Female Scientists

The Place That Doesn't Believe in Female Scientists

Nathan Siegel | August 11, 2015

Quick — what’s your first association with Vikings and high quality of life? If you said Scandinavia, we wish you were here so we could give you the OZY sweatshirt off our back. Scandinavia has robust social safety nets and policies that emphasize gender equality. Hell, Scandinavian countries took four of the top five spots on the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Global Gender Gap Index. But in the closet with all their goody-two-shoes is at least one skeleton: science. A recent paper published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that: The Danish still largely believe that all scientists are men.

<more at http://www.ozy.com/acumen/the-place-that-doesnt-believe-in-female-scientists/61186; related link: http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/edu0000005 (Women’s representation in science predicts national gender-science stereotypes: Evidence from 66 nations. David I. Miller, Alice H. Eagly and Marcia C. Linn. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 107(3), Aug 2015, 631-644. [Abstract: In the past 40 years, the proportion of women in science courses and careers has dramatically increased in some nations but not in others. Our research investigated how national differences in women’s science participation related to gender-science stereotypes that associate science with men more than women. Data from ∼350,000 participants in 66 nations indicated that higher female enrollment in tertiary science education (community college or above) related to weaker explicit and implicit national gender-science stereotypes. Higher female employment in the researcher workforce related to weaker explicit, but not implicit, gender-science stereotypes. These relationships remained after controlling for many theoretically relevant covariates. Even nations with high overall gender equity (e.g., the Netherlands) had strong gender-science stereotypes if men dominated science fields specifically. In addition, the relationship between women’s educational enrollment in science and implicit gender-science stereotypes was stronger for college-educated participants than participants without college education. Implications for instructional practices and educational policies are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)] and http://www.biokemi.org/biozoom/issues/536/articles/2466 (Women in science in Denmark: A natural sciences perspective. Published october 2014)>