Women making waves

How many female scientists can you name? How many on campus?

Yet lead scientists on the teams that developed both the Oxford and the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines are women!

We're guessing that you've heard of: Mary Anning, Dorothy Hodgkin, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, and Jane Goodall. Here are some other notable names of women and women of color pioneers that aren't mentioned as often as their male counterparts:

Maryam Mirzakhani – an Iranian American mathematician and the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal mathematics prize for her work in the field of geometry and dynamical systems
Lise Meitner – Germany's own Marie Curie, physicist who worked on fission and had to flee the Nazis because of her Jewish decent
Katherine Johnson – one of NASA's human computer wizards that enabled manned missions to the moon, including the moon landing
Ellen Ochoa – the first Hispanic woman to go to space
Gladys West – whose calculations led to Global Position System (GPS)
Barbara McClintock – first suggested epigenetics, her work on jumping genes in maize was recognised 35 years later with a Nobel prize

Throughout their careers, women in science can face many challenges and biases, including but not limited to sexual harassment. These obstacles are becoming better understood with time, research, and attention to the gender disparities within science, technology, engineering, and math, commonly referred to as the “STEM Gender Gap.” Like too many institutions, TU Delft reflects this STEM Gender Gap in its scientific staff (Fig 1). A companion exhibition, Academic Heritage's Novices (Novieten) shows student gender demographics and details the history of freshwomen at TU Delft.

Fig 1. Institutional data from recent years on gender diversity of scientific staff at TU Delft. Credit: Zhané Hunte

EU Gender studies, peer reviewed research, and documentary films like the recent Picture A Scientist help to call attention to long-standing inequalities. Updated policy could help to tackle inequity and improve representation of women in science.

One of the key aspects of challenges faced by women is economic. The pay gap between male and female PhD holders in the U.S.A. can be as much as 25%.¹ Science faculty members are more likely to offer jobs to males than females, and pay them more,² and it has been shown that institutions support female faculty in resource intensive disciplines less, therefore lowering their publication rates.³

Research suggests that factors which may contribute towards this are that women are less persistent in their pursuit of higher salaries than males and that men perceive other men more favourably thus women get overlooked for promotion.⁴

Women are also more likely to be perceived as being less competent than men meaning they are less likely to be offered jobs.⁵ Within undergraduate peer groups, female students are less likely to be highly rated than males, due to males overestimating other males,⁶ and in some faculties' mentoring requests from females are twice as likely to have a query left unanswered compared to a white male counterpart.⁷ There is evidence male students also perceive themselves as being smarter than their female peers, primarily in their ability to answer questions and understand the learning material.⁸ In addition, women with children are perceived as less competent by prospective employers than those without and are subsequently offered reduced salaries, while the opposite can be true for men.⁹

Also noteworthy, as antithesis to the goal of this exhibition, there are prevalent problems with women being heard and the challenges they face getting recognition. In colloquia, women are less likely to be invited speakers despite being equally as willing to accept invitations as men, and after academic seminars, women are less likely to ask questions.¹⁰ Both of these effects respectively can be ameliorated if a woman is the colloquium chair or if another woman is the first to ask a question after a seminar. Perhaps most tellingly of all, men are less likely to give merit to research into these gender biases than women are, an effect that was repeated when the research that pointed this out was published.¹¹

Fortunately, there is persistent momentum in Western academia and politics to acknowledge and address gender bias as well as many other topics related to diversity and inclusion that have perpetuated inequalities. To address awareness of implicit bias, Harvard has opened its research (and results) on the subject to the public.

Fig 2. Open Data from Harvard's Implicit Bias Test does show decreasing association of male terms with career (instead of family) over time in both male and female respondents. For more info. Credit: Jonathan Townson

Fig 3. Open Data from Harvard's Implicit Bias Test depicting age and gender distribution of participants to associate men/women with science instead of arts. The infographic also supports that men are less likely to take the test (only 274,543 responses compared to 539,260 for female). For more info. Credit: Jonathan Townson

Challenge yourself to take a test and reflect on your implicit bias and the ways you promote inclusivity, diversity, and equality on campus and throughout your career.

Here, at TU Delft, diversity policy, officers, initiatives, and networks like Delft Women in Science (DEWIS) contribute to improving campus climate and policy for fairness and equality.

With assistance from the DEWIS network and considering diversity, the Library invited 30 nominees with at least one full/associate and assistant professor from each faculty to be included in the exhibition.

Curated by Vincent Cellucci (Open Spaces, TU Delft Library) and Jonathan Townson (TU Delft Library PIPS intern from Cambridge University).

Special thanks to: Astrid Taal (DEWIS), Jules Schoonman (TU Delft Library Academic Heritage), Ashley Cryan (TU Delft Library Data Stewards), Rene Haverslag (TU Delft Strategic Development / Corporate Policy Affairs), Zhané Hunte, and participating faculty.

Bibliography:

“Gender Pay Gap Persists,” Nature, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-00113-6.
Corinne A. Moss-Racusin et al., “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 41 (2012): 16474–79, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211286109.
Jordi Duch et al., “The Possible Role of Resource Requirements and Academic Career-Choice Risk on Gender Differences in Publication Rate and Impact,” PLoS ONE 7, no. 12 (2012): e51332, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051332.
Toni Feder, “Salaries for Female Physics Faculty Trail Those for Male Colleagues,” Physics Today 70, no. 11 (2017): 24–26, https://doi.org/10.1063/pt.3.3760.
Moss-Racusin et al., “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students.”
Daniel Z. Grunspan et al., “Males Under-Estimate Academic Performance of Their Female Peers in Undergraduate Biology Classrooms,” PLoS ONE 11, no. 2 (2016): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148405.
Katherine L Milkman, Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh, “What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway Into Organizations,” Journal of Applied Psychology 100, no. 6 (2015): 1678–1712, https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000022.supp.
Katelyn M. Cooper, Anna Krieg, and Sara E. Brownell, “Who Perceives They Are Smarter? Exploring the Influence of Student Characteristics on Student Academic Self-Concept in Physiology,” Advances in Physiology Education 42, no. 2 (2018): 200–208, https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00085.2017.
Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik, “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?,” American Journal of Sociology 112, no. 5 (2007): 1297–1338, https://doi.org/10.1086/511799.
Christine L. Nittrouer et al., “Gender Disparities in Colloquium Speakers at Top Universities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 1 (2018): 104–8, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708414115; Alecia J. Carter et al., “Women’s Visibility in Academic Seminars: Women Ask Fewer Questions than Men,” PLoS ONE 13, no. 9 (2018): e0202743, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202743.
Ian M. Handley et al., “Quality of Evidence Revealing Subtle Gender Biases in Science Is in the Eye of the Beholder,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, no. 43 (2015): 13201–6, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510649112.