Contemporary Reflections on the Role of Women in Russian Academia
Ekaterina Zibrova
Photo: The documentary “Science Is Female” was screened in several major Russian cities in 2024. Photo: Ekaterina Zibrova.
Academic freedom cannot be comprehensively studied without analyzing the position of women in academia. The precarity of this position becomes especially visible during periods of political and social upheaval, which compel a rethinking of women’s roles in society.
Today, the Russian Federation is undergoing such a transformation, shaped by geopolitical circumstances that force women scientists to navigate new realities, reconsider their academic careers, and repeatedly face the question: Can women thrive in scientific fields?
The Documentary as a Method of Free Associations
To explore this, we employed the method of free associations, using as a stimulus the 2023 documentary “Science Is Female” (Наука женского рода), which was produced in 2023 and screened in several major Russian cities in 2024. This method provided a unique lens for analyzing social perceptions and cultural narratives surrounding gender and science within Russia’s academic landscape.
The diverse feedback collected from audiences illustrates how women in science are caught in a controversial and shifting context, one that profoundly affects academic freedom by reinforcing their minority status and increasing the risk of their contributions being undervalued.
Please find information on the documentary here.
The Context of Gender Disparity in Russian Academia
According to Rosstat’s 2018 demographic survey, among the population aged 15 and older who indicated their education, 55% were women and 45% were men. When it comes to higher education, 58% of university degree holders are women and 42% are men.
However, this numerical advantage does not translate into leadership. Russia’s academic system includes two advanced degrees: Candidate of Sciences and Doctor of Sciences.* Women represent 43% of Candidate degree holders and only 28.3% of Doctor degree holders, despite their overall strong presence in the field.
* The Candidate of Sciences (Kandidat Nauk) is roughly equivalent to a PhD, while the Doctor of Sciences (Doktor Nauk) is a higher doctoral degree.
At the highest levels of academic leadership, this gender disparity becomes even more pronounced. Only 5 of the 71 members of the Russian Academy of Sciences Presidium are women, and none of the top 11 positions are held by women.
This pattern reflects what is often referred to as the “leaky pipeline”—a term that captures the disproportionate drop-off of women at each successive level of academic advancement.
Another critical issue underlying the concept of the documentary is the ongoing crisis caused by the so-called “brain drain” in Russian academia, which had already been observed prior to 2022 and has since dramatically intensified. Institutions have attempted to address this problem through science communication initiatives aimed at engaging new audiences and inspiring future scientists.
There are no disaggregated data on the gender composition of scientists who have left Russia, but during the personnel crisis of 2022 some companies and recruitment agencies publicly framed women as a valuable labor reserve to fill gaps left by men, both those conscripted into military service for the so-called “special military operation” and those who left the country to avoid this military mobilization. Meanwhile, the Russian authorities interpreted the resulting labor shortages as a drop in unemployment.
Despite these dramatic shifts, the share of employed women in science remained unchanged, and no targeted measures were taken during the state’s “Decade of Science and Technology” initiative to recruit women specifically. Even in science popularization content, representation is lacking. Among Russian documentaries on scientists, only one features a female protagonist: Sofia Kovalevskaya. But her story focuses more on her personal life than on her professional achievements or the gender-specific challenges she faced.
A third issue that directly affects women is the increased targeting of their reproductive role. State campaigns now openly encourage young women, including female students obtaining their university degrees, to have children, sometimes offering them financial incentives to do so. One example is a regional initiative in Oryol that offers payments to schoolgirls for giving birth.
At the same time, the current Russian government ignores a key structural barrier to gender parity: the timing of early-career decisions. Upon graduating, many women take maternity leave, which delays their professional development. Meanwhile, their male peers continue to build careers, claim leadership positions, and increase their labor market value. This gendered career split is a specific feature of the Russian context. Even women with higher education earn significantly less than men.
This is a core contradiction of Russian state feminism, a point on which Anastasia Shvetsova and I elaborated in a 2023 paper. Moreover, legislation passed in 2024 bans so-called “child-free propaganda;” the broad definition of propaganda (promoting such a choice in order to induce others to make it) means that virtually any public statement on a life without children could be interpreted as contravening the law.
The Documentary and Audience Response
The documentary “Science Is Female” presents five women scientists telling their personal stories in an open format. After the screenings, audiences were invited to fill out a questionnaire. These stories became the stimulus for a free-association response, allowing us to explore how women in science are perceived.
Approximately 300 responses were collected. We divided this feedback into seven categories:
- Motherhood: Balancing parental leave and a career in science.
- Women’s Empowerment: Persistence, ambition, and the strength of female narratives.
- Gender-Based Discrimination: Experiences of sexualization, discrimination, and emotional trauma; calls for more such films.
- Men: Complaints about imbalance and calls for a similar film featuring men in science.
- Out of Gender: Stories of general motivation and interest in science; critiques of how research was presented; interest in other underrepresented groups (e.g., scientists with disabilities); and criticism of some women’s speech being “inarticulate.”
- Denial of Gender Inequality: Claims that problems shown are universal and not gender-based.
- Equality as a Harmful Illusion: The claim that the film promotes women’s employment in science at the expense of femininity, deemed inappropriate in the “Year of the Family” declared by the government in 2024.
Academic Freedom, Gendered Gaze, and Blindness
It is essential to note that the documentary is gendered not only in content, but also in authorship:
- the concept was developed by women, including myself;
- the cast was entirely female; and
- 90% of the crew were women.
Framed through the “female gaze”—a counterpoint to the “male gaze” as theorized by Laura Mulvey—the film offers viewers an embodied vision of academia in which women are agents of knowledge.
However, the audience response revealed tension: although three categories of feedback related directly to women’s stories, four others reflected discomfort with gender framing. The expected identification with the protagonists did not materialize. Instead, we saw hesitation, denial, and resistance.
Drawing on Lacan’s theory of the gaze as an act of naming and interpretation, we argue that seeing is never neutral. What is “seen” depends on the subjectivity of the viewer.
In this sense, the female gaze reveals its limits when it tries to confront patriarchal norms in Russia. Audiences both see and refuse to see the gender-specific barriers women face. This selective perception is not passive; it is shaped by narratives that define what is acceptable, visible, and real.
If we understand academic freedom for women as an essential principle of free speech, where a woman can speak for herself and openly address the gender-based barriers she and her colleagues face, even when this message reaches beyond academia to potential future scientists, we must also recognize that the audience may not fully understand this message and may even avoid direct engagement with it.
In the contemporary Russian context, the discourse of rights and freedoms is increasingly being replaced by a focus on laws, legality, and control. As a result, the principles of free speech are being narrowed from universal ideas to specific and constrained interpretations.
This broader shift is reflected in the feedback to the film:
- on one hand, academic freedom is stripped of context, and gender differences are ignored;
- on the other, there is a simultaneous acknowledgment that women remain in vulnerable positions in academia.
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One key concern voiced by the audience is whether the active inclusion of women in science contradicts or disrupts an essentialist discourse that romanticizes femininity.
This creates an internal conflict, placing the viewer in the difficult position of trying to reconcile the women’s personal narratives (as presented in the documentary) with the social expectations of traditional female roles, particularly motherhood, which are intensively promoted in the current social context in Russia.
This tension turns into a perceived restriction of freedoms, as it raises doubts about whether a woman’s academic aspirations may ultimately come at the cost of her femininity. Here I would add that such a bright example of a woman in science as Sofia Kovalevskaya is framed in modern Russian discourse specifically as a woman who is looking for love. This reflects the agenda of Russian state feminism, in which “women’s issues” relate to family, children, and care, and not to freedom.
Ekaterina Zibrova is the co-creator of the Science Is Female project, a scientific advisor, and an expert in diversity, equity & inclusion. She holds a PhD in Psychology.
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