UN leaders: Remodel science, tech ecosystems to accommodate women
A woman working in a laboratory. Based on the 2021 Unesco Science Report, as of 2018, women accounted for one in three researchers in the world.
What you need to know:
- UN Women Executive Director, Sima Bahous and Unesco Director General Audrey Azoulay, say women would explore their full potential in the respective fields if the systems are free from bias and discrimination.
- Based on the 2021 Unesco Science Report, as of 2018, women accounted for one in three researchers in the world.
UN leaders have called for urgent transformation of science and technology ecosystems to provide an enabling environment for the effective participation of women.
UN Women Executive Director, Sima Bahous and Unesco Director General Audrey Azoulay, said in a joint message that women would explore their full potential in the respective fields if the systems are free from bias and discrimination.
“We are already seeing how working together across the public and private sectors, and across generations can bring about positive change,” they said
They cited the elimination of gender stereotypes in education and putting policies in place to attract and support women scientists in the workforce, as ways of creating more inclusive science and technology ecosystems.
Based on the 2021 Unesco Science Report, as of 2018, women accounted for one in three researchers in the world.
To break down the statistics, women constituted 28 per cent of tertiary graduates in engineering and 40 per cent in computer sciences.
While in artificial intelligence, only 22 per cent of the professionals are women.
The report further indicates that less than one in four researchers in the business world is a woman and, when women start up their own business, they struggle to access finance.
In 2019, for instance, start-ups founded by women received only two per cent of venture capital.
Positive remedies
“We must put the principle of equality into action so that science works for women, because it works against them all too often – for example, when algorithms perpetuate the biases of their programmers,” they stated.
Last year, the Generation Equality Forum launched the Action Coalition on Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality, which seeks to double the proportion of women working in technology and innovation by 2026.
It also aims at ensuring women and girls participate fully in finding solutions to the large, complex and interdisciplinary problems facing global nations.
To realise these targets, the UN leaders suggest having “positive remedies for increased representation, as well as constant vigilance to uproot long-standing discrimination and unconscious bias.”
