Funding the Future: Exploring Gender Inequity in Women’s Research: A Report on the MIS Endorsing Group
It is important to focus policy change on the funding system, say members of the MIS report’s endorsing groups. Parents who take away time with their families are missing out on some opportunities that scientists advance in their careers by being in high-impact journals and bringing in prestigious grants. At every stage in our career, we need to demonstrate that we can get funding. “Funding agencies are contributing to gender inequity, and, therefore, can be a huge player in equalizing those inequities.”
The report is endorsed by 17 organizations, including the Association for Women in Science, 500 Women Scientists, and the European Platform of Women Scientists.
A number of funders, which collectively control the annual distribution of billions of research dollars, say that they are interested in working with the organizations to roll the recommendations into their existing policies. Australia, European and US funders are represented by the NHMRC, the US National Institutes of Health and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
She received more rejections for grants and fewer professional opportunities due to becoming a parent, limiting her ability to advance. “When I was compared to my peers, I was behind,” Staniscuaski says. “I thought that was really unfair. I didn’t become incompetent or lose my passion for science, I just had a break because I was raising my children.” Ultimately, she began advocating for gender-balanced policies in Brazil full time, setting her research aside and launching the non-profit organization Parent in Science in 2016.
The full report on the preliminary results of their global survey will be published this year, after a conference held by MIS to bring together groups researching gender discrimination in women’s studies.
The report also includes examples of good practices already in effect and that create a sliding scale of strategies for organizations to consider. Rolling deadlines and extensions for grants and application formats that allow scientists to explain lapse in productivity are among the easiest to implement.
My choice to hard work was made by my love for the work and systemic factors. Studies show that the risk of burnout is higher among young researchers (A. Boone et al. Front. There is more pressure to perform among female academics from marginalized groups. Although that includes me, I can’t speak to the even greater pressures that affect many young women, among them those from minority racial groups, those juggling motherhood with early-career research, those from the LGBTQ community, and scientists from countries where there is extreme gender discrimination or violent conflict.
Other agencies, including the ERC and the NSERC, have dedicated committees that advise their leadership on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Kristina Archibald, director of the research grants and scholarships portfolio at NSERC, says that she will work with the committee to assess whether any of the report’s suggestions could enhance the agency’s existing practices. She notes that if a policy adequately supports women, it’s important to look at the diversity data by parental status.
The disproportionate amount of domestic care work that mums do also translates into the workplace: moms have to leave to pick up children from childcare, are not able to travel to conferences and have less time for their work. If you don’t think time, you can’t write good papers, do data analysis or write proposals. During COVID-19 lockdowns, that time just vanished. There was little opportunity for those with young, unvaccinated children after a lockdown ended. For instance, childcare centres frequently closed because of COVID-19 cases. Many scientists chose not to travel to conferences, give seminars or do fieldwork because of the risk of exposure for their laboratories, themselves and their families.
Biosecurity recommendations for dangerous infectious pathogens from a panel analysis of prairie vole oxytocin receptors: Implications for disease prevention, research priorities, and public-health funding
Gene- edited prairie voles that can’t detect the love hormone have monogamous relationships and care for their pups. The study challenges decades of research suggesting that prairie voles’ unusually strong bonds were down to the way their brains express oxytocin receptors. The study could help scientists understand the relationship between oxytocin and humans. It has been trialled as a treatment for conditions that can affect social attachment. There is a similarity between prairie vole social behaviours and those of humans. rairie voles are one of the few mammals that have social attachment.
776 infections of the flu were reported between 1996 and 2019. The other most common outbreaks were Middle East respiratory syndrome and Ebola, found researchers who compiled 2,789 World Health Organization reports into a searchable database. According to their analysis, disease reporting is often subjective and depends on a country’s priorities. The database will allow researchers to look at how factors such as conflicts, weather and public-health funding affect disease outbreaks.
The future of how research with dangerous pathogens is regulated in the United States remains unclear. A biosecurity panel agreed on a long-awaited set of recommendations — but only with significant modifications — and without a firm plan to finalize the guidance. Panel members were concerned about the vagueness of some recommendations: for instance, health officials should review all experiments that could be “reasonably anticipated” to make a pathogen more transmissible or dangerous. The wording, they argued, could stifle crucial research or allow some risky studies to slip through without review.
Vaccines against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) from the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, GSK and Moderna are poised to be approved. They are likely to have very different impacts among the two age groups most at risk from the virus: babies and older people. There isn’t as much awareness and urgent as for COVID-19, which may mean that vaccine take up will be low in people over 60. Vaccines for pregnant people and newborns are highly anticipated because RSV is the second-highest cause of death for children aged between around one month and one year.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00276-x
The pressures of scientific collaboration: How much work do I have to put on a pedestal when I am a female professor? A top five science books to read this week by Andrew Robinson
Astronomers are turning fast radio bursts (FRBs) into a tool of “great scientific power” to measure cosmic expansion and find the Universe’s missing matter, which isn’t concentrated in galaxies. FRBs are powerful radio pulses caused by unknown astrophysical processes. Because the radio waves interact with any medium they traverse, scientists can use FRBs to study diffuse matter that is difficult to spot by other means, such as the gaseous haloes around galaxies.
Andrew Robinson picks a top five science books to read this week that includes a discussion of animal creativity, a sparkling account of numbers thatunlock the Universe and an environmental history of capitalism.
I left Slovakia to study in the United Kingdom at the age of 18, with a small suitcase and big hopes. When my parents were younger, they only had the opportunity to grow up in a communist regime. I never thought I’d be a professor by the age of 35.
More hours meant more results. I thought seeing my studies translated into apps for kids motivated me to do more. I put my work on a pedestal, often at the cost of my health and social life.
I thought I was the exception. But when I read an article containing interviews with five successful female psychology researchers (P. Alexander et al. Educ. Psychol. Rev. 33, 763–795; 2021), I realized that this is the norm for top-performing academics. I admire the people interviewing and know how much they love their work. I hid my contribution to the toxic research culture because I felt bad about it. And for me and many others like me — female, immigrant, non-native English speakers — the pressures are even greater. It’s time to speak out.
I made the greatest sacrifices during my years on temporary postdoc and lectureship contracts, when not publishing an extra paper could have cost me the grant I needed to secure next year’s salary. I filled every spare moment with writing after a mentor told me it was publications. I wore wrist splints when I typed because the doctor said ice would ease my carpal tunnel syndrome.
Not being a native English speaker, I had to put in extra hours for each paper. The fear of being misunderstood by using the wrong word added to the stress of conference presentations and translated into regular pounding headaches and fatigue, which I still experience.
The pressure to perform sucked me into a negative spiral. When I felt stressed, I doubted myself, feared saying ‘no’, overcompensated by saying ‘yes’ to extra tasks, and became more stressed. I cut back on spending time with friends and on sleep. My then-boyfriend told me I was married to my computer and cut our holiday short when he saw me typing a paper on the beach. The ticket inspector knew me because I habitually overschedule my stop on the late-night train. When I had a bout of autoimmune illness, my family was not surprised.
Through a combination of hard work and luck, I got a permanent position early in my career. As I’ve climbed the career ladder, I’ve gotten requests for mentoring, article and grant reviews, departmental duties, and voluntary contributions of time and expertise to professional societies. The higher the cost of making a mistake, the greater the chance that a large grant will be delayed.
What we have learned from working at university, where we have lost my mind, and what we can do to help improve the society that we live in, and where we are going
My survival anxiety has gone down. Starting a family and moving to Norway, a country known for a better work–life balance than the United Kingdom, helped. Beginning to take my childhood hobby of writing poetry seriously was the best thing I ever did for my mental health. I’ve learned to manage my calendar better, blocking out time to write and don’t feel guilty for setting out-of-office replies.
The extreme workload of my early career was unhealthy for me, and it’s unhealthy for others. I am trying to undoing my contribution to the toxic culture of overwork.
I’m responsible for promoting definitions of academic success that aren’t tied to excessive working hours. In the book Inspirational Women in Academia: Supporting Careers and Improving Minority Representation (2023), my colleague Loleta Fahad, who is head of career development at University College London, and I interview female academics and administrators. We openly share where we failed, what we wish we had known when we started working at a university and what those in power could do to address systemic discrimination.
One of the leaders of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecological Services, is a researcher from the National University of Crdoba in Argentina. Díaz wants to celebrate women as science leaders. Although they make up far from half of the researchers running major laboratories or winning big awards, women are increasingly realizing that they can be at the cutting edge of discovery and knowledge production, Díaz notes. More and more women are getting involved with leading large science-policy bodies and come up with really risky ideas. She says girls learn that they don’t need to work in the shadows as followers if they engage in a scientific career.
Gihan Kamel is a physicist at SESAME, the beam for experimental science and applications in the Middle East, based in Jordan. She says there is progress. “Not least in breaking the extremes in cultural and religious traditions and rules that are made by society and forced on women — usually inherited from one generation to another.”
Aster Gebrekirstos, a senior scientist at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, will be marking women who have succeeded in their roles despite facing significant challenges. The Tigray region of Ethiopia, which has been at the centre of a devastating conflict, has been listed as one of these challenges. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa has published Earth, Oceans and Skies, an open-access anthology of writing from and about African women scientists (including Gebrekirstos). The book is honest about the hardships women have endured “to reach where we are”, Gebrekirstos says. Acknowledge the hard times and advance equity every day after that.
My toddler was 15 months old at the beginning of the flu epidemic. I had to balance my schoolwork and parenting at the same time. I constantly felt as if I was drowning, with no means to surface for air. The lines between our home, my workplace and our child care centre were blurred by the Pandemic. A lack of energy, motivation and time for research proposals were the impacts of this and are affecting me as I try to get new funding.
When we were writing a paper about how institutions could help academic mothers, we had many meetings with the kids crawling over us during the day or asleep at night. We came up with a few ideas we thought would be good for the scientific societies, publishers and funding agencies. For example, they could provide relief from serving on committees, offer childcare and lactation support at meetings and invite mothers to write review articles and serve on editorial boards. We also recommended changes that didn’t cost much to implement, such as asking supervisors to be flexible about timelines. If you really want to give more support to scientist mothers, then you have to put some money behind it.
When I first became a mother, my daughter’s needs were my priority. I asked if she could be present in my meetings and tag along with me when I went to the lab. Most of my colleagues supported my requests and surprised me as I had never seen any other mothers do that in the workplace. So don’t be afraid to ask, and to do what is best for you and your children.
The number of women submitting papers declined as well as their mothers. It’s not a mystery; a human can only do so many things.
Home-schooling in Australia during the Lockdowns: How I learned to take a break from my role at the journal of the Royal Society B
I was in Australia during pandemic lockdowns and there were a few months when I was home-schooling my children. I talked to other colleagues in the same situation and realized that we were all struggling with not having enough hours in the day.
Fulweiler and her colleagues published a paper about supporting academic mothers. There were many suggestions for what institutions should be doing, and one of them was for publishers. As an editor of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, I thought I could use my position at the journal to do something useful.
There are three kids in my family who are at least one and a half years old. Lockdown allowed me to bond with them and get involved in their education. We all had a laptop. When it was time for them to join a Zoom class for school, I had to leave what I was doing to give them the laptop. I would often work at night to catch up on everything I missed during the day.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00888-3
Providing informal mentorship and time for a PhD student before and after COVID-19: Importance of the emotional labour of faculty members
Once I could start travelling for work again, I did some training for a mining company to teach their workers how to use a geographic information system to collect and analyse data. They provided hotel rooms for me and my nanny in the first phase of the training when I told them I had a baby. The mining site we camped at had no microwaves or stove in the rooms. I explained to them that I needed to be able to prepare food for my baby, and they quickly gave us access to a stove, fridge and everything else we needed. The company was doing its best, but other institutions could be doing more.
I and my colleague, the associate professor of higher education at Michigan State University, recommended how institutions could support faculty during and beyond COVID-19. We suggest that committees and external reviewers apply different standards for evaluating productivity before and after lockdowns. For instance, expectations that faculty members who have yet to get tenure publish two papers per year should not apply for the years 2020 or 2021. They should also consider how the transition to online learning might have negatively affected student evaluations of their professors.
The number of papers you published, the grants you received, and the classes you taught can all be used to measure productivity. But those metrics miss all the emotional and invisible labour that faculty members engage in, such as informal mentoring. Administrators and reviewers should invite faculty members to detail the emotional labour they provide and to document mentorship efforts, workshops and training they participated in.
As administrators, we need to think about how we can provide faculty members with the support they need to meet expectations. Are we providing access to caregiving? Is it possible that we are providing funds for another graduate student? Are we providing more time by granting sabbaticals or releases from teaching courses or from significant service responsibilities?