26 The Israel Chemist and Chemical Engineer Issue 8 · November 2021 · Kislev 5782 Report Blickenstaff [3] claims that women are not represented enough in science technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in not only the United States, but also in most other countries around the world, despite the advancements in science and technology. Women continue to represent a smal l proportion of faculty members in science and technology programs, especially in more prestigious research institutions. For STEMwomen faculty, for example, academic tenure often coincides with their child-bearing years. With decreased lab space, inadequate resources, lower salaries, and fewer prestigious opportunities, early stages of an academic career are particularly difficult for women. They still need to cope also with discrimination, an unconscious bias, and the demands of their families. Makarova, Aeschlimann, and Herzog [4] conducted a study in which they investigated the impact of the masculine image of three school subjects – chemistry, mathematics, and physics – on secondary students’ career aspirations in STEM fields. The data was collected from a cross-sectional study among 1364 Swiss secondary school students who were close to obtaining their matriculation diploma. The findings suggest that gender-science stereotypes of math and natural sciences may influence young women’s and men’s aspirations to enroll in a STEM major at university. According to UNESCO Institution of Statistics [5], fewer than 30% researchers all over the world are women. A three years’ global project (2017-2019): “A Global Approach to the Gender Gap in Mathematical, Computing, and Natural Sciences, How to measure it? How to reduce it?” was funded by the International Science Council and involved eleven scientific partner organizations [6] . The main goal of the project was to investigate the gender gap in STEM disciplines from different angles, globally and across disciplines. The project consisted of (i) a global survey of scientists with more than 32,000 responses; (ii) an investigation of the effect of gender in millions of scientific gap in Mathematical, Computing, and Natural Sciences at various levels. Chiu and Ceca [7] analyzed the results of the global survey disseminated to 32,000 scientists, of which 50% were male and 50% female. They showed how it contributed to the understanding of the gender gap, and to the identification of the various factors which cause it. Its results confirm that the Gender Gap in Science is very real: it exists across all regions, disciplines, and development levels. Women’s experiences in both educational and employment settings are consistently less positive than men’s. Recommendations for improving the situation were based on the survey’s findings. The recommendations address a variety of groups: (1) instructors and parents of girls in primary, secondary, and higher education, e.g., to avoid books and social media that reinforce the gender gap in science; (2) educational organizations, e.g., to avoid books and social media that reinforce the gender gap in science; (3) scientific unions and other worldwide organizations, e.g., to encourage the presence of women in editorial boards in their disciplines and publish reports on the proportion of papers published by women. Discrimination can be also found in the publication data [8]. A Survey of Doctorate Recipients [9], and the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty [10] deal with questions about career progression, such as self-reports of faculty persons and the number of their publications, a measure of productivity. The findings show that women are less likely to be promoted with tenure, even after controlling for number of publications [10]. Weisshaar [11] claimed that publicationmeasures show gender bias, expressed through work on self-citations. Publication data were retrieved fromGoogle Scholar using a Python script. She created multiple variables to measure both the quantity and quality of research productivity – number of journal articles, books by type (research monographs, textbooks, and edited volumes), book chapters, and (for Computer Science) conference presentations. She measured the quality/visibility of research productivity with three measures: (1) a binary variable that is coded as 1 if the professor has published in the highest-prestige journals in their discipline, (2) a variable that reflects the cumulative percentage of first-authored and single-authored publications. Each of the above productivity variables were measured at three time periods: 1) the five years prior to beginning an assistant professorship; 2) the years in which the person served as an assistant professor; and 3) the year after a tenure decision is made. 2. Science and women chemists in Israel Prof. Hagit Messer-Yaron, an electrical engineer fromTel Aviv University, chairperson of the Council for the Advancement of Women in Science and Technology, established by a government decision in 2000 [12] , and Prof. Hadassah Degani from the faculty of biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science [13], who participated in the symposium mentioned above focused on interesting aspects of women in science in Israel. Messer-Yaron [12] presented the percentage of women engaged in science and technology in Israel. She said that it does not exceed ,25% while women are about 45% of the labor force in Israel, and about 55% of university graduates. Women who choose to work in scientific fields encounter a glass ceiling, in academia as well as in industry, so that the percentage of women decreases. In the highest ranks )full professor( it is slightly less than 10%. In order to improve the situation, The Council for the Advancement of Women
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