What’s behind Czechia’s lowest representation of women in science?
Czechia has long struggled with one of the lowest shares of female researchers in the EU, and a recent report from the Czech Academy of Science’s Centre for Gender and Science has revealed that the country now ranks last in this regard. I discussed the key findings with the centre’s director, Marcela Linková:
“In the Czech Republic, we have approximately 49,500 employees in research and innovation. Researchers account for 57% of all the people employed in this sector and the representation of women among researchers was only 24%.
“And we have not seen any positive trend since the time we started collecting statistical information in 2005. So essentially, it remains at 24% over this entire period of time. And this is despite the fact that we see huge increases in the proportions of women among students at all levels of education.
“So we can really see a tendency for the disparity between women and men in the educational path to converge, but we do not see this translated into the research staff. And the biggest loss that we can see is in the natural sciences, where we essentially lose 50% of women who complete their PhDs and do not proceed on the research path.”
So what do you think are the main reason behind this trend? What prevents women from proceeding into research once they finish their education?
“Overall, I would say that for academic research, it is the temporary contracts that we see both in the Academy of Sciences and in higher education, especially at the early career stages. It means that women who, for example, get pregnant, do not see their work contracts extended. So this is one of the main reasons we are seeing losses, particularly in the early career stages.
“The second is definitely continued gender bias against women in research and the roles that women should hold. And this is also related to specific biases against not only women in leadership positions, but also against the ability of researchers who are mothers, to perform excellent research.
“In the business enterprise sector, what we see is that despite huge increases in the staff that works in the business enterprise sector, in the private companies, and this has essentially doubled over the years, the proportion of women stays at 14%. And again, the number of people working in this sector has doubled. So clearly, there is a barrier to employing women by the private companies.”
So what systemic changes are needed to improve female representation in science and in leadership roles?
“One of the main ones, I would say, is at the cultural level. It really relates to the elimination of biases related to leadership and motherhood, especially in people in leadership and managerial roles. And this can be done, for example, through gender bias training, which we see deployed across the EU, but also in North America.
“In the early career stages, we definitely need to address work-life balance issues, particularly the availability of childcare facilities, but it is also about the conditions among research funders in terms of combination of caring duties and implementation of grants. And here we have seen some important changes in the Czech Republic over the last five years or so, but we still need to improve that.
“And that relates to the precarity in the employment contracts, which I mentioned, because people in early career stages are employed on temporary contracts. And when you are on maternity leave and your contract expires, this is the place of exit for women researchers.
“Our hypothesis is that in the natural sciences, where we see the biggest drop, this is the issue, because it's very difficult to combine a research career in the natural sciences, where you're expected to also go on long-term mobility abroad, and where the research career is very strongly segmented and combine it with parenting. So we definitely need to see further work on addressing this.”
Finally, how does this under-representation of women in science impact both the field and the economy?
“The repercussions, I would say, are quite severe. What we can see across the EU is that the countries that have the highest innovation score in the EU also have the highest index for gender equality. And we can hypothesize that the countries that are capable of utilizing all the talents that they have also fare best in terms of the innovation score.
“So it has economic implications, but not only that, it also has repercussions for what we can know about the societal challenges. Because the continued under-representation of women in research means that, for example, research topics that are of high relevance to women continue to be under-researched. This relates to, for example, to health issues, but also technology development.
“And if we cannot get women and other marginalized groups to these vital areas at the forefront of scientific discovery at the current moment, we will be producing knowledge that is biased against these groups, and we will not be answering the research needs of these groups. So it's extremely important that we really address the fact that the knowledge we produce addresses the so-called gender dimension.”
