Women in Science Day
Tell us a little about yourself
I grew up in the eastern suburbs of Rome, in a family that taught me to be free and curious. I decided to become an astrophysicist because it seemed to me the best way to understand Nature, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, and so I immediately found myself working on the primordial supermassive black holes, those black holes that were in the hearts of the very first galaxies in the Universe. I was a visiting researcher at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris and the University of Thessaloniki, where I carried out an interdisciplinary project on climate change visualisation models with PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). As time went by, my enthusiasm grew and I started to tell other people what I was learning - because scientific knowledge is a common good, to be produced but also redistributed. I thus became increasingly passionate about science communication. I am currently a research fellow at the National Institute of Astrophysics and a science disseminator, author of workshops and laboratories and curator of projects on the intersection of science, society and gender issues. I collaborate with RAI as author and presenter of Superquark+ and I am author of in-depth scientific programmes for Rai Cultura and Rai2. Together with five colleagues, I published the book “Apri gli occhi al cielo” (Mondadori, 2019), selected among the finalists of the National Prize for Scientific Disclosure and in the same year won the National Prize for Young Researchers GiovedìScienza. I am one of the founders of WeSTEAM, a network of young female scientists committed to the promotion of scientific knowledge from an inclusive and plural perspective.
In Italy only 18.9% of female graduates chose STEM disciplines, why do you think?
While the numbers of women in STEM are low, in some faculties the female percentages reach truly significant lows. This is generally the case in disciplines historically considered for men, for example physics and the so-called hard sciences, or engineering and computer science. The gender stereotypes and prejudices that have pervaded our culture for centuries, in fact, attribute to men logical-rational abilities, while to women a natural predisposition to emotionalism, a characteristic that would make them unsuited to science, especially the exact sciences. These mental schemes, which may seem like harmless and abstract categories, have concrete effects in the real world, for example by conditioning precisely the number of women who are ready to choose a course of study in science. One thinks of the word computer science, which according to various studies is often associated with the word nerd, an unattractive, awkward, socially awkward person who is extremely interested in computers (as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary). How many women would serenely represent themselves in a nerd?
The problem of stereotypes involves the gender issue not only directly: people who study STEM subjects are usually described as brilliant, enlightened, endowed with an intelligence outside the norm, and the data tell us that girls begin to think they are less intelligent than their male peers as early as pre-school age, from the age of five. It is evident that the sum of these two factors has the effect of creating a horizontal segregation: girls study, they do it a lot (they are almost 60% of the student population) and well (they achieve on average higher results than their peers) but their contribution is mostly relegated to the humanistic-social areas of knowledge.
How hard is the glass ceiling for female scientists?
In addition to the horizontal segregation, there is the issue of vertical segregation: the higher we climb in positions of academic prestige, the more women disappear. If we look at the number of Nobel Prizes in science awarded to female researchers, the percentage is around 2-3%. An even harder glass ceiling, since it covers a staircase where women have not even been able to walk for centuries, but which represents a transversal phenomenon in the academy. We find it, for example, in the humanities, where women have long represented the majority. Already after World War II, there were twice as many female scholars in psycho-pedagogical and historical-philosophical areas, yet even today the percentage of female professors is only 25%.
Speaking of representativeness, what are the most annoying stereotypes about scientific personnel?
The person who does science is usually depicted as a man, white, brilliant and solitary. In the common imagination, Albert Einstein produced the theory of general relativity locked in a room, alone, in front of the blackboard in the grip of an almost mystical fever that revealed to him, and him alone, the nature of the Universe.
There is no more erroneous myth than individual science: science is by its very nature a collective subject, constructed and animated by groups of multiple individuals, scientists who cooperate, pool forces and viewpoints, and listen to each other. Depriving science of its plural dimension profoundly distorts its essence, as does presenting it as the one who will save the world (which we alone can save). Narratives of this kind, in fact, feed a superhuman vision of it, as if we were dealing with a mythological creature. Lifting science off the ground, bringing it to an almost intangible level, on the Olympus of the intelligent loners, only fuels its detachment from ordinary people, making it even more distant than it already is.
Why is gender equality also important in science?
We often imagine science as neutral knowledge, independent of those who produce it and the contexts in which it is generated. Perhaps we have never thought about it, but science is a human product and as such is affected by the values of those who construct it and the historical and geographical contexts in which it is produced.
There is more: in science, there are no essential values to be respected or objectives to be pursued. It is we who determine its values and goals, who choose what we find interesting, what experiments to set up and what questions to try and answer. This is why it is important for scientific communities to be plural: if each person has eyes that can only observe a small portion of the world, i.e. the world according to his or her specific point of view, then we must strive to build scientific communities that are as diverse as possible, because more perspectives will correspond to richer scientific knowledge.
How did the idea for WeSteam come about? What are your present and future plans?
WeSTEAM was born out of the need to create a movement around the issue of gender in science. As founders, we felt the need not only to discuss these issues, but also to propose shared reflections within the scientific community itself. With WeSTEAM, we try to operate on two complementary levels. We carry out science outreach projects focusing on gender stereotypes and prejudices in science, with the aim of offering different perspectives and thus increasing the number of women in this field. But we think that numerical growth in itself is not enough: if, in order to enter a field, it is necessary to espouse the logic and cultural dimension of that place, the female perspective becomes secondary. It is therefore necessary to work in parallel so that there is a deep cultural reflection within the scientific community, starting with raising awareness of the role that plurality could play in the production of scientific knowledge itself.
What would you recommend to girls and teenagers who are interested in science subjects?
Stephen Hawking said to look at the sky and not at your feet. Science helps to lift our heads, and physics and astrophysics do it even more. Indeed, the Universe can help us clear our eyes and broaden our vision, two riches that, once gained, can never be taken away from us again. My advice is precisely to look up, to reach for the stars with your belly and your head. And as Donna Theo Strickland, Nobel Laureate in Physics in 2018, told a young scientist: ”If someone thinks differently from you, start believing that they are the one who is wrong and you are the one who is right and move on. That has always been my way of thinking.”
