Findings such as these usually provoke a cry of “We need more women in science!” and organisations wheel out a spokesperson to explain that girls should be encouraged to study science at university. The Welsh government, for example, celebrated International Women’s Day this way.
But while this is a fantastic way to persuade science funding bodies to reach into their pockets, it just doesn’t fit with the evidence. The quiet truth is this: women are doing science. And not only “more women than ever before”, as the New Scientist puts it. In fact, in lots of scientific disciplines women outnumber men. [...]
European social science research shows that male and female scientists often have different types of partners: male scientists more frequently have a stay-at-home partner looking after the children, while female scientists are more likely to have another scientist as a spouse. So male scientists might not need family-friendly working practices to have a successful career but female scientists do. Hence the loss of women in the “leaky pipeline” of scientific careers. And that is to say nothing of the research that found scientists perceived job applicants to be less competent when they had female names.
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