Introduction: pipeline break

Abstract

We are now at the cusp of attaining the conditions needed for gender equality and equity in academic science. However, traditional academic science cultures are high walls, and those barriers have not yet fully been breached. Women now can enter many previously male-dominated academic fields but are still under-represented in higher positions. The socalled ‘pipeline’ thesis – encourage entry at the lower levels on the premise that with time, the increase will filter up to the higher levels – has led to the founding of numerous programmes and projects to encourage girls and young women to engage with science, technology and mathematics. An ‘assisted pipeline’ has worked up to and including PhD programmes and entry level positions in many academic science fields. However, it has been noted that the pipeline is ‘leaky’, with women being lost in ever greater proportions as they ascend the academic ladder (mixing metaphors). Indeed, their paucity at advanced levels is so great, with little ‒ if any ‒ improvement over the past 30 years, that it has been held that the pipeline is broken (see Etzkowitz et al., Chapter 19 in this volume). As Paula England (2010) has argued more broadly, the gender revolution has ‘stalled’. A simple funnel mechanism, an educational system attached to a pipeline with a ‘capillary action’ flow, propelling upward mobility of individuals expected to rise by virtue of increased input, has failed to produce equity, let alone equality. Instead, it has transmogrified into a mechanical model of an engine that has seized up and stopped running, at least temporarily, and is in stasis. In a ground vehicle, such as an automobile, a stall is inconvenient but not usually fatal unless a following vehicle runs into the stopped one. The academic system has proved resistant and resilient in the face of pressures to change. It bends, accepting gender research programmes, and is resilient, promoting relatively few female scientists, who generally accept the male model of science, thus keeping the existing system intact. Nevertheless, there are men and women scientists who attempt to innovate a female ‘family friendly’ model, balancing work and life with a private sphere, that an increasing number of