Bologna 29.9.2000/European Women's Studies Institutional Forum

 

    IMPROVING THE SCIENCE CAREER FOR WOMEN

 

 

Dr. Marja Sorsa, director

Ministry of Education and Science,

Department for Education and Science Policy,

Meritullinkatu 10, PB 29, FIN-00230 GOVERNMENT, Finland

 

The rapidly changing world and the fast development of societies put new demands to all strategic planning processes and future watch exercises - the challenges to see a bit further would sometimes make our life easier. We know that the global market economy is reacting at the speed of light, microbial diseases can spread at the speed of jet airplanes and distance means nothing in transfer of new information. We live in the same "global village" - where the most important challenge is to turn the overwhelming mass of data and information available to us in real time into knowledge which would benefit our societies and allow a sustainable development for human life. In the information chaos we see different things. This presentation from the Northern edge of Europe is an optimistic one; the stream is running for mainstreaming gender equality in science - and it cannot be stopped.

 

The changing role of universities

 

Universities have been part of our European cultural heritage for a thousand years - as here in Bologna's  "Alma Mater Studiorum" - and have traditionally been the sources for the creation of new knowledge.  For over 95% of their life span universities have been 100% male dominated. The classical university concept was a balanced research based teaching which allowed a comprehensive education for clever boys in humanities. Since those times universities have undergone a rapid development in enlarging their curricula to science and technologies and only later, due to growing needs for advanced knowledge in  industry and socioeconomic areas,  to new problem oriented disciplines. The freedom of the academic community to pursue their research and disseminate their findings has been the central idea for the autonomy of the university institution.

 

Only rather recently the tandem of teaching and fundamental research has increasingly developed into a triangular formate - service to the society has emerged into the mission.There is a new " social contract" between the research community and the society. Concurrently, the traditional boundaries between basic and applied science, university and industrial research are disappearing. This development is reflected in science policies and in research funding strategies aiming at technological, economic and social objectives gradually leading  to problem oriented funding rather than funding purely basic research. Universities and science are increasingly involved with society - thus women are desperately needed for strengthening the innovation system. Governments, industry and research funding bodies around the world now want to increase the number of women in science!

 

New skills are needed - renovations in researcher training are necessary

 

The strong positive correlation of investment to science and technologies with improvement in national economy and in employment has been revealed by various international and national surveys on productivity and job creation. The important denominators for success comprise of well educated work force, creation of new knowledge

and investment to research infrastructures - placing knowledge as the key element of productivity. Creative and innovative research environments provide the soil to grow new knowledge and also to breed the next generations of researchers - both men and women alike. Researcher training is a key responsibility of present science policy and should be organised in a way that the best researchers and teachers can be brought together to provide the best education and training for the young researchers. International collaboration in researcher training is becoming increasingly necessary.

 

The new working life demands new kinds of basic skills and competencies from its trained specialists with "learning to learn" skills at the top of the list. Since international communication is daily routine among researchers, command of languages, communication skills, literal skills and  skills for team work and collaboration are required. Psychosocial characteristics such as self-esteem, flexibility and tolerance to change do help in keeping up the motivation, which is so necessary to all researchers. These personality traits are often considered more prevalent in women than men.

 

A new system for doctoral training was started in Finland in 1995. The Finnish graduate schools, which cover about 30% of post-graduate training, have also assisted women in improving the possibilities of more efficient doctoral training. The system now comprises a total of 96 graduate schools and 1280 doctoral student positions financed for a four years' period by the Ministry of Education. Additional funding comes from the Academy of Finland, from universities, from the National Technology Agency or from private funding sources - so that the total number of doctoral students in the graduate schools is about 4000, almost half of whom are female. According to a recent questionnaire survey, no major differences were observed between male and female doctoral students in their satisfaction of research equipment, quality of training courses or possibilities to take international training or participate in meetings abroad.

 

The graduate schools have clearly improved the quality of teaching and training and made the doctoral studies more efficient and better organised. Also the age of doctoral students at dissertation has slowly decreased. In 1999 the median age to receive a doctorate was 36 years, while the median for doctors from graduate schools was 32 years. For women the mean age was nearly two years higher that for men. However,  the number of children did not have a delaying effect in the time period necessary for finishing the doctoral studies.

 

 

Women scientists on the way

 

Very similar progress on increasing educational level of women is ongoing in all European Union countries. The Directorate for Education and Culture (former DG XXII) of the Commission has  together with the Eurostat and Eurydice agencies, published a survey covering the education systems of 24 European states (Key Data on Education in the European Union 1997). Younger generation of women are in all countries higher educated than men, but are behind in the level of jobs, top positions and salaries. According to the survey, in all European countries studied, the average is 103 females to 100 males with higher education degrees, in European Union countries this is 124 females to 100 males with academic degrees. The highest frequencies of academic women are in Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Also very similarly in all of the countries, female students tend to choose medical and humanistic studies, while natural sciences, mathematics and information technology fields are dominated by male students.

 

Some changes are to be seen in Finland, from where my data is most recent. In 1999 total of 6653 women received their higher level (Master's degree) university degree in Finland - this is 56.1% of the degrees given. Five most popular disciplines for women were: health care sciences (94.4 %), fine arts (88.2 %), veterinary medicine (83.7 %), psychology (81.6 %) and education sciences (81.2 %). The lowest percentage of women among the discipline areas is in the technical sciences (20.1 %) - but a slow increase as compared to previous years is now seen.

 

When the figures for doctoral degrees (in 1999) are studied, a steeper increase of doctorates by women is seen even in the technical and engineering studies, where 36 women (18.9 %) received a doctoral degree, 13th in popularity among the discipline areas. The five  most popular discipline areas for women doctors were: health care sciences (87.5 %), veterinary medicine (62.5 %), medicine (57.6 %), psychology (54.5 %) and agriculture and forestry (53.5 %). In 1999 women in Finland received 43.3 % of the total of 1165 doctoral degrees.

 

 

 

"Gender scissors"  and the "leaky pipeline"

 

The extensive, detailed, highly professional and eyes opening  recent report of the ETAN Expert Working Group (2000) on science policies in the European Union very clearly demonstrated the leakyness of the  career pipeline among women scientists. In all European Union countries the graphical statistics of females  and males in the scientific career has the same resemblance to scissors - only the blades might be more or less open in different countries. (See figure 1 for slowly closing "gender scissors" from Finland).  Even if there is an incresing representation of women entering universities, receiving university degrees and also among recipients of doctoral degrees, this has still remarkably failed to translate into the presence of women in higher university positions, senior and director positions in research institutions and science policy bodies and research funding organisations. The ETAN report as well as several articles in scientific journals  and the web debate launched during autumn of 1999 in Nature have given evidence on both real and unconscious discrimination of female scientists - a major causality factor in the formation of the " gender scissors".

 

 

 

Figure 1.  Academic gender scissors in Finland (based on 1999 statistics).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The proportion of female professors in Finnish universities  is the highest in the European Union. In 1998, all assistant professorships were combined into one full professorship category, the previous figure of 13%  then jumping  up to 18.4% for 1998 . However, the 1999 statistics reveals a downwards trend - the percentage of female professors had decreased to 17.9 %. Although the drop is not statistically significant, it is still contradisctory to the development trend. The reason obviously is the increasing practice of inviting persons to take professorships. In early 1990's less than one fifth of professors were appointed by invitation. By 1996 the proportion had risen to half, and since 1 August 1998, when the new university legislation entered into force and gave the right of professors' nominations to the universities, 60% of professorships have been filled by invitation. The percentage of women appointed to a professorship during this period was only 13.7 % (18 women out of 131 appointments during 1 Aug 1998 to 15 Feb 2000) - in the competitive filling process by open calls the percentage of women appointed was 17.5% while it was as low as 10.1% among the invited professors. The numbers are small,  the time period  only 18 months and many new professor appointments have been done in the universities of technology, where fewer women are available for professorships - but the trend is still worrying and it is important to follow the situation.

 

Actions in the European Union

 

The Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 set the principle for the promotion of gender equality through out the EU policies. The European Parliament's Recommendation already in 1988 stated that the "under-representation of women in academic life is a highly topical problem and calls for practical incentives". The strong recommendations, originating from a conference organised by the research DG of the Commission in spring 1998, were realised in the Commission Communication on Women and Science (1999), inviting the Member States to take actions to improve the collection of gender disaggregated statistics, to review the implementation of gender equality policies and to pursue the objectives and means for gender equality in science.

 

A special unit to monitor the implementation of the gender dimension in the Fifth Framework Programme for research was set up at the Research DG in 1998. This is the first framework programme which includes the gender issue in a mainstreaming way - to promote research by women, on women and for women. Very clearly, Europe is in shortage of researchers, it has an aging work force also in research - and thus cannot continue wasting the research potential of women scientists, as very implicitly revealed in the ETAN Report. A further important step in promotion of possibilities for female scientists has been taken in the Communication of the Commission Towards a European Research Area (COM 2000;6), presently under discussion in the European Union bodies.

 

The goal has been set to reach a minimum of 30% of both genders in the decision-making committees within the EU by year 2002 and of 40% by year 2005. Likewise this goal should be reached into the proposal evaluation committees. The problem so far has been that female reviewers in the data base have been too few. Also the number of women scientists who have been applying and who have received funding has been low. According to fragmentary statistics of the previous 4th Framework Programme only some 10 % of projects funded had female partners. It is also up to the female scientists to make applications!

 

 

 

Important steps in the equality road of women scientists

 

The equality road is long and sometimes stony. It needs the action of the whole society as in the Nordic model of gender equality. The equality legislation in the Nordic countries is nearly two decades old, in Finland the Equality Act  came into force in 1987. It was amended in 1995 to include the quata article on minimum 40 percentage of female or male members in all governmental committees. The guidelines of the Equality Ombudsman on promotion of gender equality in universities were given in 1990 and new 5-year professorships (total of 8) were established in Finnish universities in 1995-98. The first committee for monitoring of obstacles in careers of women researchers made its report already in 1982  and since then several other working groups and committees have considered the issue, recently a special working group of the Academy of Finland (1998). All this work has now led the Academy of Finland (2000) to announce concrete measures to be taken to promote women in research.

 

Concrete actions for improving the gender balance in science

 

The Academy of Finland, which comprises four research councils, is the most important funding organisation for universities and fundamental research. The follow-up group for women scientist career suggests the Academy of Finland to follow the 40% quata of either sex in all research councils, referee panels, all categories of researcher positions, scientific conferences and working groups nominated or funded by the Academy.

 

The follow-up group also suggests that in cases of even scientific competence of applicants for a researcher position, preference should be given to the minority sex within the discipline. Because of the under-representation of women in engineering sciences, a new professorship for women needs to be established. In order to remind the scientific community about the promotion of women, the gender composition of the research group has to be given in all applications for research funding as well as in the final reports. The project leaders must take into account the maternity and paternity leaves of researchers and the Academy has to consider this in the necessary extension of the funding periods. Women are especially encouraged to apply for research funding and for researcher positions - and male researchers are encouraged to take their paternity leaves. Special short-term post-doctoral "start funding" grants should be made available for women, since the post-doc period is known to be one of the leaks in the pipeline for a researcher career. Visibility of women researchers and research by women should be improved - and the models of women in research must also reach the schools. The recommendations also include that female Finnish scientists be encouraged to be active in order to take international advisory and expert duties.

 

Finns and Nordic women in general may have a great deal to offer to the rest of Europe in terms of well rooted equality - or is it only a dream?

 

 

References

 

Academy of Finland. Women in Academia. Report of the working group appointed by the Academy of Finland. Publications of the Academy of Finland 3(1998)1-50.

 

Commission of the European Communities. "Women and Science" . Mobilising women to enrich European research. COM (1999) 76 final. Luxembourg 1999, pp.48.

 

European Commission. Key Data on Education in the European Union 97. European Communities, Luxembourg 1997, pp. 185.

 

European Commission - Research Directorate-General. A Report from the ETAN Expert  Working Group on Women and Science. Science Policies in the European Union. Luxembourg 2000, pp.156.

 

European Commission. Towards a European research area. Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. Brussel, January 2000, pp. 41.

 

Ministry of Education. KOTA - The database on university sector statistics 1999. Helsinki 2000, in press.

 

Suomen Akatemia. Naisten tutkijanuran seurantatyöryhmän muistio 29.2.2000 (in Finnish). Mimeograph, Helsinki 2000, pp.22.