Send it in. These words proved to be prophetic. Even though some prizes are still available, the heroic age for women scientists is largely over. But the age of complete normalcy for women scientists has not yet begun. The numeric trends over the past 25 years show that women have established a substantial presence in many scientific fields, but they also point to persisting problems and to new levels of complexity in gender segregation.
Statistics demonstrate the significant influx of women into the sciences over the past few decades.
Whereas in 1973 only 8.7 percent of the doctoral scientists and engineers in the United States were women, this number more than doubled to 21.6 percent in 1995. But this influx has not occurred in a simple linear pattern over time, and it has clearly been uneven across fields. Even within a given discipline, the genders often segregate into different subspecialties. In engineering, for instance, the percentage of female doctorates in 1993 ranged from 16.1 percent in materials science engineering to 3.5 percent in aerospace engineering. In the same year, 79.7 percent of the doctorates in developmental psychology went to women, compared with only 37.6 percent of those in physiological psychology.