Reading your manuscript is really depressing. Where are the women?
Sara Seager, 2004
Even a cursory scan of this book reveals a field that has been overwhelmingly dominated by white males. Why should this be? Who’s to blame?
The answer certainly isn’t in the nature of the discipline. A few scientific subjects, like field geology and high-pressure research, require extraordinary physical exertion and carry a level of risk that provided a convenient excuse for decades of almost exclusive male domination. But no such hardships are associated with research on life’s origins, a field that holds intrinsic fascination for men and women alike. Yet hardly a single female appeared as coauthor on any origins paper in the three decades following Stanley Miller’s 1953 landmark article.
I don’t know why, but I suspect that two factors played a significant role in this unfortunate, embarrassing bias.
First, the origin-of-life field is small, and by simple bad fortune several of the most prominent leaders during the 1950s through the 1970s were male professors who were at best unsupportive of women students (if not downright misogynistic). All young scientists need the encouragement of mentors and the inspiration of role models. Lacking this support system, women felt excluded from the origins club. Only within the past decade has the research environment changed enough to provide women with a more conducive environment in which to excel.
Second, the best and brightest women scientists may have shied away from the origins field in the beginning, when it held a rather dubious status in science. Everyone is interested in how life began, to be sure, but unambiguous experiments and firm conclusions are scarce. It was hard enough for many women to be taken seriously as scientists in the 1950s, 1960s, and even into
the 1970s. No point in stacking the deck by entering a suspect area of research. Better to have concentrated on mainstream subjects like genetics or organic chemistry if you wanted to land a good job.
Times have changed. More than 100 women scientists participated in the 2002 Astrobiology Science Conference at NASA Ames, while female enrollments in several astrobiology PhD programs are close to 50 percent. But our community must still look in the mirror and ask why it has taken so long.