Editor's Chair: A French affair

 

A politician's gaffe highlights the gender gap in science. Political action, not talk, is what's needed to close it.

François Goulard, France's education and research minister, landed himself in the political soup recently. In the wake of the country's ethnic rioting, issues of social equality have been explosive here - Goulard was playing with dynamite.

It began in his shake-up of management at CNRS, the public research institution that is France’s biggest R&D organisation. His new, 21-person slate of CNRS directors included just one woman - and when a prominent female physicist publicly complained about it, he dismissed her comments as sour grapes over not being appointed, herself. Then, in one of those rare flashes of candour that reveal a politician’s true colours, he flippantly offered to solve the gender problem at CNRS by appointing his own (female) aide. "Now, if it would please you, I can name my assistant," he told an interviewer.

Charges of sexism bubbled in the French press for days, and on 16 November he did his penance at a conference on women in science in Paris. He apologised - kind of - for his indiscretion: "I was wrong," he said - not about the CNRS appointments, but about what he described as his previously naïve belief that no special government measures are needed to help women advance in science or industry. Government action "must be more positive, decisive, to give women the place that is theirs." Then, lest he trigger another political flap by seeming to support "positive discrimination" in contradiction to his own prime minister, he added: "That is my personal view."

A touchy subject

As the episode suggests, gender politics are a touchy subject. Anyone who raises the issue is accused of political correctness. Anyone who ignores it is accused of sexism. But a growing body of international data document that it's a dramatic and systemic problem - and in a growth business like R&D, in need of an ever-rising number of scientists and engineers, any problem that restricts labour supply needs attention.

The extent of the problem was outlined at the Paris conference, organised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the French government. Across the European Union, about a third of government or university researchers are women - far short of the population averages, of course.

The picture in business R&D is worse: 17.5 per cent are women. As a general rule, the percentages are lower in southern and eastern Europe, and higher in the west and north. They're higher in such "soft" fields as social sciences and healthcare, and lower in "hard" disciplines like physics and chemistry - what the people who study this field call "horizontal discrimination" from one field to another. There’s also "vertical discrimination", with junior research posts more likely to be filled by women while their bosses are men.

The best person for the job?

So what, you may ask? Surely all that matters, as Goulard said before his minders reined him in, is that the best person get the job - man or woman. And as bad as the numbers are by gender, they're even worse by ethnic group (and in some countries, such as France, the government doesn’t even track the numbers for race.)

All true. But a simple economic fact remains: "Women remain an untapped resource for science," said Berglind Ásgeirsdóttir, deputy secretary-general of the OECD.

Does that matter? It may affect lab productivity. One study, presented by Maria Bordons of the Spanish public research body CSIC, suggested a slightly lower research productivity among women than men in the organisation - but analysis of the data suggested that's largely because so few women are senior researchers, able to control budgets and researchers to crank out the research.

How much higher would CSIC's overall productivity be if more women were at the top? Women may also bring different perspectives to science. Johannes Klumpers, head of an EU Commission group that studies the problem, cited research suggesting women take a more inter-disciplinary approach to technical problems than men: "It's not only a question of equality; it's a question of what they bring into the discussion, in the priority-setting of research."

To an economist, such studies are interesting - but far from hard data. What was clear, however, is that gender laws, policies and programs actually do make a difference. In general, those nations with the most activist policies are also the ones with the biggest growth rates of women in science. In New Zealand universities, representation of women in senior staff positions rose by 140 per cent between 1997 and 2003. Setting quotas for membership in grant-funding boards, creating special career-advancement programs, requiring companies that get big government R&D grants to include gender-balance plans in their applications - all are simple measures that force attention on the problem.

Because of the gender gap in science, Goulard noted at the conference, "there is a loss of potential. We must try to counteract this tendency." D’accord, M. le Ministre.