• Question: Why do you think there are more male scientists than female

    Asked by 582bera34 to Colin, John, Kevin, Shikha, Triona on 14 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Shikha Sharma

      Shikha Sharma answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      Hi 528bera34,
      Earlier the ratio difference was more because of family responsibilities that after a certain stage women used to leave their job. But scenario is changing very fast. Women are catching up and balancing both professional as well as personal life really well.!!!!!! The scenario is not only in science but also in other areas. I personally don’t see there are any fundamental reasons for less no of women in science. Government is running a lot of programs to encourage the young women to take science as a career and continue their career with their personal life.

    • Photo: Tríona O'Connell

      Tríona O'Connell answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hapilly, that’s a situation that’s changing rapidly.
      There’s a lot of reasons for a gender imbalance in science, including the choice of subjects at boy’s schools vs. girls (they get a head start on engineering topics for example), how the media portrays scientists (lots of men in white coats, Silicon Republic is doing a good series on women in tech/sci called #womeninvent to try to highlight women), and how society expects women to behave (be polite, be quiet, don’t shout, don’t boast, have babies, stay at home to mind them).
      There’s also changes in teh ratio as you go up the ranks from students to heads of companies, the more senior the role, the more men you see. There’s attempts to change this, but a lot of this might be a holdover from the past, with time this will improve, but there’s no harm trying to fix it sooner rather than hoping it’ll right itself on its own.

    • Photo: Kevin Motherway

      Kevin Motherway answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      I do visits to schools both single sex and coed and I gotta say I see no difference in the amount of girls doing science. That’s what’s great about Science its a universal thing. But I know people at work who even just 10 years ago were discouraged from doing science at leaving cert level. I dearly hope its not like that now as although boys and girls/men and women are completely equal they can have different perspective and can think differently about puzzles and problems and we need all the variety of approach we can get when it comes to solving scientific mysteries. If you’re in a girls school that doesn’t offer the full set of leaving cert sciences at leaving cert level, that’s a scandal and you should ….raise absolute hell! I hope thats not the case anywhere

Comments