Women in Science Exhibition
Digital Design
Content Production
Digital Promotion
Exhibition Curation & Archival
A discussion of how to slow the rate of attrition of women from scientific careers takes place at an institutional level. This exhibition showcases the collaboration between photographer Fanny Beckman and the Centre for Gene Therapy & Regenerative Medicine as she invites the viewer to observe women from the CGTRM at work as they lend their voices and faces to the discussion.
Researchers will often evoke the metaphor of a pipeline to describe how individuals are funnelled through rigid and competitive academic career path. And the pipeline is full of holes. In the UK, 60% of bioscience postgraduates are women whilst only 15% of professors are women. Just 9% of professors in chemistry are women, a drop of from an already underrepresented 35% at undergraduate level. This “leaky pipeline” is a well-documented phenomenon describing the progressive loss of women, particularly those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, from key stages of academic careers. There are important discussions ongoing on how to plug the cracks caused by obscure biases and barriers in academia and increase workplace diversity in the interest of both the underrepresented groups and better scientific research.
Spagnoli Lab
Understanding the establishment of cellular identity is a major goal in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. Led by Professor Francesca Spagnoli, researchers at the Spagnoli Lab are interested in understanding the interplay between extrinsic signals and intrinsic determinants in establishing and maintaining cell identities.
Watt Lab
Led by Professor Fiona Watt FRS, Director of the EMBO, Watt Lab is interested in how the differentiated state of adult tissues is maintained. Their research examines self-renewal and lineage selection by human and mouse epidermal stem cells; the role of stem cells in epidermal and oral tumour formation; and the assembly and function of the epidermal cornified envelope.
Related Projects
The women at the Centre for Gene Therapy & Regenerative Medicine have lent their voices and faces to the discussion as part of the Women in Science photography project with photographer Fanny Beckman. The series depicts the everyday working lives of the women behind the statistics, capturing an interest, joy, and confidence in their work that is often missing from discussions of women in science. The written stories which accompany the photos cover the hardships they have faced in their careers – looming imposter syndrome and workplace discrimination – but more often focus on their successes and the support systems that have made their experiences positive and which should be available to all women.
