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In Brazil, over 4.7 million women enrolled in university in the year 2017. However, Brazilian women have been consistently overrepresented in humanities and care majors and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Given that observed gender differences in math-intensive fields have lasting effects on gender inequality in the labor market, and that observed gender variations do not necessarily associate with differences in innate ability, in this paper we explore the paths of societal gender bias and gender differences in a Brazilian university.

We conduct a social experiment at a University in Southeastern Brazil, applying the gender-STEM Implicit Association Test.

We found that women in STEM are less likely to show gender-STEM implicit stereotypes, compared to women in humanities. The results indicate a negative correlation between implicit gender stereotyping and the choice of math-intensive majors by women.

The stereotype-congruent results are indicative of the gender bias in Brazilian society, and suggest that stereotypes created at early stages in life are directly related to future outcomes that reinforce gender disparities in Brazil, which can be observed in career choices.

A brief historical account of women in science is given as introduction to discussion of their present situation in the USA. Factors affecting female achievement and interest in science and in scientific careers include education, socio‐cultural and personal factors. Obstacles and constraints for women during preparation for scientific professions are also described together with myths about women and recent trends. Strategies for increasing their participation are proposed.

This chapter is based upon a five-year qualitative study and focuses on the experiences of 39 black women who entered physics and other science majors. The women reported feeling prepared to compete; however, they faced challenges in establishing meaningful relationships with faculty and peers. In the classroom they were often stereotyped as less capable then their male counterparts. They relished opportunities to meet other female scientists who inspire and motivated them to succeed. Perhaps most importantly they sought balance and desired to have a full life that includes science as well as other important elements like family.

Purpose – This chapter addresses the participation of women (or lack of it) in industrial research and development (R&D), one of the key indicators of innovation.

Methodology/approach – The empirical investigation is based on a sample of 84 science- and technology-based small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), engaged in new product development and innovation, operating in the United Kingdom.

Findings – The results demonstrate that the participation of women in R&D employment, particularly at senior levels, in the SME sector operating in England, is extremely low, partly attributed to some specific challenges faced by science and R&D-based SMEs. As a result of under-representation in the scientific research, women are missing out on the opportunities that are offered by ‘open innovation’ activities such as university–industry collaboration, access to external networks, exchange of knowledge and ideas and working on joint innovation projects with other scientific researchers elsewhere.

Research limitations/implications – There is a need for more rigorous research at firm levels to examine the cumulative effects of factors that could be translated into policy measures in order to attract more women to industrial research.

Practical implications – Specific policy measures should also focus on addressing barriers faced by SMEs to meet the specific needs of their female R&D employees, particularly those expecting or looking after young children while undertaking scientific research in laboratories.

Social implications – There is a need to raise a greater awareness and promote the take-up of numerous specific positive action measures, networking platforms and other promotional activities amongst women working in the private sectors, particularly those working in isolation in laboratories.

Originality/value of chapter – The findings are, fundamentally, based on an original and unique database. Women in industrial R&D is relatively a new topic of policy and research and their participation in R&D team within the science and technology-based SMEs in England has not been investigated before.

Despite the impressive record of advancing toward higher education, women are substantially underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields compared to men. Less is known about the factors that explain gendered patterns of participation in STEM in countries with dissimilar national characteristics and educational systems. To fill this gap in the literature, this study first examines the historical trends of female representation in STEM fields cross-nationally. Then, this paper explores the relationship between women’s and men’s enrollments in STEM with various structural, national characteristics. Recognizing that the relationship may vary by subfields of STEM, the study further investigates the association separately for natural science and for engineering. Using time- and entity-fixed effects panel regression models pooled between 1970 and 2010, the study’s analyses built on earlier studies on gender segregation across fields of study and gender inequality in higher education. The findings suggest that the common assumption of tight, positive linkage between societal development and participation in STEM holds for only men at an aggregate level under the period covered. The authors find a negative association between national economic development and women’s participation in STEM, especially for engineering. On the other hand, they find positive associations between men’s enrollment in STEM as well as women’s enrollment in other fields of study with women’s participation in STEM. Taken together, the results suggest the significance of the diffusion of an inclusive logic in higher educational institutions.

Contemporary scholarship has enabled a deeper analysis of the dynamics that gave rise to professional home science and a greater understanding of the obstacles women encountered and the strategies they employed to gain legitimacy as the field developed in the twentieth century. This paper examines how home science moved from its origins as ‘glorified housekeeping’ to encompass the ‘professional and ‘scientific’ dimensions of women’s lives. It goes beyond judgments about whether home science ‘helped’ or ‘hurt’ women, and asks instead, what we can learn from a study of the professional lives of women working in the highly gendered domains of academia, the professions and education? The article documents the scientific and professional lives of two women, E. Neige Todhunter and Emere Makere Waiwaha Kaa Mountain who completed qualifications at the Faculty of Home Science, Otago University in the 1920s and 1930s as a way of offering new insights into the professionalisation of women and a rethinking of the relationship between women and household science in the twentieth century.

“The world needs science, science needs women” is the message given by UNESCO in the program for the development of women in science” (UNESCO, 2017). In Vietnam, women’s participation and achievements in scientific research is considered a great and important resource for industrialization and modernization. Even so, are there gender differences in scientific achievement in the social science research institutes in Vietnam? What factors influence the scientific achievement of female social researchers? The answers will be based on data from a 2017 survey with a sample of 756 researchers, of which 77.6% were female. The survey was conducted by the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, a leading, ministry-level national center for the social sciences in Vietnam. This chapter analyzed the scientific achievements of researchers through their position as principal investigators of research projects and their publications, and factors that may impact this. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of factors that may affect the scientific achievement of researchers found that gender differences in academic achievement in the social sciences in Vietnam was still prevalent. Female researchers’ scientific achievements were lower than those of their male counterparts. The contribution to science of Vietnamese female researchers was limited by many different factors; the most important were the academic rank of the researchers and gender stereotype that considered housework the responsibility of women.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into international career motives, repatriation and career success of Indian women in Science and Technology.

In total, 30 semi-structured interviews were conducted with (upper) middle-class Indian women in Science and Technology in Bangalore and New Delhi, India.

Thematic analysis resulted in four themes – International career motives, Theme 1: cross-cultural and scientific exposure; Repatriation reasons and experiences, Theme 2: family reunion, career prospects and readjustment; Career success, Theme 3: international experience; and career growth, Theme 4: social responsibility. Motives for international career mobility of Indian women were: exposure to foreign cultures, international collaboration in science and personal and professional development. Family formation and reunion and career prospects were reasons for repatriation and positively influenced repatriation experiences of Indian women. Readjustment to people and conditions in India impacted their repatriation experiences negatively. The meaning women attribute to career success is grounded in recognition from peers in science, career growth, satisfaction and contribution to science and Indian society.

The sample of Indian female scientists may limit generalization of the findings to global career professionals in other professions from other countries with different socio-cultural and economic contexts.

HR policies that foster international careers of women scientists as well as women's networks in science to share and apply knowledge, and their contribution to the Indian economy and society will enhance global career success of women and strengthen the sustainable competitive position of organizations.

The study provides new insights into motivation for international career mobility and repatriation of women professionals from a developing country and their career success in the home country, and contributes to the development of theoretical frameworks on international career mobility and career success.

In the context of research on the career advancement of women and men in academia, this paper aims to reflect on how deans at six schools of a Dutch arts and a Dutch sciences‐based university construct the image of the ideal academic, and on how these images are gendered.

Using an inductive approach, the study analyzed the transcripts of semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with six deans (all men) from two different Dutch universities on the career advancement of men and women at their school.

It was expected that the images of the ideal academic would be more gendered in the sciences than in the arts university, considering the stronger male domination in the sciences university. The images of the ideal academic, while fundamentally different, regarding the expertise, the applicability of knowledge, and the visibility needed to be considered successful, were equally gendered in assuming that practicing science leaves little room for caring obligations outside work; in both places science was considered an omnipresent and greedy calling. Moreover, deans at both universities to a similar extent expected women academics not to fit to this standard. Paradoxically, in the arts university deans construct an image of women academics that in some aspects reflects a mirror image of women academics in the sciences university and vice versa.

The paper suggests that in this construction the process of “othering” women academics is more constant than the content of the ideal academic. They contribute to theories on the ideal worker in the field of science by arguing the construction of the ideal academic is fluid rather than fixed. Further research could investigate how the image of the ideal academic changes within the same discipline across different countries with a higher representation of women among full professors, as the findings are limited to The Netherlands.

The paper argues that the fluidity of the ideal academic norm offers space for renegotiating such norms by making it more inclusive for women, which will have positive consequences for women's career advancement in academia.

The contribution of this paper is that constructions of the ideal academic are fluid rather than fixed, while dominant actors in organizations seem to attribute universal value to these images. The “otherness” of women relative to the image of the ideal academic is more constant than the characteristics of these images themselves.

For many years, science fiction has been perceived as “rayguns and rocket ships” boys' literature. Any number of impressionistic and statistical studies have identified the typical SF reader as male, between the ages of twelve and twenty and, in the case of adults, employed in some technical field. Yet I continually find myself having conversations with women, only to find that they, like myself, began reading science fiction between the ages of six and ten, have been reading it voraciously ever since, and were often frustrated at the absence of satisfying female characters and the presence of misogynistic elements in what they read. The stereotype of the male reader and the generally male SF environment mask both the increasing presence of women writers in the field of science fiction and the existence of a feminist dialog within some SF novels. This dialog had its beginnings in the mid‐sixties and is still going strong. It is the hope of the feminist SF community that this effacement can be counteracted.