Beyond access to transformations: A cross-national analysis of women in science and engineering education, 1970--2000

Over the years, attention to the issue of women in science has tended to focus on individual and organizational efforts to encourage women's greater participation in science and engineering fields of study and occupations. With more intense globalization processes that increasingly shape and are shaped by science, national- and global-level understandings of the situation of women in science and engineering as well as methods to boost their greater and more equal participation in these fields are necessary.; This study is a cross-national and longitudinal study of women's participation in science and engineering fields of study at the higher education level. In order to explain the growth in women's participation in these fields of study between 1972--1992, I use a world society theoretical perspective to argue that national linkages to global models regarding women's educational equality and women in science may positively influence their participation in these fields. In multivariate statistical analyses, women's participation in higher education, measured as female enrollment in non-science and non-engineering fields of study, exerted a positive effect on women in science and engineering as did male enrollment in science and engineering higher education.; The fact that linkage variables and those measuring women's status and other national-level factors were not found to be influential suggests that world-level factors may be contributing to women's greater participation in these fields. To better understand processes at this level, I use feminist critiques of science to examine the efforts made by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank to address women in science and engineering education over a thirty year time period. My examination of their publications as well as conference declarations and platforms of action from ten international conferences finds a reliance on liberal feminist suggestions such as access and equal opportunities for women in science. More recently, UNESCO publications have included some transformative perspectives that entail possibilities for the inclusion of women's needs and interests into the existing male-dominated scientific curricula and structures. The same is true of some of the most recent international conferences.