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Science policies in the European Union
basis.  Selection and promotion procedures need to ensure that women are
not disadvantaged by career breaks.  This means a more sophisticated
measurement of quality and productivity than longevity of service.
Counting a candidate’s number of publications may in effect be more a
measure of years’ service and access to unlimited time, rather than
productivity.  Similarly, the differential in the size of men and women’s
research teams will have an impact on number of publications.
The leaky pipeline described in Chapter 2 means that women are lost to
science just as they complete their education and have the most to
contribute.  Such data illustrate that the maxim ‘we only have to wait for
equality, because there is now a better gender balance among first degree
students’ holds no water.  More dramatic measures are needed.
There have been two relevant examples of mainstreaming strategies in
science targeted at the recruitment issue.  The first, which has been used in
Sweden and in Switzerland, sets targets for appointing women based on the
proportion of women present in the pool of recruitment, that is, the next
level down on the academic ladder.  The second was developed in Germany
and is designed to increase the number of women eligible for professor
positions starting in the year 2000.  Many new professors will be needed
then because of retirements.  The HSP II (started in 1991) and III (started in
1996) programmes are thus designed to address both the demographic
problem of a large number of retirements and to increase the proportion of
women professors.  This initiative is part of a wider package of
mainstreaming tools introduced in Germany (see Appendix I for a detailed
description).  Further examples of how a mainstreaming approach might be
developed are presented in Chapter 9.
Good practice in recruitment, selection
and promotion
This chapter has been concerned with the position of women in scientific
careers and the identification of some of the practices that cut across good
equal opportunities.   It is clear that gender has an impact on who gets
offered career track posts, who gets offered and can take up fellowships and
who gets promoted.  Universities and research institutes need to examine
their policies and ensure that they have methods of assessing merit that are
not informed by stereotypical images of scientists or of women and men.
They need to guard against the use of the old boy network and patronage
in the allocation of jobs.  Transparent systems of recruitment and promotion
are essential.  Good gender equality practices should be implemented and
adhered to where they are not already.  These include advertising all posts,
clear job and person specification, gender audits on pay, benchmarking to
keep aware of best practice and positive action measures to address
disadvantage, such as mentoring, networks and women-only opportunities.
It is also essential that employers adopt or develop family friendly policies:
these are discussed in Chapter 7.
Networks for women in science
In the 1960s in the USA, there was a growing concern to improve women’s
contribution to science and engineering. In 1971, women scientists founded
Dual career couples - the
‘two body problem’
This is the difficulty couples
face when they need to find
two jobs in the same
geographic area. In the US, the
problem is particularly acute
for married female physicists
since 43% have a physicist
spouse, whereas only 6% of
married male physicists have a
physicist spouse. A recent
survey of dual career couples in
science in the US suggests
possible solutions and discusses
the advantages and
disadvantages of each.
Solutions include shared or
split positions, institutional
hiring programmes for the
spouse, finding an alternative
position in or outside academia
for the partner, as well as
‘commuter marriages’.
Although many dual career
couples in science face similar
problems in Europe, institutions
rarely take these into
consideration when making
appointments. Lack of
professional opportunities for
the spouse, or nepotism rules
in institutions, may cause a
candidate to reject a job offer.
It may also cause the less
experienced partner - often the
woman - to drop out of
science, or accept a job in
which his or her talents are
underused. Open discussion of
this problem which contributes
to the loss of highly trained
women from science, as well as
of measures to alleviate it, are
long overdue in Europe.
(for details of the US study  by Laurie
McNeil and Marc Sher, see http://
www.physics.wm.edu/dualcareer.html)
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the Association for Women in Science (AWIS), dedicated to achieving
equity and full participation for women in science, mathematics,
engineering, and technology.  After much lobbying from women scientists
and their allies, the US Congress passed an Act in 1981 to promote Equal
Opportunities for Women and Minorities in Science and Technology.  This
instructed the National Science Foundation to mount an affirmative action
programme, and to report on the current situation biennially.
In the UK, 1984 was declared WISE year (Women into Science and
Engineering) by the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Engineering
Industry Training Board, the activity continuing subsequently as the WISE
campaign to attract girls to engineering.  Later in the 1980s, the Institute of
Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry set up committees (Women in
Physics, the Women Chemists’ Committee) in response to their observation
that women members were dropping out of the profession at around the
age of 30. They investigated this question in some depth, and work now as
networking bodies, helping women to survive as scientists, and encouraging
girls to take up science.
Networking for mutual help and support and the sharing of information is
particularly valuable.  The example of US AWIS was noted during the
drafting of The Rising Tide, and the Government’s response indicated it ‘looks
forward to the work in this area of the newly formed Association for
Women in Science and Engineering’ - AWiSE.  AWIS, which has over 70
local chapters in the USA, from Alaska to Hawaii, set up a Mentornet with
sister bodies, universities and industrial corporations.  There are now several
comparable associations to AWIS and AWiSE: WITS in Ireland, SCWIST
(Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology) in western
Canada, TWOWS for women in the Third World, AWIS in New Zealand,
SA WISE in South Africa, and WISENET in Australia.
In the UK, the Women’s Engineering Society has been going since 1919,
while women mathematicians have formed strong international links based
on email, with annual meetings.  AWiSE fills a particular need for numbers
of women biologists and biomedics, and for women in science education,
administration and the media, as well as providing a forum for broad
discussion in meetings and in the electronic media. The need for AWiSE
was shown dramatically by the spontaneous appearance of AWiSE branches
from the grass roots, when the idea of AWiSE was mentioned in reports of
The Rising Tide in 1994.  The national body was launched, effectively, in
1998, with the launch of its website and quarterly
journal Forum.  A new task is to form a MentorRing, co-operating with sister
organisations and others, to help girls and women progress in science.
The European Social Fund
The European Social Fund is one of four EU Structural Funds. Its purpose
of is to co-finance schemes for human resources development. It can be
used to help people to get (back) into the labour market and also to support
people who already have work by improving their professional prospects.
The need for a systematic gender breakdown of beneficiaries of the
European Social Fund has been highlighted in a number of studies
(Lefebvre 1993, Rees 1998) and is likely to be attempted more rigorously in
future following the Mainstreaming Communication (CEC 1996) and the
reform of the Structural Funds.
Quality and fairness in scientific professions
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