DOPPIO STANDARD

Donne e carriere scientifiche nell’Italia contemporanea

Camilla Gaiaschi

Roma: Carocci Editore; 2022.

272 p.

30,00 €

[Double standard, women and scientific careers in contemporary Italy]

The European Commission constantly monitors the status of gender equality in research and scientific innovation. In the recent report She Figures 2021, it has been once again pointed out that, notwithstanding a positive trend, women continue to be underrepresented in all areas of research, compared to their male counterparts. The data clearly indicate that although on the undergraduate and master’s degree level female students outnumber their male colleagues, a gender balance is achieved at the doctoral level. Nevertheless, women are less represented in the population of employed scientists and engineers at the European level (41.3 percent). These data clearly highlight how, despite the adoption of a new European strategy targeting gender equality, more efforts are needed to increase women’s participation in scientific careers. It is worth noting that education and gender equality are also an integral part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, as distinct Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but also as catalysts for the achievement of all others. This agenda considers it crucial to understand and reduce the specific obstacles that keep young women away from science subjects, promoting their careers.

Among the many reasons that have been introduced to explain the gender inequalities in science, in general, and in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine) in particular, is the notion that women and men do not play according to the same rules: women are judged more harshly than their peers because of an implicit bias, an unconscious conditioning that, even keeping all other things equal, leads us to view a female person as less capable of factually pursuing a scientific career or holding leadership roles than a male colleague, a bias that leads women to work harder to achieve the same results or held the same positions as their male colleagues.

This implicit bias is the “double standard” described by sociologist Camilla Gaiaschi in her interesting essay entitled precisely Double Standard, Women and Scientific Careers in Contemporary Italy (Published by Carocci). The book stems from an academic interest in the reasons that lay behind the different career trajectories that characterize women and men who start a scientific career, using both quantitative and qualitative observations. The original and particularly interesting aspect of this assay is that, unlike most available texts, which report aggregate data at the European level, it focuses on the Italian situation, illustrating its peculiarities in terms of scientific careers and work-life balance, broadening the focus also to the analysis of careers in medicine. Through her analytical lens, the author not only confirms the dual track, a premise of the entire work, but also points out the “paradoxes” of gender differences, that is, “unexpected or accidental spaces” in which some distortions are smoothed out, giving reason for the complexity of cultural and structural constraints that hold back women’s race for success.

While the premise of the book is an analysis of the “double standard of evaluation” in scientific careers, as we get deeper into the work, which is very dense with data and citations from numerous sources, it becomes clear that the evaluation “bias” alone is not sufficient to explain why women still struggle to build careers in science and medicine. Through careful analysis, the author highlights the complexity of variables involved in changing career trajectories. The multiplicity of “reasons for inequalities” takes the synthetic form of a multilevel map that is nothing but a metaphor for the web that harnesses every woman every day, made up of individual and contextual elements that, like quicksand, limit the potential for achievement at work and in life in general. One example: accumulated work experience represents a measure of a person’s human capital. Because women have, on average, more family responsibilities, they more frequently choose to work part-time than men, especially in those situations or countries where there is little employment in general. This difference in the accumulation of hours worked has important negative effects on women’s professional growth, as well as on their pay.

The paradox described by the author here is that countries with generous work-life balance policies and high female employment are also those with high pay gaps and high horizontal gender segregation. Italy, although among the less advanced countries in Europe in terms of female employment, is paradoxically among the countries with the smallest pay gaps. As the author well describes, the trade-off between segregation and women’s employment is by no means a foregone conclusion since when you gain in women’s employment, you can go backwards in terms of gender equality.

A further employment paradox is that the lack of life-work balance policies means that a country like Italy has more ordinary female professors than Germany and Belgium as a result of female self-selection in high-skilled professions. This effect can also be explained considering the peculiar Italian situation of the last decade, characterized by a high male outflow from the academy due to the retirements of professors, which has accelerated women’s access to top academic positions, accidentally oiling career mechanisms that are often slow, unpredictable and discontinuous.

Interesting and original is the author’s inclusion of the analysis of careers in the medical field where we see another paradox, namely that in this discipline the glass ceiling has some cracks, if, however, one manages to get to the intermediate career levels.

If some women are just as likely as their male colleagues to make it to the top, the explanation lies in the fact that here, too, they have gone through a self-selection, for example, by limiting the number of children or organizing family life through a dense network of support. The goal has no zero costs and, in any case, would seem to concern a small number of women.

It is a truth, however, that notwithstanding some positive data, women behaviors often hold back their careers. Amongst the many examples brought by the author, it is useful to highlight here the phenomenon of lack of self-promotion: women often ask less frequently than men for career advancement or raises. This behavior can be explained by an underestimation of one’s own abilities but also by the realization that if women in a certain company struggle to advance their careers, one will be less likely to go knocking on the door of the manager(s) to ask for career advancement.

In the face of this evidence showing the existence of gender bias in academia and the workplace what can be the solutions? The answers are in the folds of the pages throughout the chapters of the book. Interestingly, it is mentioned that, as far as boards of directors are concerned, our country has made a great leap forward thanks to the Golfo-Mosca law, passed in 2011, by which gender quotas were introduced on boards of directors and boards of statutory auditors of listed companies. This is undoubtedly an important positive action that must, however, be accompanied by many others. Among these, building networks that support women’s scientific careers to identify their talents and make them competitive, for example, when they want to access funding that requires an extended research team. In fact, the author reports that, while at the individual level (see Marie Sklodowska Curie and ERC research grants), women are competitive on par with their male colleagues, they have a harder time accessing funding where large research partnerships need to be created.

Gender equality is a society-wide issue. If we are to address the many urgent global challenges, we need all the talents at play, and women in this regard are an important assett. The road ahead to break the glass ceiling is still long and bumpy. Recognizing the barriers that separate us from that goal, means climbing one more rung of the ladder that can get us to break that ceiling, which is what Camilla Gaiaschi’s book achieves.

Francesca Cirulli

Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy

francesca.cirulli@iss.it