This issue of ISR brings together eight perspectives on how gender problems in science impact on the quality of scientific research. The aim is to exemplify current directions in the discourse of gender equality in science that go beyond the traditional preoccupations with the numbers of women to encompass questions about when, why, and how biological differences (sex) and/or socio-cultural factors (gender) influence research results and outcomes.
To provide an historical reference point, an interview with Evelyn Fox Keller by Rana Dajani, ‘What do we mean when we talk about gender and science?’, concludes this issue. In the interview, Keller speaks about her intellectual preoccupations with gender issues when writing the book Reflections on Gender and Science, more than 20 years ago. For her, and for the preceding papers in this issue, the main concern is about better science and reliability of the knowledge science produces. As a philosopher, Keller is interested in the limitations of the (culture-derived) conceptual frameworks and the biases such frameworks create in how scientists look at nature and how they create knowledge. The seven papers included here make these concerns concrete by providing evidence to show what these biases look like at the levels of knowledge and practice, and what their (unintended) consequences are for women and men.
In ‘Sex and Gender Approaches in Environmental Health Research: Two Exemplary Case Studies of the German Environment Agency’, Małgorzata Dębiak, Katrin Groth, Marike Kolossa-Gehring, Arn Sauer, Myriam Tobollik and Dirk Wintermeyer explain practical applications and obstacles in incorporating sex and gender dimensions into environmental health studies. The authors point out that the integration of sex/gender perspectives suffers a paradoxical mandate: on the one hand, it is essentially a critique of gaps in knowledge production that points out the limitations of believing in gender-neutral scientific truth while demanding the inclusion of sex/gender and avoidance of (erroneous) gender-binary assumptions while at the same time taking intersectionality into account. So, the authors say, if we agree upon the necessity of adding such complex understandings of sex and gender to produce better science, we require nothing less than the ‘transformation of epistemological frames’ in research and policy advice.
Mary Olson, in ‘Disproportionate Impact of Radiation and Radiation Regulation’, critiques biases in the standards used in the USA to calculate cancer risk from exposure to ionizing radiation. These standards assume as a basis the Reference Man model, which includes in its definition age, height, weight, race and ethnicity, lifestyle, habit and climate corresponding to a young adult white male living in northern industrial society. The author points out that the findings from 60 years of A-bomb survivor data show that Reference Man does not fairly represent the human life cycle with respect to harm from radiation exposure. Ionizing radiation harms living tissue; male bodies – particularly young boys – are harmed, but females, and in particular the very young girls, are harmed disproportionately more. Hence the use of Reference Man to evaluate harm from radiation and draft regulations results in systematic under-reporting of harm for the global population.
In ‘Road Safety: The Average Male as Norm in Vehicle Occupant Crash Safety’, Astrid Linder and Mats Svensson provide a review of the biases in how the adult population is represented in vehicle safety assessment tests and explain the main female and male differences relevant to vehicle crashes. Adult females are currently not represented in any crash-test dummy models. The authors use injury statistics from road accidents to estimate risk to women and men and provide recommendations on how better to represent the whole adult population in vehicle safety assessments rather than rely solely on the male as the norm.
The remaining four papers shed fresh understanding on Keller’s question in the concluding interview: What exactly is the relation between more women entering science and changing established frameworks?
In ‘Measuring Gender in R&I – Theories, Methods, and Experience’, Rachel Palmén, Evanthia Kalpazidou Schmidt, Clemens Striebing, Sybille Reidl, Susanne Bührer and Dóra Groó offer a comparative analysis of innovation systems, welfare, and gender equality policy initiatives and programme evaluation cultures in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and Sweden. They reinforce their argument with the analysis of 19 case studies of gender equality interventions. The result is an evaluation framework that offers theories on how progress on gender equality objectives affects the desired outcomes of research and innovation, conventionally measured as number of publications, citations, and patents.
In ‘Creating a more supportive and inclusive university culture: a mixed-methods interdisciplinary comparative analysis of medical and social sciences at the University of Oxford’, Pavel V. Ovseiko, Linda H. Pololi, Laurel D. Edmunds, Jan T. Civian, Mary Daly, and Alastair M. Buchan compare how women and men experience culture with comparison between two different university departments, in the social and medical sciences. The authors found that both women and men were more positive about culture in the medical than the social sciences. They attribute the difference to the widespread implementation of Athena SWAN gender equality action plans, which for the medical schools were linked to funding incentives.
Rochelle Fritch, Allison McIntosh, Nicola Stokes, and Marion Boland, in ‘Practitioners’ perspectives: A funder’s experience of addressing gender balance in its portfolio of awards’, present an analysis of gender-disaggregated data across Science Foundation Ireland Funding Programmes since 2011. The paper summarizes these data and describes four types of initiatives that have been implemented: (1) pre-award activities, (2) post-award activities, (3) changes to the existing funding programmes, and (4) the creation of a new funding programme. Like all funders, SFI receives many more grant proposals from men than from women. Therefore, with considerable success in achieving positive improvements, the SFI has focussed on initiatives to increase the number of applications received from excellent female researchers whilst maintaining its high standards of peer review for excellence and impact.
In the penultimate paper, ‘Impact of family characteristics on the gender publication gap: Evidence for physicists in France’, Jacques Mairesse, Michele Pezzoni, and Fabiana Visentin look at physics as one of the ‘male-dominated’ fields to assess the impact of family characteristics on the publishing productivity of women and men scientists. They find that female scientists suffer an average productivity loss of about one article when they have a young child, while male scientists suffer an insignificant loss. This finding might be surprising, the authors point out, since the French government is investing in many efforts to support families. For example, by reducing the required time at work, parents who have young children are allowed to devote more to family life. The French government seems to perceive this need, hence intends to reduce the compulsory school age from 6 to 3 years starting from 2019 to consolidate the habit of sending children to pre-school.
These papers, supported by the concluding interview, are but a small part of the new understanding of gender and science today. The assumption that good science is ‘gender neutral’ has been shown to be an illusion that hides widespread male bias in the accumulated body of scientific evidence and in science cultures, often leading to outcomes that are worse for women than for men. As a result, the discourse about gender equality in science has been shifting from the preoccupations about the number of women in STEM to concerns about scientific excellence. This shift has helped mobilize science policy makers and leaders, particularly in Europe but also in other parts of the world, to effect improvements in organizational practices, in human capital development, in compliance with regulations and, most importantly of all, in science knowledge production, application, and communication.
I thank all the reviewers for their excellent comments for the authors, which have added clarity to each case, and to the issue as a whole.