WOMEN in SCIENCE – The Difficulty of Finding Female Talents

Is this another article about the lack of women in management positions? Maybe this is an engaged complaint about missing childcare places and employer flexibility? Will it result in continued requests for quotas? Well, most readers already know the approximate content of such a contribution. This gives me an opportunity to instead express some thoughts originating from my own, personal experience. And as this article is clearly an „opinion piece“, let me start with a fundamental, yet controversial statement: Women ARE different!

It is needless to determine where those differences come from. Whether a female human is dominantly influenced by her genetic imprint, by differences in her early childhood education, or environmental insinuation; it is a fact that average girls behave differently than boys, even today, in the „time of equal opportunities“.

Consequently, our society must address these differences to provide fair conditions for both genders.

Recently, DW-TV reported as a headline that the Telecom Company wants to fill a third of their management positions with women within the next five years. While the story unfolded on TV I couldn’t help wondering how that company would try to accomplish this goal and find enough qualified women when they were clearly unsuccessful in this area in the past. Unfortunately, no details were given with regard to the company’s change in future appointment procedures. It is widely recognized nowadays that women are needed in all professions. However, how to get them into leading positions remains an open question.

Political initiatives to provide better „background conditions“ for working women through improved daycare systems and more flexible shopping hours are certainly helpful. In some countries, an employment quota for women proved to be successful, too. Having this „framework“ in place does facilitate a woman’s choice to pursue her career into a leading position. Yet, the main obstacle remains: women simply do not advertise their own talents as aggressively as men do, and, consequently, they are not as often as passionately supported as their male counterparts. Female talents have to be discovered and coached to learn management skills as well as „to sell themselves“.

However, finding that particular talented young woman and actively assisting her in the development of her potentially outstanding career is not often dominant in the minds of parents, partners, teachers, professors, supervisors, and managers. If we want to permanently increase the number of women in top business positions, we all have to change our attitude towards those female talents and become personally involved.

I would like to end with a variation of Martin Wagenschein’s words: „If we step out of our everyday’s hectic life and provide our girls with time and trust, we will see them perform in astonishing ways!“ It is up to all of us to pave the way for more future female business careers.

With greetings from Berkeley,
Petra Specht, Dr.rer.nat.
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Ähnliche Inhalte