Scientists and/or knowledge workers : gender participation and the changing contexts of science

This paper emerges from an ARC Discovery project looking at scientists' career paths and their concerns and opinions about the changing contexts of scientific practice. The paper discusses changing relationships between science, economy and society that can be argued to be breaking down the autonomy of the 'republic of science'. The emergence of the contemporary 'knowledge worker' is contrasted to a particular social-historical construction of the persona of the independent 'man of science'. The paper then focuses on reporting primary data on science practitioners in Australia drawn from over 500 responses to a survey conducted online with authors publishing in scientific journals from Australian institutional locations, located through the ISI Web of Science database. This primary data and selected secondary data are used to support the hypothesis that there is a transformation underway in the gender structure of Australian scientific practice. A gendered comparison of the age, position, tenure and salary structures of the survey respondents is also undertaken. This suggests that constraints on gender participation in science practice remain. It is argued that the changing gender structure of the scientific field provides insight into the social positions that 'knowledge workers' will take in the future.