{credit}Cody Anthony Hernandez{/credit}
By Kendall Powell
The University of Oxford has a female vice chancellor, Louise Richardson, who took up the post in January 2016. {credit}Getty{/credit}
Just 34 of leading universities named in this year’s annual Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings have female presidents, down 1% from the 36 that were led by women in 2017. Continue reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdfqXdibc0k
Continue reading
Rebecca and her daughter at the annual conference for the Animal Behavior Society at the University of Colorado in 2013
Calisi, a behavioural neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, and a group of 45 other scientist-parents, have turned their frustrations into a call for action. In a paper published online Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers detail the shortcomings of past conferences and offer a blueprint for making conferences more welcoming and accessible to parents of young children.
By not providing accommodations for children, Calisi says, conferences can unintentionally create barriers that exclude large swaths of scientists—especially early-career scientist-mothers who may not be able to afford childcare. “One part of promoting diversity is supporting women with children,” Calisi says. “If institutions say they want to support diversity, they should put their money where there mouth is.”
In the paper, Calisi and co-authors suggest that conferences could fund on-site childcare services, lactation rooms and other amenities by asking for voluntary donations during registration. Exhibitors who make a donation could receive a sign or emblem that show their support. “I guarantee you they would get more foot traffic,” Calisi tells Nature. The paper also calls for all conferences to clearly state that parents are allowed to bring babies to talks and poster sessions. For now, she says, rules about children seem to change from conference to conference and even from hour to hour. She notes that researchers with babies were recently turned away from a poster session at a large conference even though the official policy permitted children in the exhibit area.
A practical, comfortable space for breastfeeding or pumping breast milk is an especially important accommodation, Calisi says. “A lactation room tells you a lot about how much a [scientific] society values women,” she says. In November, she turned to Twitter to complain about the facilities at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting, held last year in Washington DC. Within hours of that tweet, the society provided more comfortable lounge chairs for mothers. “It’s not that the society was anti-women,” she says. “They just didn’t know.”
SfN, for its part, aims to become more inclusive. “The society is actively exploring ways to continue to enhance the spaces for nursing mothers in San Diego [California] this year and at SfN’s future meetings,” says society spokesperson Kara Flynn in a statement to Nature. She adds that the society is committed to “fostering a welcome and diverse community in which all scientists are able to contribute fully.”
Some conferences are already parent-friendly, Calisi says. She recently attended the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement in Science in Austin, Texas, where the lactation room was comfortable and easily accessible. “I gave them two thumbs up,” she says.
Chris Woolston is a freelance writer in Billings, Montana.
Suggested posts:
US academic institutions continue to enhance postdoctoral researcher experiences, but there is room for significant improvement, according to a 3 January report from the NPA in Rockville, Maryland. Continue reading
Naturejobs journalism competition winner Jiska van der Reest
By Virginia Gewin
{credit}westend61/Getty{/credit}
Rana Dajani, a molecular biologist based at Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan, developed the toolkit to inspire female researchers to build the networks they need to support, collaborate and advise one another as they move forward in their careers.
The number of female researchers in Middle Eastern countries varies wildly. A 2016 report found that women represent around 35.5% of total researchers in the 57 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation countries. Still, the numbers of employed women in some Middle Eastern countries are much lower. In Jordan and Algeria, just 12% of women work and in Saudi Arabia, 14% are employed.
Dajani built a mentoring network in Jordan in 2013, pairing 10 mentees with 10 mentors. From that experience, and with funding from the US National Academies of Science and the US National Science Foundation, she created ‘Three Circles of Alemat’, a three-year project to develop and test the mentoring toolkit. Working with female researchers from 17 universities across the Middle East, she and her team created a low-cost method to improve personal and professional success for both women and men. The final phase of her mentoring project, Three Circles of Alemat, brought together a cross-regional group of female Middle Eastern scientists this year in Boston, Massachusetts, at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.
The mentoring toolkit is available for free through the website of the Society for the Advancement of Science and Technology in the Arab World. Another organization, 500 Women Scientists, a network of 19,000 women worldwide, has also adopted the toolkit. “We did not want to provide a centralized forum for mentors to find mentees because it is costly,” says Dajani, who is spending this year as a fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writing a book about women redefining success. “Rather, we wanted people to take control and start their own creative forums.”
Virginia Gewin is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.
Suggested posts
Video: How did you cultivate mentors?
Ten tips for finding an effective mentor
The faculty series: What does it take to be a mentor?
