It’s women who are going to change the world. By Kristin Hohenadel
The future of science and tech is female.
WOMEN MAKE UP HALF of the world’s population, yet in terms of leadership opportunities, financial compensation and recognition for achievements, it’s still largely a man’s world. This is particularly true in the realm of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). A 2015 UNESCO Science Report showed that women represent only 28 percent of total researchers globally. In 2018, when two women—Donna Strickland and Frances H. Arnold—won Nobel prizes for physics and chemistry, respectively, it was big news, partly because women have been awarded only 3 percent of Nobel prizes for science since Marie Curie won her first in 1903.
Medical research is still primarily conducted by and for men, dangerously ignoring the differences between male and female anatomy. The overwhelmingly predominantly male artificialintelligence (AI) engineers have led to biased algorithms that reinforce sexist stereotypes and leave out women’s health concerns altogether. Apple, for instance, forgot to include the ability to track menstruation on its Health app when it launched. The World Health Organization has determined that climate change often disproportionately affects women and girls, and yet women have been excluded from the decision-making processes to address it.
Where are all the women in science and tech? This industry requires the work, talents and ideas of people of all genders. In this galvanizing time of cultural and political upheaval around the world, women on every continent are raising awareness about gender bias in STEM education and occupations and working to create greater inclusion for themselves and future generations.
Farah Alibay, a 31-year-old systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was born in a small town in Canada to parents who emigrated from Madagascar. After watching the movie Apollo 13 at age eight, she was inspired to become an astronaut. She eventually majored in aerospace engineering at the University of Cambridge, completed a Ph.D. at MIT and landed an internship and subsequent job at NASA. In November 2018, she was part of a team—notably half made up of women—that successfully landed a robot on Mars as part of the InSight mission.
Alibay’s resumé is impressive in its own right, but given that
she is a woman of colour facing both gender and race biases, it’s even more remarkable. “I never had a role model that looked like me,” she says. Her mother, a teacher, and father, an engineer, encouraged her to pursue her interest in higher education. However, the female guidance counsellor at her all-girls high school in the United Kingdom told her, “You should rethink wanting to be an engineer because it’s a male-dominated field and you’ll struggle,” which is a terrible thing to say to a 15-yearold. She said: “Screw you! I’ll go do it and prove you wrong.” If it had been someone else with a different personality, he or she might have been discouraged.
Alibay admits that it was challenging to be a young woman of colour in overwhelmingly white and male university classrooms where she had to learn to advocate for herself.
In the workplace, Alibay has embraced standing out, even with regard to her brightly dyed hair. “The main challenge in careers with predominantly white men is you’re always the one trying to prove that you belong,” she says. “The lack of diversity makes you feel that way because you don’t see yourself in your mentors or your managers. But I have learned to embrace being a minority—with coloured hair.
Because if you step into a room and you look different and you do a good job, you can be sure you’ll be remembered. They won’t remember the other 10 white men in the room.” Like most women, Alibay doesn’t want to be singled out for her gender any more than she wants to be discriminated against because of it. She says that the InSight mission had a singularly diverse team that included a high number of women as well as people of colour and different sexual orientations. “We always say that diversity matters, but it never really gets put to the test,” she says. “I was never treated differently because of who I am, so, yes, it does make a difference.”
For Ukraine-born, Israelbased tech entrepreneur Inna Braverman, fighting climate change is personal. “Two weeks after I was born, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded,” she says. “Due to the vast air pollution, I went into respiratory arrest. Luckily, my mom, who was a nurse, approached my crib in time and gave me mouth-tomouth resuscitation, which saved my life. Given a second chance at life, I definitely want to make sure that I do something that changes the world for the better.” Today, Braverman, founder of Eco Wave Power, a Tel Avivbased company that has developed innovative technology to produce clean electricity powered by the ocean and sea waves, has dedicated her life to creating safe, sustainable and 100-percent-environmentally-friendly energy. She was one of this year’s winners of the Women4Climate Tech Challenge, an international competition organized by C40, a network of the world’s megacities working together to fight climate change. The challenge empowers women to lead climate action through technical innovation. Braverman’s Eco Wave Power will be implemented in Tel Aviv, with energy harnessed from the waves of the city’s coastline connected to the city grid. While Braverman says that she has been confronting gender bias since cofounding her company at age 24, she still encourages women to be proactive. “We have a lot to contribute. You know, a female entrepreneur is a bit like wave energy technology. Both of them take their energy from a source that has always been around, but, for some reason, no one has taken them seriously enough.”
Effecting meaningful change on the slow march toward gender equality requires a multipronged approach that includes challenging everything from societal norms to education, government policy and business practices. “Gender equality is often seen as a women’s issue,” says Alexandra Palt, an Austrian lawyer who started her career working for Amnesty International and is now chief corporate-responsibility officer at L’Oréal and executive vice-president of the L’Oréal Foundation in Paris. “But when we look at our future with artificial intelligence and robotics, for example, if we want to have an inclusive society, everybody has to be able to contribute.
If, at the moment, 22 percent of AI professionals are women, we see very clearly that the world we are creating is going to reflect a strong male perspective of things. We know that inclusive societies are the ones that function best on a social, economic and scientific level, so it’s in all our interests to have equal gender representation in science.”
The L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Awards were launched in 1998 to support the work of women working in science, mathematics and information technology. But Palt admits that awards alone are not sufficient when studies have offered dispiriting projections about how gender equality might still be hundreds of years away if we keep up the current snail’s pace of change. Women in Science works to raise the visibility of female role models and offers leadership training for young scientists. It also recently created a men for women in science initiative to enlist the other half of the world’s population in the common fight. “Ninety percent of high-level positions in science are held by men, so if we really want to change the system, we need women on board [too],” says Palt. The initiative started in France and has spread to Spain, Egypt, Morocco, Japan and Italy.
“We are working with men on how they can change their institutions to be more women-friendly and give more opportunities to them,” she says. “Ideally, one day all these kinds of initiatives will disappear because we will have reached equality—but this is not for our lifetime.”
“Ideally, one day all these
kinds of initiatives will disappear because we will have reached equality.”