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By Paul Smaglik
By Virginia Gewin
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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.
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It’s no surprise that the number of PhD degrees in scientific and related disciplines conferred upon US students has leapt by half in the past decade — from about 18,000 in 2006 to more than 27,000 in 2016 — according to a recent report. But “Snapshot Report – Science and Engineering Degree Completion by Gender,” released last month by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center in Herndon, Virginia, shows that the proportion of women who earn those degrees has stayed stagnant — at a dismal 39%.
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The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in Washington DC are conducting a study on how sexual harassment in academia influences the career advancement of women in the scientific, technical and medical workforce.
Last week, Julia Etulain was sitting in a lobby of a hotel in Paris, far from her hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She explained her research energetically, occasionally apologising for near-perfect, short-sentence, staccato English.
Julia Etulain {credit}Photo via ParaBuenosAires/thebubble{/credit}
Female scientists are often more productive than their male colleagues but much less likely to be recognised for their work.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdfqXdibc0k
Andy Briggs, the UK government’s new adviser on older workers, told The Times this week that 27% of men of UK men aged 65 to 70 are in paid employment, compared to 15% in 2006. The figure for women is 18% and rising, and one in ten people aged over 70 are still working. And employers have an unconscious age bias.
Employers have an unconscious age bias
“Just as there are resources invested in younger workers in coaching and career development, and similarly when women return from career breaks, companies should invest in their older staff and give them midlife career counselling. It’s in business’s interest to do this,” he said. Continue reading
Late, I sneak into the back of a room on the 4th floor of a conference centre in central London, where 70 young female physicists are listening to Professor Dame Athene Donald speak. I try not
to break their concentration as I find a chair. Professor Donald is relaxed and passionate, and manages to condense her advice – put into context through deeply personal, humorous anecdotes – into ten simple points to live by. Donald has had a hugely successful career (though, she admits, she is still embarrassed when people say it), making her way through the physics of metals and polymers, then the physics of food, then colloids, then starch, then proteins and
cellular biophysics, and finally ending up in her current area of the physics of biological and soft systems. She’s now the Master of Churchill College at Cambridge. It’s a quite the CV, and made all the more impressive by her achievements outside the world of academia.
Donald casually weaves her personal life into her career as she speaks. She has to leave early – her husband has been to the hospital recently for a bad leg, and still needs looking after. Her daughter did a placement when she was 17 and learnt a lot about office politics; apparently it was useful. Her message is one of pro-activity, self-confidence and overcoming failure. She’s been the gender equality champion for Cambridge University, has written for The Guardian, The Observer and The Conversation, and her blog – started in 2010 – has become enormously popular online. Somebody asks her what’s next. She says retirement. I don’t think anyone quite believes her. Continue reading
