STEMM: A global network of scientists representing millions of women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine aims to eradicate systemic barriers to researcher-mum advancement
Funding agencies worldwide must abolish the systemic barriers that have historically prevented female academics, including researcher-mums, from moving forward professionally, says a coalition of organizations around the globe that collectively represent millions of women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM).
Besides MIS, the 17 endorsing organizations behind the report include the Association for Women in Science and 500 Women Scientists, both US non-profit organizations, and the European Platform of Women Scientists, a non-profit organization in Brussels.
A number of funders, which collectively control the annual distribution of billions of research dollars, say that they are interested in working with the organizations to roll the recommendations into their existing policies. The NHMRC, European Research Council, the US National Institute of Health, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada are some of the funders.
As a consequence, she received more grant rejections and fewer professional opportunities, such as invitations to collaborate or to travel for conferences, than she had before becoming a parent — a snowball of obstacles that limited her ability to advance. Staniscuaski says that he was behind when he was compared to his peers. “I thought that was really unfair. I didn’t become incompetent or lose my passion for science, I just had a break because I was raising my children.” She started advocating for gender-balanced policies throughout Brazil, as well as launching a non-profit organization in 2016 called Parent in Science.
The preliminary results from the global survey were shared at the conference in 2021, and the full report is expected to be published this year.
The report includes examples of good practices that can be used to create a scale of strategies to consider. Among the easiest to implement, according to Torres, are things such as rolling deadlines, and extensions and deferments for grants; application formats that allow scientists to explain lapses in productivity; and unconscious-bias training for grant reviewers coupled with an appeals process for when bias is suspected.
The NIH often creates working groups of external scientists to tackle issues such as diversity and sexual harassment, and these discussions have helped to shape guidelines for funding scientist-parents according to a source from the Office of Extramural Research. “It is through these and other work–life integration policies,” the spokesperson said in an e-mail, “that we can better ensure a competitive and diverse workforce for the biomedical research enterprise now and in the future.”
Some agencies have committees that advise their leadership on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Kristina Archibald, director of the research grants and scholarships portfolio at NSERC, says that she will work with the committee to assess whether any of the report’s suggestions could enhance the agency’s existing practices. For example, she notes that without using parental status in the data, it’s hard to determine whether the policies they recommend support mothers.
How funders can remove the systemic barriers faced by mothers in academia. Plus, voles’ relationships don’t need the ‘love hormone’ and all about the three vaccines poised to fight respiratory syncytial virus.
Gene-edited prairie voles that can’t detect the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin still form monogamous relationships and care for their pups. The study challenges decades of research suggesting that prairie voles’ unusually strong bonds were down to the way their brains express oxytocin receptors. The study could help scientists understand more about the social bonds that connect humans. A treatment for conditions that affect social attachment has been used. “There’s a sort of eerie similarity between prairie vole social behaviours and human social behaviours,” says neuroscientist Nirao Shah. Prairie voles are one of the few mammals that exhibit social attachment.
Summary of World Health Organization Reports on Influenza, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Ebola, and Cosmic Influenza
Worldwide, 776 influenza outbreaks were reported between 1996 and 2019, more than any other infectious disease. The other most common outbreaks were Middle East respiratory syndrome and Ebola, found researchers who compiled 2,789 World Health Organization reports into a searchable database. Their analysis reveals that reporting on disease outbreaks is often subjective and depends on a country’s surveillance capacities and priorities. Researchers will be able to look at factors such as conflicts, weather and public-health funding in disease outbreak research.
There is not a clear picture about how research with dangerous pathogens is regulated in the US. The panel did not have a plan to finalize the guidance but they agreed on a set of recommendations. Panel members were concerned about the vagueness of some recommendations: for instance, health officials should review all experiments that could be “reasonably anticipated” to make a pathogen more transmissible or dangerous. The wording, they argued, could stifle crucial research or allow some risky studies to slip through without review.
Vaccines against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) from the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, GSK and Moderna are poised to be approved. Babies and older people are the two age groups most at risk from the virus. Scientists suspect that vaccine uptake in people over 60 will be low because there isn’t as much awareness and urgency as for COVID-19. The second-most cause of death for children between the age of one month and one year is respiratory syncytialviruses, which means that vaccines for pregnant people and newborns are highly anticipated.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00276-x
Science predictions for the next few years: Fast radio bursts for astrophysics and astronomy, and an introduction for physicists
Astronomers are using fast radio bursts to explore the missing matter in the universe, as well as measuring expansion of the universe. FRBs are powerful radio pulses caused by unknown astrophysical processes. Because the radio waves interact with any medium they traverse, scientists can use FRBs to study diffuse matter that is difficult to spot by other means, such as the gaseous haloes around galaxies.
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes an appealing discussion of animal creativity, a sparkling account of numbers that unlock the Universe (although this one is not for the mathematically faint-hearted) and an environmental history of capitalism.