International Day for Women and Girls in Science, what have we learned?

This week, in the run up to the International Day for Women and Girls in Science, I had the pleasure of interviewing four inspiring female senior leaders (Dr Vicky Weise, Dr Anusha Panjwani, Dr Shara Cohen, Dr Ana Iorga) to understand their challenges and achievements throughout their careers. I thought I’d share a few musings I’ve had from my conversations with them.

Your degree (or background) does not define your career

There are some who believe their degree choice limits their scope for what they can achieve later in life (I included “or background” here because not everyone has a degree, but may nonetheless feel restrained by their early career choices). I believe it’s becoming increasingly accepted that your degree / background is not the be all and end all. In fact, it merely provides a foundational set of skills that you can apply in multiple fields of work. Vicky gave a great example of a Project Manager she worked with who studied History, but had an interest in science, so successfully applied her skills in research and communication to a completely different field.

I think this is an important point to raise when discussing gender equality in STEM, because it’s only relatively recently (and still not nearly enough) that we’re making increased efforts to encourage school girls / minorities to pursue STEM subjects. That means there remains several generations of females already in the workplace who never had this early on encouragement, which is vital (we know that children start developing gender biases from an early age so it’s important to combat these early on).

That’s why we need to emphasise the above point; if you don’t have a science degree / background, it doesn’t mean you can’t work in science! Shara, for example, has founded a fantastic network called Mums in Science (https://mumsinscience.net/) which is designed to support mothers developing / furthering science careers later in life. We should absolutely target young children to consider careers in STEM, but if we only target young people we’ll miss out on a wealth of older women who could also add value. For hiring managers, look at your job descriptions and consider removing any requirement to have a degree in a certain field. For job seekers, don’t be put off if you see this stipulation, give them a call and find out the necessary skills they’re looking for, and make your case if you have them.

Equality in the workplace is linked to parenthood

Hardly breaking news! But worth emphasising I think.

The biggest challenge we have for female leadership is that the majority of women still bear the brunt of child minding. Even for those women who choose to take the lead in raising children, getting them back into leadership positions afterwards is very challenging. COVID has not helped with this.

I have heard of some cases where, in order to help and support women finding it difficult to work whilst home-schooling, employers have given those women less work so as to incur less stress. Seems like a good idea right? The upshot though, is that those women were (unintentionally) given less interesting / important work that would push their careers forward, so they’re consequently less likely to receive promotions as quickly.

Then let’s look at the other side, the women who don’t want to be solely responsible for raising the kids. Shared parental leave is more talked about now, but less easy to enforce in practice. Most companies continue to offer full maternity for mothers only, whilst fathers receive very little paternity. So, in most families, the women often have to take the full maternity or the household will lose income (I won’t need to tell most of you how much childcare costs). This is a point Shara emphasised; for women to have more equality and ownership over their careers, men need more paternity rights.

All four women I interviewed agreed that our perceptions of “gender roles” are improving, so I do believe this will continue to get better (notwithstanding the setbacks from COVID). In the meantime, businesses could support their employees who have kids by offering more flexible working (becoming more prevalent now anyway), childcare vouchers, or even onsite childcare so that parents have more options before them.

He for She / She for He / They for They

This leads me on to re-emphasise that, when we talk about equality in the workplace, we’re not just talking about female-identifiers, but also male-identifiers, non-binaries, LGTBQ+, BAME etc. I liked Vicky’s point that diversity is not simply about hiring a bunch of people who look different from each other, but about encouraging and nurturing a rich variety of voices and ideas (especially from those who might not be the loudest in the room).

With increased focus on ED&I, many businesses are introducing new policies that focus on promoting female / minority rights in the workplace. But as we’ve seen with paternity restrictions, supporting males remains just as important. Instead of introducing new policies that only focus on one / some social identities, why not review your current guidelines to make them fully inclusive to include everyone?

Diversity results in quantifiable benefits

So why bother with all this? Well, other than the clear moral obligations we have to each other, there are clear quantifiable benefits as well. We know that businesses with more diverse leadership teams perform better than they would without. This is largely because having more diverse teams reduces tunnel vision and encourages creative “outside-the-box” thinking.

Diversity is also becoming an increasingly important factor for candidates when job searching and various publishing’s from Stonewall* have demonstrated a link between diverse workplaces and employee satisfaction. A happier / more supported workforce inevitably leads to greater productivity and success. To encourage diversity in your organisation, consider celebrating key awareness days (such as yesterday), setting up mentorship programmes for minority groups, and training employees to recognise unconscious bias.

We will continue to need days like these for a while yet

Even if we all action these things straight away, it will be a long time before our workplace diversity is self-sustaining. Anusha pointed out the bottleneck issue we have with the middle-management tier where the level of diversity doesn’t seem to have improved much (possibly because this is typically aligned with when people start having children).

I think we also need more time to become more confident in our female / minority leaders. Ana very candidly spoke about her own experience on a commercial flight when the pilot introduced herself as a woman, and Ana instinctively felt nervous about her ability (before immediately reproaching herself). We can’t control our unconscious bias, but we can continue to check them. Awareness days like these, can help improve confidence in the ability of women and help erode those assumptions of incompetence.  

What are your thoughts on this?

Like / share / agree / disagree on anything I’ve said, I’d be keen to hear your thoughts!

*For reference to the effects of diversity on workforce productivity, see here: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/about-us/news/stonewall-diversity-champions-creating-lgbt-inclusive-workplace 

It goes without saying, that all the above opinions are my own and not that of Xpertise Recruitment Ltd.