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The Myths Behind Gender in Science with Professor Marlene Zuk

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Lara Veylit 4 comments

Marlene Zuk, prominent evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist, has been trying to encourage more fact-based discussions about gender in the scientific community

This interview was first published in late 2018 on the predecessor to Ecology for the Masses under the title “Marlene Zuk: Gender in Science”. Image Credit: Marlene Zuk, University of Minnesota, CC BY 2.0

Co-authored by Kate Layton-Matthews

As part of a two-day gender equality workshop for the Department of Biology at NTNU, Kate Layton-Matthews and I had the chance to interview Professor Marlene Zuk. Marlene is a prominent evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist, and a well-known advocate of improved gender equality in academia.

Her emphasis on bringing about more fact-based discussions on gender and how to attract women to typically male-dominated professions is unfortunately still necessary. People are still maintaining the view that women are ‘naturally less inclined’ to what are considered as ‘masculine’ disciplines, but as Marlene explains, it is impossible to disentangle culture from genetics. Her work is fundamental in the face of such dangerous over-simplification, for instance in the light of the firing of a disgraced professor at Cern, the European nuclear research centre in Geneva, where a male professor commented that ‘Physics was built by men’, which was unsurprisingly met with immediate backlash. In the words of another gender equality-advocate and professor in Physics, Jessica Wade, we need to fight against the ‘toxic and incorrect messages’ that such people are propagating.

The Forefront

Calling All Scientists: Letters to a Pre-Scientist Needs Your Help!

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Caitlin Mandeville One comment

Last year, 1650 students from across the US exchanged letters back and forth throughout the school year with professional scientists from around the world as part of the Letters to a Pre-Scientist program. Through the friendships formed between students and their scientist penpals, Letters to a Pre-Scientist helps kids see scientists as real people and empowers them to see themselves as future scientists.

Opinions

Towards Equality in Ecology: BES Edition

Posted on February 10, 2020 by Sam Perrin Leave a comment

Every year, ecological organisations like the British Ecological Society and the Ecological Society of Australia make efforts to create a more inclusive society. Over the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to attend several annual meetings run by such organisations, and even in such a short space of time, the differences are marked. Name-tags with gender pronouns are starting to become the norm at large ecology conferences, the audience seems to represent a much more diverse community, and conversations and workshops around promoting inclusivity are now commonplace.

The Forefront

The Changing Face of Ecology: Part Five

Posted on January 23, 2020 by Sam Perrin One comment

Image Credit: rumpleteaser, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped

2019 was a year in which many changes that our planet is experiencing came to the fore, capped off in December by the Australian bushfires, a phenomenon that scientists predicted would start to occur with increasing intensity at the beginning of last decade. With all the change that our planet is currently undergoing, it’s always worth noting that the discipline of ecology itself has changed as well.

Over 2019 we got to sit down and talk to some pretty exciting people. And whether they were at the forefront of genomics, the science-policy interface, or the wave of inclusivity currently sweeping ecology, they all had some great comments on how ecology has changed over the last few decades.

The Forefront

Towards Gender Equity in Ecology: Part Two

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Sam Perrin One comment

Professors Amy Austin, Eva Plaganyi, Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, Prue Addison and Johanna Schmitt (not pictured) share their views on gender equity in ecology (Image Credit from left: Amy Austin, CSIRO, NMBU, Synchronicity Earth; All images cropped, CC BY-SA 2.0)

In Part Two of our ongoing look at gender equity in ecology, four prominent female ecologists share their thoughts on how gender equity in ecology has progressed, and where it needs to go from here.

For Part One of this series, click here.

The Forefront

Towards Gender Equity in Ecology: Part One

Posted on February 11, 2019 by Sam Perrin 2 comments

We spoke to prominent female ecologists about the challenges facing women in ecology today (Image Credit: Shannon McCauley, Gretta Pecl, Marlene Zuk, CC BY 2.0, Images Cropped)

Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Woman are still under-represented in science, with UNESCO showing that at latest count, less than a third of all researchers in Western Europe and North America are women, with the highest percentage in any region of the world 47.2%, in Central Asia. Rather than go into depth about gender in ecology myself, I thought that I’d share some of the thoughts of prominent female ecologists that we’ve spoken to over the last year. We asked these scientists two simple questions. Has the gender gap closed during your time in the discipline, and what needs to happen to close it further?

The Forefront

Who Gets the Credit?

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Adam Hasik One comment

Scientific papers nowadays are written more on computers than with ink and paper, but no matter how you write a paper it is important to distinguish who gets credit for what. (Image credit: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped)

A huge component of science is the execution of successful experiments and then writing about those experiments. Consequently, a lot of weight is put on who did what, and what kind of credit people deserve for what they do. This can result in some arguments about how much so and so did for the project, and why they deserve authorship credit. In this article, I want to briefly cover some authorship issues and what kind of impact authorship can have on a scientist’s career.

Opinions

Amy Austin: Closing the Gender Gap in Ecology

Posted on April 9, 2018 by Sam Perrin 4 comments

“I think that [traditional gender roles] are powerful and yet subtle in terms of affecting the choices that women make along their careers.” (Image Credit: Amy Austin, University of Buenos Aires, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped)