EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines face a gender gap that has been exacerbated during COVID-19.
Drawing on research carried out by the Women in Supramolecular Chemistry (WISC) network, this essential book sets out the extent to which women working in STEM face inequality and discrimination. The authors use approaches more commonly associated with social sciences, such as creative and reflective research methods, to shed light on the human experiences lying behind scientific research. They share fictional vignettes drawn from research findings to illustrate the challenges faced by women working in science today. Additionally, they show how this approach helps make sense of difficult personal experiences and to create a culture of change.
Offering a path forward to inclusivity and diversity, this book is crucial reading for anyone working in STEM.
education Barriers to women students’ participation in STEM Despite several decades of research devoted to increasing women’s participation in STEM fields, sizeable gaps between the sexes remain. Statistics obtained from the National Science Foundation (NSF) paint an alarming portrait of a leaky pipeline for women in STEM. While 51% of all bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering are earned by women, they comprise only 45% of master’s degrees and 39% of doctorates in STEM fields. In contrast, women earn 61% of bachelor’s degrees, 63% of master’s degrees and 58
the men around them. Women and feminism have done much to challenge this culture, but at the time of writing the patriarchy and male violence towards women remain a pervading and pervasive truth which impacts how women live their lives. Women in STEM, women in science, and women in chemistry are still women. When we talk about numbers of women in scientific disciplines, when we talk about neoliberal cultures of overwork and hyperproductivity, when we talk about isolation and the loneliness of women working within environments that are dominated by men, we cannot
achieved through witty and geeky science humour as exemplified by @NathanLents: Even as a biologist, #FatBearWeek was just not what I was expecting it to be. #LGBTQinSTEM Figure Sp7.1: Word cloud showing the frequency of hashtags in the LGBTQ and STEM dataset A word cloud with prominent components being Queer in stem, LGBTQ in stem, LGBTQ stem, LGBT in stem, LGBT stem, women in stem. Such testimonials can also document the fellowship that an online support network can provide as shown by Em Haydon (@emhaydon): Look at all those lovely friendly faces
jobs has increased substantially, particularly in computer occupations, the proportion of women in STEM jobs has not crossed the 25% mark by 2016 ( Funk and Parker, 2018 ). There is considerable variation in the percentage of women in the 74 STEM occupations that were studied – from only 7% of sales engineers and 8% of mechanical engineers to 96% of speech therapists and 95% of dental hygienists. Women make up an overwhelming majority of workers in health-related occupations, but only 14% of engineers, on average. Through a US Census Bureau data analysis, it was
but also the technology’. This fits nicely with STS approaches in which technologies are given agency as non-human actants by scholars like John Law (2004) , Michel Callon ( Callon and Law, 1997 ) and Bruno Latour (2000) . Chapter 6 , by Anamika Gulati, draws on the Indian context in order to explore how gender biases operate in the practice and communication of science and technology. The chapter opens with a discussion of digital health technologies before moving to the case of women in STEM. Vis-à-vis health, Gulati examines the subjects of privacy
those who could do better. We reported on data from our first survey of the community (see Chapter Five ). In addition, we wrote about our approach of embedding EDI expertise within scientific research, and utilising social science methods – predominantly qualitative research methods, in order to do this. In order to write this book, we incorporate literature on women in STEM and academic identity, together with data from WISC’s qualitative research projects, some of which were open to participants from all genders within the supramolecular chemistry community
, there is a notable absence of research in the SoSP domain more generally. Science policy has been used to address failures in higher education. For example, some 40 STEM professorships were created in 2019 to address the under-representation of women in STEM areas (see Chapter Fourteen, this volume). Conclusion Our review of the evidence of the impact of state investments in science suggests both the high (global) social return to investment and also the challenges facing SOEs in recouping such investments due to spillover and scale effects. This creates an
scientists in STEM is predominantly male ( Makarova et al, 2019 ). This emphasizes that women are viewed as deviating from the norm of the ideal worker ( Acker, 2012 ). Male domination makes the lack of access to networks ( Fox and Colatrella, 2006 ; Terosky et al, 2014 ) and role models more evident. In addition, intensified international competition requires early career researchers to be mobile ( Herschberg et al, 2018 ), influencing women’s chances for recruitment and promotion ( Jöns, 2011 ). The under-representation of women in STEM has created the necessity for
1970s, particularly the NASA moon landings. This insightful and illuminating film has contributed immensely to raising awareness among science communicators of the imperative to communicate the women in science narratives through the more inclusive equity lenses of the intersections of gender and race. Through this landmark book and film, the names of pioneering Black women in STEM, such as Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan, are now as familiar as those of their White counterparts. The question for science communication is why they were not as
