A Changing Tide For Women in STEMM?
BY ALLY HUGHES
It’s often difficult to appreciate the story behind statistics sometimes, and often people will skew these outputs to suit their own story. 60% efficacy sounds pretty decent, until you realise that the sample set is likely zero in the case of Brian Fantana and his tried and trusted Sex Panther cologne. However, I was truly shocked last year when I attended a talk and the speaker proclaimed that 11% of physics professors at that university were female, and that she alone represented that 11%! And that value does nothing to describe the hard work, determination, setbacks, and discrimination that she may have faced in order to become that sole female professor, that 11% on an Athena SWAN application. However, using statistics in the place of anecdotal evidence is our most accepted form of getting the message across about the so-called “leaky pipeline” down which we keep losing our talented female STEMM researchers.
In a report published last year by the Royal Society of Chemistry, 1800 participants in the chemical sciences were consulted about the progression and retention of women within this sector in the UK. They reported that whilst undergraduate student rates were up to 44%, this number continued to drop as women progressed through academia where only 9% of professors were female. Similarly, in 2010 the American Institute of Physics reported that 8% of full professors were female. The authors of this report were happy about the fact that female faculty members had increased to 14% in that year. The news is slightly more upbeat over in biology where 40% of postdocs and 36% of assistant professors in the top 24 institutes are female, according to a 2014 study by MIT. It is difficult to tell how we are doing in the realm of marine research as a whole since it spans so many different areas within the STEMM realm. However UNESCO published on their website that 30% of the world’s researchers are female although “regarding marine science and ocean research...women appear to be particularly rare to pursue such career paths.”
So now that I have cheered you up with some horrifying statistics, why are we unable to retain women and help them progress in STEMM careers? We are seeing some bottom-up changes with increased female undergraduate students registering in STEMM courses and more engagement from school girls in science subjects and at outreach events (check out What Does A Scientist Look Like? For some truly heartwarming content). However, the “leaky pipeline” particularly affects women in a number of ways, and Equality Diveristy and Inclusivity advocate Prof. David Smith recently wrote about this in an article for Nature Chemistry eloquently entitled “The race to the bottom and the route to the top.” In this article he highlights how old-school attitudes of long working hours, short-term contracts, and disregard of mental health are creating a race to the bottom. These problems disproportionately affect women and other groups far more than others. Being present outside of normal working hours is simply not possible for those with children or dependents. Similarly, short-term postdoctoral contracts offer no job security and make it incredibly challenging for women to start a family due to financial stress and of course the “publish or perish'' attitude still held by some dinosaurs. It is too large of a subject to cover in this article but women are generally more likely to suffer from imposter syndrome than men and experience sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace. In his article, Prof. Smith calls for us to think about “what we value as scientific success” and abandon the current metric systems that we use to evaluate people in STEMM and realise that success means something different for each person.
But before you throw your phone out the window and give up on trying to break those impossibly high glass ceilings, let me highlight some good news stories to help you keep up the fight:
Homeward Bound women in leadership programme aims to train 1000 women in 10 years. I interviewed three participants for our December blog.
eXXpedition - an all-female voyage exploring the impact of plastics and toxins in our ocean.
500 Women Scientists whose mission is to make science open, inclusive and accessible to all and have recently developed a Request A Female Scientist app.
The Women Speaker Initiative will also help organisers find speakers for their events to avoid having the dreaded manference or manel.
Speaking of conferences, Nature Springer announced that it would no longer allow all-male organising committees or panels at conferences that it supports.
Male allies such as Prof. Jonathan Eisen and head of US National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins have actively spoken out about lack of diversity at conferences and refuse to partake in manels moving forward.
And if that just isn’t enough, then follow Dr. Jess Wade’s mission to diversify scientists on Wikipedia by creating profiles for women that have otherwise been overlooked. She also has a great TEDx talk speaking about diversity in science. And finally, check out our social media accounts where we promote women working in all areas of marine science.
Remember that “nevertheless she persisted”, and she will continue to persist!