Women in Science Lucy Glover

1. Women in Science Lucy Glover

2. Institut Pasteur • Institut Pasteur - Paris • Opened by Louis Pasteur in 1888 • 130 research labs • 11 departments • 2,680 researchers • 10 Nobel Prizes Louis Pasteur 1822 - 1895 • Women at Pasteur • 93 % score on gender equality index • Underrepresentation of women in senior scientific positions • 23 % of laboratory heads are female • Developed germ theory of disease • Invented pasteurization, rabies vaccine

3. The problem If a woman is a star, there aren’t that many problems. If she is as good as the rest of the men, it’s really pretty awful. A woman is expected to be twice as good for half as much.” Joan Steitz, ‘Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science’ winner

4. The leaky pipeline

5. Why women leave Science • Decades old problem, 1999, study on women in Science at MIT found: • consistently lower salaries, • smaller lab spaces, • less access to mentors and professional networks. • This put women at a disadvantage for publications, grants patents and tenure. • Minimal support for family and maternity • Inequality in pay compared to male counterparts • This results in a system that forces women out of science careers • 2008 approximately 3,000 female PhD graduates opted out of the Scientific workforce in the USA at a cost of ~$1 Billion to the economy

6. Why women leave Science • 2019 in the USA, 40 % of women left a STEM career after their first child compared to 23 % of men, parenthood is an important driver of gender imbalance • This suggests parenting is a structural problem with STEM careers (as both men and women are leaving)

7. A few examples of women who were overlooked Katherine Johnsondiscovered the exact path for the Freedom 7 spacecraft to enter space for the first time in 1961 (and later for the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon in 1969). Her work went largely unrecognized and was credited to the men she worked with (and for), who not only dismissed her because she was a woman but also because she was African American. Nuclear fissionwas discovered by Lise Meitner, who studied nuclear physics and radioactivity. She was studying uranium with her lab partner, Otto Hahn, who got credit for her work and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. Candace Pert, a neuroscience graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, discovered the receptor that allows opiates to lock into the brain. The discovery led to an award for her professor, Dr. Solomon Snyder. Pert wrote a letter of protest, highlighting which of her specific contributions were necessary for the discovery. Dr. Snyder simply told her, "That's how the game is played.”

8. The problem of unconscious bias Unconscious (or implicit) biases are learned stereotypes that are automatic, unintentional, deeply engrained, universal, and able to influence behavior.

9. How do we keep women in Science • Unconscious bias training • A helpful mentor seems to make a bigger difference in career success for women than for men • Promoting young women and girls’ participation in STEM • Academia needs to move away from a “publish or perish” model • On an institutional level, women need more support from their workplaces during and after pregnancy. • Larger systemic changes take time. • Hiring practices, funding opportunities and workplace culture