Underrepresentation of women scientists in the public sphere perpetuates the stereotype of the white male scientist and fails both to reflect the true diversity of people practicing science today and to encourage more diversity. In a new article publishing April 23 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, Dr. Elizabeth McCullagh and colleagues from the grassroots organization 500 Women Scientists, describe the first year of a database they founded in January 2018 to combat this issue. The database--called Request a Woman Scientist--is a public register of women scientists categorized by discipline and geographic region, as well as other self-identifying dimensions.
In under a year, more than 7,500 women from 174 scientific disciplines and 133 countries voluntarily signed up, expressing a willingness to share their science. These volunteers indicated interest in participating in panels, public outreach, and interactions with the media. The biological sciences and the USA are best represented in the database, but targeted outreach is planned to improve the representation of women from other disciplines and regions.
To understand how the register has been utilized, 500 Women Scientists sent an electronic survey to women on the register in November 2018. Of 1,278 respondents, 150 women (11%) had been contacted for a range of reasons, including media requests for expert comment, conference participation, and educational outreach. This is likely an underestimate of how many women are being contacted since the database has been accessed more than 100,000 times. Guided by input from database users, we are now working to improve the functionality of the online database, focusing on improving user experience, and ensuring that the database can continue to grow and meet the demand for women scientists and their expertise. The scope of the database is also being expanded to include the medical sciences.
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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000212
Citation: McCullagh EA, Nowak K, Pogoriler A, Metcalf JL, Zaringhalam M, Zelikova TJ (2019) Request a woman scientist: A database for diversifying the public face of science. PLoS Biol 17(4): e3000212. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000212
Funding: KN was supported through a 2018 fellowship from The Safina Center. EAM was supported through NIDCD 3T32DC012280-05S1. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Journal
PLoS Biology