A UNESCO Gender Gap in Science map from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, October 2012, is called a rough picture, because data from the United States, Canada, China, and some other countries are missing. The reason given was “lack of data.” Even so, the map is quite interesting. It shows that South America is doing a good job of including women in science careers, while most European, African, and Asian countries aren’t. According to Eileen Pollack of the New York Times, the problem of gender inequality in science isn’t due to differences in gender, but rather differences in culture.
As for how the United States would do on this map, Pollack writes, “Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the united States, only 14% are women.” That’s only physics, but . . . .
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