How women enter higher education, attain degrees, and work in chemistry, mathematics, statistics, and computer science is essentially regulated by the different cultures within their national societies. These express social, economic, and political values about the role of women in society, and shape the values of academic institutions. The latter are sometimes contradictory and burdened with a historical legacy inimical to the full participation of women in science. At the same time, an increasing international consensus about the practice of science tends to be much more supportive of women training and working in these fields.
What follows is a brief analysis of the multiple cultural and institutional factors affecting women’s participation in science and mathematics around the world. Increasingly the major international institution for participation in science is the research university. Its origins are mixed, but the most emulated form developed in the United States after World War II. That this form flourished there is an accident of history. In 1945, few other countries were able to pour national resources into higher education after economies, infrastructure, and millions of citizens were destroyed by the war. The development of research universities was a deliberate result of federal policy and in tandem with the increase of national and private laboratories. After 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, federal funds poured into universities, expanding facilities for big science, and increasing the number of doctoral-granting programs and graduate students (Geiger 2009). Undergraduate enrollment expanded from 1,494,203 in 1940 to 16,386,738 in 2008 (Chronicle of Higher Education [CHE] 1974; CHE Almanac, 2010). The research university or a similar form has a monopoly on doctoral conferral, and a historical legacy of exclusivity, internal stratification, and competition among academic fields. It transmits both academic and social values to students and sustains them in successive generations of scientists.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2012. Blueprint for the Future: Framing the Issues of Women in Science in a Global Context: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13306.