Women in STEM unite
A quest to bring together 500 women scientists now involves more than 10,000. FIONA MCMILLAN reports.
KATARZYNA NOWAK is a wildlife conservationist with a long history of reaching very hard to reach places. She has studied elephants in the Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania, ventured to the glacial fjords at the southernmost tip of Chile, and waded through mangrove forests of Zanzibar. Yet it’s a small stage in Colorado that stands out in her mind for its poor accessibility.
It was September 2017 and Nowak had been co-instructing a seminar on international conservation, when she and several graduate students – all female, as it happened – attended a nearby environmental film festival. The films were preceded by a talk from a wellknown CEO – himself an environmentalist and avid outdoorsman – then followed by a discussion panel on fishery sciences and conservation in marine and freshwater areas.
“That panel was made up of five men, all white,” says Nowak. “I was surprised by this – being in a place like Colorado, I would imagine there being plenty of women in the fishery sciences available to join such a panel.”
She’s not wrong. In the US, women comprise roughly 52% of PhDs in biological sciences and are well represented in ecology. Roughly a third of researchers in fisheries are women, and Colorado is indeed a vital hub of fishery and freshwater ecology research. Later, Nowak approached the dean of the college hosting the event, and asked why no women had been included. He informed her that organisers had contacted one, but she had been unavailable.
Just one.
“That stuck with me,” says Nowak. “Especially sitting with my female students, who I perceived as a little frustrated by this and unable to imagine themselves on that panel or up on the stage giving a keynote because they weren’t seeing women up there.”
“It stirred me to contact 500 Women Scientists, and that’s what led me to Liz.”
IN THE WAKE of the US presidential election in November 2016, a small group of women scientists, including ecologists Jane Zelikova and Kelly Ramirez, texted one another to vent frustration about the
anti-science sentiments and derisive rhetoric targeting women and minorities that had spread during the campaign and showed no sign of slowing.
The texts became emails, and the email chain grew. They agreed that strong advocates of science were needed, particularly women. To this end, they drafted an open letter – a pledge, really – for women scientists to continue to advocate for science and for inclusivity within science.
They had hoped 500 women scientists would sign the pledge, as this would serve as a strong signal of unity and resistance. Within hours, they’d blown past that number. Today, more than 20,000 women and supporters from more than 100 countries have signed.
Those texts have grown into an international organisation focussed on building a strong and inclusive community of diverse women scientists. In a nod to its origins, they called it 500 Women Scientists.
Nowak was among those who joined, as was
Liz McCullagh, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado.
McCullagh specialises in auditory neuroscience and is particularly interested in how sound location information is processed in the brain, and how that is altered in disorders such as autism. But her interest in networks and communication extends well beyond neuronal circuitry.
Around the same time that Nowak was becoming frustrated with all-male panels, McCullagh wanted to find a better way for women scientists to find one another.
“I was thinking of creating a collaborative network where women scientists could get together and work on projects and scientific issues together or find mentorship and other ways to engage with each other,” she says.
“500 Women Scientists saw our dual initiatives and decided Kate and I should collaborate on this,” says McCullagh. “There could be one platform that could do all of these things.”
Nowak, McCullagh and a small group of colleagues immediately got to work. By January 2018, the Request a Woman Scientist database was up and running. It’s built upon a questionnaire that gathers information about scientific discipline, degree level, career stage, areas of interest, and geographical location. Participants can also self-identify as belonging to an under-represented minority. Journalists and conference organisers can use it to find more diverse sources and panellists, respectively. It’s keyword searchable, too, making it easy to find an expert on CRISPR, exoplanets, or eutrophication.
“I’m always surprised by what you can find on the database,” says McCullagh.
Moreover, she says, it has blossomed into an enormous support network. For example, an early career scientist can find a woman scientist with
expertise in a particular area and reach out for advice or even mentorship.
“You know there are all these other women out there who are also available as resources and wanting to fight this fight to increase representation,” she says.
“I think that’s one of the beautiful parts of this platform: it really is whatever you make it.”
So far more than 10,000 women from 174 scientific disciplines and 133 countries are in the database, and it has been accessed more than 100,000 times by journalists, conference organisers and other scientists.
Nearly 500 women scientists in Australia have signed up.
“I think it’s a fantastic idea,” says Marguerite Evans-Galea, a geneticist at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne.
She isn’t surprised by the level of interest, though. Over the past decade she has seen a long overdue shift in the conversation around gender equity in Australia and a demand for greater recognition of women’s contributions to science.
“We felt it was really important, because when we looked at professors across many organisations, they were all men, and a lot of them were white men.”
Like Nowak, Evans-Galea has heard many excuses, including that a woman scientist was either unavailable or couldn’t be found.
“The other one is ‘oh, we’re merit based’.” To which she retorts, “Well, sorry, but merit is gendered.”
Indeed, not only are notions and perceptions of merit subjective, research shows that focussing on merit can inadvertently exacerbate personal biases.
This “paradox of meritocracy” was highlighted in a joint MIT-Indiana University study that showed the very belief one is making a merit-based decision reduces self-scrutiny of those unconscious biases.
Evans-Galea says it’s also commonplace for people to rely on immediate networks when selecting a conference panel, reaching out for an interview, or starting a scientific collaboration.
“Men tend to know men and women tend to know women, so if your organising committee is male dominated, often your speaker list will be male dominated. This is a real issue and we need to put our voices out there.”
A few years ago, using the twitter handle Women in STEMM Australia, Evans-Galea put her own voice out there in order to share updates about gender equity initiatives in science. TODAY MORE THAN 20,000 WOMEN AND SUPPORTERS FROM MORE THAN 100 COUNTRIES HAVE SIGNED
“I started getting so many followers I couldn’t believe it.”
Inspired, she reached out to Michelle Gallagher, Director of The Social Science, a STEMM focussed marketing and communications consultancy in Melbourne.
“We shook hands over a cup of coffee and agreed to start a non-profit organisation called Women in STEMM Australia,” she says. “We began to call things out, either through our social media platforms or through our day-to-day networking.
“Since then we’ve also had the SAGE pilot come online and it has empowered people,” she adds, referring to the Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) pilot of the Athena SWAN program, a system that requires universities to find information about women in their organisations and identify bottlenecks in their career progression.
“It has created an environment for brave conversations and bold action to happen,” she says. “Moreover, through talking about gender, we’ve also started talking about minority groups and underrepresented individuals – everybody is included.”
As the organisation’s membership grew, EvansGalea noticed that simply putting individual profiles on the website led to an influx of emails from teachers, students and journalists. There are now more than 120 profiles of women in STEMM on the site, and while she’d love to include a profile of every Australian woman in STEMM, she concedes sourcing all that information presents a logistical challenge. That’s why she’s excited about a new database called FindHer.
Back in 2017, Zoe Piper and her team at CSIRO worked with a range of experts inside and outside the organisation to develop Expert Connect, a platform technology that automatically creates profiles of Australian researchers. It pools data from multiple datasets, including The Conversation, IP Australia’s patent database, researcher profiles from ORCID, and journal article datasets from Clarivate.
The resulting database now contains profiles of 70,000 researchers across 220 organisations in Australia. Researchers are welcome to verify their profile, add to it, and even elect to have information imported directly from their LinkedIn accounts. They can also opt out, if they wish.
Piper says this approach provides an important advantage for women scientists.
“While efforts for women to make themselves more discoverable through databases and websites is making progress, it does place a large burden on those women to constantly keep multiple profiles up to date,” she says.
In order to make it easier to find women scientists in this massive, automatically populated database, Piper and her colleagues developed machine learning algorithms that make an informed guess about a person’s gender based on facial recognition, name classifiers, pronoun use and, where possible, gender-specific titles such as Miss/Ms/Mrs and Mr. Researchers are also encouraged to self-select their gender as either female, male, gender non-conforming, or “prefer not to disclose”.
So far, around 15% of researchers in Expert Connect have been assigned a gender, with the remainder left undetermined. Of those 15%, around 5000 were identified as female with a 99.99% certainty level and this was double-checked by humans. The result is FindHer, which was launched on International Women’s Day in March 2019.
On the Expert Connect portal, the FindHer button is prominently placed right next to the more general “Find Experts” button. This is deliberate, says Piper.
“We wanted profiles of female researchers to be discoverable in the same place that people would go to look for researchers in general.”
IT HAS CREATED AN ENVIRONMENT FOR BRAVE CONVERSATIONS AND BOLD ACTION TO HAPPEN.
It’s a nudge, and it seems to be working. FindHer is now receiving more than 1000 hits per week and is often used more than the general search button. EvansGalea says FindHer will soon be accessible from the Women in STEMM Australia website, which already provides a link to 500 Women Scientists.
“My approach is, once you hear about a good thing, back it,” she says.
As both Request a Woman Scientist and FindHer are expanding their reach, so too is a database run by the Organisation for Women in Science in the Developing World (OWSD).
Founded in 1987, OWSD currently has around 7000 full members who are women with masters or doctorate degrees in scientific fields and who are living and working in developing countries. The OWSD website contains a searchable database of each member’s profile, including scientific background, research discipline and interests, publications and geographical location. In the second half of 2018, OWSD added national chapters in Kenya, Indonesia, Myanmar, Ghana and Zimbabwe.
So far, 2019 has seen the addition of chapters in Tanzania, Cameroon, Pakistan, Turkey and Uruguay. With these and future additions, memberships – and the vital networks they foster – will no doubt continue to grow.
As women scientists around the world become easier to find, public perception of what a scientist looks like is changing.
Back in Colorado, Liz McCullagh says this is a big part of what inspired her work on Request a Woman Scientist. She also hopes the database will become a vital source of scientific information in and of itself.
“My goal is that eventually it could be your resource for almost any scientific knowledge you might need.”
“I can almost imagine this being the next Google for science, in that if you have any scientific question, instead of asking Google, Alexa or Siri, why don’t you just reach out to a scientist themselves? Or, even better, a woman scientist.”
Recently, Nowak has been monitoring mountain goat populations as part of an expansive citizen science ecology project on the steep and hard-to-reach slopes of the Rocky Mountains. She needed an expert in artificial intelligence to aid the analysis of camera-trap photos from a large number of sources, so she used the database to find one.
“I also searched within a certain geographical area because I was interested in finding those women but also in asking one to mentor a high school student who happens to be in California. It’s just as an example of what you can do.”
There is more work to be done to achieve gender equity in STEMM, but whether in Colorado or Tanzania or anywhere in between, these databases will mean that no one will be able to say they couldn’t find a woman scientist.