There is a call to create funding equity
The challenges faced by scientists-mums in STEMM during their teenage years: The MIS-led 2018 European Platform of Women Scientists (EWSH2019)
Progression up the seniority ladder relies on opaque factors, such as social networks, and being vouched for by other academics, as well as access to information on grants and how to win them. Multiple studies have found that, whether consciously or not, senior figures are more likely to see potential in — and guide — people who are similar to themselves, an effect sometimes termed affinity bias.
Richards compares navigating from one side to the other of a dark, cluttered room to not giving a torch to someone who isn’t. People helping out someone isn’t a bad thing. But if you’re not being helped out as much as others, then inevitably, it’s going to make a difference in progression,” he says.
Women from Black and minority ethnicities face an additional systemic bias, which results in them being less likely than their peers to be promoted and get the largest grants, adds Ijeoma Uchegbu, a pharmaceutical nanoscientist and envoy for race equality at University College London.
Despite gains by women and people of colour, men continue to occupy almost three-quarters of all science and engineering positions in the nation, while close to two-thirds are occupied by white people.
Before the 2020 MIS-led survey, which examined the full extent of parental discrimination in STEMM, the challenges faced by scientist-mums existed largely as an underlying murmur of anecdotal stories.
The European Platform of Women Scientists, as well as the Association for Women in Science and 500 Women Scientists, both US non-profit organizations, are part of the 17 organizations endorsing the report.
A number of funders who collectively control the annual distribution of billions of research dollars are interested in collaborating with organizations to roll the recommendations into their policies. The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, the European Research Council, the US National Institute of Health, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada are some of the funders.
She had a harder time getting grant approvals and professional opportunities after becoming a parent due to a snowball of obstacles that limited her ability to advance. Staniscuaski says he was behind when he was compared to his peers. I thought it was unfair. I didn’t become incompetent or lose my passion for science, I just had a break because I was raising my children.” Ultimately, she began advocating for gender-balanced policies in Brazil full time, setting her research aside and launching the non-profit organization Parent in Science in 2016.
The full report on the preliminary results of the global survey will be published this year, which reached roughly 9000 researcher-respondents, including parents and those without children.
Good practices already in existence can be seen in the report and create a sliding scale of strategies for organizations to consider. Rolling deadlines, extensions and deferments for grants, application formats that allow scientists to explain a lapse in productivity, and unconscious-bias training for grant reviewers are all things that are easy to implement.
A spokesperson from the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research says that the agency often creates working groups of external scientists to tackle emerging issues — including topics related to diversity and sexual harassment — and that such discussions have helped to shape policies around funding scientist-parents. We can better ensure a competitive and diverse workforce in the future through work life integration policies, according to a spokesman.
The ERC has committees that advise their leadership on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Kristina Archibald, director of the research grants and scholarships portfolio at NSERC, says that she will work with the committee to assess whether any of the report’s suggestions could enhance the agency’s existing practices. She notes that not all diversity data by parental status is used to determine the policies that support mothers.
Sandra Díaz is an ecologist at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina and one of the leaders of IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Women should be celebrated as science leaders. Although they aren’t as famous as the researchers running major laboratories or winning awards, women are starting to believe that they can be useful in discovery and knowledge production. More and more women are taking responsibility for coming up with innovative ideas, leading risky scientific efforts, or leading large science-policy bodies. She says that girls understand that a scientific career does not always mean working in the shadows as a follower.
Gihan Kamel, a Physicist at SESAME, which is located in Jordan, will be celebrating breaking barriers. “There is progress,” she says. “Not least in breaking the extremes in cultural and religious traditions and rules that are made by society and forced on women — usually inherited from one generation to another.”
The committee began meeting before a wave of legislation by some US states seeking to clamp down on diversity initiatives and the inclusion in university curricula of the topic of racism. The number of DEI roles created to help companies and institutions achieve a balanced workforce increased following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020 but the attrition rate of those roles had risen. Abby Ray, vice-president of marketing and communications at oSTEM, a national non-profit organization based in Grandville, Michigan, that advocates for people from sexual and gender minorities in science, says that such efforts underscore the need to keep pushing for change. They say that it is essential to support those who have been excluded from the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
For Jesse Lee, a fifth-year PhD student in Gregory Beatty’s cancer-immunology laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, this type of group structure has led to what he calls “one of the more healthy lab environments” that he’s been a part of. Students are trained by several technicians in a project, working together on a project which will be based on their training in the lab. This, along with Beatty’s hands-on approach to mentoring, means that you are constantly working together andordinating how your things run through each team. “Everybody knows a little bit about everybody’s projects, and everybody’s always thinking about someone else’s project.”
In order to add more data from a literature search, the committee worked with the Roundtable on Black men and black women in science, engineering and medicine to conduct structured interviews about their lived experiences. Their testimonials “add context to the data and add complexity that is oftentimes just not seen in raw numbers”, says Wilson. Although he has served on many committees, he says that the report is the first document he’s seen that includes these types of interviews. “It was a learning experience for me,” he says. “I think it’s a very powerful tool.”
Ableism, or discrimination against people with disabilities, along with continuing inaccessibility of physical and virtual spaces, could bar scientists with disabilities from seeking or getting positions in their field, says Bonnielin Swenor, director of the John Hopkins University Disability Health Research Center in Baltimore, Maryland. She notes that the barriers are very high for scientists with disabilities, who are also under-represented. “These disparities are both a cause and consequence of inaccurate, but common, views that people with disabilities don’t belong in STEM, are incapable of being scientists and are overlooked as STEM leaders,” she says.
Under-representation in STEM could result from a scarcity of role models, says Johnna Frierson, associate dean for equity, diversity and inclusion for the basic sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina. She sees the problem as a cycle in which lack of representation leads to continued lack of representation. She says not having robust diversity in representation can send a message that people from under-represented groups don’t fit in and can’t be successful.
The pay disparity between different groups in science and engineering: a case study of the North American Science and Engineering (S&E) sector
The earnings disparity between different groups in science and engineering are found in the report. In 2020, the median annual wage for all employees in the sector was US$89,990. But men in these fields earned around $25,000 more than their female counterparts ($99,923 versus $75,562). The median salary for white S&E workers was $89,977. For Asian S&E workers, it was $107,150.
NSF representatives say that the agency is integrating questions about the LGBT+ community into its surveys, adding that it hopes to publish its analysis of the data in a few years.
