A European Commission group set up to promote the participation of women in science celebrates its 10th birthday this month. Named after the location of its first meeting in 1999, the Helsinki Group meets twice a year to discuss national policies and promotes the participation and equality of women in the sciences on a Europe-wide basis.

The group also helps the European Commission understand the situation in member nations, gathering statistics and building gender-sensitive indicators. Its members produced national reports on the situation of women scientists in their respective countries in 2002, which were brought together in a single report.

A founding member of the group, Tiia Raudma of the science, culture and gender unit at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research, said in the first years of the project, the commission and some member nations had little data on women scientists.

In many cases, male and female researchers were simply counted together, she told the commission's research news service, CORDIS News. The first statistics indicated how many women were involved in science in the European Union, but also revealed an intriguing trend, Raudma said.

In countries that spend more on research and development, researcher salaries tend to be higher, and more men and fewer women become researchers. In countries that invest less in science, scientists are typically paid less and there are more women scientists.

Raudma told CORDIS News there were exceptions to the rule but the findings highlighted the fact that "you can't just plough more money into research and development without addressing how we do research".

She said the current research system was designed for men with a stay-at-home-wife, and it had simply not evolved in line with changes in society. The system was in urgent need of modernisation, she argued, adding that improving researchers' work-life balance and offering them more flexibility would be good for men too.

Though Raudma said the Helsinki Group had succeeded in ensuring women in science were an important policy issue, some countries still needed to do a lot more work. The commission reported last year that only 15% of full professors in European universities were women. It also found that the proportion of women on scientific boards topped 25% in just six countries - Denmark, France, Finland, Sweden, UK and Norway.

Elsewhere women made up between 7% and 20% of board members and those figures fell further when only the boards taking the most important decisions were considered.

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