Introduction to the Special Issue. Gender and Science :Old Challenges, New Approaches

This special issue on gender and science, brings together 10 articles that present some of the results of the study ‘Meta-analysis of gender and science research’ and its final conference ‘Beyond the leaky pipeline: Challenges for research on gender and science’, held in Brussels in October 2010. The ‘meta-analysis’ study was a project of the 7th RTD Framework Programme of the European Union, coordinated by Maria Caprile at the CIREM Foundation. Its main objective was to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the last thirty years of European research on horizontal and vertical gender segregation in science with a view to steering policy-making and to defining future research priorities in this field. For the purposes of the study, ‘science’ was understood in its broadest meaning, including social sciences and humanities as well as research and technological development. The study covered all research on gender and science produced between 1980 and 2008, in all European languages, in 33 countries: the 27 EU Member States as well as 6 Associated Countries to the 7th Framework Programme (Croatia, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey). A major output of the study was the creation of the Gender and Science Database (GSD), a unique online resource containing 4,500 European academic publications scanning three decades. This introductory article summarises the main conclusions of our research project and presents the 10 articles comprised in this special issue. In addition to our synthesis report (Caprile et al. 2011), further details about the study and the conference can be found on the website of the study, which gives access to the GSD, all the reports produced in the framework of the study and the proceedings of the final conference (www.genderandscience.org). It also acknowledges all the experts who contributed to this research project, as national experts, members of the coordination team, of the advisory groups, keynote speakers and participants at the conference. We wish to express our deepest gratitude to all of them.