Abstract
Despite increasing awareness and concern regarding the low numbers of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as well as the growth of programs intended to recruit and retain more women in these fields, the gender gap in STEM persists worldwide. Gender bias characterizes the sciences in terms of their content and practices; the sciences have for centuries presented women as naturally inferior to men and the norms of scientific communities have effectively excluded or marginalized female scientists. Gender and Science explores this persistent gender bias in the sciences as well as questions whether the relationship between gender and science varies across cultures and nations.
The volume is divided into two parts. The first centers on several disciplinary and theoretical perspectives to the study of gender, science, and technology. It brings together five chapters, three of them written by U.S. scholars, whose work has focused on gender and science. Only one chapter in this section, the editor’s, directly addresses cross-cultural issues, using India as an example. While each of the authors provides a different approach to the study of the relationship between gender and science, given the historically dominant role played by Western science, it is unfortunate that non-Western frameworks are not well represented in a book on cross-cultural studies of gender and science. However, for those not familiar with the current state of women in STEM in the United States, the chapter by Henry Etzkowitz provides an excellent summary of the barriers and dilemmas faced by women in science.
The second part of the book provides examples from seven countries (the Netherlands, Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the United States, France, and India) examining the gender and science nexus within specific cultural contexts. Chapters on the Dutch, Saudi, and Indian cases provide particularly valuable insights. Mineke Bosch in presenting the Dutch case examines the particular segmentation of Dutch society along religious and political dimensions, called verzuiling or “pillarization.” As Bosch demonstrates, the organization of all social life into four “pillars” (Protestant, Catholic, socialist, and liberal), including universities, in the Netherlands between 1880 and 1945 strongly influenced patterns of appointment (recruitment and selection) in the sciences in favor of men. The practice of pillarization, albeit in a reconfigured form, characterizes contemporary academic politics resulting in lower than typical Western European representation of women in many science fields.
Samira Islam’s chapter on Saudi women in science shows that despite a very short history of women’s access to higher education in Saudi Arabia, more than 50 percent of students enrolled in the sciences are women. This educational advancement, however, does not translate into gains for women in the workforce where they constitute only 18 percent of all of those employed, 14 percent of science faculty, and are totally absent from the highest ranks of governmental research positions. Islam attributes this to the overall social status of women that reifies gender stereotypes and supports practices that exclude women from leadership roles.
Arpita Subhash points to the recent advances women in science in India have made in the fields of engineering, veterinary science, and forest sciences. She states that “the proportion of women in higher education and that of women in science disciplines is [the] same” (p. 282) and that this indicates that women’s preferences for the sciences do not differ from those of men. Low participation of Indian women in science, and in higher education more generally, can be explained by family attitudes toward women’s education, lack of female science faculty, gender discrimination, and the fact that more than 50 percent of Indian women are illiterate.
Neelam Kumar concludes that significant cross-national differences in gender and science exist. Some nations allow for greater influx of women into such fields as computer science (Malaysia, Vietnam) or engineering (Saudi Arabia, India) and she understands such differences to be broadly related to variations in opportunity structures for girls and women (p. 297). Nevertheless, gendered universal patterns can be identified. These include especially the under-representation of women at the highest levels of STEM fields in academia, in the government and corporate sectors, and the continuing, and increasingly more subtle gender biases in favor of men. Kumar ends with a call for more insightful cross-cultural research on the “particularities of women’s experiences, moderated by time, place, and the discipline, in relation to the larger cultural setting” (p. 297).
This volume should be of interest to researchers and policy makers who seek to explain why the gender gap in the sciences continues to exist and how it is manifest in specific national and cultural contexts. Students and faculty interested in gender and science will find much of value here, especially in the second section focused on national case studies. While the book raises more questions than it answers, it sheds valuable light on gender and science in cross-cultural perspective.