Women: Economic Empowerment

Baroness Greenfield Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greenfield (CB)]

My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, on bringing attention to this urgent and wide-ranging issue. As a research scientist at Oxford University, and now founder and CEO of a biotech company, I shall focus on just one aspect: the importance of science for women’s economic empowerment in both private and public sectors.

At a national level, graduates of both genders in the so-called STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and maths—are perhaps unsurprisingly on higher starting salaries. However, there is a clear gender discrepancy. Just over 10% of science-based business owners are women, compared to 33% for other types of businesses. Of the FTSE 100 companies in STEM sectors, 13% of board directors are female, compared to 17% in non-science-based organisations, while fewer than one in 10 of STEM managers is female.

When it comes to apprenticeships, the gender disparity is particularly stark. In IT and telecommunications roughly 10% are taken by women, in engineering less than 4% and in construction just 1.4%. So in the private sector, whether it be founding a company, sitting on a board or taking up an apprenticeship, women are woefully underrepresented in the very occupations that in general would be among the most economically empowering.

The public sector, too, presents problems. While sexist views may be suspected but hard to prove in the corporate world, overt prejudice against women has been explicit in academia, sadly. Back in 1997 a report was published in the high-impact journal Nature from the Swedish Medical Research Council. This clearly demonstrated a gender bias in peer review of grant applications. Astonishingly, women with the highest scores on their objectively measured publication record were judged subjectively to be about as good as a low-average man.

Meanwhile, in January 2005, the then president of Harvard, Larry Summers, sparked uproar at an academic conference when he said that “innate differences between men and women” might be one reason why fewer women succeed in science and maths. Sadly, the situation has not improved. In a paper published more recently, in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there was still an objectively demonstrable bias, this time by the faculty, in both the biological and the physical sciences in terms of perceived competence and hireability of men over women.

Another major hurdle for women in the academic science sector in particular is the lack of any type of structure in the first stages of their career. This will have devastating implications for having children. Typically, a research scientist in a university will gain tenure, and hence any kind of job security and structure, only when they are in their mid-30s. Those women wishing to start a family, as might be expected, in their 20s are therefore faced with an unpalatable set of options.

This is an important thing to grasp about science research: it is at this stage that a young post-doc scientist, having become finally independent of their thesis supervisor, now needs to be maximally productive in publishing their own all-important peer-reviewed papers, which will in turn serve as the gold standard for obtaining a lectureship. Therefore, the choices would be: first, have no children; secondly, defer having children beyond your biological optimum; thirdly, have a child and give up research science altogether; or fourthly, have a child and inevitably take time out just as your male competitors are forging ahead with their publications. Very rarely would a man have to make these choices.

In addition, the situation is not helped by the meagre and often prohibitively expensive childcare facilities available in universities. Moreover, a frequent complaint is that in the national audit of science research in universities—the so-called REF—the one-year dispensation allocated against your track record for having a child is just not enough. One rising star in her 30s, who has a toddler, summed it up:

“Quite frankly it is exhausting and I am not surprised that many women decide to quit science … I don’t feel anywhere near as competitive or productive as my peers can be or I used to be. It does make you wonder if it is all worthwhile”.

It is no surprise, then, that women are once again underrepresented in senior science university posts. I first flagged this issue back in 2002 when, as requested by the then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, I prepared a report on the recruitment and retention of women in science, published as the SET Fair report. Looking back at data from that time to the most recent statistics published in 2012-13, there has been some improvement. Across all STEM areas the percentage of female academic staff has increased from 35% in 2002 to 42% some 10 years later. However, currently just over 2% of all women academics are professors, compared with almost three times as many males, so the situation is still not good enough.

In general, women hoping to flourish in science-based careers face a wide range of difficulties. In a survey of more than 100 employees in the science-related public and private sectors, an astonishing 70% of women stated that they had experienced personal and professional barriers to entry and progression in science. These barriers varied; while some that the survey flagged cannot be readily addressed, such as the need to live in geographical proximity to their partner, others can, including the lack of resources and funding—particularly for childcare—institutional sexism and male-dominated informal networks.

A big problem often is lack of awareness of current initiatives that would help to combat these problems. One example that includes both university and industry is so-called WISE—Women in to Science and Engineering —which aims to improve the gender balance in the UK’s workforce, pushing the presence of female employees to 30% by 2020. WISE launched an ambitious, industry-led campaign in September 2014 to ensure that women in science, technology, engineering and manufacturing have the same opportunities to progress in their career as their male counterparts. They invited a cross-section of businesses to tell them what had made the most difference to the retention and progression of women in their organisation. The result has been 10 recommended steps, which, interestingly enough, all relate to mindset and the need for changing attitudes, particularly in the corporate world.

Meanwhile, for women in science-based academia, the Athena SWAN programme addresses gender equality in UK universities. Athena SWAN has been developed to encourage and recognise commitment to combating this underrepresentation and to advancing the careers of women in science-based research and academia.

In addition, Sheffield Hallam runs Women in Science, Engineering and Technology—WiSET—based within the Centre for Science Education. This aims to widen the participation of underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, maths and the built environment. It has developed and delivered a wide range of innovative projects, resources, schemes and activities for more than 10 years now, based on gender and occupational segregation at all levels of education and employment. It works from a local to an international level and provides resources and runs events to encourage participation in science, as well as supporting those already working in the STEM subjects.

Sheffield Hallam was also one of the universities involved at the start of Aurora. This is a national scheme aimed at developing future leaders for higher education. It was launched in 2013 as a women-only leadership development programme. Aurora aims to encourage a wide range of women in academic and professional roles to think of themselves as leaders, to develop leadership skills, and to help institutions maximise the potential of these women. These are innovative development processes for women up to senior lecturer level or professional services equivalent.

These are all really impressive initiatives that could change the prospects for women in science since I published SET Fair in 2002. So why is there still a problem? Why is it not unusual to read in the press of a “female scientist” but not of a “female politician” or “female lawyer”? It is as though the fact that a woman is a scientist is still unusual and worthy of note. Perhaps that is at the heart of the problem. Clearly, for the real economic empowerment of women in science, attitudes still need to change. I recommend the following initiatives.

The excellent schemes just mentioned for helping women in science need much more publicity and co-ordination. Presumably this could best be achieved by central government. Moreover, it is surely only the Government who could bankroll a sufficiently well resourced scheme for funding a truly realistic—not just a token effort—large number of ring-fenced fellowships and/or return-to-work allowances for pump-priming a career for those returning from childcare. The same benefits currently available to women should be extended to men if they choose to share the burden of maternity leave traditionally taken by women—for example, the allowances in REF and in fellowship applications. This might encourage male scientists to share parental responsibilities more, as they could be less concerned about the long-term effect on their career, and we could move towards an equal future where both male and female scientists were competing on equal grounds.

Within the private sector, the L’Oreal Women in Science awards have shown how awareness can be raised of the achievements of individual women in their research, but we now need other companies, particularly those in science and technology, as well as smaller biotech companies, to take up the challenge of new initiatives for promoting the appeal of science to women as well as celebrating the benefits that they bring. For example, only last week I attended a gender-diversity summit in Luxembourg, organised by KPMG, where the advantages of female representation in the corporate world were stressed over and over by the men attending as well as the women. It would be wonderful if science and tech-based companies were to organise similar events, and from them develop constructive programmes.

Finally, none of these initiatives—neither those already in train nor those just suggested—will have any effect at all without one single, essential ingredient, which has already been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly. That is the essential ingredient of a woman who chooses to do a degree in science. Schoolgirls need to be aware not only of the thrill of doing research at the bench but of the wide variety of career options that will open up to them with a science background, even beyond the lab bench, such as patent law, media, politics and teaching. What a shame it would be if they were deterred from such exciting prospects by the perception—indeed the reality—that a major obstacle to realising their true potential in science was their gender.