 Okay, so after that very nice talk by Jim Gates, now we the next talking about the experience of African Americans in American academia. I'm very happy to have as the next speaker, Professor Shobana Narasimhan about an experiences of a woman scientist working in a society like India. I have, I know Shobana very well as she has been a good friend. And in fact, we sort of went to graduate school to the US at the same time. She graduated from Harvard, her main area of interest is in computational nano science, examining, you know, lowering of dimensionality and reduction of size effects and material properties. And she has been a fellow of several academies including the Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences in India. And she's also an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of a number of awards. In addition to her work as a scientist, she has also has a long connection with ICTP much like Jim Gates in various capacities as a, you know, as a visiting scientists. Also, she has been very strong supporter of our women in science program and she has been driving it quite actively and enthusiastically. So, I'm very happy for her to be giving this talk today. So, another connection that she has with ICTP is that her father, who was also himself a major mathematician from India in S. Narasimha. He was the head of ICTP unfortunately he passed away recently but he was the head of the ICTP math section. And he, so therefore she has yet another connection with ICTP. So, welcome Shobana, and now I give the floor to her. Shobatish, thanks for that kind introduction. I'm very happy to be giving this talk. ICTP is very close to my heart. It's really my second home, I think. And, oops, okay. So, I'm really very happy and I think the diploma program though I'm not a former diploma student myself. I think it's a fantastic program, really one of the jewels in the crown of ICTP's portfolio. And I'm very happy to be a part of this event. So, I've been asked to talk about fighting systemic gender discrimination in science. This picture on the cover, I don't know if any of you can make out where it was taken, it was taken on the terrace of the Adriatico. So, to start with, let me say that gender discrimination can be targeted at women or also as sexual minorities, LGBTQ, etc. In this talk, I will discuss only the situation of women because this is what most information is available about and this is what I'm familiar with. This is not to minimize other forms of gender discrimination. So what are the challenges faced by women in building their careers in science? I'm sure most of you are aware of it. It's been mentioned already by previous speakers today. They do a number, they face pressures due to family responsibilities, they face discrimination and bias, this might be implicit or it might be explicit. Women face isolation, a lack of peer group and mentorship, a hostile work environment sometimes, sexual harassment and a lack of recognition. Because of the limited time available to me today, I'm going to talk about these three topics. I will tell you that women are a minority in science. Of course, everybody is available. I ought to warn you that my neighbor's cat has come into my house and it is approaching the computer so it looks quite possible that some unfortunate event will occur very soon. Okay, women frequently face discrimination and I'll talk about some ways to combat discrimination. So women are a minority in science. So historically, of course, the number of women in science has been low. This is a very famous picture that was taken at the Solway Conference in 1927. It is sometimes called the picture of the brightest minds ever because nearly everyone in this picture went on to win an Nobel Prize. And of course, there's only one woman in this picture, which is Marie Curie. And you may say, oh, but this was taken in 1927. That was almost 100 years ago. Things have changed a lot since then. Well, they haven't changed that much. This was a picture that was taken at a conference in 2010 that I was a part of. And can you find me? Can you find any women at all? Well, I am there. If you look very carefully, you can see the time there. And I was one of only two women. There was one other woman here. Also, as you might notice, there are very few people of color. There were a lot of Chinese people because the conference took place in Shanghai. So things we really do not have much diversity in science, considering how much time has passed. So this is a map that shows the percentage of scientists in a country who are women and the darker the color shading of that country, the greater the percentage of women. And you can see that pretty much everywhere the shading is very light indicating that women are a minority. There's only about 10 countries in the world where about 50% of the scientists are women. And there's only one country, which is here, which is Myanmar, Burma, where it's over 70% of the scientists are women. So here are some of the numbers. These are UNESCO statistics. So in the world as a whole 28.8% of scientists are women. But you see there are big regional variations and you might be surprised by some of these numbers because they may not meet your preconceptions or your biases, whatever. The highest percentage is in Central Asia, 48.1%. The lowest is in South and West Asia. You notice, for example, the Arab states have a high percentage 39.8%. And if you look at North America and Western Europe, it's 32.3%, which is almost the same as you have in sub Saharan Africa. And these are statistics separated by geographical area by continent. So these are the numbers for Asia. The highest is Myanmar. The lowest is Nepal. India is the second lowest in Asia, which really shocked me when I first saw it. I didn't expect that. These are the numbers for Africa. The highest is Tunisia. The lowest is Chad. These are the numbers for Latin America. Latin America in general has a high percentage of women inside. The highest is Bolivia at 62.7%. And the lowest is Peru at 31.9%. So every country in Latin America has a higher percentage than the world average. These are the gender ratios for the ICTP diploma program. 28% of all diploma students, if you look at it over the years have been women. And I told you that 28.8% of scientists in the world are women. And that's exactly matching. But in fact, the diploma program has probably done better than you see participation ratios in the world because this includes statistics from early years where the percentage of women in science was lower. I decided to look at these statistics a little more because I'm from a developing country myself. And I began to wonder, are there any differences between developing countries and developed countries? I mean, you might think, oh, developed countries have a lot of women in science and developing countries have fewer. Is that really true or is it the opposite? So one of the things I did over this past pandemic year was do some research into these kinds of statistics. So the question, first question I asked myself, is there any correlation between the participation of women in science in a country and the wealth of that country? What I did was I looked at the percentage of women in the scientific workforce of that country versus the per capita GDP of that country, the gross domestic product adjusted for purchasing power parity. And when I plotted it, I found something really surprising, which is I found here on this axis is the percentage of women scientists in a country. On this axis is a gross domestic product adjusted for purchasing power parity. And you get this inverted U shaped curve. So the very poorest countries have very few women doing science, which is not very surprising. And then it rises quite sharply as the country becomes richer. And then what's really surprising is as it maximizes somewhere here. And then as the country becomes richer and richer and richer, the percentage of women doing science in the country falls. So you get this inverted U shaped curve. Especially surprising for me to see this, because in development economics, people have known for quite a long time that if you look at the participation of women in the labor workforce as a whole, you see exactly the opposite. You don't see an inverted U, you see a right side, right side up U. That is, you see that the poorest countries and the richest countries have lots of women working. And you see fewer women working in the middle income countries. So there's something about science that makes it very different from other forms of labor. So that you see exactly the opposite pattern. I don't have a definite answer for why this is this is something I want to look at more but we can discuss this I hope in the question answer session I have some ideas. I looked at various other things. Today I'll just talk about one other thing I've looked at, which is whether we can see trends in patterns of dropout or retention that is women leaving science, which is a big problem. So for that, I looked at the percentage of women studying science at the tertiary education level that is in college versus the percentage of women working in the scientific workforce. I separated the data into the developed countries and countries defined as developed, if it has a high GDP. So here are their blue bars and orange bars, a blue bar tells you the percentage of students studying science in the country who are women, and the orange bar tells you the percentage of scientists in the country who are women. The data fell into two groups. Okay, so these that I've circled here, these are the countries in the Middle East, the oil rich countries of the Persian Gulf Oman Kuwait, Bahrain, Brunei Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and also Saudi South Korea, you see a big drop. So women are dropping out of science after having studied it at college. Okay, so presumably they're getting married, they're having children and they're leaving science. Whereas for all the other developed countries, this blue bar and this orange bar are almost the same height. And so this suggests that in these countries, which also have lower participation of women in science in general, the real problem is at the early stage women are not getting attracted to studies science in school or in college. So you have to have different strategies if you want to address the problem of low participation of women in science in these two groups of countries. Now if you look at the developing countries, then with the exception of a few formerly communist countries, you see the first pattern which is that you see a big drop from college to working as a scientist. So a lot of women are studying science, they're getting attracted to study science, but they are not continuing in science afterwards, they're not working in science. Okay, so now I want to talk a bit about the kinds of discrimination that women face. This is obviously a big topic I can't cover the whole thing that I will say a little bit about it. So, my title was about systemic discrimination in science. What do we mean by systemic discrimination. It's asking whether the processes and organizational culture of science. Do they somehow do the ways we practice science today the way science is structured. Does that somehow result in discrimination against women, and often possibly without conscious intent it's not. I mean there is of course a lot of explicit discrimination where you know people may say oh I don't want any women in my lab. I'm not going to choose any women for this position, but there is something much more insidious where people may be discriminating without even being aware that they are discriminating. So, there was something, there was a big survey, just last year, it was called the gender gap in science, which surveyed 32,000, more than 32,000 scientists from 159 countries. And they asked them lots of questions, and they found that men are 4.8 times as likely to say that they have never experienced discrimination as women. So women are saying that they're facing discrimination. So what kinds of discrimination might women face. So here, so one thing you might say is oh well maybe women are not getting jobs, maybe they're not getting grants, because they're just not as good, or they just not as productive, maybe they're not writing enough papers. Maybe they're just not as driven. So here was this study, it's a very famous study that was done in Sweden, and it looked at grants that were given to applicants. And it tried to quantify their ability and their performance in a numerical way. That is, it looked at how many papers they had published, where they had published, where they had studied, etc. So it was trying to put an objective numerical score on their performance and competence. And then on this Y axis is how they were evaluated by the reviewers who are deciding whether they should get this grant or not. Okay, so in this case you're really comparing life with life, you're comparing men and women who have exactly similar CVs. Okay, I mean they're published the same at the same rate in the same journals, etc. And what you see is that men are ranked much higher than women who have the same score. Okay, and in fact women had to perform two and a half times as well to get the same score as men. And they also said in the sort of numerical rating scheme they had, this was equivalent to having to publish three extra papers in science or nature. So that's a huge additional barrier for women. I mean if they have to do that much extra to get just the same rating as a man. So this suggests that there is something else going on here. I mean men and women are just not being evaluated similarly. There was another similar study that was done more recently. This was published in PNAS where people just made up a CV for an applicant for a position in a lab and they took the identical CV and they sent it to men and women professors asking if they would give them the job. And not perhaps that surprisingly, if the CV had a male name on it, people were much more likely to say they would be willing to give that person a job. They were also willing to offer them a higher salary. And the interesting thing is that this was both men and women who were doing this. Okay. So why do we do this? Why do we rate men and women higher? Of course some people may just be very sexist and very chauvinist and think that women cannot do science etc. But there may be other things at play as well. So here I'm going to tell you a confession about myself. Okay. So I grew up in a very liberal household. I was encouraged to do whatever I wanted to do by both my mother and my father. My mother is a well known feminist author. But the first time that I went in a plane that was piloted by a woman, the captain's voice came on over the intercom and she said, Hello, this is your captain speaking. And for just that fraction of a second, this thought crossed my mind. Oh my God, the pilot is a woman. I hope she knows how to fly this plane. And then I was of course immediately horrified at myself, really shocked. I thought how can I think like that? This is completely against everything that I believe in so strongly. So why do we have these biases? Why do we have these thought patterns? It's because everything in the media, in our schools, in our friends, our families are bombarding us with these messages that men should do certain things and women should do certain things. So this is for example a page from an elementary school textbook in India and it is showing different professions. And a woman is being shown here as a school teacher, but all the other professions, you know, a doctor, someone doing a computer, a farmer, a doctor, a judge, everybody else is being shown as a man. And these images really bury themselves deep in our psyche and we have certain biases. Now, what other challenges can women in science face? Okay, this is a picture that I think typifies what I have faced as a woman in science and many women say they can identify with it, which is after work my male colleagues will all get together and go for a beer and I would never be invited to go along. Now you may think, well, so what? I mean, they're just socializing. If they don't want to socialize with me, it's okay. But it's more than just socializing. Of course, I feel a bit lonely, I feel left out. But these after work gatherings are extremely important to one's career. Because this is where collaborations are forged. This is where men give each other advice about how to reply to a referee report, how to apply for a grant, etc. And if women are left out of this, either because it is not socially acceptable for them to go to these things, or because they just have family responsibilities and they don't have the time to socialize, they're totally left out. So women lack this whole access to this kind of old boys network. Now let me tell you a little story about myself. Once the guys at work were going out to drink and I asked them. I mean, I know that they never asked me, but that day I just somehow felt like going along and I said, can I come to and they kind of looked at each other and then they said, no. And I was really horrified and I said, what do you mean no, how can you say no. And one of them said to me, a decent woman wouldn't come where we're going. And he was so shocked. I mean I still don't know where they were planning to go. Things have changed since then I get along much better with them and they do sometimes invite me along, but this tells you that it's not. I mean, it's not a really inclusive environment that we face at work. This is about man interrupting and bro creating. This is again something that's not very explicit discrimination, but it's something that a lot of women say they face your talking and men keep interrupting you or a man takes your idea and takes credit for it. This picture I didn't put from science it was a notorious occasion at the MTV Music Awards where Taylor Swift was giving a talk and Kanye West just grabbed the mic from her and spoke. This is something we love based you know I mean, I would be saying something at the meeting or in the question answer session after talk, and people would just ignore me it would be as if I hadn't spoken. And then a man would say the same thing and they would say oh that's an excellent point. And I would think that I just said that, and you know you just not. It's, you're not listen to, which can be very frustrating. This is about women in science academies about the recognition given to women. This, the countries are colored according to the percentage of women in their science academies. The percentage is really really low, nearly everywhere in the world. Another recognition about Nobel prizes. This is the statistics for the number of Nobel prizes one in one by women and in science, the percentage is 3% and that is just shockingly low, really, really low. Okay. And, of course, there you see a picture of Marie Curie she's very famous for having won two Nobel prizes so how did she win two Nobel prizes. Well the story of her first Nobel Prize was that only becquerel and Pierre Curie were nominated, and she was not nominated, and they were planning to give it to two of them. And Pierre Curie was informed about this and he wrote to the committee that if it is true that one is seriously thinking about me I very much wished we considered together with Madan Curie. And he got it because her husband pleaded for her. And there are many, many, many stories I can tell you about women who did bath breaking work, and the credit went to some man instead and he was given the Nobel Prize for it I can tell stories for other awards. This harassment is really widely prevalent. It is quite shocking how prevalent it is. This is again from the gender gap in science. The green bars are women and the orange bars are men. This is indicating that they personally encountered sexual harassment at school or the workplace. And in general, 20 to 30 or even 40% of women say they have personally encountered it. There is a small percentage of men who say they've encountered it but it's about two to 5%. So this is really a huge problem that women face. Now for the rest of the time I want to talk about some ways to combat discrimination. I don't have all the solutions but I just want to throw out some ideas. You can raise awareness, call out bias and discrimination with support networks or workshops from alliances and associations, start targeted programs, increase the representation of women on committees and formulate laws and policies. So I told you that there's implicit bias, bias that you're not even aware that you have. So Google implicit bias and Harvard and you will go to this website where there are various tests for whether you have implicit bias on various things. So one of them is about women and science and take this test and see whether you have implicit bias and do it regardless of whether you're a man or a woman, and let's see what you find out. Okay, the first time I took the test I was quite shocked it showed that I had a lot of bias that men should do science and women should do non science jobs. Over the years my results I keep taking the test and my results have changed and now it says I have a bias the opposite direction, but maybe I'm cheating a little bit because now I know the test how the test works I don't know. So you can share stories. We've been doing this a lot in India. This is a book of stories of women scientists, this is some more. The same thing tailored for a younger audience, their books like this, which are aimed at young girls telling them stories of women and science. The African academies of science have recently brought out a pamphlet of stories of women and science. I'm now going to tell you a lot about India because that is what I'm familiar with, but that there are of course initiatives all around the world. So for example, in India there's this website called the life of science.com, and it tells it, it's a website and it features stories of women, especially women from marginalized communities. What are called the backward casts, the disadvantaged communities who have chosen to take science as a career. I think having a website is relatively easy because you don't need much infrastructure you don't need much money. One thing that you see a lot of what are called manuals manual means male panel. So there are lots of conferences where all the speakers are male or almost no female speakers so this for example, was one in India which was advertising the newspaper and it said every single speaker's digital concrete every single speaker was male. I've even seen advertisements for conferences about women in science where all the speakers were male which you may think is impossible but it has happened. Okay, so what can one do about it. I myself, every time I see this I write a mail to the organizers saying dear organizers you don't have the agenda balance in your conference etc. Sometimes they get irritated. Probably I think you go God there she goes again, but I think if you keep doing it you raise awareness, but there are also groups for example in India recently a group has been established called bias watch India.com. And what they did is first they established what they call a base rate. So they looked at all the institutions in India the leading institutions and they looked at the percentage of their faculty who were female. So these are the numbers in biology is 22.3% mathematics 15.4% computer science 11.1% etc all the way down to engineering which is 7.9%. So these are of course very low numbers. But what is shocking is that the percentage of speakers at conferences are the percentage of women on a committee tends to be even lower than this. So they monitor it, which is very easy to do now because all this information is up on the web. So for example here was one conference in biology that was held recently, and they treated it. They said, out of seven speakers, zero women out of one moderator one was a woman and then they have said the base rate of women faculty in biology is 23.2%. So the argument is that if your number of speakers women speakers falls below the base rate in that field, then you are probably discriminating you're not looking at the available pool of women scientists who could be speakers. So how can you change this so this is a series of conferences that was held at ICTP it's called the total energy conference. It's held once every two years. And this is the blue bar is men and the red bars women. So you see initially there were almost all male speakers very few female speakers and we kept saying you should have more women you should have more women. Then what happened in 2017 is there always three conference directors as you know at ICTP conferences, and all three of us were women. Okay, so that's me over there. And we made a special effort, not to choose more women but to suggest more women as possible speakers. And then there is an international committee which votes on the speakers based on the interest in the topic that skill as a speaker etc. And then you see what happened that year, one third of the speakers were women and many people told us that that was one of the best conferences ever. So including women as speakers and organizers at conferences is important and if you make a special effort you can have lots of women as speakers. This is an example of a petition that was raised. So this is called the International Congress of Quantum Chemistry. It's an international conference that moves around from country to country. And in 2015, they put up their program, their list of invited speakers and plenary speakers, and there wasn't a single woman amongst the list. And so what a group of women did was they started a petition on change.org. You may be aware of this website. It's where you can start up petitions and get people to sign online. And, you know, I think hundreds and hundreds of people signed saying it was clear that discrimination is taking place if there are no women speakers at this conference. And then they actually changed it. They said, sorry, that was a premature posting, whatever that means, of an all-moy list. And they apologized and they redid their list and added women speakers. So you can change things. So what are the activities you can do to build a support network? You can have just lunches, meetings online, panel discussions, scientific talks, talks by role models, career development workshops, which I'll talk about now, leadership development workshops, mentoring, outreach programs, screening programs and internet databases. I don't have time to talk about all this. So I'll just talk about career development workshops. This is something we've been doing at ICTP and that Atish Dabholkar mentioned. So we've been having them at ICTP every other year. And we've also done one at the ICTP partner institute in Rwanda. So the aims of our workshops is to give women a space in which they can share their experiences, acquire skills to rise in their career and form a community that can support one another. So as I said that women lack access to this all-boys network. So we want to give an alternative to that. So these are the organizers. That's me there. That's Liz Simmons, Erica Coppola, whom some of you may know. And Nikola Spalden, who was the director one year and Mari Shantel, who was the director when we did it in Rwanda. The participants have come from all over the world. We've done about 80 countries. We've had participants from about 80 countries so far. Now people ask me, why should you have something just for women? Isn't that discriminatory? So I have various answers to this. Sometimes women are just more comfortable talking about sort of traumatic experiences, etc. If there are only women present. But let me tell you about this story of the first time we did it. There's one woman who told us, this is the first conference of any kind that I've attended because this is the first conference my husband allowed me to attend. And he allowed me to attend this one because I told him that only women would be there. So there are women who have all kinds of challenges that they face, all kinds of backgrounds that they're from. And we have to cater to all these different situations. If you're thinking about doing some activity like this, I would urge you to include social scientists because they have a lot of experience with dealing with such situations. For example, these are my friends and colleagues, Anuradha and Maitri, who helped me design a program that was inclusive that everyone participated in. I will talk more about it. I also think it's quite important to involve men because I think it's important to give the message that there are supportive men and that men are not the enemy. I like this particular picture because it shows a man surrounded by a sea of women, which is exactly the opposite of what you usually see at a physics conference. I would also like to talk about the talks by inspiring role models. This is Jocelyn Bell Bernal, who was one of the notorious cases where she did amazing work. She discovered pulsars and she was not given the Nobel Prize for it, which is seen as a big miscarriage of justice, but she did receive the big breakthrough prize in fundamental physics, which is $3 million. We've had talks by very inspiring role models. For example, this is Setsuko Tajima from Japan, who had a break in her career after she had children and would just go into work in the lab one day a week just because she loved physics so much and eventually ended up having a fantastic career in physics. This is Sosina Haile, who is a professor at Caltech and is now at Northwestern and grew up in Ethiopia. We shared our stories. This is Rabiya Saeed from Nigeria who has an amazing personal story. She got married straight after out of school. She had six children. Two of them had severe health problems, but she went on to do a bachelor's, a master's and a PhD. This is Ivana Wobornik who had to escape the war in Sarajevo in order to do her PhD in physics. This is Shazreen Mohammed from Zimbabwe, who also has an amazing trajectory. I don't have the time to tell you about all these amazing women. We also work on helping women improve what are called soft skills like how to write a paper for publication, how to make slides, how to deliver a talk, how to write grant applications, how to negotiate. Negotiating is very important because women tend to be uncomfortable asking for things, whether it is less teaching load or a bigger salary or more lab space or more money for equipment. So we train women how to negotiate for things, how to make a professional looking CV, etc. So here are just some pictures from that. These women in groups of four working on their CVs. This is after we had a workshop on how to give effective talks, every woman at the workshop gave a one minute talk, introducing her research topic. I think just from these pictures you can tell that they gave fantastic talks. We do something very interesting which is a drama workshop where we have a trained counselor who uses techniques of drama to help us talk about challenges we face in our either balancing career and family or in a hostile work environment. This is a very transformative experience this workshop. We have poster sessions. We have panel discussions how to pick a research topic women in physics in Africa, how to balance a Korean family. We have exercises on how to pick a research topic. We do get together and discuss science. And these are some of the things women said afterwards. When they were asked what they found about the workshop. They said, they found that we all share the same problems regardless of our country culture and religion. They gained from it a great deal of confidence. And most importantly they felt that they're not alone. They have a support network. Many women who have attended this have gone on to conduct similar workshops in their countries. For example, this is in Uzbekistan. This one is in India. I'm going to skip this. I'm going to tell you a story from our workshop. So, Zikora, who was a PhD student from Kenya came to our first workshop, and she had a PhD fellowship but no research topic and she felt very lost and confused. And Arthi, who was from India, had many ideas for research but she didn't have enough students to carry them out. And they connected at our workshop and went on to work together and they've published several papers together. And Arthi sort of long distance was Zikora's PhD advisor. So this is the kind of thing we've done at our workshops. This is at the end of one of our workshops. You can just see how much positive energy was generated at our workshop. And we continue to stay in touch through Zoom. I also do Zoom meetings with all the women who have ever been in my group. We meet once a month and just share our stories. And if you want to do something like this, there are also many resources available online. I just, you know, there are lots of YouTube videos, etc. I just end by saying a couple of other things that you can, that governments have done. So for example, in India, we realized that the big problem was we had quite a lot of women doing science PhDs but we were losing them to science after the PhD. So the government started these fellowships specifically for women who've had a break in career after their PhD. And they can either come back to science and be funded for three to five years, or they can be trained in science related careers like patent law, etc. The government has also set up technology parks for women who would like to do a science startup like become entrepreneurs. In England, there's something called the Athena Swan program, which rates institutions, according to how gender inclusive they are, they can get a gold rating or a silver rating or a bronze rating, and many funding agencies now are starting to link government funding to what rating they get. So this is a real incentive for institutions to change to become more gender inclusive. I just want to say that you can lobby for change. You can lobby for representation of women amongst faculty members committees conference speakers, general editorial boards winners of prizes and awards. If you have a hostile climate, if there's sexual harassment. If you don't have good maternity and childcare leave age limits. But I just want to say that when you lobby it's very hard to lobby as an individual so it's much better to lobby as a group than as an individual. And nowadays with connectivity, so high and social media, etc. It's not so hard to build a support group so that you can lobby collectively. So that's all I wanted to say and to women I want to say stay strong and don't give up and to men I say educate yourself about the problems that women face and do be supportive. Thank you very much. Well, thank you Shobana once again for another insightful talk connecting personal experience with a broader view and also some hard statistics. So, I think these are, I mean, is fundamental to ICTP mission to overcome these barriers of gender geography, ethnicity and economics, and we are seeing different aspects of this kind of discrimination, both implicit and explicit. The fact that this Women in Science program has been, we are very proud to support it at ICTP has been quite successful in terms of the impact it has had. I had the opportunity to attend, sort of hear direct testimonials from some of the workshop participants. In fact, I was invited as a panelist. There was also a situation where I got to experience where I was the token male panel member in the sea of women panel members it was the it was an experience to understand how it feels to be the other way around. But I think ICTP is committed. I know that there are a lot of very interesting questions because I think it's something that is important to all this women scientists who are want to make a career. For example, things like daycare has come up I saw. And I want to say that ICTP is very committed we already have taken note of this. There are many logistic logistic difficulties but we have launched initial some preliminary daycare facilities at ICTP and a few people who did access them, you know, despite COVID were extremely happy about it. But these are the kind of things that an institution like ICTP needs to keep in mind that in what way, in a systematic way we can address some of the barriers that exist. Now hand over the floor to Paolo to take questions. Thanks. So there's so many questions in the chat I don't know I mean which ones to take so. Yes, so Paolo will moderate. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, many people have asked for the slides. I have already sent my slides to Paolo so perhaps he can share them somewhere. Yes, yes, I will. So, first of all, if we can unmute Angie Arfani, she has a question and she raised the rent. So if I see ICTS can, Angie, you can talk please. Yeah. Hello everybody. Thank you so much for ICTP for having this anniversary meeting and also for Toshobana for a really great talk. Actually, I wanted to comment about something that I raised as a special diploma program for females if it's possible by ICTP, especially in the basics, basic physics because we know that in some of the countries we have a lack of the physics in the case of the master and PhD level, especially for females, it's really great if ICTP is going to have a special program for them. Not just in high energy physics and mathematics or condensed matter just in basic science because they are really limited and also I want to raise some other issue regarding the next year which is called as the International International Institute for Basic Sciences and Sustainable Development. And we know that the sustainable development will not happen by ignoring the women in science in basic sciences. So I suggest ICTP to have the women physicist organization because ICTP has a, is one of the international institutes in physics and has a really good connection between developing and developed countries. So if you really great chance if you can have female physicist organization establishing ICTP if it's possible by their roles. Thank you so much. Okay, maybe I would suggest you to maybe send this suggestion in writing not to our organizers so that we can follow it up. I have a question for her. Why do you think you should have a diploma program just for women rather than just making sure you have a large number of women amongst the diploma students. Hello. The question is for you but now you're muted. Okay, maybe we take it later. Okay, maybe we go to the next question then. Well, it will be better. Can I see TSM mute ancient. Yeah, I can answer that because I'm from a developing country and I know that for example the high energy physics and mathematics. They're really few females. And it's really difficult to find the really candidates that they can participate in the diploma courses. But if it's going for the basic sciences in general we know that they are many of them who got their bachelor or they got their master. It would be really great to have them after their studies to do this basic science is not just going to the high energy physics and also for the mathematics are going for the next matter because even in the future finding the jobs in theoretical physics is really difficult for them. If having a specific program just in basic science for females and give them the chance to get familiar with the other subjects of the physics that will help them to find a career in the future, especially to become a PhD students and find their way. And you know that theoretical physics is not really common subjects in the case of even the physics and then women are really minority in this team in general. I hope I answered the question. Okay, I mean you've given me some food for thought I need to think more about it, whether there's certain fields of physics which have less representation of women and what you should do about that. This is a question by Valverde so we cannot unmute her for him. Can I see this unmute Valverde. She or he raised the hand. Please go ahead. Thanks for the great talks. So I had a question. You showed a plot, comparing the population of women that went to do their undergrad studies with the percentage I think of women that stayed in science so I was wondering how you counter the women that stayed in science from which, say, degree of seniority if they had. So I didn't get those statistics they are UNESCO statistics, and they are they don't really specify they just say they look at the R&D researchers in that country, and what percentage are women. So I am assuming that they're looking at people who have permanent jobs at all levels. Okay, thank you. Yes, maybe let me read there are some nice commented maybe show what I can elaborate on. For instance, Sarah Oliva says I know of man who make a point to decline invitations to be a part of a mannel, old man panel, and instead of recommend a list of women colleagues who can do the job as well. Yes, I think that's an excellent thing to do. I'm very happy to hear that there are men who do this. I know women who do this in the sense that if they are not enough women speaking they refuse to be a part and I have written to men, suggesting that they refuse to be a part of a mannel but I don't know if they've actually done it. I think it would be great for example if everybody attending the stock, all the men attending the stock said that they will not take part in any all male mannel. Good point, good point. Let me read another comment. I think women having supportive husband in laws do better than others perhaps women were not married to do better since marriage and in laws are obstacle to career for women unless they extend the due support. I think that I think that is true. Somebody a friend recently told me something. But I haven't seen the statistics and so I don't, you know, I don't know where she saw it, but she told me if you look at who performs best and whatever that means. First is married men. Then is unmarried men. Then is unmarried women and then is married women. So, so marriage actually helps a man a lot in his career, but marriage typically hinders a woman in career progression. Presumably because she gets a lot of household responsibilities in childcare responsibilities which make it difficult for her to devote enough time to her career. But yeah, I mean, a friend of mine. I myself am not married but a friend of mine said that if she was asked one piece of advice to give a young woman and science, it would be choose your spouse or partner very very carefully because that is the most important decision you make both for your personal life and for your career. Good, let me. Maybe you want to read the to speak yourself about your question about alumni. Maybe I see this can unmute the news. Hi, can you hear me well. Yes, we can. Your talk was really excellent. Thank you so much for giving such a great topic topic overview. I actually have several comments on on you know many of the things you discussed but I think the question Apollo is mentioning is about. I asked, do you think we should create a subgroup, a subgroup of women, I see to be alumni who are women within within you know this this conference or even in general, and what do you envision this group should be should have as the main mission to reach more women in science and I mean I think I see TV is already doing a lot of things but do you think we should put more into this. I definitely think that's an excellent suggestion. And especially nowadays with social media it's so easy to set up a group like that it could be. I don't know, Facebook group, WhatsApp group, whatever. I mean, I know Facebook and WhatsApp are really old fashioned and I don't know what other newer things. We've done that with some of the people who took part in the career development workshops I've organized and mean what they can do it depends you can either have it as a loose thing where people, you know, just, you know if somebody's organizing a talk or somebody knows that there's a fellowship for women they put it etc. Or you can have it more structured for example senior women can mentor the more junior women in a structured way. If you can have, for example, if the diploma students each had a senior woman as mentor, then it would be perhaps nice for them to have someone to whom they could bounce off ideas etc. In fact that would be fantastic even for the male students I think I mean. Yeah, I agree yeah. You can have a you can have a meeting once a month online and whoever feels like and join. I do that with many of the women networks I'm part of not everybody takes part every time but once in a while people join and whatever they feel like they're talking about the or sharing they share it. And I think just sharing experiences itself is an extremely powerful thing. It really helps you hugely when you're facing various challenges. First of all to care that other women face the same challenges and secondly sometimes you get advice about how to cope with them. And I just related to the point that you mentioned before about marriage, and how that affects career. I mean, what what I was thinking of was that, because you mentioned okay we need to choose up us spouses carefully and I was thinking, there are so many women who don't get that choice. Especially, you know even in my country, you know many women need to get married right after high school or even sometimes before that. And so even before they realize that they would like to have a career. So that that option is, you know already sort of. So you know what one of the women that I worked one of our workshops said, which I thought was very powerful image and stayed with me. And she said, my advice to women is be like a snail. And I thought what does she mean, and she said creep forward slowly slowly slowly, so that nobody even notices that you are moving forward. When there's danger, go back into your shell. And then when the danger has passed. Go back into your shell again and move forward slowly slowly slowly. And for me that was a really powerful image because it was so different from the way I think and had been told to think. I mean I'd always been told you know fight. You know don't take any nonsense. But I realize for many women that is just not an option. And there are other paradigms other ways of dealing with situations. And those can also be very powerful ways of dealing with situations. Thank you. Thank you for your response. I see many, many, many remarks on the chat, but maybe we should close we're running rather late so let me thank show one again for her talk. So her slides will be distributed. And, okay, it's time to close it so let me remind you that tomorrow we start at 3pm and the discussion tomorrow will be mostly by diploma students will be many diploma students presenting what what happened in these original meetings. There will be a discussion about this round table with notable ex diploma students. And we also remind you that there will be the group photo at 245 and where your t shirt if you can. And finally let me remind you about wonder me so if you want to go around and meet all the new friends you can use this platform the link is on the program so you can find the program on the website you just click on it and you, you will find your avatar in this platform and you can chat and talk with the other diploma students. Okay, so I just want to say one thing. I really want to thank ICTP and acknowledge all the support we've got for the programs we've held that ICTP in Trieste and Kigali and without the support of many people, we would not have been able to do it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, we can close here and thank you very much and we reconvene tomorrow at 3pm Trieste time. Thank you.