New Delhi:
Women researchers in India are as prolific in publishing scientific
papers as men in spite of being significantly fewer in number, says a
study in Tuesday’s edition of Current Science.
While
it’s established that many women drop out at progressive stages of
their careers as scientists, the study in the peer-reviewed journal
quantitatively establishes that—as a proportion of their representation
in India’s population of scientists—women may not only be at par but
better than their male counterparts.
For
the study, the authors analysed—by gender—998 scientific papers
published between 2004 and 2009 by researchers at the doctorate and
post-doctorate levels. Generally, aspirant scientists are of ages 25-35
years at these stages of their careers. The study found that
proportionally, there was barely any difference in the number of papers
published by 358 women and 640 male researchers.
The
study analysts found 26% of female research scholars published their
findings in both science-citation index (SCI) and non-SCI journals; 11%
in non-SCI and 63% in SCI journals. Almost similarly, 28% of male
research scholars published both in SCI and non-SCI journals, 9% in
non-SCI and 63% in SCI journals. SCI journals are those accessed by a
database called the Science Citation Index, a compendium of more than
3,700 journals and a metric of their quality and outreach.
Other
data show women are grossly under-represented as research scholars as
well as in the larger scientific establishment. According to the
department of science and technology, only about 37% of those with a PhD
in science in India in 2005 were women; in general, only around 15% of
India’s scientists were women, significantly lower than the 25% in the
US and the European Union.
“This
study is specific to women at the PhD and post-doctorate level and
what’s most striking is there’s no difference in quality in their
output,” said Rajesh Luthra,
the main author of the study and head of the human resources department
of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India’s largest
group of publicly funded research laboratories.
The
data accentuated the fact that it was harder for women to have equally
productive careers in science as men, he said. “The recently constituted
task force for women in science talks about this,” he said.
In
2005, India’s science ministry constituted a committee to address the
poor representation of women in science. Under-representation of women
in science had grabbed international headlines after the then Harvard
president and former US secretary of treasury Lawrence Summers
attributed “differences in aptitude” as one reason for the lower
representation of women in the upper echelons of science and
engineering.
“There
is a drastic drop in the percentage of women from the doctoral level to
the scientist/faculty position, suggesting a bottleneck at the
employment stage due to recruitment procedures and family
responsibilities,” the committee said in its report, made public last
year. “Focused efforts are needed to identify the sources of this
precipitous drop and counteract them,” it said.
Garima
Balwani, who’s pursuing a PhD in pharmacy at the Birla Institute of
Technology and Science in Pilani, says she has never experienced any
bias academically. “There are no separate restrictions for women
studying science. Even to get papers published, there are no
restrictions. Journals only consider your credibility,” she said.
Private
companies, however, discriminated against women, she said. During her
internship at a company she did not want to name, Balwani could not get
hands-on training or do any actual research. “That particular company
hired women only in selective departments like patent and regulatory
affairs. They did not hire women in the department which involves actual
research work,” she said.
Balwani
added that several women who got a PhD also preferred to get into
teaching, a point also emphasized by the science ministry committee.
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