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| Source: "Mind the Gap" goes feminist, London Student Feminists |
“With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there – not always, but more often than not. With girls, 'why her?' came up so quickly.”
Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Academia's Leaky Pipeline
Imagine
the following scenario: you turn on the tap and very little water comes
out. When checking your pipe, you realize it has plenty of holes and
the water is dripping out before reaching the tap – it is wasted. It seems like academia has some holes just like that: if you imagine academia to represent the tap in this example – female scientists are the lost water drops!
Although
nowadays it is generally accepted that intelligence and capability have
nothing to do with gender, we, as society, still struggle to provide
equal opportunities to men and women. This
becomes quite obvious when we look at the so-called leaky pipeline, a
phenomenon that describes how women progressively drop out and become
underrepresented in the course of a typical academic career – like drops out of a leaky pipe.
How Much is Spilling Out?
If
you are at least a bit like myself, you look around and think: 'where
is this inequality? I don't see it! More than half of my colleagues are
women!‘ So here's the evidence for vertical segregation, that is the
higher and more important a position, the less represented women are.
Fortunately, there seems to be no gender gap until university level [1] – a big progress compared to the 19th century, where only 21% of university students were female [2]. In
2013, the proportion of female students (55%) and graduates (59%) at
the first level of academic education even exceeded that of male
students [3]. However, in the same study, women represented only 45% of
grade C academic staff (the first position for which a newly qualified
PhD graduate would normally be recruited), 37% of grade B (associate
professors) and 21% of grade A academic staff (professors/principal
investigator).
What's Making Those Holes?
These
statistics make you wonder: if access to education and the likelihood
of successful graduation is equal for both genders, why are women far
behind when it comes to taking up leading positions?
One
answer may lie in the existence of a bias when examining the
performance of female scientists. For example, according to one study,
women needed 2.4 times as many merits compared to their male
counterparts to achieve the same evaluation in peer reviews [4].
Family formation impairs women’s but not men’s careers
Other
studies found that marriage, childbearing, and caregiving are major
factors that push women out of the scientific pipeline. It seems that in
academia, starting a family negatively affects women’s, but not men’s,
careers [5]. For instance, a study from 2009 found that women in science
who are married and have children are 35% less likely than married men with children to enter a tenure-track position after receiving a PhD [6].
We
need to question and change the factors that contribute to the
situation where society fails to provide equal opportunities for men and
women.
Patching the Pipeline
The
good news is that, thanks to extensive statistics like the 'She
Figures', there is clear evidence that a gender gap exists in top
positions and that attempts are being made to counteract it. For instance, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,
a central organization for the promotion of science in Germany, has
made it a central task that ''universities and non-university research
institutions must commit themselves to promoting equal rights for women
and men in all areas of work'', including the improvement of
compatibility of career and family life in research and science [7].
The
European Commission also actively works on structural changes in its
member states, summarized in a report from 2011, in which they identify
problems contributing to the gender gap and possible solutions. One
problem the report identified is a lack of awareness of how systems can
be discriminatory, even if the employers have the best of intentions.
For example, employers may be aware of the existence of a gender pay
gap, but may not realize that they themselves contribute to it [4].
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| broken pipe by Horst Gutman via Flickr |
by Juliane Schiweck, PhD Student AG Eickholt
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