WOMEN, SCIENCE and EDUCATION Giulia PANCHERI Research Physicist, INFN Frascati National Laboratories INFN Equal Opportunity Committee For most of my life I have been asking myself what is the reason for the very scarce presence of women scientists, especially for what concerns the so-called hard sciences and the "hardest " of them all, physics. There is of course no single reason to explain such a striking and exceptional absence of women, but as usual a combination and concurrence of causes and I shall try to list them in this note. But, before entering into more details, let me state from the very beginning that I do not believe the existence of feminine and masculine science, at least not in the field where I have been active, elementary particle physics. On the contrary, I am now convinced that the main reason, albeit not the only one, for the scarce participation of women to the formulation of modern science, is ascribable to the fact that women were not admitted as students in those universities where modern science was formulated and taught. The admission policy of some of the most famous universities with regards to women is illustrated in the following few examples. 1. At Oxford An Association for the Education of Women in Oxford was formed in 1878, and was followed by the founding of four women's colleges and the Society for Home Students. From about 1884 women were allowed (duly chaperoned) to attend university lectures and to sit the examinations, and from 1920 they were entitled to full membership of the university and allowed to receive degreees. In 1927 reactionary male dons imposed a limit on the number of female undergraduates to be admitted each year, and the limit remained until 1956. A list of the first women's colleges can be found in Appendix A. All of these colleges acquired full collegiate status in 1959. 2. At Durham the first women to start at University of Durham as students was in 1896. The first all women's college had its 100th anniversary last year. 3. At Harvard, until 1943, Radcliffe students were not permitted to attend classes with Harvard students, even though Radcliffe had been officially incorporated in 1894. And until 1967, female students were barred from Lamont Library for fear that making the secluded stacks co-ed might distract students from their studies and encourage romantic trysts. The reasoning which leads me to assert that the lack of participation of women to the development of science which still persists up to these days, has been the esclusion of women from Institutions of High Learning in the most prestigious North Europe Universities, is based on the following points : 1. In the 17th century, the hub of scientific thought moved from the South to the North of Europe, from the catholic to the protestant countries. 2. Most of the North Europe Universities, unlike their counterparts in the South, did not admit women neither as teachers nor as students and therefore women became excluded from learning modern science in the university setting. 3. Physics laws and their applications do not come easily to the student, as they require memory and leaps of faith (who has ever seen different objects, like a feather or an iron ball, fall at the same speed, except a visionary like Galileo?). Training of the mind from practising scientists and in formal settings is a conditio-sine-qua-non of learning to use the inductive-deductive process characteristic of modern science. In the second half of the XXth century, all the major european and american universities admitted women students, even Harvard. One could then expect that the problems should be fading away, as new generations of young women get educated and start training in science. However, there still are major problems faced by science in relation with women : notwithstanding the fact that women now enroll in much larger numbers in science and engineering courses, there is still too low a presence of women in research and academic institutions, as one can see from two main publications from the US National Science Foundation, [A] and [B]. Physics is emblematic in this respect : in Fig. 5-6 of [B] one notices for instance that the percentage of unemploymemt among persons with PhD in physics is twice as large for women than for men, unlike all the other fields in Science and Technology, where the relevant percentages are quite similar. One cannot avoid admitting that factors, other than university admission policies, must be influencing women as they choose or rather not choose to make hard science a life choice. The question we therefore face is which other factors have influenced the scarce participation of women to the hard sciences.In general, the difficulties faced by women in this respect are not only at the entrance level, but at all subsequent steps, permanence in the profession and career advancement. At the European Community level, only 3 out of 54 of the successful physics networks of the Research Training and Mobility Networks had a european coordinator which was a woman, and at least in one of these cases, the woman coordinator was accompanied by a "Scientific " Coordinator, a rather unusual occurrence. Why so few women in basic research? To answer this question, I shall start with stating which are the elements which can make a good scientist out of a young person looking for a profession for life. From the point of view of innate abilities, one can draft the following list : i) natural intelligence ii) disposition to study iii) capacity for hard work iv) intuition There is no doubt that such qualities pertain to women and men in (at least) equal measure, and therefore the obstacles must be found in the (lack of) other necessary, albeit not sufficient, conditions. I would like to focus the discussion into two main categories which pertain respectively to I. the emotional world II. the relationship with mentors and teachers As far as the emotional world is concerned, stability, in the sense of fundamentally stable emotional ties, constitute a necessary condition for the scientist who wishes to concentrate his/her intellectual resources on internal creativity. For a writer or a painter, emotions are not necessarily something to keep under control since in this case the flux of passions are the elements of creation, even the object of description. For a scientist, emotions may be a stimulus to creativity but not an ingredient of scientific endeavours. This is a noticeable difference between scientist and artists, which does not imply that scientists are not men and women of passion, indeed finally the most recent biographies of great scientist do show how different they are from pure ice cold intellects, but rather that passions are not a "tool of the trade". As marriage is one of the elements which may ensure emotional stability, it must be noted that women active in the intellectual professions are at a disadvantage. Fig. 5-7 of [B] shows that women scientist or engineers have a lower probability than their men colleagues to be married. In addition, as shown in Fig. 5-9, married women scientist have a higher probability than men to be married to a colleague, thus entering into another problem faced by women scientists and their spouses, the "dual career" problem, whereupon these couples need to find positions in the same field in closeby institutions. For women who wish to follow the natural pattern of having both a family and a scientific career, one then encounters a set of typical drawbacks, like 1) in the daily life, even with the most open minded companion, women are hardly able to dedicate all their time to research, since they are not willing to ignore the emotional instances of children, elderly parents and family in general 2) for the same reason, but also because of childbearing during the years for career building, women do not have the mobility of their male colleagues, both concerning working abroad as well as concerning working in a different city from where the family lives, and also as far as accepting invitations to conferences any time the opportunity arises. These obstacles are very difficult to overcome. In many other fields, art and literature in particular, women have been able to go around these obstacles, by inventing or creating the famous "room of one's own" of Virginian memory. But in the sciences, a room is not enough. You need a laboratory and other scientists, especially in the modern sciences. However, one need to be ingenious and try to find the way to get the great intellectual component of women's mind into the creation of science. It is neessary to get out of the usual schemes, which define the modus operandi of the man scientist. My message to young women scientists, or would be scientists, is that we need not follow men's pattern and must develop our own way to do scientific research notwithstanding the differences I tried to outline above. It is one of the recurrent myths of modern sciences that great discoveries are made by scientist before they turn 40. This fact is particularly depressing for women, whose biological clock runs in the same direction, but for producing children, not great discoveries. However, we know that women live longer than men, by almost 10 years, in fact, and this can be used at our advantage. Our life as scientists must include a period of "latency", between 25 and 40 years of age, during which we may have to accept the fact that requirements of family life may slow down the professional endeavours. For the creative and ambitious woman, this may be difficult to accept without emotional stress, but it can become bearable if one can foresee that at the end of such period it will be possible to reenter the professional and scientific life with renewed courage and emotional steam. This is not always possible, of course, especially in the extremely competitive world of fundamental reearch. In addition most of the programs for training and hiring of young scientist have an age limit which makes very difficult if not impossible to enter into the scientifc positions after 35 or 40 years of age. Finally, even without these restrictions, to be back into the main stream of reearch requires first of all never to have completely abandoned doing research, and second to accept to be behind in salary and professional levels. In a number of cases however, this may be the only way to build one's own family and remain active the field of fundamental research. This road has been the one I have followed, and although it refers to an experience which started 30 years ago, it may still be valid, especially since the problems I described have not yet been solved. Another problem I would like to briefly discuss concerns mentorship. In science, like in all other fields of human endeavours, teachers play a great role in the training and establishment of individual personalities. Unfortunately, the lack of women scientists or, in the best case, the small number of such personalities in the physics departments, renders much more difficult for women students the road to structure one's own personality along the pattern of other successful scientists. This problem has been discussed at length in the literature and is recognized as being at the origin of many of the difficulties encountered by women students in basic research, together with the further difficulty for a woman to enter and made herself accepted in a natural way in a mostly male ambience. These considerations naturally and inevitably lead to the question of quotas, as a means to ensure a sufficiently large representation of women in positions of power and/or prestige, so as to offer an image of woman scientist to the young women entering a scientific career. CONCLUSIONS In this short note, I have outlined some of the differences between men and women in relation to their entering and pursuing a scientific life. I believe that the main reason for the low presence of women in basic science is both due to historical reasons, namely the exclusion of women from university training until the end of the 19th century, and personal reasons, like the emotional strain and the absence of mentors. I have proposed personal solutions, like a slowing down of research activity during the family forming years, as well as institutional amendments, like the establishments of quotas and abolition of age restrictions on hiring in reearch and academic institutions. Quotas, albeit in principle undemocratic and discriminatory in a reverse sense, appear to be necessary, in light of the purpose to change, in reasonably short periods of time, a very distorted situation, like the one we see in women and men relative impact on the development of basic science. It is now clear that a society which is not exploiting the full intellectual potential of its population, is wasting its resources. I am personally convinced that one of the causes of the present economic and cultural success of the United States lies in having recognized this problem more than twentyfive years ago, starting a program of equal opportunities and affirmative actions, for women in science in particular. The problem is still far from being solved, as the statistics still show, but there have been obvious improvements, mostly thanks to the quotas, established at the beginning and now eliminated as obsolete or downright rejected by various groups. The situation in Italy, as far as science is concerned, and in particular physics, is better than in the USA, when the various Women in Science programs supported by the National Science Foundation were started. As discussed in an article in Science, [C], in the Mediterranean countries and in Italy in particular, there appear to be more women active in basic research than in the USA. This can be attributed to an educational system based on science curricula identical for men and women up to high school level, and to a more liberal policy of admitting women in the Universities. However, there is still a remarkable inability to recognize the seriousness of the problem represented by the low participation of women to the development of science and it is the duty of Research and High Learning Institutions to help our society to overcome this deficiency. Appendix A At Oxford, the first women's colleges were the following: Lady Margaret Hall founded in 1878 Somerville College founded in 1879 St Hugh's College founded in 1886 St Hilda's College founded in 1893 Society of Home Students founded in 1879, which then became St Anne's College in 1952. All of these colleges acquired full collegiate status in 1959. Bibliography [A] Science and Enginnering 1998, National Science Foundation, Washington,D.C., 1998 [B] Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation , Washington D.C., 1996 [C] Women In Science 1994 in SCIENCE , Vol. 263, pag 1345, 11 Marzo 1984.