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Sciences in the Universities of Europe, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries pp 69–88Cite as

Challenging the Backlash: Women Science Students in Italian Universities (1870s–2000s)

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Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 309))

Abstract

The literature of the last few decades shows that the relationships between men and women in higher education not only have social and institutional repercussions, but they influence the making of science too. Following these discussions, this chapter presents quantitative data on the presence of women in Italian medical and science faculties from the Liberal age (1861–1922) to the present. The inquiry begins in 1877, when the first woman took a degree in a modern Italian university; it continues through Fascism, the Cold War years, and the 1990s, when graduate women overtook graduate men; the paper closes with the 2000s, when men and women with a PhD are balanced overall, with women’s good performances in many scientific fields. However, as in the rest of Europe, these very good results of women in higher education in Italy have not corresponded to similar results in the work of research. From the First World War onwards, when women began to increase in numbers in Italian universities, they suffered from strong pressure aimed at restraining their ambitions as researchers and scientists. By examining the long-term data, it becomes evident that a second backlash is happening now, more than twenty years after the time when the number of women graduates overtook that of men in Italian universities.

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Acknowledgements

It is with great pleasure that I am able to thank Ana Simões. In 2011 she invited me to take a seminar on this subject at the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia of Lisbon; the lively and encouraging discussion, which followed, was very useful to me in writing these pages.

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  1. Department of Education, University of Bologna, Via F. Re, 6, 40126, Bologna, Italy

    Paola Govoni

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  1. Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT), Faculty of Sciences/University of Lisbon, Campo Grande, Lisboa, Portugal

    Ana Simões

  2. Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT), New University of Lisbon (FCT/NOVA), Lisbon, Portugal

    Maria Paula Diogo

  3. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Kostas Gavroglu

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Govoni, P. (2015). Challenging the Backlash: Women Science Students in Italian Universities (1870s–2000s). In: Simões, A., Diogo, M., Gavroglu, K. (eds) Sciences in the Universities of Europe, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 309. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9636-1_5

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