Comments on: Women in science.. at the top

By: Elaine Supkis

Elaine Supkis — Thu, 06 May 2004 03:10:54 +0000

My grandmother, Hanna Pettit, and my mother, Marjorie Meinel, both had to toil hard just to be heard in the world of astronomy. Both married astronomers. Astronomy has a host, an ARMY of great women scientists who do really great work, and few are recognized for this. It really steams me.

By: h. e. baber

h. e. baber — Wed, 05 May 2004 20:13:26 +0000

Margaret Rossiter Women Scientists in America which gives a neat account of the difficulties women in the sciences have faced historically is a really good read. Especially interesting is what she calls “The Madame Curie Effect.” Since Curie had gotten two Nobel Prizes the inference was that “all doors were open to women”—and more generally, that since there was a small percentage of women, rather than none at all, in the sciences it followed that the majority of women were either incapable of doing science or unmotivated. Maybe this could be added to the list of informal fallacies—argumentum ad mariecuriam.

By: chun the unavoidable

chun the unavoidable — Wed, 05 May 2004 19:05:44 +0000

I don’t mean to get all Flowers for Harrison Bergeron up in here, but should the children of academics be allowed to become academics? I think of a couple of reasons why not.

By: eszter

eszter — Wed, 05 May 2004 18:07:43 +0000

Brian, my understanding is that data like this are really hard to come by. In general, I think it’s hard to get stats on the percentage of women in various ranks by field, not to mention have data on their ages. I spent one summer in college working with two computer scientists analyzing some data about women with PhDs in computer science and related fields. Those data had been collected through word-of-mouth (e.g. use of relevant mailing lists, I think) so they were hardly great. But it was the most we could get our hands on. But we didn’t have data for people who stopped before getting a PhD. We were examining the pipeline post-PhD and it was quite dramatic. I guess with science academies, since the membership is relatively small and they’re all high profile with information about their membership, it’s reasonable to get some stats.

By: jacob

jacob — Wed, 05 May 2004 17:37:05 +0000

Congrats to your mom, Eszter! The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected its first woman member in 1848—astronomer Maria Mitchell. It elected its second member in 1943.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Wed, 05 May 2004 17:07:08 +0000

Congraulations to Eszter’s Mom! Is there an easy way to get data comparisons between the % of women at various career stages and % of women graduates at the relevant prior time. (E.g. comparing how many women are full professors to how many women graduated from the relevant departments roughly 20 to 40 years ago, which is when most full professors would have graduated?) My impression is that just looking at the historical graduation rates will give you a small pipeline effect, but would go nowhere near far enough to explain the data, which are largely due I’d imagine to all kinds of systematic and/or explicit discrimination.

By: eszter

eszter — Wed, 05 May 2004 16:56:42 +0000

Des, Spain seems to be around (just below) 3%.

By: des

des — Wed, 05 May 2004 16:47:21 +0000

I work in maths, and anecdotal evidence is that Spain is much better than the UK in women moving up the pyramid. (This is setting the bar v. v. low.) Is that in the tabulation?