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

The literature of the last few decades shows that the relationships between men and women in high education not only have social and institutional repercussions, but they influence the making of science too. Following these discussions, the paper 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. As in the rest of Europe, however, to these very good results of women in higher education in Italy, have not corresponded similar results in the work of research. In a similar way to what has happened in other countries, indeed, from the First World War onwards, when women had begun to increase in numbers in Italian universities, they suffered from strong pressure aimed at containing their ambitions as researchers and scientists. On examining the long-term data, a second more evident backlash would seem to be happening now, more than twenty years after the time that the number of women graduates overtook that of men in Italian universities.