Help
7th RTD Framework Programme of the European Union (RTD-PP-L4-2007-1), commissioned by DG Research
to the consortium led by CIREM (Spain) and made up of Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Inova
Consultancy Ltd. (United Kingdom), Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini (Italy), Bergische Universität Wuppertal
(Germany) and Politikatörténeti Intézet KHT (Hungary). The study was carried out between 2008 and 2010.
The purpose of the study was to collect and analyse research on horizontal and vertical gender segregation in
research careers, as well as the underlying causes and effects of these two processes.
The objectives of the study were to:
- Provide an exhaustive overview and analysis of research on gender and science carried out at the European, national, and regional levels.
- Make the study results accessible to researchers and policy-makers via an informed bibliography (online database) and a set of reports.
- Steer policy-making on gender and science and define future research priorities within the Framework Programme, in particular through good practice examples and gap analysis in the various research topics.
For the purposes of the study, ‘science’ was understood in its broadest meaning, including social sciences and humanities as well as research and technological development.
The study covered the research on gender and science produced between 1980 and 2008, in all European
languages, in 33 countries: the 27 EU Member States as well as 6 Associated Countries to the Seventh
Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7) (Croatia, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey).
The study produced five country-group reports, seven topic reports and the final synthesis report:
Although men still outnumber women in science and research, women seem to be catching up as the
proportion of female scientists and engineers or the share of women graduating at the PhD level in
sciences are growing at a faster pace than men’s. However, gender segregation across economic sectors
and fields of science persists as does vertical segregation resulting in an unequal distribution of women
and men across the different stages of a typical academic career.
It thus seems that even though there are many positive signs of change there is no natural or automatic
move towards gender equality (and if there is it would take far too long to achieve). More efforts are
needed to increase women’s participation in the decision-making processes that shapes the entire
scientific landscape.
The objective of this report is to present and analyse those studies in the Gender and Science database
that deal with horizontal and vertical segregation in science and research.
The first part of this report focuses on the concepts of vertical and horizontal segregation. First, different
definitions of segregation that were encountered in the literature are presented. Then, explanatory
theories of segregation are developed as well as the methodology that is commonly used to quantify
segregation. Segregation indicators are then presented followed by their comparison over European
countries. Finally, this section is rounded off by an analysis of the evolution of segregation in Europe over
recent years.
In the second part, we focus more specifically on gender segregation in the field of science and research.
This part is mainly descriptive and is based on the available harmonized European data from She Figures
2003 (EC, 2004) and She Figures 2009, (EC 2009b). An attempt to draw the evolution over time and to
compare the particular situation of researchers with the general degree of segregation in the total
workforce is made.
The third part of the report is devoted to the description and analysis of gender segregation in the Gender
and Science database. We first provide a statistical synthesis of the publications that deal with the topic of
segregation in the Gender and Science Database. This part is followed by a presentation of the main
research questions and methodology addressed by these publications on segregation. Finally, the results
of the most relevant studies are presented.
The last part summarises the gaps that continue to exist both at the level of data and research and
proposes several recommendations for further analyses.
Meta-analysis of gender and science research on horizontal and vertical segregation.