If science wants to deal with its diversity issues, it needs to think beyond gender and be willing to change



In June last year, the European Commission released a teaser video for a new campaign to recruit young women to science: "Science: It's a Girl Thing!" It was met with a loud and global WTAF.

If you somehow missed the resulting outrage, watch it now and have a mini one all of your own. Even if you remember it, treat yourself to a re-watch. There is something almost beautiful about how bad it is.

Concerned that stereotypical images of science were putting girls off studying the subject, the video wanted to show science in a female light. But they simply replaced one set of stereotypes about science with a few more, and added a few painful ones on gender for good measure too. It obscures the detail of actual science with some sort of pink haze and objectifies female scientists to boot.

The thinking man's crumpet

There's a long history of problematic images of women in science (indeed, of women as experts in general), often emphasising a woman's domestic life above her professional accomplishments. As Dorothy Nelkin notes in her 1995 book Selling Science, Nobel prizewinners Maria Mayer and Barbara McClintock were described in press coverage as, respectively, "a tiny, shy, touchingly devoted wife and mother" and "well known for baking with black walnuts".

We might we live in more enlightened times. But according to research undertaken in Cardiff, modern media images of women in science may be less detracted by their domestic life, but seem to focus on their appearance instead. So you get lines like "she may be Britain's leading authority on the brain, but it is her physique that turns heads". Or "she looks like an off-duty Bond girl, but she's actually a physicist. Given the chance, plenty of viewers would happily experiment with her."

Such references might seem fairly innocuous – even playfully subverting masculine ideas of science – especially when located within a generally positive article. However, the Cardiff researchers note that while women might be described as having a "mane of blonde hair", a piece about a man is more likely to say, "his full white beard is worn more in homage to Charles Darwin than the Almighty". Very different connotations.

They also draw attention to the different places women are used in science coverage. One publicity officer for a major science organisation it interviewed explained that if it were dealing with a "real heavy-weight current affairs programme" it would go with a white middle-class male, where as BBC breakfast shows would ask specifically for a young, attractive woman. Another of its research subjects reported that she had trouble moving from kids' television, where her tomboy image fitted fine, to adult programming, because she couldn't suit an image of "thinking man's crumpet".

Overall, the research suggests that men signal an aura of gravitas in science, while women are used when the science is being made "accessible" or "sexy"; scientifically flavoured "eye-candy".

Fixing the "leaky pipe"

The focus on role models reflects one of the key ways of looking at issues of science and gender: as an input problem. An alternative take is to consider issues within science itself, in particular reasons why women might not stay on in careers. This is sometimes described as a "leaky pipe" because you can stuff as many new recruits into science as you like, but you need to retain them.

Ceci and Williams's 2011 paper on causes of women's underrepresentation in science (pdf) is a clear example of one focusing on the leakiness of the science pipe. Drawing on 20 years of US data on women in the sciences, they conclude women are more likely than men to make personal choices – many of which may well be constrained – that prevent them from progressing to more senior levels. For example, taking time off to raise children, following a spouse, caring for parents.

This is a problem in many jobs, but a particular one in much of science as you are expected to work especially long hours, often on short-term contracts, with a lot of travel at a point in life where women are most likely to want to take some time off. Post docs in some fields are often expected to clock up several continents before they're 35, and be unquestionably grateful for the opportunity.

There's also the issues of drinking culture, or at least social activities which women might feel either culturally uncomfortable in, or simply unable to devote the time to (or even outright unwelcome at). One of the things I've noticed from running social media training for postdocs is that mothers hope this will be a chance for them to engage in the everyday social interactions around science which they miss because they don't want to leave children to attend conferences; things like the 'overly honest methods' tag which offer information and guidance, not just jokes and bonding. There's a telling reference to the role of shooting days in a Cranfield School of Management report on women in science and boardroom culture (pdf). In terms of social interaction within work itself, Platform's Kevin Smith offers some revealing notes (and useful practical tips) about the experience of being in meetings with expert female colleagues and yet finding the men defer to other men.

Many men suffer because of the various social structures of science and other work too. It's not just an example of how science excludes women, it's a warning of a larger pathology in the way we do science.

Global picture

Let's take a step back at this point and consider the global picture. According to Unesco data, overall women account for a minority of the world's researchers, but it's not a tiny minority and varies a lot from place to place. The Atlantic did a nice introduction to one of its figures last week.

To pull out a few examples from its 2012 factsheet (pdf), the UK is around the middle of Europe, with 37.9% female researchers, with Latvia at 52.4% and Luxembourg has 21.2%. France, the Netherlands and Germany aren't far ahead though, all under 27%. In terms of the Americas, Bolivia is at 63.2% with several others still over 50%. With Asia, it runs from 85.5% in Burma to 1.4% in Saudi Arabia.

These sorts of audits can be very useful, helping us find new questions to ask about interesting trends, and data gathering of this sort is increasingly undertaken at national and more local levels. But it's important to remember that the global picture means dealing with many different types of gender and scientific contexts.

Campion and Schrum's 2004 work on women scientists in Ghana, Kenya and India argues that a combination of issues restrict the professional networks for women, and suggest work aiming for greater gender equality should focus on increasing social rather than material resources. There was also an interesting point made by UN data analyst Chiao-Ling Chien, on how women in the formerly communist countries have a 40-year advantage on many others. Or, I was a bit puzzled by Burma, but Beck Smith offered information from the International Food Policy Research Institute and suggested it could be due to science's low pay and low skills threshold. If you are going to compare countries on gender and science issues, you have to understand how and why the questions and possible answers might vary globally.

The main message from this is not just gender, but how gender becomes an issue in a range of different social contexts. Understanding the granular detail of these issues will also be a matter of how gender intersects with other forms of oppression (yes, that is that thing people call "intersectionality"). So let's talk about race and class and a few other things, too. Because then we can learn more about how oppression works.

Facing the whiteness of science

One of the many outcomes of the Lawrence inquiry was a greater awareness in the UK that simply thinking you were against racism didn't actually mean you were anti-racist. Institutions and individuals had to check themselves more thoroughly for unwitting and thoughtless acts of racism in structures and attitudes which have become normalised. To put this in a science context, I can recommend DN Lee's great post last January discussing why she is unapologetically a female, black, urban scientist, and exposing ways in which a scientific career is denied to many before they get in the door of a university.

In discussing race and education, David Gillborn invites us to push ideas of unwitting racism further, advocating an approach informed by critical race theory. This sees racism as an endemic part of society, deeply engrained legally and culturally, which means it tends to look normal. Formal equal opportunity projects can remedy extreme forms of injustice but do little to deal with the business-as-usual forms of oppression. Claims to objectivity and 'meritocracy' act as camouflages for in equality.

Applying a critical race approach means trying to notice these more embedded forms of injustice and questioning them. A lot of the time it means noticing whiteness which, unlike colour, can go unnoticed and unquestioned as the norm.

We can say the same of many other forms of privilege, be it in terms of gender, disability, sexuality, class or more. Notice what the norm is and ask whether things might be improved if we diversified from that simple point of view. When someone invites you to check your privilege, it can feel like a challenge, but it is also an invitation to learn; to simply see yourself, and possibly develop in the process. It isn't necessarily an attempt to take something from you.

Importantly in terms of thinking about science, Gillborn refers to accounts of sometimes heated exchanges when the implicit supremacy of whiteness is challenged in universities. He suggests this highlights how ideas of validity, objectivity and authority have been constructed in highly racialised ways, and that academics still find this hard to acknowledge. This point was made very well in a recent post from sociology PhD student Tressie McMillan Cottom, responding to DN Lee being called an "urban whore":

Many academics consider research that examines the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities as unscientific and less rigorous than research that focuses on politics, war, philosophy, the Higgs particle and the like. Even when that research intersects with the experiences of minorities with politics, war, philosophy or natural science it is often considered a pet interest with little relevance to real science.

Gillborn gives an example of a black student in one of his classes angrily exclaiming "don't you believe me" to another student after giving witness to her own experience of racism. This anger at not being trusted as an authority is an experience many women in science will be familiar with too, and many working class people, many disabled people, many others. It's one of the reasons it is so annoying that, useful as the term mansplaining can be, the 'man' focuses on gender. It isn't simply something men do to women, and most corrosive when it goes unnoticed. On a similar theme, I can recommend Tom Leonard's poem The Six O'Clock News, in particular the points he makes about our ideas of "trooth" in relation to the use of a regional accent.

Asking science to question the assumptions it makes about rigor, rationality and authority can be difficult, but we need to recognise white dominance of science just as we need to face up to implicit patriarchy and address it as a possibly distorting factor. If science really wants to claim to aim for objectivity, it needs to look at itself.

Science and social mobility

In the UK in particular, science has a reputation for being relatively accessible to working class students. Science and engineering, compared to subjects where you were expected to have the social or cultural capital of a middle class family to progress in, are traditionally seen as places a student could succeed in with simple hard graft. Long gone are they days of the "gentleman scientist" who studied nature as a hobby, funded by independent wealth. Now they are professionalised and paid, a contrast to the humanities where many PhDs are self-funded.

Science and engineering are also often sold as a route to "social mobility", a way of stepping up a metaphorical class ladder. And yet, science is becoming an increasingly exclusive endeavour in itself, be it tutors to help schoolchildren through exams, if your school can offer triple GCSE science or not, or access to university more generally. The basis of a scientific career is at least one degree, if not three or four and will always be elite as long as higher education is.

It was also interesting to see science and technology playing a part in Savage et al's recent expansion of the vocabularies of class (the BBC class calculator thing) with their new category of the "technical middle". They describe this as small, but relatively prosperous. It contains an over-representation of those doing research, scientific and technical forms of work, and an over-representation of people with degrees from established and prestigious universities with reputations for science like Warwick, UCL, Imperial, or Cambridge, with a slight over-representation of graduates in science and technology.

Importantly, they are socially and culturally restricted – going against the idea that more disadvantaged people have low numbers of social contacts – although the relationships they do have tend to be of high status. Geographically, they are largely in the south-east of England, but "shun the centre of London and tend to be located in suburban locations (perhaps consistent with their social isolation)".

They also note that it has an above average number of women, and that they are surprised by that. It surprised me too, but I'm not sure it is good news. Is this socially excluded and exclusive group what we want as a success story for women in science?

I started with a video showing a truly awful attempt to deal with diversity in science, but I want to end with something better. This film by Nathan E Richards exploring the absence of black professors in UK higher education institutions is an excellent discussion of race in academia but also the politics of knowledge more generally. Very much worth your time.



Alice Bell is a research fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. Some of the content of this post is based on a lecture for the Science and Technology Policy MSc.