Debate

One of the policy objectives of the new Federal Government in Germany is equal opportunities for women. It is to be a guiding principle in all programmes and projects in education and research, and it is to be understood as a means to improve quality and performance and to make more efficient use of existing potential. This paradigm shift requires rethinking by all those responsible in politics and industry, as well as in science and research.

Lydia Makkubu reflects on the socio-cultural dimensions at work in the Third-World that affect the numbers of women scientists, and introduces interventions that may help improve the situation.

Increasing attention has been drawn to the problems faced by women in science, engineering and technology (SET). Women are unequally represented in science and their career progression is not comparable to their male colleagues. The growing interest in this topic may partly be because of the growing awareness of the huge untapped economic potential that women represent.

In Germany, 6.8% of the male students who finished their biology degree between 1977 and 1979 reached a "habilitation" within the ten following years (more exactly: 1986 to 1988). Only 0.8% of the women who finished their biology degree between 1977 and 1979 received a "habilitation" within the ten following years¹. Habilitation is the German entry ticket to tenured professorship.

Women are under-represented in European science. They do not contribute as much as they could to scientific progress.

Most of us have grown up hearing stories of gender bias and 'glass ceilings'. We wonder how much these biases and ceilings affect our own lives.

Predicting earthquakes requires an understanding of the underlying physics, which calls for novel multidisciplinary approaches at a level never yet undertaken. Notwithstanding past efforts in several countries in the last decades, I fail to see that the scientific community has used the full potential of artificial/computational intelligence, statistical physics, super-computer modelling, large scale monitoring of a full spectrum of physical measurements, coupled together with more traditional seismological and geological approaches to make a dent in the earthquake problem. What we have learned is that past failures in earthquake prediction reflect the biased view that it was a simple problem.

This debate has highlighted both a degree of consensus and a degree of continuing controversy within the thorny subject of the predictability of earthquakes. In terms of the four levels of prediction of seismicity I introduced at the start of this debate, a consensus has emerged that at least some form of time-dependent seismic hazard can be justified on both physical and observational grounds. The phenomenon of earthquake triggering leads to a transient, local increase in probability of future earthquakes, for example as aftershocks, but also sometimes in the form of subsequently larger events. In fact warnings based on such clustering are already in use in California (Michael, week 2). On the other hand, all of the contributors to this debate who expressed an opinion agree that the deterministic prediction of an individual earthquake, within sufficiently narrow limits to allow a planned evacuation programme, is an unrealistic goal.

Geller and Jackson have both reproached me for not citing all of the Jackson and Kagan papers in my earlier statement. Space requirements did not allow for a fuller discussion it that time.

The question at the heart of this debate appears to be whether earthquake prediction should be recognised as a distinct and independent research field, or whether it is just one possible research topic in the general field of study of the earthquake source process. As there are no known grounds for optimism that reliable and accurate earthquake prediction (as defined in my first article) can be realized in the foreseeable future, the case for the latter position appears clear-cut. As a consequence there is no obvious need for specialised organisations for prediction research. Besides the benefits that always accrue from pruning deadwood, abolition of such organisations would force prediction proponents and critics to confront each other in common forums, thereby speeding the resolution of the controversy.