Yesterday the New York Times interviewed Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, one of the "great biologists of the past 100 years." Dr. Nusslein-Volhard, along with her partner Eric Wieschaus, discovered "how genes in a fertilized egg direct the formation of an embryo," a revelation for which she and her co-researchers were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Nusslein-Volhard is just the tenth woman scientist to win a Nobel Prize. Recently, she used a grant from Unesco-L'Oreal's Women in Science Program to establish a foundation to encourage female scientists by offering grants for babysitters and household help.
One of the reasons that so few women win Nobel Prizes in the sciences is that relatively few women ever become scientists in the first place. Even though women are moving into professions like law and medicine in ever-increasing numbers, they remain relatively scarce in the so-called "hard sciences"--math, biology, physics, etc. Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes, by Yu Xie and Kimberlee A. Shauman, aims to explain this phenomenon. They begin with three questions:
* Why is it that science and engineering occupations seem less responsive to the social forces that have successfully effected progress toward gender equality in other occupations?
* Is science "the final frontier" for occupational gender equality?
* Is it simply that more time is needed, or is science so unique that it defies the trend toward gender equality evidenced in other professional occupations?
The last question--whether there is something "unique" about science that causes fewer women to be scientists--goes to the heart of the controversial comments made last year by Harvard's own Lawrence Summers. Women in Science tackles these and many other difficult issues in a sober way that debunks much of the hyperbolic myth-making that's gone on around a subject as controversial as this one.
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