WHAT IS THIS?

A comprehensive study of gender (in)equality in Malaria.

When observing Malaria’s epidemiological facts, we found that women and men are not always affected equally. The origins of this difference happened to be mainly cultural.

This brought us to self-reflect on our world of Science & Engineering as well as our community here at Trinity College, Dublin.

We used a quantitative approach: a database was gathered to depict sex ratio in Trinity’s academic staff as well as students.

IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING

As much as we would like to see even numbers of representatives of each gender in any work place, fields of engineering, science, technology and mathematics are not those places-not yet anyway. Why is that so? We will look at some global statistics as well as statistics from our own college to seek an answer to this question.

General picture:

• Women earn less than men.
• Ten years ago 47% of new entrants into maths, science and computing courses at university level were women. However, the number has fallen down to 40% by 2013.
• Less than 7% of positions in technology in Europe are occupied by women.

At Trinity College Dublin:

• Women account for 39% of all academic staff in College, but only 22% of academics in the Faculty of Engineering, Maths & Science (Annual Equality Monitoring Report 2011-12).
• At present, 8 out of the 25 Heads of School in College are women.
• At Professor and Associate Professor Level, the School of Linguistic, Speech & Communication Sciences has 25% women, while the School of Medicine fares slightly better at 37%.
• However, 4 Schools achieve a 50/50 balance among these senior positions. They are the School of Education, School of Law, School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, and the School of Social Work and Social Sciences.

The two main barriers that exist for women to succeed in STEM are ‘unconscious bias’, which causes undervaluation of women, and the fact that women are expected to take care of the household, and have bigger family obligations.

Moreover, media pictures beauty and style as the most important aspect of life, which turns young girls away from seeking a career in science, technology or maths as they’re not as glamorous. Prof Christine Loscher, director of Dublin City University’s Health Technologies Research and Enterprise Hub wrapped up the goals of today’s female society in a one simple sentence: ‘I do think that teens today are living in a world where image is more important than it has ever been.’ Hence, women predominate fields that are considered ‘feminine’ such as nursing, psychology, biology, pedagogy and letters. In fact, more than 70% of places in those areas are occupied by women. However, fields of physics, engineering and astronomy were traditionally considered ‘masculine’ and remain so till this day. Nonetheless, a balance of genders is seen in graduates in medicine, administration, law, and veterinary medicine.

The future of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is promising. Companies such as SFI (Science Foundation Ireland) are currently working on emending and attenuating any factors, such as the ‘traditional’ outlook, that would limit the amount of women pursuing those degrees/careers.


GENDER INEQUALITY AND MALARIA

It is widely known that occurrence of some diseases is associated with sex-dependence. An example of that is haemophilia, a recessive, sex-linked disorder. As females possess two copies of the X chromosome, inheritance of a mutated one does not lead to manifestation of the mutated gene in the phenotype unless the female carries two copies of the mutated gene, which is however, highly unlikely. Males, on the other hand, with their sex chromosomes being X and Y, need only one copy of the mutated X chromosome to have haemophilia.

This difference in susceptibility to haemophilia is based on genetic differences in males and females, that occur naturally, and therefore, in our opinion, should not be considered a subject for gender inequality issues.

However, is there a disease in which difference in occurrence in males and females is a matter of gender inequality? The answer is yes.

We tend to associate susceptibility to malarial infection with the country of residence as well as the social status of the affected person. Nevertheless, one important issue commonly neglected by the media is that women in some African countries tend to be more prone to infection and death from malaria than men. Why is that? Below you will find a brief summary of the issue.

EXPOSURE TO MALARIA

Segregation of responsibilities between men and women in a household is common (not only in poor countries), and in many cases it affects probability of contracting malaria. However, it must be noted that women are not always the disadvantaged side.

• Since Plasmodium falciparum is most likely to bite in hot and humid areas, men working in mines/forests have greater occupational risk.Women responsible for providing water for the household from the streams may be particularly exposed to mosquitos, which tend to reside in such places.

These are only two examples of how gender patterns of behaviour are important to malarial susceptibility. However, it still does not seem to raise the issue of gender inequality, as both sexes are affected, with the only difference being the area of contraction.