SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Female Frontrunners
from the Scientist
Excelling in industry is not easy, especially if you're a woman. According to a 2010 study of New England biotech firms, females comprised only about 12 percent of biotech founders, despite earning about half of the biological science PhDs. And women are equally underrepresented at the senior management level, holding just 12 percent of senior executive positions in the world's top drug companies and 22 percent of the senior management jobs in biotech, according to a 2007 report in Pharmaceutical Executive.
"[Women] are just going to hit more hurdles," says Joanne Kamens, executive director at Addgene, a nonprofit plasmid repository in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "They can even hit outright discrimination. It still happens, and it can be career-debilitating."
But just because the odds are stacked against women doesn't mean there isn't room for success. The Scientist spoke with three women who are thriving in biotech and polled them for advice on excelling in an entrepreneurial environment.
Read more...
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.