Established in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science is celebrated every year on 11 February to draw attention to the biases and gender stereotypes that steer girls and women away from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines. The aim is to provide full and equal access to science for all girls and women, to further achieve gender equality.

Here is a comment by Claudia Agnini, Associate Professor at the Department of Geosciences and Coordinator of the PhD Course in Geosciences, on the situation of girls and women in the Geosciences’ Italian panorama in the last 20 years.

“The unexpected outcome…

2020 was an extraordinary year for many reasons, most of them are negative but all of them will remain in our minds. For me, the collaboration with some of my colleagues at the Department of Geosciences, which eventually led to a publication on the gender equality in the Italian geosciences (Agnini et al. 2020), is the unexpected positive outcome of the lockdown. We have collected data available from the MUR (former MIUR), AlmaLaurea and ISTAT datasets with the aim of providing the evolution of the presence of women and girls in the geosciences in the last 20 years. The situation in the different disciplines of the Italian geosciences is quite heterogeneous with a couple of SSD showing an acceptable gender balance.

However, the academic world is only the last step in a carrier that usually starts with the enrollment at the University. For this reason, in our paper, we have tried to follow what typically happens throughout an entire carrier at both males and females and we have decided to show the results using a scissor graph* that, I am sad to tell, is self-explanatory. In Italy, the master female students in Earth Sciences are, on average, 35% of the entire student population. The percentage of female increases up to ca. 50% at PhD level but suddenly decreases to ca. 35% at the first level permanent position and continues to fall down to 20% at full professor level. This trend is particularly scaring but as coordinator of the PhD program here at the Department of Geosciences I am particularly worried of the remarkable reduction of the presence of women occurring between the PhD level and the permanent research position.

To summarize the Italian situation, the bright side is the positive general increase in the female component in the different academic roles through time (2001–2019), but the negative side is the decrease in the female presence at the beginning of the university career. This trend could likely result from the existence of a structural gender bias in both Italian and foreign university systems. However, it is part of the task of the institutions to conceive, promote and implement supporting actions so that men and women can be given equal opportunities of career advancement”

To learn more about some of the girls and women of the Department of Geosciences, visit our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages.

Don’t let the gender bias limit you!