Where are the women?
1 Nov 2012 by Evoluted New Media
You don’t need me to tell you that science deals in the currency of evidence. This evidence builds into a constellation of data that then allows a conclusion to be drawn. To think contrary to well gathered evidence would at best be ‘un-scientific’ and at worst utterly foolhardy. As such, it is time for science to admit it has a problem. A problem highlighted by some truly damning statistics – evidence which must surely lead to one conclusion: That there are not enough women in science.
Women have always been underrepresented in STEM, but worse – to my mind at least – it seems as if those women who have contributed to scientific understanding throughout history fail to get the recognition they deserve. This why we have heard of Aristotle but not Merit Ptah, Louis Pasteur but not Margaret Cavendish – the list goes on.
Case in point is one of the UK’s most famous female scientists – Rosalind Franklin. Her notoriety however came largely from society’s shame at not recognising her work earlier. In the 1950’s her excellent and vital work producing x-ray diffraction images of DNA did not earn her the credit she deserved. While the distinctly male Watson and Crick were hoisted upon history’s shoulders, Franklin was left wallowing in obscurity. Revisionists have rightly fought hard for her name to be as synonymous with the double helix as Watson and Crick – but the controversy often replaces the achievement in people’s minds.
Is this all that the pursuit of science can offer womankind? A long fought for pseudo-recognition which frankly denigrates the inherent dignity of a life devoted to discovery. A dignity, apparently, automatically afforded to the possessors of an XY chromosomal pairing.
Yet whatever awaits women once they have embarked on a career in science, the problem remains that not enough of them do so. And so, what should be the reason for this gender disparity? Can it be that the X-chromosome recessively imparts traits that hinder any predisposition to scientific rigor? A kind of recessive antisense working against the scientific thought process? I’m being asinine of course, but this shadows the inherent absurdity that in 2012 – you are six times more likely to work in STEM if you are male.
