research in the USA, she has spent her career in Cambridge, specializing in soft matter physics and physics at the interface with biology. She was the University of Cambridge's first Gender Equality Champion, and has been involved in numerous initiatives concerning women in science.
Donald applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Girls in Science gives only a very specific example of the challenges underlying the title, an inkling of what the book is about. This particular page considers part of what happens in the classroom to young children, and why girls – so often given different toys from boys, ones less likely to develop good spatial awareness – may feel they don’t belong in science and engineering. If girls are never given a chance to practice thinking in three dimensions, they may appear to be less suited for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) compared with their male peers, when in fact it is only a case of practice making perfect for the boys. Nevertheless, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, acting as one factor impacting on the choices girls make later.Visit Athene Donald's blog.
The book itself has a much broader canvas, which page 99 barely touches upon, ranging from the structural impediments women faced when trying to learn and practice science in past centuries, to the active harassment many women and other minorities still face when in a lab, a lecture theatre or on a field trip. The lack of women in STEM is a well-known problem of long-standing in most of the developed world, although much less acute in the global south. This gives a clue as to how much societal, parental or cultural attitudes and expectations impact decisions and career choices that girls make. The book provides evidence of many of these contributing factors, which begin affecting the child essentially at birth. It discusses how things could be done differently and what attitudinal changes are required.
Even for those women who start out on a STEM career path, many factors may derail their aspirations, ranging from outright harassment or hostility to subtle exclusions or sexist letters of reference. Metrics may appear to be totally objective yet turn out on closer investigation to contain biases, frequently unconscious. As an example, it isn’t obvious that, or even why, men should cite papers by other men more than by women, but evidence shows that this is the case. It is not surprising that women often find themselves progressing more slowly than their male peers up the academic ladder.
I want this book to be read by parents, teachers and policy-makers. I want our system to be scrutinised to look at where subtle biases come into play in locations ranging from the classroom to funding panels. Only then will we really know how many women want to do science and what difference they make to the science that is done. Because, the arguments for encouraging more women into these subjects do not rest simply rest on fairness and the moral case, but in finding the optimum solutions to the many problems the world now faces.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
