Gender equality: Is it real?

References

Cite

Share

Abstract

Nowadays, women are found in the mainstream of science with many of the world’s top scientists are women; however, the issue of gender equality has still not been fully sorted out. Although the proportion of science degrees granted to women has increased in past decades, there is a persistent disparity between the number of women receiving PhDs and those hired at junior positions in faculty. This gap suggests that the problem will not resolve itself solely by more generations of women moving through the academic pipeline but that, instead, women’s advancement within academic science may be actively impeded. A recent paper by Moss-Racusin et al [1] revealed that both male and female faculty judged a female student to be less competent and less worthy of being hired than an identical male student, and also offered her a smaller starting salary and less career mentoring. Thus, their results suggest that subtle gender bias is important to address because it could translate into large realworld disadvantages in the judgment and treatment of female science students. It is a fact that the dearth of women in science reflects a significant wasted opportunity to benefit from the capabilities of our best potential scientists, whether male or female. On Sept 7th 2012 the Women in Science Symposium took place during the European Congress of Immunology in Glasgow, Scotland as a European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS) event. It was chaired by Prof. Fiona Powrie FRS from Oxford, UK who was the first EFIS-European Journal of Immunology (EJI) Ita Askonas prize winner [2] in 2009, a prize that is awarded to female immunologists, and Dr. Maŕıa Montoya from Barcelona, Spain. The idea was to open a discussion based on personal experiences of female scientists regarding the hurdles that women find in their careers in Europe. The room was full of people, predominantly (90–95%) women. The symposium started with a short introduction by Dr. Montoya. She started by mentioning that for much of human history, women were officially excluded from the scientific world. However, in spite of their invisibility in the history narrative, this did not mean that science was exclusively a man’s world. In fact, the face of science as we understand it now would not have been the same without major contributions made by female scientists. There are a dozen female Nobel laureates, not to mention those pioneers who missed out on the accolades and recognition their work deserved. Dr. Montoya finished with the message that there should be gender equality, whatever the circumstances. Following the introduction, Dr. Katja Simon gave a short presentation about the