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Why are there so few women role models in the STEM field?

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To be a role model, one would have to have some public recognition and public visibility. So maybe the real question is not the one in the title of this article but this: why are more women from STEM not publicly recognised? Were women, historically, not part of the STEM field? Sure, we all know Marie Curie, two-time Nobel Prize winner, once for her work in physics and once for her work in the field of chemistry, and maybe we can count one or two more, but is that all? And if the answer is no, where are all these other women hiding?

If one takes time to dig deep, one can find that history is full of strong, intelligent, amazing, brilliant, brave women who made groundbreaking discoveries, invented amazing things, or launched new theories that changed the field in which they were working or even had a broader impact. Society benefitted greatly from women's contributions; from the invention of windscreen wipers (Mary Anderson) to the discovery of DNA (Rosalinda Franklin), to name just two of many. But still, they are invisible to most of the public.

When searching for reasons why things are the way they are, patriarchy is the obvious starting point. The status of women in STEM is similar to their status in general. And in general, our society has been male-dominated. For a long time, the science world was that of white middle-class men, who were seen as the norm, with women as the other, something that was different from the norm. Here lie the roots of inequality and unequal opportunities that women had to face (and are still, sometimes facing) in all areas, including in the STEM field.

Firstly, the basic precondition for scientific work had been denied to them as they were not allowed to study at universities for centuries. They were excluded from obtaining academic degrees or being a part of trade associations. Even after the doors to the universities finally opened to them, they had problems with finding employment in their field, with career advancement, important, decision-making positions were difficult, if not impossible, for them to obtain, and research money was harder for them to raise if that was even an option. In addition to the systemic barriers, they were constantly faced with overt biases, from sexism to misogyny (women are meant to take care of the home and family, are less intelligent than men, are not able to think logically, are not interested in STEM disciplines, to name a few) as well as unconscious biases like usage of only male pronouns in different official documentation.

Even when women managed to overcome all of the above-stated barriers - with great commitment and dedication - and achieved success in their field, their achievements were downgraded and less rewarded than those of their male colleagues. If we take a look at the most famous award: from 1901 to 2022, only 6% of Nobel Prize winners were women (Novak, 2023). This low percentage might indicate that women were not active in the fields that were being awarded. But that, of course, is not true. Their achievements were just not awarded or recognised.

Let us now look at a specific phenomenon known as the Matilda effect. This is the expression coined in 1993 by Margaret W. Rossiter, that describes: »the phenomenon where an innovation or scientific discovery made by a woman is attributed to her male counterpart« (Mihajlović Trbovc, 2023, p. 15). History is full of Matilda's effects and the STEM field is no exception. Let us take a closer look at three examples:
  • Joycelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first radio pulsars (supernova remnants) but because she was a postgraduate student at the time of discovery, her mentor, Antony Hewish, was awarded a Nobel Prize for physics in 1974 for the discovery that she made.
  • Lise Meiter is another woman from the STEM field who devoted her life to science but never gained the recognition she deserved: together with her colleague Otto Hahn, she contributed key findings to the mystery of nuclear fission but in 1944, only Otto won the Nobel Prize for physics although Lisa was the one who provided the theory behind the experiments. 
  • Esther Lederberg was another scientist whose achievements were overshadowed by men, in her case by her husband. Although they worked together in the laboratory and shared their work with research and study of bacteria, only her husband was awarded with Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1958. (Senica, 2021)
To answer the question from the title: the reason behind the lack of women role models in STEM does not lie in the assumption that women have not contributed important discoveries in the STEM field but that their contributions were more often than not taken away from them, undervalued, or overlooked. We, as a society, have not given them the recognition they deserve. It is time to change that; to acknowledge their contributions and to learn about all the struggles they had to face on their way – to give them the recognition they deserve. With biographical fairytale-like stories, the STEAM Tales project is trying to do exactly that: we are putting the amazing yet underrepresented women from the STEM field as role models for young girls (and boys) to look upon.
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