Gender representation seems to be a timely topic. For instance, Scientific American wrote about Gender Diversity and Synthetic Biology, where they report a study performed by 2013' team Paris Bettencourt. Even more interesting is to find a page dedicated to Women in Synthetic Biology in Pinterest, with links to blog posts and news. More recently, scientists around the globe have been showing real signs of disavowal to any gender discrimination present in science.
    This is an interesting topic for our team because we are mostly composed of women. So, we decided to search more about Women in Science by doing some research ourselves, such as interviweing students from the Physical Intitute of São Carlos from the University of São Paulo and doing an internet survey.

Team iGEM Brasil USP - 2015 Girl Power!

    We are very happy that more than 70% of our team are women. Additionally, our PI and the majority of our advisors are female. Rumor has it, this is the reason behind all of our project success ;)

Interviews

    Our Intitute, the São Carlos Physics Institute - University of São Paulo, has a majority of men, but we have some very talented female scients. We interviewed four female graduate students from our Institute to hear their opinion about women in science and how they see this subject in our institute and in general. All students have graduated at IFSC and are doing master or doctorate, so they have lots of experience and opinions to share with you! You can find the links for each interview below and choose if you want to read the original version in Portuguese or the translated one in English. Don’t forget to check it out!

Krissia de Zawadzki: English | Português

Hilde Harb Buzzá: English | Português

Nathália Beretta Tomázio: English | Português

Letícia Zago: English | Português

Survey

    We did a survey about women in the academic evioronment to see how people perceive it and draw some statistics on the current situation in Brazil. Our purpose was to better understand this topic by knowing the proportion of women on the course over the years, how they were compared with their male counterparts, if they were ever discriminated or harassed during university, etc. Remember that the survey was performed with a rather small number of participants, and should be seen as a scrap in the surface of what people really of about the subject.

Almost 340 brazilian students participated with the survey, especially those from University of São Paulo. The data we have gathered can be seen below.

What is your gender?

When did you attend to college?

In your opinion, there is segregation and gender harassment in the academic environment?

Is discrimination against women in your opinion a real problem?

How may women who enrolled colleg with you dropped out before finishing it?

Do you believe women have disadvantages in your course because?

Here are the possible answers: 1- Yes, they are too sentimental
2- Yes, because men are naturals
3- Yes, because there is a larger enrollment of men
4- No, because there is no kind of discrimination at all
5- No, because women are naturals
6- No, because there are no distinctions between man and women
7- Other

Contact with PyLadies

    Especially in the so-called hard sciences, women engagement seems particularly low. It is very hard to deny some kind of gender disparity, although the reason might very well be disputable (be it prejudice or simply a matter of taste). Several initiatives have emerged over the last decade to encourage more and more women to become active in such areas. Just a famous and popular example is the Women of Silicon Valley facebook page. We contacted another very sucessfull endeavor that has recently started on our own home town: PyLadies (click here for PyLadies international home page). From their website, they are "an international mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community." Python is a high-level programming language that is spreading faster and faster every year. But it is not only about being a programming language and the fact that women are rare among computer scientists: Python is embedded in an environment of rich collaborations and mutual help. An environment where everyone is invited to participate and contribute however possible.

PyLadies São Carlos is the only PyLadies organization in the whole state of São Paulo (check here), right in the home town of our team. During our discussion with Gabriela Mattos, representing PyLadies São Carlos, we learned that this strong spirit of community can bond women that otherwise would go through college and computer science studies all by themselves. Their ideal is to bring together women with this common interest and make them leaders among Python developers and software engineering. PyLadies São Carlos is in its first year, but is composed by people engaged with the group's ideals. They have been giving talks in conferences and classes to high-school students. We will share just a bit of all we learned with PyLadies São Carlos. Don't hesitate contacting them if you are interested in joing the group or even if you just want to get in touch with other people with the same interest!

It is not a secret that women in computer-based areas are somewhat lonely. And it is not about not having colleagues to talk to: sometimes, it is because your (male) colleagues won't see you as their peer; as their colleague. In the 60`s-80`s, according to Gabriela's research, the number of men and women attending computer science classes were almost equal. Yes, 50% men, 50% women on average. Apparently, this is due to the fact that secretaries were expected to have a "background with computers" - i.e., the majority wanted to learn how to type instead of dreaming with becoming a computer scientist or a software engineer. With time, and especially when computers became very popular and companies dropped the need of a college degree, they massively stopped enrolling to such disciplines. Nowadays, in most of computer science courses in Brazil, only about 10% of all freshmen are women. And this trend seems stagnated.

Gabriela Mattos in a talk, probably talking about "Grandma Cobol" =)

This is one of the reasons why PyLadies São Carlos wants to organize regular excursions to high schools and technical schools, and show how cool computers and Python can be. Part of their program involves showing how to develop games using Python. Although they are not avoiding men, they focus on women. They already had one experience and they told us that one thing became clear: when girls are surrounded by boys, most of them feel uncomfortable of asking questions or commenting on something. Thus, they want to organize activities where only girls will be there and they will be encouraged to actively engage in such activities. This could potentially show to many girls who may think "computers are for boys" that "computer are cool" and they are for everyone.

In contrast, we asked ourselves: can a college really be this intimidating? Can the university environment be such unwelcoming as we are speaking of? It is not a matter of finding a culprit or a smoking gun. This is, however, a question to bug everyone; Yes, it should bug the present reader, the writer, everyone. Another topic of our conversation was how subtle jokes or comments, several times interpreted as naive or simply silly, may give away prejudices and deep opinions. And indeed, it is not hard to find ourselves in an uncomfortable situation where someone makes a joke that are solely based on false morals and prejudices. Who knows the effect of that joke, if said on the right time, can have on anyone, from any gender. Yet, women seem to be easier targets.

This is the reason why there is a need for such a community. A community that is not as interested in creating a group of Python experts, as in creating a diverse group. To PyLadies, the way to achieve this is through outreach, education and social gatherings.

To summarize, and allied to our survey on gender disparities, we believe the main problem might be that some people still do not acknowledge the existence of a problem; the existence of any disparity or segregation. That is why we wanted to make sure to promote PyLadies here. If you agree with us, help us spreading the word and share their website in all social media you have access to. This might help more than we think.

Brasil-USP team would like to publicly give a round of applauses to PyLadies!!