Women in Science

Researchers will often evoke the metaphor of a pipeline to describe how individuals are funnelled through rigid and competitive academic career path. And the pipeline is full of holes. In the UK, 60% of bioscience postgraduates are women whilst only 15% of professors are women. Just 9% of professors in chemistry are women, a drop of from an already underrepresented 35% at undergraduate level. This “leaky pipeline” is a well-documented phenomenon describing the progressive loss of women, particularly those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, from key stages of academic careers. There are important discussions ongoing on how to plug the cracks caused by obscure biases and barriers in academia and increase workplace diversity in the interest of both the underrepresented groups and better scientific research.

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The women at the Centre for Gene Therapy & Regenerative Medicine have lent their voices and faces to the discussion as part of the Women in Science photography project with photographer Fanny Beckman. The series depicts the everyday working lives of the women behind the statistics, capturing an interest, joy, and confidence in their work that is often missing from discussions of women in science. The written stories which accompany the photos cover the hardships they have faced in their careers – looming imposter syndrome and workplace discrimination – but more often focus on their successes and highlight the support systems that have made their experiences positive, support systems that should be available to all women.