‘Political shocks’ hitting women’s representation in science

Attacks on academic freedom by authoritarian and populist governments around the world have stalled female representation in science, according to a new study.

Researchers tracked how the proportion of women working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields in countries such as Hungary and Brazil has stagnated after the election of right-wing politicians.

The paper, “Sex, science, and society”, published in Research Policy, argues that the culture of a country has been an underexplored area when looking at the reasons why women’s representation in science still lags behind men’s, with research often focused on “preference and evolution-based explanations”.

The research examines Scopus data for 3.7 million scientists across 170 countries in 21 academic fields and found that just 33 per cent of all scientists and 15 per cent of top scientists are women.

Focussing on case studies in Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, the paper says “shocks to academic freedom appear to be linked to changes in women’s representation in science in both Non-STEM and STEM fields”.

In Brazil, women’s representation in science is relatively high, consistent with broader trends in Latin America, rising from about 38 per cent in 2008 to 41 per cent in 2018. However, since then, this growth has stalled and the proportion of women remains about 41 per cent. 

The study links this to the election in 2018 of Jair Bolsonaro, who served as president until 2022 and enacted deep budget cuts to public universities and “discouraged research in areas such as sexual diversity, gender equality, and racism”.

During this period China, Hungary, India and Mexico also saw political interventions restricting academic freedom, which affected women’s representation in academia, according to the researchers.

In China, women’s representation in science increased steadily from 2008 to 2015 but has since remained relatively stable at about 29 per cent. In Hungary, India and Mexico, women’s representation in science “rose prior to state intervention and continued to grow afterward, but at a slightly slower pace”.

They say that Donald Trump’s “ongoing attempts to curb academic freedom” make examining the link “particularly salient”.

In contrast, policies that encourage more academic freedom and gender equality have the opposite effect.

Saudi Arabia’s introduction of the Vision 2030 strategy, which sets out its plans to diversify the economy and empower women in the labour market, led to a “sharp” increase in women’s representation in science after 2016, the researchers found, from about 12 per cent in 2015 to about 18 per cent in 2022. 

Lead author Renée Adams, professor of finance at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, said the paper’s findings were important because “there’s this long-standing discussion why women are not represented in science, and often the argument or the conclusions come down to preferences, and people often will say, ‘well women are not in science because they don’t like maths’”.

She said such arguments were lazy and had been pervasive throughout the scientific world because if “it’s just down to preferences, it means you don’t have to do anything about it”. 

“As soon as you acknowledge there are structural barriers like culture, then you actually have to tackle them, and that makes people uncomfortable,” she told Times Higher Education.

The paper also finds that female scientists are more likely to migrate to more gender-equal countries, which could explain “why countries with more gender-equal cultures have more female top scientists”.

It concludes: “Our results suggest more generally that the conduct of science and innovation in countries and fields may be hampered by man-made constraints. Instead of simply educating women and girls, policies that change field-specific and scientific culture…and improve women’s rights and the rights of other minorities in science could lead to more inclusive science and higher rates of innovation.”