Women in STEM: we need more of them! Thu. AND

The International Day of Girls and Women in Science is a good opportunity to look at the real presence of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), using available research.

Although it may seem to us, especially after a cursory review of the more liberal media, that the participation of women in both the labor market and in science or culture has increased significantly, let us not be fooled by online images and instagram virals. What we often take for granted today, or even as the new social status quo, is — especially in the age of algorithmic media — only a small slice of reality. On the one hand, the internet, “tailored” to our clicks and preferences, shows us mainly those contents and narratives that we ourselves have previously reinforced with attention. On the other hand, she can juxtapose extremely different stories from the most remote corners of the world; from the luxurious American celebrity Kim Kardashian to the dramatic situation of women in Afghanistan.

So it is not surprising that when we take up the topic of women in science, we can face a certain dissonance at first. On the one hand, we have never before had such a comprehensive picture of women's presence in culture and social development. On the other hand, it is precisely because we are increasingly talking about women as a group marginalized for decades, we are beginning to see how deep the gap is between the mere possibility of women “entering” areas such as the sciences and the real possibility of full participation in them, which for years has been much more readily available to men.

So, using the tools that the internet and social media offer today, it is worth looking at the topic of women in science holistically, confronting our own intuitions with the data and research carried out in recent years.

The Matilda phenomenon: or how prejudices rule us

The history of ignoring the role of women in science, or even attributing to men their scientific discoveries, is unfortunately very long. If we look at the many turning points in the development of the world - such as the invention of the Internet, or more precisely, the first wireless connections, behind which the Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr is behind - it is easy to understand that in history books, read from the first school years, we will find little information about famous scientists.

Apart from Marie Skłodowska-Curie, who, moreover, also faced, even after being awarded the Nobel Prize, enormous exclusion from scientific circles (despite receiving the prize for the rest of her life, she was not allowed to enter the French Academy of Sciences for sexist and xenophobic reasons), in vain to look in our textbooks, as in many others in the world, stories like the one about Hedy Lamarr, who really contributed to the creation of a global network of connections.

The phenomenon of this systemic exclusion of women from science, and even attributing to men their discoveries, has been called The Matilda Effect. The term was coined in 1993 by science historian Margaret W. Rossiter, who named it after Matilda Joslyn Gage, a 19th-century suffragist and author of an 1883 essay describing the omission of women's contributions to science. One of the most famous examples of such “theft of achievements” is the story of Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction studies of DNA (the famous Picture 51) were crucial for the discovery of the structure of the double helix. Still, the 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, and Franklin's contributions were marginalized over the years and not appreciated until posthumously.

A broader discussion of the mechanisms of exclusion of women from science would require at least a few pages of analysis, however, in brief, one can point to the long-standing educational neglect of women (lack of access to education), as well as biological determinants that - without the development of medicine and technology - have much more often reduced the role of women to bearing and raising offspring. This necessarily limited the time and resources that could be devoted to actively working for their own rights, including access to education and work.

Research on the so-called. authority gap (gaps in authority) and gender bias (gender bias) show, however, that even today (despite formal equality), the subconscious frivolous treatment of the female voice is rooted much deeper than one might think, among both men and women. This is evidenced by, among other things, a study Women Experts and Gender Bias in Political Media in 2023 (Adam L. Ozer, University of Houston), which, using the example of the perception of women in politics, shows the persistence of stereotypical perceptions of gender roles. In short: although the negative consequences of gender stereotypes, or beliefs about “which things should be dealt with by women and which men”, affect both sexes, in practice, due to the much greater representation of men in the media, culture and the public sphere (including politics), it is women who bear the brunt of the consequences. As the author of the study notes, “female experts are less rewarded for additional expertise and punished more severely for the lack of it, which exacerbates gender bias compared to the control group”.

Another example of the lack of coherence between the actual achievements of women and the social acceptance of female authority is the data cited by the American “Forbes”, based on research by the World Economic Forum. An analysis of 194 countries, conducted by the Center for Economic Policy Research and the WEF, found that women in leadership positions responded faster and with greater firmness to life threats. As a result, countries governed by them recorded, on average, about twice as many deaths as those headed by men. Despite these results, women are still rated as less predisposed to the role of leaders.

The scale of this perception is measured by Reykjavik Leadership Index, which explores societal beliefs about equality between men and women in leadership positions. In the 2020-2021 report, the average score obtained by women was 73 points - well below the value of 100, denoting the widespread belief that both sexes are equally suitable for exercising leadership.

The reverse effect of Matilda: or how what was supposed to help women turned against themselves

An extremely interesting and surprising discovery concerning the position of women in science was made by Polish researchers from the University of Wrocław, working in a team with Prof. Chip Bruce (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Dr. Anna Krasnodębska (WSB Merito Opole University) and Dr. Piotr Sorokowski, professor of the University of Wrocław. Their study showed that even a seemingly sufficient representation of women in science can, under certain conditions reverse the classic Matilda effect, leading to a completely opposite result to the intended one.

The researchers conducted an experiment in which more than 800 high school students were presented with a presentation on science (STEM) and the most interesting discoveries in these fields. The only variable that differentiated the different versions of the presentation was the gender assigned to the authors of the discoveries. In one version, the discovery was attributed to men, in the other to women - with the help of the study, both male and female figures of scientists were completely invented (using AI). The third group consisted of students from the control group, who were presented with an identical presentation, but without specifying the gender of the authors of the findings.

As it turned out, the version of the presentation, in which the scientific findings were attributed to women, was more often rated by the high school students surveyed as less interesting and less often perceived as a field they would like to study in the future. The opposite effect occurred in the case of a presentation in which authorship was attributed to men, even though the content of the discoveries was exactly the same in each version. The gender assigned to the authors was therefore sufficient to guide the assessment of the attractiveness of a given field of science.

These results surprised the scientists themselves, who initially assumed a completely different result. As Prof. Wojciech Małecki explains, it was expected that the version with female scientists would be particularly motivating for girls, and at the same time would not negatively affect the assessment of boys. “We assumed - according to one of the psychological theories - that if the gender of the presented scientists occurred in the presentation with the gender of the subjects, this should increase the motivation of the study participants to study the field in question. Meanwhile, this did not happen,” emphasizes the researcher.

So what could have happened, based on the available psychological and sociological knowledge, for yes, would seem a strange, even contradictory choice, which is the “reverse effect of Matilda” ? Researchers from the University of Wroclaw explain this as follows:

Women associated with “warmth” and men with “competence”:

One key mechanism is entrenched gender stereotypes that — often unconsciously — order our thinking about the social world. As Dr. Marta Kowal explains, these stereotypes function in two basic dimensions: heat and competences. Women are more often attributed to the former; seen as empathetic, caring and relational — while men are identified with high levels of competence, rationality and effectiveness.

At the moment when a woman succeeds in a field that requires high competence, for example, in science, it can provoke cognitive dissonance in people who unconsciously share the belief that “competence” is the domain of men. Cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant feeling of psychological discomfort that occurs when our beliefs collide with information that contradicts them. In this case: a successful female scientist challenges the stereotypical image of gender roles.

As Dr. Kowal adds, one of the easiest ways to reduce this discomfort is diminishing the importance of the field itself - recognition that it is not at all so important, prestigious or worthy of attention. In this way, it becomes possible to maintain the coherence of one's own beliefs without having to revise them.

Feminization of the profession reduces the amount of earnings:

A similar mechanism can also be observed in other areas of social life. Wojciech Małecki points out that the discussed effect is consistent with the well-documented relationship between the feminization of professions and the decline in wages. As numerous studies show, as a given profession begins to be perceived as a “female occupation”, its social prestige decreases, and with it - the level of wages.

Małecki suggests that this process may also be driven by stereotypes about what roles women are “naturally suited” to. When a field begins to be associated with a female presence, it can be perceived as less demanding, less specialized or less relevant - regardless of the actual competencies that are needed in it. The researcher also cites the example of the book market: according to analyzes, the average price of books written by women is as much as 45 percent lower than the average price of books written by men. Importantly, this difference is not due to objective factors, such as the different literary genres chosen by writers. Here, too, the mechanism of devaluing female creativity as less valuable is revealed.

summary

The International Day of Women and Girls in Science is not only a symbolic gesture of appreciation for the contribution of women researchers, scientists and explorers, but above all an opportunity to consciously and reliably recall analyses of the complex, multilevel problem of systemic exclusion of women - a problem whose consequences we face to this day. The study of high school students, while surprising at first glance, only highlights, after much thought, how deeply rooted gender stereotypes are and how strongly they influence our thinking about social and professional roles.

In the following parts of the article we will look at the data on the number of women in STEM fields, as well as the reasons for their lower professional activity in these fields - despite the increasing (compared to previous decades) the number of women entering science studies.

Sources:

Women in STEM: we need more of them! Thu. AND

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