---
title: "Women in science"
chunk: 17/25
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:51:28.816114+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Latin America and the Caribbean ====
Latin America has some of the world's highest rates of women studying scientific fields; it also shares with the Caribbean one of the highest proportions of female researchers: 44%. Of the 12 countries reporting data for the years 2010–2013, seven have achieved gender parity, or even dominate research: Bolivia (63%), Venezuela (56%), Argentina (53%), Paraguay (52%), Uruguay (49%), Brazil (48%) and Guatemala (45%). Costa Rica is on the cusp (43%). Chile has the lowest score among countries for which there are recent data (31%). The Caribbean paints a similar picture, with Cuba having achieved gender parity (47%) and Trinidad and Tobago on 44%. Recent data on women's participation in industrial research are available for those countries with the most developed national innovation systems, with the exception of Brazil and Cuba: Uruguay (47%), Argentina (29%), Colombia and Chile (26%).
As in most other regions, the great majority of health graduates are women (60–85%). Women are also strongly represented in science. More than 40% of science graduates are women in each of Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay. The Caribbean paints a similar picture, with women graduates in science being on a par with men or dominating this field in Barbados, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago.
In engineering, women make up over 30% of the graduate population in seven Latin American countries (Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and Uruguay) and one Caribbean country, the Dominican Republic. There has been a decrease in the number of women engineering graduates in Argentina, Chile and Honduras.
The participation of women in science has consistently dropped since the turn of the century. This trend has been observed in all sectors of the larger economies: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Mexico is a notable exception, having recorded a slight increase. Some of the decrease may be attributed to women transferring to agricultural sciences in these countries. Another negative trend is the drop in female doctoral students and in the labour force. Of those countries reporting data, the majority signal a significant drop of 10–20 percentage points in the transition from master's to doctoral graduates.
A study at UNICAMP (2019–2023) reveals female underrepresentation in publications, particularly in STEM fields and first/last authorship positions. While UNICAMP's 42% female participation is comparable to USP's historical average (38.28%), both fall below the Brazilian average (49%), contrasting with higher female representation in science in some Latin American countries (UNESCO). Despite gender equity policies, female participation at UNICAMP declined after 2021, potentially due to the pandemic, and Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) was lower in areas like Social Sciences and Life Sciences, highlighting the need for stronger gender equality policies in science.

==== Eastern Europe, West and Central Asia ====
Most countries in Eastern Europe, West and Central Asia have attained gender parity in research (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Ukraine) or are on the brink of doing so (Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan). This trend is reflected in tertiary education, with some exceptions in engineering and computer science. Although Belarus and the Russian Federation have seen a drop over the past decade, women still represented 41% of researchers in 2013. In the former Soviet states, women are also very present in the business enterprise sector: Bosnia and Herzegovina (59%), Azerbaijan (57%), Kazakhstan (50%), Mongolia (48%), Latvia (48%), Serbia (46%), Croatia and Bulgaria (43%), Ukraine and Uzbekistan (40%), Romania and Montenegro (38%), Belarus (37%), Russian Federation (37%).
One in three researchers is a woman in Turkey (36%) and Tajikistan (34%). Participation rates are lower in Iran (26%) and Israel (21%), although Israeli women represent 28% of senior academic staff. At university, Israeli women dominate medical sciences (63%) but only a minority study engineering (14%), physical sciences (11%), mathematics and computer science (10%). There has been an interesting evolution in Iran. Whereas the share of female PhD graduates in health remained stable at 38–39% between 2007 and 2012, it rose in all three other broad fields. Most spectacular was the leap in female PhD graduates in agricultural sciences from 4% to 33% but there was also a marked progression in science (from 28% to 39%) and engineering (from 8% to 16%).

==== Southeast Europe ====
With the exception of Greece, all the countries of Southeast Europe were once part of the Soviet bloc. Some 49% of researchers in these countries are women (compared to 37% in Greece in 2011). This high proportion is considered a legacy of the consistent investment in education by the Socialist governments in place until the early 1990s, including that of the former Yugoslavia. Moreover, the participation of female researchers is holding steady or increasing in much of the region, with representation broadly even across the four sectors of government, business, higher education and non-profit. In most countries, women tend to be on a par with men among tertiary graduates in science. Between 70% and 85% of graduates are women in health, less than 40% in agriculture and between 20% and 30% in engineering. Albania has seen a considerable increase in the share of its women graduates in engineering and agriculture.