Go back

A lab of one’s own

Image: Grace Gay for Research Professional News

Women scientists don’t need to lean in, they need science to change, says Gemma Derrick

Athene Donald is well placed to comment on gender inequality in scientific research and careers. She is emeritus professor in experimental physics at the University of Cambridge and that university’s first Gender Equality Champion. She has supported and advised on many programmes and policies aimed at promoting research careers for women. 

These personal experiences form the foundations of her new book, Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science. As a physicist, her focus on science makes perfect sense; as an Oxbridge professor, not all will recognise her view of academic life, although many of her experiences will resonate with female readers.  

What she doesn’t do, though, is build out from this to a more systemic analysis or critique of the issue. Gender disparities
are present right across academia; they stem from professional and intellectual structures rooted in a specific interpretation of excellence that actively excludes women.  

Women make up the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. But as university staff, they get paid on average less than men for doing the same job and are woefully underrepresented in senior positions. 

Donald’s focus on the personal means that, while this is the book to get readers angry about such unfairness, it misses both the complexity of the issue and the point that it is science that needs to change, not women. 

Weak reasoning

By one recent estimate, at current rates men and women will not be equally represented as authors in the physical, space and Earth sciences until 2063. The factors that Donald highlights may well explain why men came to outnumber women in science. But they are not why inequity persists, or why the gap is closing so slowly. 

The reality is that gender disparity does not persist because there is a dearth of female PhD candidates, or because children lack female scientific role models. Nor is it because girls’ mothers give them dolls rather than Lego or chemistry sets (I was given all three).

More important, this viewpoint means that the lessons and remedies that Donald offers are unlikely to result in science’s gender gaps closing more quickly. She writes about how male mentors supported her career and life choices—introducing her to other (male) professors in the field during her postdoc, and supporting her decision to have children. She lauds the benefits and importance of mentorship, and discusses broader evidence of the links between mentoring and success.

But such relationships can also turn toxic, potentially destroying an individual’s self-confidence and career. Female researchers are more likely to experience these toxic relationships and suffer the consequences, which, in turn, work to exacerbate inequalities. 

This is one area where a broader view would have helped: Donald does not offer the ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ counterfactual, asking what it would have meant for her career if, as is still the case for most female researchers, she had not been so ‘lucky’.

As a result, Not Just for the Boys reads something like an academic version of the ex-Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In. Both Sandberg and Donald wonder why there are so few female leaders, and both suggest how women should act to get ahead. 

Both offer women tools that provide encouragement to persist, but also messages to knuckle under and reasons for fatalism. 

Often, this means that the path to success comes across as a recommendation to act more like men. This risks sending a message that women’s failure to gain parity in science, tech or any other field is at least partly down to their own experiences and decisions.

But in science, the problem is the structure of the system, not women’s choices and behaviour. Academia is still shaped by criteria for success that were defined by men and are controlled by people—mostly men—who believe that any system that brought them to the top must be a meritocracy.

By failing to convey that it is the system that is failing women, or interrogating how that system is organised and governed, Not Just for the Boys does not provide the spark for the gender revolution that science needs.  

This is a shame, because accelerating the journey towards gender parity across academia requires a fundamental change to structures that disadvantage women systematically, unconsciously and directly. It is not the responsibility of individuals to be any one
type of person to achieve a scientific career; it is the responsibility of the system to accommodate difference. 

Gemma Derrick is an associate professor in the Centre for Higher Education Transformations at the University of Bristol

This article also appeared in Research Fortnight