Gender equality in science remains firmly on Commission agenda

Women in science, or rather the lack of them, is set to become a hot topic of discussion in Brussels this month as the European Commission publishes a report on its progress in promoting awareness and understanding of this important and sometimes controversial issue. In an int...

Women in science, or rather the lack of them, is set to become a hot topic of discussion in Brussels this month as the European Commission publishes a report on its progress in promoting awareness and understanding of this important and sometimes controversial issue. In an interview with CORDIS News, Nicole Dewandre, head of the Research DG's women in science sector, described the work that has been done so far and why it is considered so important.

Following a plan outlined in an earlier communication, Nicole Dewandre's team has pursued two lines of action over the past year. Firstly, through developing a dialogue on the gender dimension of women in science in the Member States through a policy forum and, secondly, through a 'gender watch system' in the Fifth Framework programme (FP5).

Last year's ETAN (European technology assessment network) report entitled 'Promoting excellence through mainstreaming gender equality', a review of the gender dimension of research in each of the European Member States compiled by leading experts in the field, provided a significant contribution to the policy forum on women in science. Funded under the Human potential programme of the EU's Fifth Framework programme, the report draws on previous studies from as far back as 1993 and reviewed 'the nitty gritty way that discrimination takes place, like less office space and less budget for research,' explains Dewandre.

These early studies were crucial in pushing the issue of women in science into the spotlight at the Community level. A good example is a 1997 report in the journal Nature, written by ETAN group members Agnes Wold and Christine Wenneras. This had a major impact in showing that if there are no women in science it's not because they're not good enough or don't choose to be scientists, says Dewandre: 'It's really because the science excludes women. There is a masculine bias.'

Last year, a conference based on the ETAN report also helped to generate interest not only in academia but also in the public sphere and from scientific journals both inside and outside Europe. The ETAN report is widely recognised as a 'masterpiece', says Dewandre. 'I really think we can be proud of this report.'

'[It] allows us to build a problematic on this which doesn't victimise women but recognises the scientific system. We should see how to dismantle the masculine bias in the system if we want to see how to take advantage of all complements of society. This is true for women as for all other categories - like ethnicity.'

In addition to commissioning the ETAN report, DG Research's women in science team has established the 'Helsinki group', consisting of civil servants representing all the EU Member States as well as the countries associated to FP5. The group meets twice a year and has developed a benchmarking process of women in science in the different countries.

'We are starting to work with them to build a strategy to develop gender indicators and we produce common information on the different policies implemented in all the Member States,' explains Dewandre, who is pleased with the group's progress.

But she laments a lack of statistics on women in science. While the ETAN group was able to compile its report by gathering data from a variety of sources, including universities, research institutions and government ministries, Dewandre says, there is still no systematic gathering of data. So the women in science group is examining all the angles through which it could compile data. It is working with the Commission's statistical office, Eurostat, and the OECD (Organisation for economic cooperation and development) to try and introduce a gender variable in their analyses. And it is working with the Helsinki group to collate existing data in each Member State. The data is not harmonised, which brings more problems to its analysis, but the collection itself is viewed as an important step.

To stimulate debate further, each member of the Helsinki group was invited to set up a steering committee on women in science in their own countries. 'This has triggered movement,' says Nicole Dewandre. 'For example, in Israel they have built a council on women in science and in France there is a brand new unit for women in science in the research ministry.' The Eastern countries are also starting to take action, she adds.

'I'm not sure that [the Commission's women in science policy] has already reached out to the lab and to the life of women scientists, but in the policy world I really think the women in science issue has been kept on the agenda,' she says.

One area of the Commission's proposed policy forum that has not been as successful as hoped is a proposed 'network of networks', which would have fostered improved communication between existing Member State networks. 'There I have to say we would like to take this further and that is still to be done,' Nicole Dewandre told CORDIS news. 'For the moment we've done a meeting the network guide and opened the possibility for financial support through the accompanying measures call.'

Positive action has been possible through the gender watch system though. The Commission has introduced a gender box on the forms contractors involved in FP5 projects must fill in. 'This is brand new. In the Fourth Framework programme we didn't know how many women were getting contracts,' says Dewandre.

In addition, the Commission set itself a 40 per cent target figure for participation of women in the FP5 monitoring panels and evaluation panels. 'We did not reach 40 per cent overall but we almost met it last year for the monitoring panels and we reached 25 per cent for the evaluation panels,' she says. Some programmes almost did reach 40 per cent, the best percentage being in the innovation-SME programme, followed by the programme to improve the human research potential. Further details on this will be released with the group's May report, although Dewandre reveals that overall 17 per cent of participants in FP5 are women.

This is all useful information, but to get a true picture of the role played by women in science in Europe and beyond, what is really needed is data on the proportion and distribution of women in science globally. And therein lies the problem. It seems that no one has carried out such a study - yet. 'The 'how many?' question is the first of the indicators we are building,' says Dewandre. But she believes it's fair to roughly estimate that at graduate level and globally the male/female ratio in science is split equally. Moving toward the higher end of the spectrum though, she says women fill less than ten per cent of full professors positions. 'But we don't have absolute numbers for each country, so we can't add them up. The first strong publication on this will be September 2001.'

In tandem with this research, the group has undertaken gender impact studies to look at the gender dimension of the research agenda. 'Each specific programme is screened by a team of specialists in that theme, ' explains Dewandre. 'So that's a set of seven gender impact studies which are now almost finished.' The impact of the gender dimension should not be underestimated. Nicole Dewandre cites the gender dimension in health as a good example of why. She believes that women are excluded from many clinical trials because of a general belief that apart from the obvious sexual difference, men and women's bodies are the same: 'Because of potential pregnancy women were not included, but in fact even in animal trials researchers often tend to take only male rats for example because they are sure to clear the hypothesis of the menstrual cycle.' This means that researchers cannot know if hormonal variations impact response to new drugs.

So would having more women in science change such perceptions? Do male scientists think of different questions to ask than female scientists? And if so is either one better than the other? Nicole Dewandre believes it does make a difference, but stresses neither sex can claim to be 'better'...'if science is about making experiments and predicting everything and at the same time going back to principles and origins and trying to subscribe diversity and go to an ideal scheme and unity of all these things.'

Empiricism and logic conflict, she says, and the history of science is full of turns about this question:

'The history of science showed that...you built your experiment with always a scheme in mind so there is no pure empiricism. You always have a way to look at facts and you build fact as much as they come to you...You have Francis Bacon, where science was there to value nature... so there is a master,... a man relation there too, and the relationship is very gendered. So the gender dimension of research is a very interesting perspective. My feeling is that science has been built in fact with the need to subsume the gender difference and this is really the challenge of gender studies, gender research, to put that back on the table.

It is these philosophical arguments that have stirred controversy in scientific circles over the past few years, with a number of researchers describing the concept of applying scientific study to science itself as 'anti-science'. So did the women in science group meet opposition from the Commission when they began their work?

'Of course if DG research was one of the last DGs to incorporate the gender dimension that was because the main attitude in science, the sort of common sense in science, is that it has nothing to do with gender,' says Dewandre. 'It is only about rationality, objectivity, excellence and things where gender has nothing to do. But this why science is really fascinating, that you have strands in science like history of science, sociology of science and scientists themselves sometimes where science is able to look at itself as an object of science and that's the perspective where...the sex difference is obvious. Nobody can deny this. But...it is one of the areas where it's most interesting to work because the potential is huge.

'I really think that the resistance to it is proportional to the interest in it. Not because there is resistance but because the dynamic of the resistance shows the deepness and the potential of the thinking on this: because nobody wants to damage excellence. And we think that...producing gender equity in science will really give a new perspective to science itself. This is the perspective we try to enforce and this is why we have put the gender dimension in the science-society [proposal for the next framework programme] and not in human resources. It doesn't mean that in human resources we don't want to encourage women's participation, but we think that the core of the problematic is really a science-society one. It's: What is science to society? How is it linked? And how can this relate and bring maximum benefit to society?