Abstract:

While Incorporation of working women into the labour market has increased significantly in the last decades, in the contrary, gender roles traditionally determined by patriarchal socialization have poorly changed. Lamentably as a consequence, equality between men and women has not been promoted enough. In this sense, Government and Public Administrations have already taken concretes measures but unfortunately are not enough to reduce dramatically the gender gap. This issue becomes particularly important for women involved in the Higher Education Teaching in Science, in which the level of commitment to keep promoting in the career ladder to get a permanent academic position requires huge amounts of work load and high quality research.

Herein, we report some of the obstacles and difficulties women have to deal with during their scientist’s life, and how women are more affected than male workmates. For this purpose, a study has been undertaken to study how the care of children affects women capacity to contribute to high level research science. Also, various and very complete investigations have been conducted involving different surveys to compare groups with and without family burdens, using interesting parameters like number of publications, postdoctoral stays, or even more interesting regarding information about the number of women leading research groups. Finally, all the information was analyzed not only to propose concrete measures in order to balance work load and time spent to take care of family, but to reduce the gender gap in these areas.

Keywords:

Career ladder, gender gap, Higher Education Teaching.