ELLIOTT & FRY/NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
Rosalind Franklin: 45 years after her death, women are still struggling for recognition.
Choose your husband carefully: one willing to share the laundry and make the children's supper. That was one piece of advice for women researchers at a recent conference in Berlin on women in industrial research. It's an example of how gender equality needs to be integrated into every part of public and private life if more women are to reach their potential.
The reasons for the shortage of women in science and engineering, particularly in senior positions, are well documented: the 'leaky pipeline' caused by opaque recruitment practices, the pressures of juggling workload with family commitments, systems of promotion that work against women who interrupt their careers to have children, to name but a few.
Responses to these problems have often treated the symptoms rather than the causes, through schemes to push more women into the pipeline. But the European Commission (EC) is now spearheading efforts to promote deep-seated organizational and cultural change in both private- and public-sector research.
The EC is pushing for industry to hire and promote more female scientists and is using the Sixth Framework Programme to make similar inroads in academia. But for real progress, individual nations, universities and companies will need to rethink their own practices.
At a Berlin conference on 10–11 October, jointly organized by the EC and the German education and research ministry, industry and governments were challenged to speed up the necessary changes.
Little information existed on the subject before the publication in January of an EC-commissioned report by a group of industrial and academic experts: Women in Industrial Research: A Wake-up Call for European Industry. This revealed that fewer than 15% of the industrial researchers in Europe are women — and only 9.6% in Germany, where a third of Europe's industrial researchers are based.
Meeting Europe's target of investing 3% of gross domestic product in research and development by 2010 will mean recruiting up to 700,000 more researchers, mainly in the private sector — and highly qualified women are a rich, untapped resource.
Several companies have woken up to this reality. In Berlin, a group of seven Europe-based companies announced a public commitment to improving the lot of women in industrial R&D. Airbus, Air Liquide, EADS, Hewlett-Packard, Rolls-Royce, Schlumberger and Siemens have each pledged to take measures such as monitoring targets and sponsoring role models, for example by endowing university chairs. "We hope other companies will take up the challenge and join us," says Andrew Gould, chief executive of energy company Schlumberger, who led the initiative. "The business case for gender diversity is obvious and essential." Others agree. "Diversity breeds creativity and innovation — factors that are a vital part of research," says Jenny Holmes, R&D diversity director at drug company AstraZeneca.
Also, women in product development are more likely to take female consumers' needs into account — a point made by cosmetics firm L'Oréal, which boasts 55% of women on its research staff. L'Oréal also organizes annual 'For Women in Science' awards and fellowships in collaboration with UNESCO.
FRAMEWORK FIX
Although the percentage of women researchers in Europe's public sector is double that in industry, the situation is still far from satisfactory. The EC hopes to set a good example by integrating equality into the latest Framework programme for research. Funding proposals for integrated projects and networks must, for the first time, include an action plan to promote gender equality — tackling both research content and the promotion of women's participation in research.
But an informal survey by the EC's Women and Science Unit of the first-round applicants for funding illustrates that much work remains to be done. Only 14% of lead scientists were women. And only 10% of projects accepted for funding detailed their gender action plan, with 15% not addressing the issue at all.
Petra Bender is diversity manager at the Research Centre Jülich in Germany, a multidisciplinary public-research centre that runs positive-action programmes for women researchers. She says that despite her efforts to explain how gender impact could be written into funding proposals, some of her colleagues remain perplexed. "Many researchers just don't understand the concept of mainstreaming," she says, adding that a typical comment was: "But crystals don't have gender."
Those projects that did make an effort to develop a gender action plan included target-setting to achieve gender balance in project management positions, plans to develop mentoring schemes for younger researchers and organizing outreach activities for schools. Many of these could easily be adopted by future applicants in need of inspiration. Not surprisingly, the promotion of women in research was better addressed than the gender implications of research which, for many projects outside the life sciences, is not immediately obvious.
Framework projects selected for funding will now be encouraged to improve their gender action plans as part of contract negotiations, and the best ideas will be shared. "We're not looking for perfection in the proposals. It's a process that will take time, but at least the visibility of the issue has been achieved," says Nicole Dewandre, head of the Women and Science Unit.
NATIONAL GENDER IDENTITY
But with the EC funding only 5% of civil research in Europe, national governments and companies must take up the gauntlet if rapid change in women's participation in science is to happen. Above all, they need to be accountable. As one speaker at the Berlin conference put it: "What gets measured, gets done."
Putting more women into senior positions will not be enough on its own. "We need to move beyond numbers to a cultural change in organizations that is truly diverse, inclusive and accommodating," says Teresa Rees, from the school of social sciences at the University of Cardiff, UK, and rapporteur of the EC's expert group on women in industrial research.
