Gender Parity

Gender equality is a challenge in many fields but it is particularly the case in the fields of science. The level of gender equality, although different from one country to another, is generally unsatisfactory in the academic and research sectors, which are still very affected by gender stereotypes.

In Europe, while women account for more than half of all students in higher education, they are a significant minority in engineering and research organizations, particularly in mathematics and the digital industry. In these fields, we believe all possible talents should be brought together to better shape the society of the future. Unfortunately, the under-representation of women can lead to significant cognitive biases, particularly in the development and application of technological solutions.

Therefore, all those who take part in scientific, technical and industrial culture should be involved in reducing these disparities by implementing a policy of valorization, retention and recruitment of women., in order to create a virtuous mechanism that will make it possible to increase female applications in these sectors.

A positive communication policy should also be implemented in order to send a signal to the general public that women can succeed as well as men, for example by highlighting profiles of women who have contributed to the advancement of science in fields historically dominated by male icons.

Here a few examples of great female scientists who can inspire new generations:

Anna Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717): A German naturalist. She was the first scientist to highlight the links and relationships between different living species and thus was a pioneer of what would later be called ecology.
Wang Zhenyi (1768-1797): A Chinese astronomer and geophysicist. She wrote astronomical treatises on lunar equinoxes and eclipses and popularized Chinese mathematics to make them accessible to the greatest number of people.
Emmanuelle Charpentier (1968): French biologist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for her work on genome editing.
Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017): An Iranian mathematician. She won the Fields Medal in 2014 for her work on the geometry of Riemann spaces and their module spaces.
Marietta Blau (1894-1970): An Austrian physicist who has received several awards on photographic methods of particle detection.

We believe that women’s candidacies for positions of responsibility can be promoted through the establishment, in public and private organizations, of an environment that reconciles professional and family life, in order to ensure a fair balance in the distribution of professional and family burdens.