Agriculture research scientist provides local perspective on women in science
A local and personal perspective about the contributions of women in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) was offered during a presentation at the Swift Current Museum.
Dr. Barbara Cade-menun, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-food Canada at the Swift Current Research and Development Centre (SCRDC), was the featured speaker during the museum’s Lunch & Learn, March 20.
Her presentation highlighted the contribution of women to scientific research at the SCRDC from 1920 to 2024.
Her talk coincided with a travelling exhibition at the museum titled Iron Willed: Women in STEM, which was created as part of the Diversity of STEM initiative by Ingenium – Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation.
Her presentation included details about early female pioneers who worked at the SCRDC, the presence of more female staff in the decades after the Second World War and the women who have worked in recent years as research scientists at the institution.
Cade-menun said afterwards during a media interview that role models are important, especially for young women.
“Nowadays we don’t tend to think it being unusual to be a woman in science and yet at the senior level and senior scientists there still aren’t very many of us,” she noted. “Women need to see role models. They need to see that it can be done, it can be normal.”
She suggested that young women who are interested in STEM careers should connect with other women in their community who are already working in those areas. It is what she did while growing up in Merritt, B.C.
“We actually had a female doctor and I met with her and talked to her,” she recalled. “I was going to be a medical doctor and then I decided humans were boring to study. There were more species to look at. I actually worked as a summer student at the Agriculture Canada Research Centre in Summerland and that’s where I thought you could do other things with a biology degree than just be a doctor.”
She won science fair prizes while still at school in Merritt and wanted to go to a high school that really promoted science. She obtained a scholarship that allowed her to attend high school in Victoria, where she was among the first female students at an institution that previously was an all-boys school for 75 years.
There were teachers at this school who have never had female students in their classes and it was also a new experience for her male classmates, who had to get used to female students who did well in science and math. She recalled an incident when she needed some help with the details of a physics lecture and the teacher’s response was to tell her it is OK if she did not understand physics.
Cade-menun completed a M.SC. degree in soil biology and a PHD in soil chemistry at the University of British Columbia. She carried out post-doctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
She worked as a research scientist at Stanford
University and joined the SCRDC in 2008 as a research scientist. Her work as a phosphorus biogeochemist applies advanced techniques to study phosphorus cycling in soil and water.
She is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Saskatchewan and held similar appointments at other Canadian universities. She received the Influential Woman in Canadian Agriculture award in 2020 and was selected as a Soil Science Superhero for an exhibit at the Canadian Agricultural Museum in 2021.
“It would be nice to reach a point where the fact that I’m a woman in science is irrelevant,” she said.
“I won an award for being an innovative woman in agriculture. You’d sort of hope that I would win an award for just being an innovator in agriculture and the fact that I’m a female shouldn’t matter anymore. I’m a fellow in societies and I didn’t get that because I was female. I got that because I do really good science. Unfortunately, we’re not at that level yet for women in STEM.”
Women continue to be underrepresented in scientific fields. She will still attend conferences where less than half of attendees are women and there are still more men than women in her field related to chemistry as well as in physics, but there is a greater gender balance in other areas such as biological sciences.
The long journey towards gender equality was evident from her research for the museum presentation, which required a lot of digging in old records to uncover details about women at the SCRDC.
The institution was established in 1920 as an experimental farm for the dry prairie region. There was little reference to female staff in those early records from the 1920s. Many female staff were hired during the 1930s, but all worked in administration in secretarial and accounting roles.
Barb Morice was the head of secretarial staff from 1935 to 1967. She was credited for her invaluable contribution in improving the general quality of publications written at the research station. She is pictured in an official photograph as the only woman with 15 men who received their 25-year service pins in 1966.
Cade-menun was surprised to discover that the first female professional staff were already carrying out research at the SCRDC during the 1940s. She felt it was probably related to the situation around the Second World War, when women’s presence in the workforce began to expand. They were Ruby Larson and Alice Wall from 1945-48 and Beatrice Murray from 1947-55.
The records for the 1950s indicate that a large number of male professional staff were hired, but no female professional staff. More women are present in photographs from the 1960s and 1970, but mostly still as administrative staff. Their presence in photographs of professional staff with white laboratory coats are more noticeable in the 1970s and 1980s.
Change was starting to happen at a faster pace and photographs of summer students during the 1990s show that half of them were women.
There was only one woman in a photograph of 26 professional staff in 1989. It was Dr. Valerie Stevens, who worked as a poultry nutritionist at the SCRDC from 1985-90. Cademenun referred to Stevens as the first of the modern era of women scientists at the institution.
Cade-menun’s presentation provided information about several women scientists at the SCRDC since the 1990s. They are cereal pathologist Dr. Myriam Fernandez (1990-present), microbiologist Dr. Chantal Hamel (200316), geneticist Dr. Fran Clarke (2002-15), pulse pathologist Dr. Michelle Hubbard (2017-present), ecophysiologist Dr. Jillian Bainard (2017-2022) and cereal pathologist Dr. Samia Berraies (2020-present).
Cade-menun concluded her presentation with a graph showing the number of female staff currently employed at SCRDC. There is a near 50-50 split between women and men working as scientific support staff, technicians and biologists, and almost a third of research scientists are women. Historically less than 10 per cent of women were research scientists.
Lunch & Learn at the Swift Current Museum takes place on the third Wednesday of each month at noon. There is a lunch fee, but the talk is free.