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Kenya: Great Time to Be a Woman Scientist
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Business Daily (Nairobi)
OPINION
12 March 2008
Posted to the web 12 March 2008
Liz Ng'ang'a
March is a significant month for women, bringing with it the celebration of Mothers' Day in some countries, and the International Women's Day.
This year, L'Oreal, the French cosmetics company, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), added another festivity to the month, by marking the 10th anniversary of their joint and prestigious Award for Women in Science programme.
So, as a woman born in March and working in science, I find myself in a place of introspection. The month began with the 'difficult' task of helping a friend to prepare a speech for a key event, on the topic 'women journalists reporting on hard issues such as science and technology'.
Disappointingly, between us, two reasonably prolific science communicators, we could hardly raise enough material to link our gender to our work. My friend, a mother of four and a highly decorated South African science communications expert, argued that she finds comprehending a peer-reviewed scientific paper a lot easier than raising a teenager.
Not wanting to write off the inter-relation between women and science as a trumped up charge, I turned to L'Oreal/Unesco online newsletter, Agoraforwomeninscience, which is this month dedicated to how women contribute to changing face of science. In it, laureates like Karimat El-Sayed, a groundbreaking physicist, share their thoughts on this complex issue.
She narrates how, at a conference, she organised last year about women in physics in her native Egypt, all the schoolgirls said they had no desire to study the subject.
They said they were put off by the photos in their textbooks, which portrayed scientists as eccentric people with grim faces, thick glasses and untidy beards.
But Venetia Briggs, a feisty young rising science star from the country of Belize, currently completing a PhD in the behavioural ecology of frogs, offers a more optimistic view.
Science, she says, looked old and boring and done mostly by men that fit a particular mould. But its fascinating world of test tubes, animal dissections, gloves and laboratory coats is now populated by women. Many of them are pioneers in their fields, from astrophysics, genetic epidemiology, tropical ecology, anthropology, forensic entomology, chemical engineering and molecular genetics. That is it!
It is a great time to be a woman, a great time to be a scientist and an even better time to be a woman scientist, Venetia exclaims. Because women have the ability to be a scientist, a mother, a wife, a partner, a lover, a friend, an athlete, an artist, a dancer and so much more, all at the same time.
Indeed Karimat was attracted to science through a wonderful biography of Marie Curie through which she learnt that the scientific icon was married, with two daughters and a husband. She was awed by the story of a woman who was both a successful scientist - the winner of two Nobel Prizes - as well as a successful wife and mother.
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There are growing inspirations for women to work in science, which could mean, as Venetia puts it, maybe women have arrived. Maybe.
But it is worth noting that since 1901, with over 300 recipients in the Nobel Prize for Science, only 10, about three per cent of them have been made to women. I believe that especially as the world celebrates women this month, we have a duty as a society to inspire, encourage, and to nurture the aspirations of girls, the women of tomorrow, to unleash their full potential in science.
Ng'ang'a is a postgraduate researcher in African and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
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