The Hindu Business Line : Women in science

IT seems obvious that in a semi-literate country such as India, it should be relatively easy for women to become politicians than top researchers in science and engineering. But it surprising that even in advanced countries, it is difficult for women to become scientists, as revealed in a recent EU study. Fewer than 15 per cent of the industrial researchers in Europe are women, and only 9.6 per cent in Germany where a third of Europe's industrial researchers are based. Often, even fate seems to favour males.

For instance, how many people know that Crick and Watson's discovery of the double helix would not have been possible without the excellent DNA images produced through X-ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin. While Crick and Watson enjoyed all the credit in popular accounts for solving the mystery of DNA, Rosalind Franklin died in 1958 and was deprived of the Nobel prize. The EU now wants to change all that. It has vowed to take affirmative action to achieve a sense of gender balance. It wants proposals for funding research to contain a gender action plan. Ms Petra Bender at the Research Centre Jülich in Germany, a multidisciplinary public-research centre that runs positive-action programmes for women researchers, says that despite her efforts to explain how gender impact could be written into funding proposals, some of her colleagues remain perplexed.

"Many researchers just do not understand the concept of mainstreaming," she says. Since only 5 per cent of the funds for research in Germany is from the public sector, a group of seven Europe-based companies in Berlin announced a public commitment to improve the lot of women in industrial R&D. Airbus, Air Liquide, EADS, Hewlett-Packard, Rolls-Royce, Schlumberger and Siemens have each pledged to take measures such as monitoring targets and sponsoring role models, for example by endowing university chairs. Cosmetics firm L'Oréal, boasts 55 per cent of women on its research staff. L'Oréal also organises annual "For Women in Science" awards and fellowships in collaboration with UNESCO. Protagonists of this change do realise that putting more women in senior positions is not enough to make the world of science "truly diverse, inclusive and accommodating".

(The author is former Member, Ordnance Factories, Kolkata.)

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