The best mansplaining stories come from women in science. An over-confident male scientist interrupts a female colleague to tell her she’s not getting it. “You need to read Lincoln et al.,” he says. She pauses, lowers her glasses, and responds, “I am Lincoln et al.” Substitute the name of any female scientist, programmer, engineer—women working in STEM fields are still dealing with situations like this—and it’s less funny in real life.
“Change has happened, but the glass ceiling is incredibly resistant in research,” says Alexandra Palt, Executive Vice President of the Fondation L’Oréal and creator of the For Women in Science Festival with UNESCO, which will celebrate the world’s leading, and most inspiring, female scientists on December 7, 2021.
Covid-19, and its accompanying lockdowns, haven’t helped to close the gap. Even women in science couldn’t escape the extra child-rearing responsibilities. On average, female scientists reported a five percent greater decline in research time than their male peers during the pandemic. For some, with at least one child aged five years or younger, that decline in research time went up to 17 percent. Some researchers believe these women will never make up the time they lost.
“While the pandemic has demonstrated the ingenuity of women researchers, several studies show that female scientists, particularly those with young children and those in the earlier stages of their careers, are hardest hit by the pandemic,” says Shamila Nair-Bedouelle, Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences of UNESCO. “The world needs science and science needs women.”
For this reason, it has never been more important to champion women in science and technology fields. Not only to encourage and inspire other women to join these fields, but also to normalize the fact that women can and should be leaders in this space—because that’s still not everyone’s go-to opinion. “We have to be very clear that there is discrimination, there is sexism, and there is bias,” says Palt. “This bias is not always conscious and deliberate, but it exists, so there is a lot of work that needs to be done to change science culture.”
In addition to the pandemic exposing gender gaps in science and technology, it has also revealed eroded public trust in those fields. While citizens should be discerning, and think critically about the information they consume, blanket distrust comes at a detriment to the advancements in those fields and to the public good. So how can we both promote women in the field and build trust?
A panel on building trust in science and technology at the For Women in Science Festival posed this exact question to a group of experts and tapped them for what they saw as the issues at hand, as well as the way forward.
“You need to find out where trust is lost, so then you know where you need to build it,” says Pauline Paterson, Co-director of The Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Paterson’s research has shown that if someone is exposed to misinformation about the Covid vaccine, they’re less likely to get the shot. And in countries where the population trusts information coming from the government, they are more likely to get vaccinated (in the US, only 40% of the population has trust in the national government, and trust in the traditional media is at a record low).
This puts science in a tricky spot, where the field is suddenly at the disposal of political agendas and misinformation. Because of their distrust of traditional media, people often turn to social media for their information, and those sites have historically been tools of misinformation. Additionally, some politicians themselves are rampant sources of disinformation, and suddenly, the population–drinking from a firehose of both correct and incorrect misinformation—is tasked with finding the truth.
“I think it’s important for the scientific community to know how to communicate to the broader public, to integrate their work or discuss it with policymakers, and to develop the field of scientific journalism,” says Denise Dresser, a writer, political scientist, and professor at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. “Scientists have to build a world in which they are able to convey information, defend facts, defend trust, and corporations have a role to play in this too.”
Studies show that businesses are trusted more than governments right now, so corporations can use that trust by publicly promoting science and encouraging employees and citizens to get vaccinated, for example. Scientists, and the media, can help by conveying more clearly how science works: it’s a rapidly changing field with new information being learned all the time, but there’s a very specific process, protocol, and peer review to vet information and findings. Making science intelligible and easy to understand is a good place to start in restoring public trust. It’s also important to realize that the public doesn’t have a blanket distrust of science, technology, and medicine, but the right conditions can exacerbate existing polarities. So the question becomes, how can we channel the areas where the trust already exists and build off of that?
“In some sense, we trust all the time, right? You go to the doctor and they tell you that you have an illness, and this is the medicine. It's up to you if you don't want to be cured, but we must trust,” says Shafi Goldwasser, Director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, the C. Lester Hogan Professor in Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley, and the laureate of the 2021 L’Oréal-UNESCO International For Women in Science Award. “There is some level where you want a society where you do trust progress, science, technology. How do you get there? I don't know. But to assume that people should question every single recommendation of an expert—it makes no sense.”
There’s work to be done in advancing women in the field and restoring and rebuilding public trust where it’s been lost. Fondation L’Oréal and UNESCO have been helping to address the gender gap for decades, with the festival hosting debates and discussions on everything from what still holds women scientists back in their careers, to how to overcome biases and systemic inequalities. The For Women in Science program has been running since 1998. Usually there’s an annual awards ceremony, celebrating five female scientists, one from each geographic region. But when the pandemic cancelled the last two, the Fondation L’Oréal and UNESCO decided to find a different way to celebrate these women—with a virtual festival.
The first of its kind, For Women in Science Festival will highlight why and how women scientists will make a difference in a post-Covid world through a mixture of talks, intimate interviews, debates, and panel discussions tackling two key themes, advancing global health and decoding the tech revolution. “These are two issues where gender bias in research has led to strong consequences already,” says Palt. In the medical world, women have always been assumed to be smaller men. Only recently was it discovered, for example, that women experience heart attacks with entirely different symptoms than men—lives were lost unnecessarily because not enough women were involved in the research.
The virtual festival will be broadcast on December 7, 2021. For more information, visit: events.forwomeninscience.com.
*This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for L'Oréal Fondation.*
