology, I don’t want to see her discriminated against, but I beseech you also to consider the possibility that we are not all Blank Slates waiting to be written on by our prevailing culture.
We now have more than 50% female representation in medical school. We’re also running out of surgeons. Back in the bad old days when 90% of medics were male, a sufficient percentage of them were drawn to surgery to keep numbers up. The percentage of women drawn to surgery seems to be smaller. It maybe those evil sexists, or it may be that being a sawbones doesn’t appeal to women compared with being, say, a GP. Maybe there are differences between male and female which are not culturally determined.