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  • Girls, science and glass ceilings?

    Thursday 25 August 2011

    Categories: Careers, Education, Role Models

    A recent article in The Telegraph on ‘Science stereotypes’ claimed that “more girls are opting for science subjects, but stubborn prejudices persist”. It explained how women have been awarded only 16 out of the 540 Nobel Prizes in Science, and how only 10% of the membership of the Royal Society is female. Dame Athene Donald, professor of Physics at Cambridge University, said: ‘Too many young women are discouraged – actively or passively – from pursuing their dream of a career in science. We need to confront stereotypes.’

    Last year I was asked to take part in a debate, entitled: ‘This House believes that there is still a glass ceiling for women aiming for top positions in organisations’. I was invited to speak for the motion, and was initially disappointed as I would have preferred to speak against it, aware as I am of how much progress has been made with respect to equality of opportunity in recent years. We have come a very long way in terms of levelling the playing field for women and ensuring they are not routinely disadvantaged and discriminated against so that they can aim for the top in any profession, if that is what they choose to do. The position of women in the workplace has improved hugely. But I trained as an English teacher and playing the devil’s advocate comes with the territory, so I started to plan my arguments, and decided to begin with some research.

    I decided I would not bombard the audience with facts and figures. I am more interested in people and their stories, as I find words more compelling than numbers. So I decided to find some case studies – examples of women in various professions today who felt they had been treated differently from men in comparable positions in the same professions and that this difference in treatment did constitute something of a barrier – perhaps a barrier that is subtle, that is hard to see (made of glass, not concrete), but still there. Things may be much better than they were 30 years ago when I started my career. We have to celebrate that. But we also have to accept that although many battles have been won, they haven’t all been won. It isn’t yet a completely level playing field in some walks of life and there is still work to be done to ensure that women in these professions are not treated differently from their male counterparts – in a way that makes it harder for them to access the top jobs.
    I found several young women who were willing to share their stories with me and who agreed that I could cite their experiences in order to demonstrate that we are not yet where we would hope to be in terms of professional equitability for men and for women. These are all current stories. The woman are all successful women in their 30s, and I have to say these stories were not hard to find.

    The main areas where I found examples of unequal treatment were in IT, in finance and in science. My science case study was Anna. Anna is a physicist, who has done extremely well in her field. She is in her 30s and is a superb role model for other girls, having an impressive range of skills. However, her story is that the world of science can still be unfriendly to women, especially to those who may wish to combine a career in science with a family, which is of course a choice that many women may wish to make; currently four fifths of women have families. She says that in her particular field of science there is still a clear expectation that those who make it to the top will work extremely long hours, including at weekends, and that they will move jobs and locations every few years. She says the women in her professional area often do not survive these demands and concessions for good women scientists are not made. There is still, in her experience, a network of men helping other men and women are not treated equally. She says some of the women in her department are not as assertive as the men, for example over salary demands, and that pushiness not only works, but to a degree it is expected. The difference may be subtle and this may not be something legislation can easily challenge, but it’s a barrier to the success of women in her field.

    I accept that in terms of equality of opportunity for the sexes we have most definitely come a long way in the last few decades and this is absolutely the right direction of travel. My initial response when I first heard the motion was to oppose it and to focus on the positive. My considered opinion, having heard the personal stories of talented young women currently working in finance, IT and science is that women still have a long way to go before we can claim we have true equality of opportunity and there is no glass ceiling to act as a barrier to our professional success. We don’t hear the phrase ‘glass ceiling’ often these days, and the girls in the audience weren’t familiar with it and certainly didn’t want to believe in its existence, but my experience of speaking in the debate strengthened my conviction that we have to be alert to prejudice when it occurs, to accept it is there (rather than to retreat into denial) and to fight against it.

    Posted by Jill Berry

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