Women in Physics in Argentina

Silvina Ponce Dawson

University of Buenos Aires

The First IUPAP International Conference on Women in Physics in 2002 revealed that physics in Argentina has many features in common with physics in other developing countries. In particular, the percentage of physicists who are female is higher in Argentina and in other developing countries than in developed countries, and these women tend to have more children and at an earlier age. About 30% of the students of physics at the University of Buenos Aires (the largest university in the country) are women. However, as in all countries, as we go up the academic ladder, the fraction of women compared with men in physics decreases enormously (see the statistics at http://www.df.uba.ar/users/silvina/women/datos_mujeres.html). I suspected that the decrease was related to the difficulties that most women encounter as they try to advance in their scientific career and, at the same time, start to build a family. This paper presents the results of a survey that seems to indicate that family is indeed one of the reasons for the falling numbers of women in higher academic positions in Argentina.

In 2002–2003 I conducted a survey, together, with a group of natural scientists and sociologists, aimed at investigating the situation of women in the natural sciences in Argentina (see http://www.fcen.uba.ar/gentec/). To this end, we elaborated a questionnaire that was completed by about 300 people. The results presented here represent the 67 physicists that answered the survey: 34 men and 33 women who mentioned physics or material science as their area of expertise, regardless of their academic degree. The age distribution was quite similar for these 34 men and 33 women (average age=42 years, standard deviation=10 years, for both groups).. Most who answered the survey were researchers at the University of Buenos Aires. For this reason, most were either PhDs or graduate students working toward a PhD. Among the 33 women who answered the survey, 7 were graduate students and 22 were PhDs. Among the 34 men, 6 were graduate students and 26 were PhDs. The rest had finished their undergraduate studies without pursuing graduate studies.

Figure 1 shows how long it took for each respondent to get his or her undergraduate or graduate degree. While the distribution of times to obtain a PhD was, on average, only one year longer for women than for men, the distribution of times to get the undergraduate degree not only had a peak that was shifted by one year but also had a much longer tail for women than for men. Looking at the family situations of the people in this tail, we found that among the 10 women who spent over 10 years to get their undergraduate degrees, 5 had at least 1 child during that time period.

Women respondents tended to have more children than men respondents, as shown in Figure 2. Regarding the time of parenthood, the distributions among men and women were also different, with more women having children earlier during their career than men: 5 women (1 man) had their children during their undergraduate studies, 13 women (5 men) had them after finishing undergraduate studies and before starting graduate school, 10 women (10 men) had them during the graduate studies, and 7 women (12 men) had them after having obtained their PhDs. One possible explanation for these observations is that women tend to have children when they are younger than men and this necessarily means earlier along their career. This could then explain the much longer duration of women’s undergraduate studies. Taking longer to get a degree complicates the advancement of a scientific career in academics: most scholarships for graduate students bear age limits and in most evaluation processes the pace at which the career is pursued is taken into account (a slow pace is not a good sign). It could also happen that men that have children earlier simply drop their career, while women try to pursue it anyway. We do not have enough data at this stage to decide whether any of these explanations is true.

Another way in which women and men respondents differed greatly is in conducting postdoctoral work abroad. Given that the scientific community in general, and the physics community in particular, is not large in Argentina, working abroad is often a very important aspect of one’s development as a scientist and is highly valued by most evaluating committees. Scientific institutions view study abroad as one of the main ways by which inbreeding in science can be prevented. In addition, researchers who work abroad usually receive more exposure for their work. Whereas 18 of the 26 male PhDs who answered the survey were post-docs at a major institution abroad, only 7 of the 22 female respondents with PhDs had such experience. Women were older at the completion of their graduate studies when they had not done postdoctoral work abroad than when they had. Women with post-docs abroad were slightly older than men with post-docs abroad. The average number of children for female PhDs with children was higher for those without post-docs abroad than for those with post-docs abroad (2.6 against 1.8); the percentage without children was 30% in both groups. Only 16% of the male PhDs with post-docs abroad had no children, whereas the average number of kids for men with children was 1.8 and 2, respectively, for the groups with and without a post-doc abroad.

Figure 2. How long it took for men and women respondents to earn
their undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Figure 3. Histograms of people classified by the number of children they had.

The data presented in this paper are an indication that family matters interfere with women’s careers more than with men’s careers, resulting in longer times to obtain a degree and difficulties in pursuing long stages abroad. These two factors have a negative impact when the past performance of a woman is evaluated. In order not to lose the potential that women scientists represent, evaluations should take into account family matters in some way, e.g., by weighing past performance depending on the number of children that the woman had. Chronological age limits should also be replaced by academic age limits. A different way of looking at past performance should result in a larger number of women in higher academic positions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The survey was made possible by a grant from UNESCO through its “Proyecto Iberoamericano de Ciencia, Tecnología y Género”. The questionnaire was made together with Marilina Estebanez (Grupo Redes, Argentina). Various women from the School of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires were most helpful in advertising the existence of the survey among people of their own discipline.