WOMEN IN SCIENCE

This week, McGill University astrophysicist Victoria Kaspi travelled to Ottawa to receive the Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal, becoming the first woman to win Canada’s top prize for science and engineering. The ceremony at Rideau Hall marked a milestone achievement for which she — and all Montrealers — should be proud.

At the same time, the singularity of the event is discouraging. It points to the vast gender imbalance that persists at the highest levels of academia in this country. The award, which is administered by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, has existed for 25 years. Of the scientists who receive funding from the council at the full professor level, 14 per cent are women. That figure drops to nine per cent when life sciences are excluded.

It is to be hoped achievements like Kaspi’s will encourage more girls to pursue science as a field of study and, eventually, redress the shortage of female science professors. As it happens, Kaspi, the director of the McGill Space Institute and a world expert on neutron stars, was not the only woman from McGill to be honoured in Ottawa. Elena Bennett, an associate prof at the university’s Natural Resource Sciences and School of Environment, was presented with the prestigious E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship for her work on land use.

In media interviews, both women spoke about the problem of female under-representation. Science draws a lot of women, Bennett noted, but struggles to keep them. At the undergraduate level in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — women make up more than half the students, but the proportion gradually shifts for graduate and postgraduate students, and more so for professors and senior professors.

The possible reasons are many, some more obvious than others. Misogyny, it seems, remains widespread, and women sense they will need to work twice as hard as men to achieve success. British Nobel laureate Tim Hunt recently set off a firestorm when he spoke of the “trouble with girls” in labs. To start, instances of harassment and intimidation must be met with a policy of zero tolerance at all levels.

There are other trickier obstacles. Combining a career in science with motherhood — as both Kaspi and Bennett have done — can be difficult when many students are close to or in their 30s when they complete their post-doctoral studies. Part of the solution might be to split parental leaves more evenly, so that men take on greater responsibility for child rearing.

As International Women’s Day approaches on March 8, there is much to celebrate, in the world of science and beyond. But much remains to be done.