INTERNATIONAL
MEDITERRANEAN WOMEN'S FORUM
- UNESCO NETWORK -

ROUND TABLE
AUSTRALIAN AND ITALIAN WOMEN SCIENTISITS
TURIN - February 3-6th

Quality and responsibility of female contribution in the fields of research and application of science and technology. Contributions from Australia and Italy.

Prof. Bice Fubini
(Docente di Chimica Generale, Facoltà di Farmacia,Università degli Studi di Torino)

I graduated in chemistry, I teach inorganic chemistry in the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Torino and my research work is in the field of toxicology of mineral dust, typically asbestos, silica, airborne particulate etc. I have been involved in the women's movement in Turin and Italy since the very beginning, and at some stages I got aware of how important it was to use all what I had learned in the women's movement in the field of science where I was working myself. From that point on, I started up a Women in Science group in Turin, with few colleagues and friends in the faculty of Science and of Medecine, a very small group, not very formal, but which has gone on year after year producing a few documents, attending some meetings and discussing the peculiar role of women in science. I expect many exchanges of experience and ideas from this meeting, I expect new ideas, new ways of going on with this struggle.

My idea was to have a bird's-eye view of why we are here now, which comes from the fact, that indeed the issue "women in science" has had an outburst in this past five years. Ten years ago very few people talked about women in science and so we need to have some sort of an historical perspective on the relation between Women's Movement and Women in Science, in order to understand what we have behind us. I will start by one major fact which is the basis of all women's development; we have had several women movements which have yield afterwards to changes in the status of women If we look back to our history we find three major movements. The first has the derogatory name of "suffragette movement" and was developed at the end of last century. That movement has yielded to universal suffrage in the following years in several countries. Then, and this is mainly in Europe, we had remarkable active participation of women to the second world war and this has brought to some legislation on "help to working mothers" i.e. leaves, creches, etc. and finally we had the feminist movement which has brought to laws on contraception, the regulation of abortion, equality at workplaces and within the family. Subsequently appeared positive actions in several countries. We have therefore precise relationships between women's movements and changes in. If we confront the juridical status of women to the scientific thought , what we can see is that most major changes in scientific thought, e.g. principle of conservation of matter, base of modern chemistry, the theory of evolution of species, quantum mechanics, l all took place when women werew totally submitted to men and did not even have the right to vote. The major development in biology, which happened in the fifties, occurred when women did not have control of their fertility, i.e. couldn't have the choice of having or not having children, which they have now. Finally the beginning of the development of molecular genetics, which is now the overwhelming topic in science, happened before the laws on equality at the workplace were promulgated in most of the western countries. The science which we are dealing with now was established and developed when women were really in a status of real legal i nferiority to men. Nevertheless there have been now and then women who produced remrkable advances in scientific discoveries and we have a list of women - usually very lucky to have culture at home and encouragement from at leas one member of the family, who in spite of all difficulties entered the field of science. But mind, although we like to celebrate this fact it concerns just an extreme minority! I think the first one, who is always quoted in Women in Science books,is the Mary who gave the name to what we call in Italian "Bagnomaria", which is the usual way to keep temperature constant by putting something in boiling water. It was a woman ­ Mary the Jewish ­ who invented it. Note that this applies to chemistry, physics and the kitchen of course. In some cases, we had the occasional contribution of women who were often concealed behind a man. Lavoisier, for instance, the famous chemist, had a wife who did a large part of the scientific work which is reported as his! Even in more recent times, in the beginning of the nineteen century, the merit is usually assigned to the man. In the following picture we see two persons. One is Lisa Meitner and the other is Otto Hann, they both discovered nuclear fission, which we all know how important was at thh time, but she was the woman behind and he got all the merit. Just now I think some women are getting recognised for their own work. Indeed we have had some female Nobel prizes, some exceptional women who made it. But I would like to draw your attention on the fact, for example, that Maria Sklodowska Curie did not have the right to vote, nor to belong to the Accademy of Science, nor had these women the right to control their fertility. The first of the Nobel prizes she had ­ for chemistry-was debated, as some members of the jury wanted to assign it to her husband Pierre and to Bequerel only, claiming that her contribute had been marginal by respect to the two men. As to the second, for physics, she was advised not to accept it in consideration of her personal situation of having a love affair with a married French man (she was then widower).

Let us have a brief look at the statistics of "normal"people. As far as university careers in engineering and medicine at different levels are concerned, we see more women at the lower level and going up the scale the number of women is decreasing; this is the Italian situation which I believe is very much like the Australian one. For graduates, nowadays, we have more women than men graduates; then if we go on to the researchers, associate professor or equivalent positions in CNR and in the university, the number of women decreases and the number of men increases. We start therefore by having more women then men and we end up with a big difference in the key positions. This is what describes the Italian and, I would say, the world wide situations.

Now, going a little bit more in detail about the Italian situation, I would like to say few words on the interest that the women's movement had in science. When the women movement started up, science was far from the women's movement and those of us who also participated to this movement felt that on one hand we were participating to something concerning our own lives, but that our own research world was something else. I have listed all the laws which we have had in Italy following the women's movement: divorce, maternity, legalisation of contraceptive etc, we do have very indeed, since the end of the seventies, good laws in Italy. But science kept on being a male dominated field.

In those days the women's movement did not care at all about science and I think it was only in the mid-eighties that discussion on these topics started up. In 1986 we established a network in Italy to discuss women and science and this network, located in Bologna, has been going on for several years. In 1991 we had discussions on positive actions for equality but I believe only in these last years we have really had some changes starting by a large increase of the number of women involved in science at the lower levels. Especially in medicine and chemistry ­ biology has always been a more "women" topic - but even in engineering the most male dominated field.

In the last few years, moreover, several biographies of women scientist were written by people who belonged both to science and the women's movement. These authors revisited the lives of famous women scientists with a gender perspective.

Finally, a point to be stressed is the fact that just last year the CNR ( Italian Research Council) established a commission in charge of helping the development and increase of women's contribution to science. This commission meets once a month and trying to find out what can be done at the level of regulation and organisation to help women in science.

Now, few words about Europe: for instance the well-known journal "Nature", one of the best and most prestigious journals in the field, has given attention to women's issues, at least in two cases: one case is the case of the Swedish researchers who found, scientifically, how men are favoured against women and they published the result of their research on Nature; the other one is about a report who was published by the European Technology and Assessment Network on the distribution of women in science in key positions. They insist on the fact that at the European level few positions of full professorship are held by women and particularly very few women are present where science politics is made. So even though we have plenty of women working in science, the decisions are still in men's hands. The table reported in this article on the number of women who take part in scientific academies shows that this number is extremely low. What strikes me is that, contrary to what we might expect, the so called developed countries scores far less than for example Turkey, where the funding for sciences is surely lower than for instance in the UK or the US.

A few words about the biographies. I think this kind of biography are very good tools to illustrate positive role models for the younger generations of women scientists, because they insist very much on the individual behaviour of these women. I would like to indicate one of those, the third biography of Marie Curie, which was written by an American writer, Susan Queen. This biography is really centred on an historical investigations of her life, analysis of her science and human contribution and underlines very much the "female" way of life and issues, which is something we did not have in the relevant literature, before. Another good example is a book about Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who was a chemist. She was the first one to understand that, in order to gain information about how proteins are made, the good idea was to make them crystallise, which is not the usual way proteins are found in the body. She too got the Nobel prize. This biography is also very much gender concerned. I would like to end up with some questions which are still open. We have been talking about positive actions, so the key question is: do we want more women in the key positions as they are now, or do we want to change the nature of these key positions? Or maybe can we use women to change these key positions? I think we all disagree completely from those scientists who carry on their research just in order to reach positions of power. Then, if we want to evaluate the female approach, what are the characteristics of this approach? Could we list these characteristics and present them to the various committees set up to help women? I would like to give a couple of examples of these characteristics: first of all a multidisciplinary approach as opposed to a more rigid approach, then the tendency to evaluate quality against quantity. I think we can find out many others, just by analysing our own lives.

Finally I think the question we, as women scientists, always had in our minds is: will women ever change science? Is science, as we know it now, being male dominated, typically a man's creature? Would science be different if women had created science? I think this is a rather difficult question to be answered, because certainly the experimental approach is the same for both women and men. But what we all think is that women could contribute to the opening of new fields, change the organisation of the production of science, change the use and the control over the use of new technologies. And all this is due to the fact that, overall, women do usually have a different attitude when they enter science. Thank you