Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Scientific collaborations are precarious territory for women

Closed networks and ingrained biases can make women’s collaborations a balancing act.
  1. Sara Reardon

    1. Sara Reardon is a freelance science journalist based in Bozeman, Montana.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

Find a new job

Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier first met at a 2011 conference in Puerto Rico, where both gave talks about a then little-known biological system called CRISPR–Cas9, which bacteria use as an immune defence. They immediately hit it off. “She was coming to CRISPR from a very different perspective than I was,” Doudna says. “And I liked her.”

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 605, 179-181 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01204-1

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 03 May 2022: An earlier version of this article mislabelled the photograph of Luís Amaral; he is on the left. The text has been corrected.

References

  1. Koning, R., Samila, S. & Ferguson, J. P. Science 372, 1345–1348 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Zucker, I. & Prendergast, B. J. Biol. Sex Differ. 11, 32 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Nielsen, M. W., Andersen, J. P., Schiebinger, L. & Schneider, J. W. Nature Hum. Behav. 1, 791–796 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Centola, D., Becker, J., Brackbill, D. & Baronchelli, A. Science 360, 1116–1119 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Ni, C., Smith, E., Yuan, H., Larivière, V. & Sugimoto, C. R. Sci. Adv. 7, eabe4639 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Larivière, V., Pontille, D. & Sugimoto, C. R. Quant. Sci. Stud. 2, 111–128 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Feldon, D. F., Peugh, J., Maher, M. A., Roksa, J. & Tofel‑Grehl, C. et al. CBE Life Sci. Educ. 16, ar4 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M. J. & Handelsman, J. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 16474–16479 (2012).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  9. Holman, L. & Morandin, C. PLoS ONE 14, e0216128 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Zeng, X. H. T. et al. PLoS Biol. 14, e1002573 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  11. AlShebli, B. et al. Nature Commun. 11, 6446 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links