The Male-Heavy World of Science
America is not producing enough scientists and engineers. Not nearly enough. So concluded participants in a wide ranging summit on our science and engineering workforce held in late November at the National Academies in Washington. More than 50% of our doctoral engineering students are foreign nationals -- fully 43% come from Asia -- and increasingly these students are choosing to return to their home countries after graduation. From 1986 to 1999, foreign students earned a total of 120,000 doctoral degrees in science and engineering at U.S. institutions, and employers increasingly rely on these graduates to fill the jobs that form the basis of many of our critical industries.
“If India and China stopped sending their students,” Merrilea Mayo, the summit’s convener, said, “our entire economy would be in deep trouble.”
We will probably be OK for the next decade, Mayo told me, but beyond that we are going to have a serious problem unless we can encourage more U.S. students to go into these fields. American supremacy in high technology is already beginning to drop behind emerging nations such as China and South Korea. At the same time, according to a recent report by the National Science Foundation, over the next decade our nation will need to hire 240,000 new science and math teachers at the middle school and high school levels. The majority of them will replace retiring teachers. Who is going to inspire our kids to even consider such careers?
Much is made of the need to improve public engagement with science -- the British have an entire movement devoted to the cause -- but in discussions of this issue we seem to hear only from one side of the equation: the communicators. In science circles, it is broadly understood that scientists must become better communicators. The need to interest a wider public has become so urgent that, in October, the National Science Foundation amended its policy so that a percentage of all research grants must be allotted to outreach efforts. In a similar vein, Caltech now requires all juniors to take a course in science writing. Students have to produce an essay suitable for publication in a popular science magazine such as Scientific American.
It is wonderful and necessary for scientists to become better communicators. Yet communication is a two-way street. In discussions about the “public understanding of science,” the one group we never seem to hear about are those on the receiving end of the equation -- the public, the people with whom we are supposed to be communicating. As any radio engineer knows, you can transmit a signal as strong as you like, but unless there are receivers tuned to the appropriate frequency, little information will get through.
Who is tuning in to our signal? One significant barometer is the readership of science magazines, the journals at which Caltech students are aiming.
The top-selling science magazines in the United States are Discover, Scientific American, Popular Science, Wired, Natural History, Science News, Astronomy and Science. Collectively, they sell about 4.4 million copies a month. Of the two most prestigious, Discover sells about 1 million a month and Scientific American around 700,000. Both are bested by Popular Science with almost 1.5 million a month.
All magazines claim multiple readers for each copy sold. In the science field, that ranges from two readers a copy for Astronomy to six for Discover. Tallying the numbers gives us a total of more than 21 million science readers a month. Reader surveys, however, tend to be subjective, and the truly concrete numbers relate to subscribers who account for the vast bulk of magazine sales.
So how do science subscribers break down? One category to consider is gender. Scientific American, the oldest and most prestigious title on our list, gives us a clue to the landscape: 87% male, 13% female. Most of the other titles follow suit. But what of the biggest seller, Popular Science? The magazine has not surveyed its subscribers in several years. Its reader surveys indicate that 19% are women, yet women science readers typically constitute a much higher percentage than subscribers. Indeed, a marketing manager at Popular Science told me, “We have almost no women subscribers.” Doing the math, it turns out that about four-fifths of all science subscribers are men.
Age demographics also reveal a significant skewing. The median age of Scientific American subscribers is 49, so also for Discover subscribers. For Popular Science, the median-age reader is 43. Even the hipster Wired has a median subscriber age of 41. Not surprisingly, science audiences are well educated. For example, 85% of Scientific American subscribers have a college degree, and 60% a postgraduate degree. With these pedigrees, science subscribers tend to be good earners. Wired tops the pool with an average household income of $132,0000.
The pattern is clear: The average science subscriber is overwhelmingly over 40, male, has a college degree and is earning well above the national average. He is well-catered-to and has a wide range of excellent material to choose from every month. But who is speaking to the rest of the population?
If we believe, as I think we must, that there is a crisis in the public’s understanding of science and, more alarmingly, in our nation’s declining participation in scientific careers, we cannot sit back and simply hope that people will come to science. Science magazines are a wonderful forum, but their range is limited. It is my belief that most people are never going to subscribe to Discover or Scientific American, but that does not mean they cannot be reached on this subject. Look at the millions who bought “A Brief History of Time” and never got past Chapter One. The sales alone demonstrate a widespread interest in theoretical physics, yet most of what is available on the subject is simply inaccessible to the vast majority of people.
Women, minorities and the under-40s are radically underserved vis-a-vis science communication. Are there other ways in which we might reach out to them?
For 10 years in Australia, I wrote regular columns on science and technology for several women’s magazines, including Vogue Australia. Writing for Vogue may not have the same cachet as writing for Scientific American, but potentially it can reach an enormous audience who will never pick up that admirable journal. Compared with the top eight science magazines with their monthly sales of 4.4 million, the top eight U.S. women’s magazines collectively sell 17.4 million copies a month. Total readership is about 70 million.
Imagine if we could reach even a fraction of these readers. No amount of wishful thinking is going to make the people come to science; we who care about science must take the initiative and go out to the people. In short, we must begin to think outside the canonical science boxes and reach out to a wider public in more innovative and creative ways.
