Brussels, 16/11/2001 (Agence Europe) - At the "Gender and Research" conference held in Brussels last week by the European Commission, various participants stressed the particular difficulties faced by women wanting to get ahead in research and also the responsibility for all stakeholders to make science more attractive to women. Over and above the problem of equal opportunities, the Commission is aware of the importance of getting more women involved in order to make progress in some forms of research, after measuring the impact of having more women involved on the assessment and selection panels for research projects funded by the 5th Framework Programme. Making scientific research more attractive to women is also of increasing importance at a time when Europe has to attract new recruits to science and is suffering from a chronic lack of researchers that can't be filled by simply importing research scientists from outside the EU. Commissioner Philippe Busquin said without the political will, no progress would be possible, adding that getting more women involved in scientific research has to be central to the European Research Area and calling on Member States to set quantitative targets for women in research.
In a report published to coincide with the conference, Eurostat notes that women are strongly underrepresented in higher education teaching. In average in the EU, the share of female professors was 26% in 1999, ranging from 9% in Germany to 36% in Finland. More detailed data on higher education teaching personnel show that there was a general trend across the EU to have a larger proportion of women at the lowest grade. While 32% of assistant professors were women, the share fell to 28% in the grade of associate professor and to 11% for full professors. In every Member State, there was a lower share of women at the senior level of full professor: from 5% in Ireland to 18% in Finland. Women are also underrepresented in research in the EU where 66% of the researchers in the government sector and 72% in the higher education sector were men. Only a few countries had a female presence higher than 40% (Ireland, Greece and Portugal, all in the higher education sector) and only in one case (Portugal), was parity reached, with 53% of women in Government sector. Eurostat pointed out that the proportion of female researchers in the EU higher education sector ranged in 1999 from 12% in engineering and technology to one third in medical sciences, social sciences and humanities.