While women working in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — may struggle for inclusion in the United States, they increasingly are finding opportunities through international collaborations.
Kathrin S. Zippel documents the phenomenon in Women in Global Science: Advancing Academic Careers Through International Collaboration (Stanford University Press, 2017). Ms. Zippel, an associate professor of sociology at Northeastern University, writes that being seen as representatives of the United States’ superior global standing in STEM fields outweighs such challenges as gender prejudice, institutional indifference, scarce grant support, and foreign workplace cultures. She coins the term ".edu bonus,” saying that overseas collaborators see that designation of employment at an American institution as more salient than gender.
Much of Ms. Zippel’s research has related to gender inequities, including her 2006 book The Politics of Sexual Harassment: A Comparative Study of the United States, the European Union, and Germany (Cambridge University Press). Her idea for her new book, she says in an interview, came while she was working with National Science Foundation Advance grants, intended to increase women’s representation and advancement in academic science and engineering careers. She noticed that women, outnumbered fourfold by men in STEM fields, were less likely than men to apply for larger NSF international grants but nonetheless were finding expanded research opportunities overseas.
That warranted attention, she says, because internationalization of research has become prominent in the United States. Since 1990, for example, the percentage of internationally co-written STEM research papers of U.S. authors has increased from 12 percent to more than 32 percent. She notes that one-third of U.S.-based STEM researchers are from overseas.
Ms. Zippel says that in Europe, particularly in her native Germany, which she left 25 years ago, academic internationalism is valued highly, and American researchers “are seen as the representatives of the gold standard of what real science is.” Contrast that, she says, with the United States, where “international collaborations are treated as a guilty pleasure that involves exotic travel but are not meaningful research. That attitude was widespread in the focus groups and interviews I conducted.”
Additional barriers, she says, include false assumptions such as that having children makes women far less able than men to work overseas or with overseas colleagues.
Many U.S.-based respondents with international experience told her they feared that colleagues placed U.S. research leadership at risk by taking that superiority for granted, even at a time when in many subfields the United States now trails. They admitted that until they worked overseas or with overseas colleagues, “they had been negligent of or ignorant about advances in other countries,” she says.
Ms. Zippel fears that with flat federal science funding and the Trump administration’s tightening of borders, institutions in other countries will poach many American researchers, who at home would “have to climb over even higher fences” to take part in international collaborations.
