Battling sexism in life sciences
We have perhaps never appreciated the value of science, particularly the life sciences, so much. While the global COVID-19 vaccine rollout remains beset by inequalities, the fact that we have multiple World Health Organization-approved vaccines for the disease, just a year-and-a-half after the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ genome was first sequenced, is a monumental achievement. That the genome was made publicly available in January 2020, mere weeks after the outbreak was first discovered, is something of a landmark itself.
How much better could we be doing if global science took advantage of the full pool of talent available? The problem of sexism in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects is well known, and isn’t limited to a particular field, region, or level of academia. Women are vastly under-represented in the numbers of scientific researchers worldwide, with STEM research being one of many male-dominated professions.
Women who have reached the top of STEM fields have played a key role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2020, Christina Pagel, professor of operational research at University College London, has become a familiar sight to UK-based viewers on television screens and on Twitter threads. Pagel was appointed director of the UCL Clinical Operational Research Unit in 2017, and focuses on how mathematics can help inform better decision-making in healthcare settings.
She’s now embarking on one of the biggest projects of her career: CHIMERA, co-leading it with “incredible mathematician and engineer” Rebecca Shipley.
“It’s a big collaboration between my group and people from other fields such as statisticians and computer scientists to look at intensive care data,” Pagel explains.
The potential of such data is vast. “They measure stuff pretty much every second in intensive care settings, but the data doesn’t tend to be stored and doesn’t get looked at ever again. But for the past few years, we have been storing it and no-one has analysed it yet.”
Systemic sexism
Pagel is an active member of, as she calls it, “Indie SAGE”, the expert group seeking to hold the UK government to account over its strategy for dealing with the coronavirus. The group is essentially a complementary group to the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE), which has been advising the UK government on its handling of the pandemic.
The group goes further than SAGE in advocating policies based on evidence and explaining the rationale to the public. As a member of the Independent SAGE group, Pagel became a vocal critic of the UK’s coronavirus response, and the sluggish pace with which the government initially moved to implement lockdown and other public health measures. She regularly appears on the BBC and other media outlets, and offers analysis of the pandemic as it unfolds in the UK and elsewhere on social media.
It’s telling that, as a prominent female scientist active in the media and on Twitter, one of her first observations is that the abuse wasn’t as bad as she thought it might be.
“When I started doing media appearances, I thought I was going to be totally trolled—but I haven’t been,” Pagel tells WIPR.
“I got a few angry emails from people who hated lockdown, and very occasionally, more personal ones,” she continues, but she is quick to point out that that experience is far from unique.
“There are quite big differences in the way men and women approach these things, and this is mainly due to confidence. Women downplay how good they are.” - Christina Pagel, University College London
“Women who are not white, women in social science, get it way worse than I do. Men feel able to patronise them for not being ‘real scientists’,” she says. Pagel has experienced sexism throughout her life and career, she explains.
As an aspiring scientist, Pagel learned early on that it was harder to succeed if you were a woman. “I went to the University of Oxford, and we were the first year that had more than one girl in Queen’s College,” she says. As she progressed, the picture didn’t change: “When I did my MSc, and then my PhD, I was the only woman.”
Barriers are everywhere
The barriers facing women in science are the same that women face everywhere else, Pagel says.
“There are quite big differences in the way men and women approach these things, and this is mainly due to confidence. Women downplay how good they are. In the first year of my PhD, I was convinced I was one of the worst there.”
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that just 30% of the world’s researchers are women—although it’s worth noting that there is near parity in Central Asia and Latin America, with 48.2% and 45.1%, respectively. Gloria Bonder, coordinator of the UNESCO Regional Chair on Women, Science and Technology in Latin America, has noted that new policies in universities and research centres have helped prevent gender-based discrimination and violence.
