Professor Carole Longson, chief scientific officer at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry discusses the lack of female representation in STEM and why a woman in science is needed on the new £50 note.
Before I begin I admit a bias – I am a woman and I have worked in science all my life.
However, I hope that many people – male or female – would agree that there are good grounds to put a woman in the fields of science, technology, engineering or maths (STEM) on the new £50 note.
Having done some admittedly not very scientific research on the people currently on banknotes, of the 31 that I can find (removing people who are featured more than once across the UK), 23 are men and 8 are women. Of these women, 2 are scientists. For me, that is a massive underrepresentation of the important contribution women in STEM fields have made to humanity.
Banknotes are not alone in their bias. From classroom to boardroom, we have a major shortage of female representation. This is important – I believe gender diversity in science helps drive innovation. Not only that, there is evidence that companies that lead the way in gender diversity also generate better returns. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organisations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board.
There are some eye-opening statistics here. Only 33% of girls who take maths and science GCSEs progress into any form of Level 3 STEM qualification, whether this is via the A-level, advanced apprenticeship or vocational qualification routes. This is compared to 80% of boys from the GCSE cohort that progress to a Level 3 STEM qualification. This is despite the fact that girls outperform boys across most GCSE subjects – more so in STEM.
In the history of the Nobel Prize from 1901 – 1918, women have won 52 times and men 856. The Fields Medal, awarded every four years, has been won once by a woman, and 59 times by men.
To correct these historical and societal wrongs, I nominate three outstanding women who all had to overcome significant barriers to women in their fields and did fantastic work despite the obstacles thrown at them.
My nominations are:
Rosalind Franklin, an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer. She was never nominated for a Nobel Prize, as Nobel rules prevent posthumous nominations or the splitting of prizes more than 3 ways. She died in 1958 at the age of 37, but her contributions to scientific understanding of the molecular structures of DNA and RNA were crucial to the winning of two subsequent Nobel Prizes after her death. Wikipedia explains.
Alternatively, I would like to see Joan Clarke on the £50 note. Her role in code-breaking in the Enigma project that decrypted Nazi Germany's secret communications has recently been immortalised by the film The Imitation Game. I was particularly struck by the fact that despite gaining a double first in mathematics from Cambridge in 1939, she was prevented from receiving a full degree, which women were denied until 1948. And while at Bletchely Park, Clarke had the same position as her male co-workers, but she was paid less due to her gender.
My third nomination would be Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon. Following her work as a surgery nurse at Middlesex Hospital in 1860 she applied to several medical schools, all of which refused her admittance. Despite this, she ended up gaining her degree, opening her own practice, and at the creation of the London School of Medicine for Women, she served as its dean.
I am of course joking when I say that putting a female scientist on the £50 note is going to correct historic and societal bias.
Putting a female scientist on a £50 note is not on its own going to overcome all the barriers for women in science, but it will send an important signal – that the modern world is catching up with the idea that women’s contributions to science and technology matter.