Madam President,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Distinguished guests,
It is an honour to be able to address you all today, on the day where the European Platform of Women Scientists is launched officially. I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so. While I am not a scientist myself, my husband is a chemist and I am a Former Minister for Higher Education and Research. I am also a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Transport and Energy policy, as well as on Environment and Consumer protection.
Having said that, I would like to go on by saying that I believe that your newly launched platform should be perfectly unnecessary.
Let me explain.
We are at a time in history where girls have general access to primary, secondary and tertiary education and where, more often than not, they achieve better results than their male classmates.
We are at a time where universal suffrage has been a constant for almost a century.
We are at a time where all the material and legal foundations for the equality between men and women have been laid.
We are at a time where, according to all appearances, it has become anachronistic – and thus perfectly superfluous – to create a platform especially for women scientists.
Why should women scientists be privileged? Do they not have the same rights, the same access to education and research as men? Do they not have the same intellectual capacities as men? I have read recently that a professor at Leeds University has been fired for asserting that women are in general less intelligent than men – a reasoning which would have been outdated even in the Twentieth Century, never mind the Twenty-first. Are we not supporting logical fallacies like the one that women are less intelligent when we claim that it is necessary to give them special treatment and support? No, with all due honesty, in a society where everyone has the same rights, it is unnecessary, and even counter-productive, to give women scientists special privileges.
If that was indeed what I believed, I would not be here today – but in politics, as in science, as originally in theology, it is sometimes necessary to play the devil’s advocate.
Because unfortunately, equal rights do not always translate into equal opportunities.
A famous chemist, Gertrude Elion, once said: “I had been given every excuse imaginable for not hiring me, even when there was an opening. They had never had a woman in the laboratory before and were sure I would be a ‘distracting influence’.”
She was commenting, of course, on her own stony path to employment in the science and research community.
The following figures, which you probably know well, show how serious the situation is. According to the 2006 EU annual report on equality between women and men, eighty percent of all women aged between twenty and twenty-four years had completed their upper secondary education, compared with only seventy-five percent of all young men. The figures remain approximately the same for the first university degree: in many cases, women are more successful than men. However, only forty-three percent of all PhD-students – and only fifteen percent of all University Professors – are women!
So although the majority of university graduates may be women, it is infrequent for women to rise to become leading project managers in research or attain positions as recognised experts. This is the reality that female science graduates have to face today: their access to research remains very much uncertain – and the only apparent reason for this seems to be that they are women.
So what could be the cause for the continuing relative absence of women from senior posts in research and hard science in general?
I believe that there is not one single factor, but a concurrence of several causes for this unacceptable state of affairs.
There is no particularly feminine or masculine branch of science – rather, it seems that there are historical foundations for the very small base of participation of women in the formulation of modern science. Unfortunately, very often women were not admitted to universities where modern science was taught.
For instance, in her book on “Women, Science and Education”, Giulia PANCHERI writes that in the case of Oxford University, an association for the Education of Women in Oxford had to be founded in 1878. It was only in 1884 that women were allowed to participate in examinations for the first time, and until 1956, a reactionary group of male Dons managed to impose quotas limiting the number of female undergraduates that were admitted to Oxford’s various Colleges.
A cynic might argue that since then, things have changed very much indeed, and that by the second half of the Twentieth Century, all major European and American universities had opened their doors to female students.
But such an improvement in the situation should not divert from the severe drawbacks at hand.
Even if ever more students are female, and if we are reaching parity in some cases, and are sometimes even faced with situation, where there are more female than male students studying a given subject, the presence of women holding paid positions in research and academic institutions is still appallingly low.
Only seventeen percent of university lecturers in France are female today; and while the French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) had thirty percent of women scientists 1950, in 2003, that figure had risen to… only thirty-one percent! This practical stagnation for more than half a century illustrates the persistent need for improvement in this area.
This shows that there must be other factors than university admission that influence women in making their career choice. After solving the problem of entering academia as students, women face difficulties on the two subsequent levels: first, gaining access to paid employment in science and second, possibilities for career advancement.
In Physics for instance, the percentage of female unemployed PhD graduates is twice the one of their male counterparts.
So what makes it so hard for women to pass from successful studies to a successful career?
One very important and heavy factor is without a doubt family life – or the lack thereof. It is obvious that Europe’s career structure, based on traditional family roles, is not suitable for shaping the way to the future for women scientists.
When I signed my first work contract as a radio journalist for RTL, I found that it contained a clause which stipulated that if I married – meaning implicitly that I would then probably have children – I would be made redundant automatically. That was in 1963, and we have come a long way since then.
Nevertheless, the long study period to achieve the necessary qualification, the high level of career insecurity and international mobility requirements are all key elements in scientific careers. It is a cruel comparison to make, but unlike for men, for women the biological clock is ticking.
It is therefore not surprising that ever more women professors live alone and cannot afford to have children. It is not my prerogative to pass judgement on these or on other women. Both family and career are a personal choice – what I would judge harshly though, are the unfair conditions on which women are forced to make this choice.
In order to illustrate this, I would like to recount the story of a young female scientist, who postulated for a vacant professorship at university, as it was told to me.
The young lady in question had all the required diplomas and qualifications for the position, and before long, she made it to the final interview. It was at this moment that she was asked, among other things, whether she had any children. Having made the courageous choice of both family and career, she replied that she had two children. A little later, she was informed that unfortunately, she could not be considered for the position.
Later on, she applied for another professorship, at another university, and made it to the final round of the application process again. In the interview, she was again asked whether she had any children. Again, she answered that she had two. And again, she was not accepted for the professorship.
After this repeated setback, she told another female colleague about this. With great astuteness, her colleague suggested that, if ever she was going to be in the same position again, she should simply answer the question about her children in the negative.
And, sure enough, at a third interview, the exact same procedure was repeated. Only this time, she answered that she had no children.
A little later, she received the professorship.
With all due respect for selection procedures, but would any jury have asked the same question of a man who applied for the same position?
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests,
In science, like in all other human strivings, teachers and mentors play an important role in the training, the structuring and the establishing of individual personalities. The comparative absence of women in leading positions in science departments renders the road much more difficult for prospective female students.
Again I would like to illustrate this by an example. The perception of science and scientists is linked very strongly to male figures in popular culture and imagination. This makes it very difficult for female role models to emerge. Indeed, when asked to name famous scientists, most of our contemporaries would probably mention Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, or even Alfred Nobel, who made enough money with the invention of dynamite that generations of future scientists can now compete to win one of the three famous prizes named after him.
Speaking of which, in roughly one hundred years of Nobel Prizes awarded for Chemistry, Physics and Medicine, only twelve prizes were won by women scientists. Moreover, they were won by only eleven women, given that Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes – thus making it into scientific history as one of the very few very renowned female researchers. And then again, some would argue that this was due in a large part to her cooperation with Pierre Curie, and to the tragic way in which the couple sacrificed their lives for science.
So what can be done to counter this unfortunate state of affairs?
Following from my last argument, a good starting point would of course be the coming about of more positive female role models in positivism – as every young female pilot may look up to Amelia Earhart, and every aspiring nurse to Florence Nightingale, every young scientist should be able to look up not only to Marie Curie and her few famous sisters in science, but to a large number of women who have succeeded in scientific research.
Here we are of course faced with a dilemma: how can you have more female role models if a woman can only become a role model when she has already attained a high visibility chair at a university, or reached a leading position in an Academy of Science or another one of those bodies which are currently determined to a large extent by their overwhelmingly male membership. Both open and hidden sexism and paternalism will remain an obstacle. But in spite of this, and because of this, women need to intensify the search for nomination and need all the help they can get to lobby others for support.
And this is precisely where the European Platform of Women Scientists will have to play an invaluable role: it can create synergies and networks between female scientists and thus help them get to positions which would be much more difficult to reach without this help!
Women should not try to follow men’s traditional career patterns but we must develop our own way to do scientific research. Although it is difficult, we need to realise that a period of a certain “latency” in the career, imposed upon us by the biological constraint of bearing children and of family life does not need to be equated with a full stop for the whole career.
Being a mother of three, I know how exceedingly complicated it is to return to professional life in the best of cases. This is exacerbated by the extremely competitive world of fundamental research, in which it is very hard to regain a foothold once one has been out of the loop for several months or even years. However, modern information and communications technologies are a first step to making things easier: they allow women to stay connected and tuned to progress in real time – in some cases these technologies may even allow women to continue research altogether during a period of maternal leave.
Here again, the Platform could play a central role in networking, and in the dissemination and development of access to the relevant information and communications technology. As a lobbying platform, you will also need to push governments and decision-makers to adopt new laws for making family life and a career not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing. This will require a great deal of courage and creativity, but I am confident that you shall be able to muster these and attain tangible results.
But this is only half the truth. While you, as women scientists, may lead a bottom-up process to improve working conditions and career access, “l’intendance doit suivre”, as the late French President Charles De Gaulle would have put it. The rest of society needs to follow the trend. Given that many men – also young ones – still seem to hold the same patronising and paternalistic views than their fathers and grandfathers, we can safely assume that a lot more needs to be done to influence mindsets to change for the better.
On a European level, we could therefore ask whether rules to promote the participation of women in research – or even quotas setting a minimum participation – should be introduced. This is not a question that is easy to answer. In fact, it would almost be an offence to ask it to women who have had to fight against prejudice and sexism during their entire careers, who have been forced to make concessions in order to combine work and family life… or who have not been able to fulfil their dream of having children because it would have been impossible to reconcile their professional and personal lives. Those women have not been successful because they are ratio women, but because they have worked hard and have fought relentlessly to become great scientists.
And yet, affirmative action should not be entirely dismissed – it is not only a matter of positive discrimination, but also of changing mindsets to make real equality possible in the first place.
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests,
The European Union has played a very important part in this area, and continues to do so: in many senses, it has contributed to improving the situation of women in paid employment. As an example, I could quote the European Council’s Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000, which established a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation, or the directive 2002/73/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 September 2002, on the implementation of the principle of equal treatment for men and women as regards access to employment, vocational training and promotion, and working conditions.
One must also acknowledge the positive actions undertaken by the European Commission to promote gender equality in science. Since the Commission has adopted the “Women and Science Action Plan” in 1999, policies to promote women’s role in science and to close the gender gap have come to play an important part in European research policies. These actions have the full support of the European Parliament and of the governments of the Member States.
Within the 6th Framework Programme for Research and Development, a specific budget line has been created for funding women science projects. The simple fact that we are here this afternoon proves that this new budget line has already come to fruition, since it has allowed laying the cornerstone in financial terms of the new European Platform of Women Scientists, which in the future will allow creating ever closer cooperation between existing networks of women scientists.
With the Helsinki group on Women and Science, synergies between European and national policies are being stimulated through the development of a dialogue and the exchange of good practices regarding the promotion of women in science.
Furthermore, the European Commission seeks to mainstream gender equality in scientific research by promoting actively the participation of women scientists in past, present and future Framework Programme activities. Success is not guaranteed though: while the Commission has set itself the target of forty percent of women representation in committees, groups and panels, little progress has been made to achieve these targets between the Framework Programmes 5 and 6. The number of Project coordinators has actually gone down from sixteen percent under the fifth programme, to fourteen percent under the current sixth programme. However, targets for the Marie Curie fellowships of forty percent have almost been met, since in 2004, thirty-five percent of all Marie Curie fellows were female. The Commission recognises that where there is progress, it needs to work harder, and where there is regress, policies need to be revised, adapted and changed.
To conclude, I would like to reaffirm that we women have come a long way. There is neither reason to lament over the persistently remaining inequalities, nor to accept the status quo and give up the struggle. We need more female role models, and we need to change obstinate and intransigent mindsets and social currents. Oscar Wilde, who professed that “women are meant to be loved, not understood”, also stated that “The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.” Women have exactly the same right to pursue and realise their destiny in life as men.
Finally, the entire society must become conscious of the fact that the responsibility to raise children does not lie exclusively with women. Raising a family is also the affair of men. Be they industry captains or government ministers, accountants or factory workers.
And not least, also… scientists.
Thank you very much for your attention.