1. Women in Science Lucy Glover
Hello everyone, my name is Sebastian Hutchinson and your teacher has invited me here today to talk to you all about CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering.

2. Institut Pasteur Institut Pasteur - Paris
Opened by Louis Pasteur in 1888
130 research labs
11 departments
2,680 researchers
10 Nobel Prizes
Louis Pasteur
Women at Pasteur
93 % score on gender equality index
Underrepresentation of women in senior scientific positions
23 % of laboratory heads are female
So I am a researcher at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. The institute was established by Louis Pasteur who I’m sure that you have probably heard of, or have heard of pasteurization, which was initially developed by Louis Pasteur to protect the French wine and beer industries. He also developed the Rabies vaccine, and it was the money and noteriety he gained from this that lead to him setting up the Institut Pasteur in 1888.
Now the institut has 130 research labs, 11 departments, 2,680 researchers and 10 Nobel prize winners. It’s also part of a larger network of 32 pasteur institutes on 5 continents with 23,000 employees.
Developed germ theory of disease
Invented pasteurization, rabies vaccine

3. The problem
If a woman is a star, there aren’t that many problems. If she is as good as the rest of the men, it’s really pretty awful. A woman is expected to be twice as good for half as much.”
Joan Steitz, ‘Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science’ winner

4. The leaky pipeline

5. Why women leave Science
Decades old problem, 1999, study on women in Science at MIT found:
consistently lower salaries,
smaller lab spaces,
less access to mentors and professional networks.
This put women at a disadvantage for publications, grants patents and tenure.
Minimal support for family and maternity
Inequality in pay compared to male counterparts
This results in a system that forces women out of science careers
2008 approximately 3,000 female PhD graduates opted out of the Scientific workforce in the USA at a cost of ~$1 Billion to the economy

6. Why women leave Science
2019 in the USA, 40 % of women left a STEM career after their first child compared to 23 % of men, parenthood is an important driver of gender imbalance
This suggests parenting is a structural problem with STEM careers (as both men and women are leaving)

7. A few examples of women who were overlooked
 Katherine Johnson discovered the exact path for the Freedom 7 spacecraft to enter space for the first time in 1961 (and later for the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon in 1969). Her work went largely unrecognized and was credited to the men she worked with (and for), who not only dismissed her because she was a woman but also because she was African American.
Nuclear fission was discovered by Lise Meitner, who studied nuclear physics and radioactivity. She was studying uranium with her lab partner, Otto Hahn, who got credit for her work and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944.
Candace Pert, a neuroscience graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, discovered the receptor that allows opiates to lock into the brain. The discovery led to an award for her professor, Dr. Solomon Snyder. Pert wrote a letter of protest, highlighting which of her specific contributions were necessary for the discovery. Dr. Snyder simply told her, "That's how the game is played.”

8. The problem of unconscious bias
Unconscious (or implicit) biases are learned stereotypes that are automatic, unintentional, deeply engrained, universal, and able to influence behavior.

9. How do we keep women in Science
Unconscious bias training
A helpful mentor seems to make a bigger difference in career success for women than for men
Promoting young women and girls’ participation in STEM
Academia needs to move away from a “publish or perish” model
On an institutional level, women need more support from their workplaces during and after pregnancy.
Larger systemic changes take time.
Hiring practices, funding opportunities and workplace culture
My research is on the african trypanosome, which causes sleeping sickness in people and nagana in cattle. I’m not going to describe what I do in any detail but just to say I use CRISPR gene editing in my research to understand how the trypanosome builds it’s cell. As you can see from this image the trypanosome is very different from other cells and we want to understand how it builds its cell.