By KATRIN BENNHOLD

PARIS - The quiet revolution that has seen women across the world catch up with men in the work force and in education has also touched science, that most stubbornly male bastion.

Last year, three women received Nobel prizes in the sciences, a record. Women now earn 42 percent of the science degrees in the 30 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; in the life sciences, such as biology and medicine, more than 6 out of 10 graduates are women.

Younger women, too, are sticking more with science after graduating. In the European Union, the number of women researchers is growing at a rate nearly twice that of their male counterparts.

But if progress has been dramatic since the two-time Nobel physicist Marie Curie was barred from France’s science academy a century ago, it has been slower than in other parts of society - and much less uniform.

“Women need science and science needs women,” said Beatrice Dautresme, chief executive of L’Oreal Foundation and architect of the L’Oreal-Unesco For Women in Science awards, honoring five scientists each year from around the world. “If women can make it in science, they can make it anywhere.”

The number of women who are full science professors at elite universities in the United States has been stuck at 10 percent for the past half century. Throughout the world, only a handful of women preside over a national science academy. Women have been awarded only 16 of the 540 Nobels in science.

The tug-of-war between encouraging numbers and depressing details is in many ways the story of the advancement of women overall. Women get more degrees and score higher grades than men in industrialized countries. But they are still paid less and are more likely to work part time. Only 18 percent of tenured professors in the 27 countries of the European Union are women.

And the big money in science these days is in computers and engineering - the two fields with the fewest women. In the 21st century, perhaps more than ever before, there will be a premium on scientific and technological knowledge.

Science, in effect, will be the last frontier for the women’s movement. With humanity poised to tackle pressing challenges - from climate change to complex illness to the fallout from the digital revolution - shortages of people with the right skill sets loom in many countries. Therein lie both opportunity and risk for women: In the years to come, the people who master the sciences will change the world - and most likely command the big paychecks.

Many obstacles women face in general are starkly crystallized in the scientific and technological professions. Balancing a career with family is particularly tricky when the tenure clock competes with the biological clock or an engineering post requires long stints on an offshore oil rig.

And stereotypes run deep. Blanca Trevino is a Mexican computer scientist and chief executive officer of Softtek, the largest private informationtechnology service provider in Latin America. She recalls that a kindergarten teacher would call her to complain about her daughter, who was playing with a calculator instead of with dolls.

“The lady told me that my daughter was making up stories, saying that her mother had an office and an assistant,” Ms. Trevino said. “The idea that this could be true did not occur to her.”

In the Philippines, Lourdes Cruz, a biochemist and L’Oreal-Unesco laureate for the Asia-Pacific region this year, was educated in a girls’ school and encouraged by a chemist father.

She had a successful research career between the University of Utah and the Marine Science Institute in Quezon City. There was never time for marriage, let alone children, she said.

Recently, two shifts have begun to focus the thinking of politicians and companies: shortages of engineers and other highly qualified labor in the West, and rising numbers of science and technology graduates in countries like China and India, just as the economic balance of power is shifting eastward.

By 2017, a shortfall of 200,000 engineers is expected in Germany, and in Britain more than half a million skilled workers will be needed to satisfy the demands of the green energy, aerospace and transport industries. The United States, meanwhile, finds itself in the bottom third of the O.E.C.D. international rankings of mathematical and scientific aptitude at high school level.

At the same time, developing countries - most notably in Asia - have increased their share of the global researcher pool, from 30 percent in 2002 to 38 percent in 2007, according to Unesco.

“Everything is in place for more women to succeed in science; now the different pieces just have to come together,” said Ms. Dautresme at L’Oreal . “I believe this century will see a lot more women become leaders in science.”


In technology and science, women are still paid less than men in industrialized countries. / GARY WARREN/ASSOCIATED PRESS