---
title: "Women in science"
chunk: 13/25
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"
---

=== Situation in the 1990s ===
Women appear to do less well than men (in terms of degree, rank, and salary) in the fields that have been traditionally dominated by women, such as nursing. In 1991 women attributed 91% of the PhDs in nursing, and men held 4% of full professorships in nursing. In the field of psychology, where women earn the majority of PhDs, women do not fill the majority of high rank positions in that field.
Women's lower salaries in the scientific community are also reflected in statistics. According to the data provided in 1993, the median salaries of female scientists and engineers with doctoral degrees were 20% less than men. This data can be explained as there was less participation of women in high rank scientific fields/positions and a female majority in low-paid fields/positions. However, even with men and women in the same scientific community field, women are typically paid 15–17% less than men. In addition to the gender gap, there were also salary differences between ethnicity: African-American women with more years of experiences earn 3.4% less than European-American women with similar skills, while Asian women engineers out-earn both Africans and Europeans.
Women are also under-represented in the sciences as compared to their numbers in the overall working population. Within 11% of African-American women in the workforce, 3% are employed as scientists and engineers. Hispanics made up 8% of the total workers in the US, 3% of that number are scientists and engineers. Native Americans participation cannot be statistically measured.
Women tend to earn less than men in almost all industries, including government and academia. Women are less likely to be hired in highest-paid positions. The data showing the differences in salaries, ranks, and overall success between the genders is often claimed to be a result of women's lack of professional experience. The rate of women's professional achievement is increasing. In 1996, the salaries for women in professional fields increased from 85% to 95% relative to men with similar skills and jobs. Young women between the age of 27 and 33 earned 98%, nearly as much as their male peers. In the total workforce of the United States, women earn 74% as much as their male counterparts (in the 1970s they made 59% as much as their male counterparts).
Claudia Goldin, Harvard concludes in A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter – "The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours."
Research on women's participation in the "hard" sciences such as physics and computer science speaks of the "leaky pipeline" model, in which the proportion of women "on track" to potentially becoming top scientists fall off at every step of the way, from getting interested in science and maths in elementary school, through doctorate, postdoctoral, and career steps.  The leaky pipeline also applies in other fields. In biology, for instance, women in the United States have been getting Masters degrees in the same numbers as men for two decades, yet fewer women get PhDs; and the numbers of women principal investigators have not risen.
It is important to determine what may be causing this "leaky pipeline" by looking at factors outside of academia that are occurring in women's lives at the same time as they are pursuing their continued education and career search. At this crucial time the most outstanding factor is family formation. As women continue their academic careers, they are often also stepping into new roles as wives and mothers. These traditionally require a large time commitment and cause difficulties for an individual looking to attain tenure. It's been found that women entering the family formation period of their life are 35% less likely than their male counterparts to pursue tenure positions after receiving their PhD's.
In the UK, women occupied over half the places in science-related higher education courses (science, medicine, maths, computer science and engineering) in 2004–05. However, gender differences varied from subject to subject: women substantially outnumbered men in biology and medicine, especially nursing, while men predominated in maths, physical sciences, computer science and engineering.
In the US, women with science or engineering doctoral degrees were predominantly employed in the education sector in 2001, with substantially fewer employed in business or industry than men. According to salary figures reported in 1991, women earn anywhere between 83.6 percent to 87.5 percent that of a man's salary.  An even greater disparity between men and women is the ongoing trend that women scientists with more experience are not as well-compensated as their male counterparts.  The salary of a male engineer continues to experience growth as he gains experience whereas the female engineer sees her salary reach a plateau.
Women, in the United States and many European countries, who succeed in science tend to be graduates of single-sex schools.  Women earn 54% of all bachelor's degrees in the United States and 50% of those are in science.  9% of US physicists are women.

=== Overview of situation in 2013 ===

In 2013, women accounted for 53% of the world's graduates at the bachelor's and master's level and 43% of successful PhD candidates but just 28% of researchers. Women graduates are consistently highly represented in the life sciences, often at over 50%. However, their representation in the other fields is inconsistent. In North America and much of Europe, few women graduate in physics, mathematics and computer science but, in other regions, the proportion of women may be close to parity in physics or mathematics. In engineering and computer sciences, women consistently trail men, a situation that is particularly acute in many high-income countries.