6. Conclusions and suggestions for further developments
A thorough scrutiny on the present situation of Portuguese women in
Science and Technology displays a quite heterogeneous picture: actually,
while they are revealing higher and probably still increasing performance
scores in scientific domains in general and most particularly in
Mathematics (a feature we described as a national idiosyncrasy), Physics
and Life Sciences, most technology areas on the opposite side are still
attracting less women than men.
This feature bears in several consequences, the first one being the
need for researchers to disaggregate between Science and Technology,
instead of carrying on a joint analysis of those two fields, when
investigating on women’ and men’ education and occupational situations22.
Another important issue deals with decision making as actually we still
perceive a severe gender bias in which concerns Portuguese youngest
generations’ choice among further education tracks, especially in which has
to do with secondary vocational education. Despite other less favourable
more general outcomes, individuals’ further work opportunities are quite
contingent on this still weaker appeal exerted by much technology fields, a
feature especially evident for women in business sectors, as several
Portuguese authors have been presenting.
Likewise, despite their scientific performance, women are
overrepresented in jobs and occupations where instability, lack of career
22 Actually, this should be the only way to avoid some frequent misleading conclusions mostly allowed by
institutional data itself, as namely data provided by EUROSTAT (New Chronos) which aggregates
“Science, Mathematics and Computing” employment values.
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