Greece is a country where the number of women in first-year undergraduate ... Most women graduate from the university with a bachelor's degree and enter the ...
Status of Women in Physics in Greece Christine Kourkoumelis University of Athens
UNIVERSITY SITUATION Greece is a country where the number of women in first-year undergraduate physics has been particularly high and stable over the last 20 years, averaging about 30%. This is probably due to the peculiar entrance exam system, which assigns a student to a discipline according to his/her grades and not according to his/her absolute preference. The percentage of women graduating from the university in physics is about 36%. At the graduate level, the number of women students still rises! This is due to the high percentage (65%) of women enrolled in graduate environmental studies [1] (see Figure 1). The percentage of women with academic careers in physics suddenly drops to 15% after they receive a graduate degree. This indicates that when serious career obligations interfere with family responsibilities, women drop out. The distribution of women by academic rank has changed over the last decade (Figure 2). A shift from the lecturer level to the assistant professor level has been observed (from 25% lecturers down
1994
Astronomy Environmental
2001 2005
High Energy
Solid State
FIGURE 1. Percentage of women graduate students in different physics fields.
F u ll P r o f
A ss o c . P r o f
A s s is . P r o f
L e c t ur e r s
FIGURE 2. Percentage of women in each academic rank over a 10-year period.
to 8% and from 14% assistant professors up to 27%). Women do get promoted, but only up to the associate professorship. Then they hit the “glass ceiling.” The percentage at the highest level (full professor) has stayed close to 0%. As a reference, the percentage of women in senior management in all fields in Greece is about 6%. Clearly the numbers at the top level are too low: very rarely have women managed to reach the full professor level or the directorship of a research institution. Furthermore, the money spent for research in Greece is the lowest in Europe, which makes things difficult even for men. Most women graduate from the university with a bachelor’s degree and enter the job market as highschool teachers. The working hours for high school teachers are generally less demanding than for researchers, so women can combine child bearing and careers. Yet men in the same age group must serve for two years in the military, but this obligation can be postponed or reduced if they enter research.
SOCIAL SITUATION If a woman works in the public sector, legislation protects her in family issues, including a 2-plus-3month leave of absence for pregnancy and a prohibition against firing her. On the other hand, she loses CP795 Women in Physics, 2nd IUPAP International Conference on Women in Physics edited by Beverly Karplus Hartline and Ariel Michelman-Ribeiro © 2005 American Institute of Physics 0-7354-0278-7/05/$22.50
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contact because of the reduced time available for work and traveling. Part-time employment and jobsharing, although legally established 5 years ago, are not available in the public sector. In the private sector things are less certain, especially because private tutoring is often done unofficially. In Greece both members of a couple have to work to support the family. Women physicists prefer teaching, with its flexible schedule. A career in research often means delaying or giving up family life. In addition, society judges that a married woman is ignoring her family if she spends long hours in her lab. The usual barrier to successful careers for women in Greece is that men at the top ranks have tailored these jobs to fit their life-style, and they avoid promoting and/or giving responsibilities to women.
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION In Greece, elementary-school students are first introduced to physics during their 5th and 6th years. The majority of teachers at these levels are male. Female teachers prefer to teach in the first three grades. This is partially due to the fact that the early grades need less preparatory work, which leaves more time for housework/family. As a result, both girls and boys—our schools are coeducational—get the message that physics (and science) is a man’s affair or that men are more capable of dealing with technical/ technological/experimental matters. Books are also filled with male pronouns (“he” instead of “he/she”) and show boys doing experiments. Studies have shown that although most male teachers consider themselves sensitive to gender inequalities, they do not apply this knowledge in class. On the other hand, girls seem to do at least as well in science subjects as boys, getting better grades and handling electrical tools with confidence. The girls’ mathematical skills seem different than boys’ and their affiliation with computers is looser [2]. One study shows that during 5th grade, 55% of boys and 45% of girls consider physics to be “very interesting.” This interest degrades during the high-school years: a year before graduation, 70% of boys and 89% (!) of girls consider physics “not interesting at all” [3]. Studies done mainly by education departments have suggested interventions that could decrease gender bias in elementary schools and provide equal opportunities in science education (www.eled.auth.gr).
GROUPS INVOLVED IN IMPROVING THE SITUATION According to the Hellenic Union of Physics, no study has been done on women and their careers in physics in Greece. A wider study, “Report on Trends of Female Employment in Technical Occupations in Germany, Greece, Finland, France and United Kingdom (1993–1999),” found that physics is considered an “occupation with high technical job content,” and that overall there is a 1% annual increase in these occupations following an improvement in average educational level, irrespective of marital status [4]. The General Secretariat for Gender Equality (www.kethi.gr)handles gender-equality matters and is supervised by the Ministry of Interior, Public Administration and Decentralization. It is responsible for promoting and supporting legal and substantive equality in all sectors (political, economic, social, and cultural). The Secretariat proposes measures to be taken by the State, collaborates with international organizations, promotes action, intervenes with political bodies, and issues updates and information. During the last 3–4 years several undergraduate and graduate programs on gender equality were launched at the universities. Most of them received support from the Ministry of the Education, which has recently shown an increased sensitivity though EPEAEK (Operational Programs for Education and Initial Vocational Training), funded in part by the European Union. However, it is too early to see any influence.
REFERENCES 1. Secretariat of the Physics Department of the University of Athens (personal communication). 2. Proceedings of the Workshop on Gender and Education: Mathematics, Sciences and New Technologies (in Greek), University of Thessaloniki, April 2005 (in press). 3. Proceedings of the First Panhellenic Conference on Teaching of Sciences and Application of New Technologies in Education (in Greek), Thessaloniki, Greece (1998). 4. N.E. Ntermanakis, “Report on Trends of Female Employment in Technical Occupations in Germany, Greece, Finland, France and United Kingdom (1993–1999),” Athens: Research Center for Gender Equality, 2000 [www.kethi.gr/english/meletes/MEleti_Leonardo/Leonardo.pdf].
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