WISE@QMUL: EVENING TALK AND DISCUSSION: AMRITA AHLUWALIA

WISE@QMUL hosted an evening talk and discussion with Amrita Ahluwalia at Charterhouse Square Campus, at 5-7 pm, on Wed 24th Feb .
As a beginning of her talk, Amrita gave an overview of her career path. It was inspiring to hear how she grew up as an individual researcher, especially the change from the isolate work as a PhD student to the collaborative work as in a group. Her research focuses on new prevention therapies for hypertension, using dietary interventions as well as pharmacology. She is the first female recipient of the GlaxoSmithKline prize in Clinical Pharmacology and the Winner of the WISE 2015 research award.
She encouraged young researchers to volunteer in and contribute to the learned society of theirs disciplines, as a good way to stay in touch with the academic communities. As a longstanding member of the British Pharmacological Society since 1989, she has contributed to and enthusiastically supported new initiatives that have promoted and advanced pharmacology in all its forms. She is the first Chair of the Society’s Women in Pharmacology group and as the editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Pharmacology.
With the statistics of career progression by gender at Queen Mary, UK and EU, she revealed a systemic problem, that of women achieving senior roles in research and academia. The number of women in the career ladder falls down drastically when it comes to the senior researcher level. She mentioned a lot of women researchers leave academia in their 30-35-year-old stage. There are various reasons for attrition, such as family, lack of support after career break, research assessments not considering the career break, difficult career progression- unconscious bias, perception about women and science – many feel like ‘imposters’. 
Amrita then talked about the gender equality promoting initiatives she has been involved in, aiming to tackle the above systemic problem and to support other women in the profession. She established a Prize for Excellence in Pharmacology for Women, developed a mentoring scheme for the British Pharmacological Society and is campaigning for medical research charities to improve the position for women winning fellowships to take maternity leave. She also played a key part in QMUL’s School of Medicine and Dentistry receiving the Silver Athena SWAN award in April 2015.
At the end of her talk, she mentioned the work-life balance. She is very proud of her two sons and she said it is possible to work full time and succeed in both career and family. “It is very hard, though, so you need to have people to help you navigate in your career path.” She has received help from several brilliant mentors along the way; now as a role model, she is dedicated to mentoring and championing female researchers. 

The audiences were from various career levels, from PhD students to senior researchers. The talk was highly praised and there were a lot of questions asked in the open discussion. Some feedbacks from the audiences: “excellent talk”, “fantastic speaker”, “very interesting and informative”, “very inspiring”, ”like most the statistical data”, “would like more talks like this about equality”.

The Royal Society International Women’s Day Event – Women Writing Science

Quotes “Join us as we celebrate International Women’s Day by exploring the history of women writing about science.”
“How did early women scientists use writing in order to further their careers? In which ways were they limited by their gender? What influence did subject specialisation and limited access to education have on their careers?”
“Guided by host Helen Arney, historians Dr Patricia Fara, Dr Emily Winterburn and Dr Claire G. Jones explore the history of women publishing in journals, writing popular science and corresponding with the Royal Society.”
“This event will also include a viewing of the video short Where are the women? created as part of the Philosophical Transactions 350th anniversary and the unveiling of our newly acquired bust of Dr Lucie Green, created and gifted to the Society by sculptor Marcus Cornish.”
 When: 6:30 pm — 8:00 pm on Tuesday 10 March 2015
  • Free to attend, no registration required
  • Seats allocated on a first-come-first-served basis
  • Doors open at 6pm

Guardian: Women considered better coders – but only if they hide their gender

Source: www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github

Reference: J. Terrell1, A. Kofink, J. Middleton, C. Rainear, E. Murphy-Hill​, C. Parnin (2016). “Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men.” PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1733v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1733v1

Quote:

The researchers looked at approximately 3m pull requests submitted on GitHub, and found that code written by women was approved at a higher rate (78.6%) than code written by men (74.6%).

… “Women’s acceptance rates dominate over men’s for every programming language in the top 10, to various degrees,” the researchers found.

… they made the disturbing discovery: women’s work was more likely to be accepted than men’s, unless “their gender is identifiable”, in which case the acceptance rate was worse than men’s.

Guardian: Women start out as ambitious as men but it erodes over time

Source: www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/19/women-start-out-as-ambitious-as-men-but-it-erodes-over-time-says-researcher

Quotes: “Many women are just as ambitious as men when they begin their careers, but become so wearied by fighting against multiple structural and experiential barriers to their success that this ambition often wanes.

This is one of the findings made by Michelle Ryan, a professor of social and organisational psychology at the University of Exeter in the UK, in her research into why women are under-represented in leadership roles and report lower ambition.”

“… men and women have absolutely equal levels of ambition and want to make it to top in equal numbers.

“But while men’s ambition increases over time, women’s decreases. My research suggests that this drop is not associated with wanting to have kids, or to stay home and look after them. It’s related to not having support, mentors or role models to make it to the top, and the subtle biases against women that lead to their choices.”

“She advised ambitious women to find a sponsor in the workplace who supported their career. Often this was a senior man, because there were not enough women in senior roles. Senior men with daughters of an age where they were entering the workforce tended to be more supportive of women’s careers, she said.

“The other bit of advice is to be resilient in the face of the uphill battle, to be aware of the unconscious biases and the lack of support, and not internalise it by saying ‘it’s because I’m not good enough’,” Ryan said.”