Women in science

The topic of women in science is a contentious issue of gender roles in academe, industry, politics, religion, and culture, as well as a field of study in the history of science and the sociology of science.

Quotes

• The administration and faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) performed the first and most famous in-depth study on the status of women faculty within a particular institution. A group of senior women on the faculty had gathered preliminary evidence that they had less laboratory space, less access to research funding, and lower salaries than their male counterparts. In addition, they were infrequently represented on committees that made decisions about hiring and research funding. MIT's administration responded by researching the charges, finding that they were accurate, and taking steps to correct the inequities. The abstract to their report is an excellent description of the issues that still confront women scientists and analysis of why they went unrecognized by administration as well as by the women themselves.
  • Ellen Daniell, "Introduction". Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists. Yale University Press. January 2006. pp. xvii–xviii. ISBN 0300133790.  (See (March 1999)"A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT". The MIT Faculty Newsletter XI (4).)

• I think most importantly, men tend to get the top jobs, with which they get a bully pulpit for publication and speaking or exerting authority. I think women can be much more appreciated in science than they are.
  • Estella Leopold, (Winter 2014)"Interview with PS Medalist Estella Leopold". Priscum, Newsletter of the Paleontological Society 21 (1): 3–5. (quote from p. 5)

• ... although close to nothing was known, until recently, of the history of women in American science, women have been an integral part of the scientific community for well over a century. I can still recall my astonishment when I discovered in 1972 some women's entries in the old American Men [sic] of Science directories, and when I read biographies of several scientists in the then-new Notable American Women. Here were people who had been present at many of the familiar places and events, but who were totally unknown even to those of us well versed in the history of American science. I felt like a modern Alice who had fallen down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of the history of science that was familiar in some respects but distorted and alien in many others. Learning more about these women and bringing their stories into closer connection with the rest of the history of this period became a compelling and absorbing intellectual task.
  • Magaret W. Rossiter, "Preface". Women Scientists in America: Volume One. Struggles and Strategies to 1940. John Hopkins University Press. 1982. p. xi. ISBN 0-8018-2509-1. 

• ... As early as 1982, Margaret Rossiter's superbly researched first volume on women scientists in America startled its readers with its meticulously drawn picture of the double bind women scientists fell into from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. Caught between 'two almost mutually exclusive stereotypes' they were 'atypical' as both women and scientists. Thus, even as higher education opened up to them, they found it easier to be educated in science than to be successfully employed in it: an impasse which proved to be long-lasting.
  • Ruth Watts, "Chapter 1. Science, gender and education". Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History. Routledge. 2013. ISBN 9780415253079.  (1st edition, 2007)

External links

Encyclopedic article on Women in science on Wikipedia