The biases in scientific publishing during the pandemic damaged women’s visibility, recognition, and career advancement, reports Jocalyn Clark. Before covid-19, Reshma Jagsi had a thriving clinical and research career. As a full time physician and deputy department chair of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan, USA, she was ascending the leadership ladder before the world around her went into lockdown. “Everything was an emergency, and [all my colleagues were] working around the clock out of a sense of need, because the house was on fire,” she says. It felt as though “I was drowning. On top of the acute emergency of helping sick patients, Jagsi was developing rapid treatment guidelines for covid-19 and reorganising research efforts for colleagues - while caring for her elderly mother and tutoring two schoolchildren. Other colleagues with younger children experienced high levels of anxiety, their careers completely sidelined by the pandemic. She says, “During an emergency, it didn’t matter how urgent the need was and how great your expertise was: if you’ve got a toddler who needs your attention and you can’t rely on your parents or your neighbours or day care, what else are you going to do?” When laboratories, operating rooms, and clinical trial sites worldwide closed because of national lockdowns, millions of people working in science found an opportunity to write, driven by a desire to help as well as the need to recover losses or to stay relevant and maintain publication records - the chief currency in research careers. Clinicians and academics were eager to secure authorships. But the covid-19 publishing game had by no means an equal playing field. Of the three million submissions to major health and medical journals in the first half of 2020, just 36% were from women. This gender gap applied to research and non-research articles, across all authorship positions, in both top tier and lower impact journals, and was especially pronounced among younger cohorts of female authors beginning their careers.

The Nobel Prize can be as controversial as it is prestigious. There is a long history of women going unrecognized, especially in the field of physics. Many female scientists icluding Chien-Shiung Wu, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Emmy Noether, Lise Meitner and Vera Rubin have made ground-breaking contributions that should have won them a Nobel Prize, but they never became laureates. Since 1901, of the 219 Nobel Prize winners in physics, only 4 were women. The following is a list of at those five women who deserved to win the Nobel Prize but did not receive the top honor. Instead, the prize was either awarded to their male colleagues, advisor or not considered at all.

Julia Martin is the Director of Field Marketing for Avanade. She has spent over 20 years working with large technology services organizations to deliver best-in-class marketing programs that drive go-to-market strategies and transform the customer experience. Outside of work, Julia has a passion for home design and interiors and puts that passion to work for a local organization that transforms the spaces of the formerly homeless by reclaiming and re-purposing gently used household items and furniture to create a “Home.” She lives in Chicago with her husband and three children.

The crew consists of NASA Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. These four astronauts will fly around the Moon and back aboard the first crewed Artemis mission, scheduled to launch in 2024. Artemis II is NASA’s first mission with crew aboard our foundational deep space rocket, the Space Launch System, and Orion spacecraft and will confirm all the spacecraft’s systems operate as designed with crew aboard in the actual environment of deep space. The mission will pave the way to way for lunar surface missions, including by the first woman and first person of color, establishing long-term lunar science and exploration capabilities, and inspire the next generation of explorers - The Artemis Generation.

Shortly after coming home from the International Space Station, NASA's Nicole Mann talked about how she is trying to bring others into the field by sharing her journey. The commander of SpaceX Crew-5 had a "hair situation" on the orbiting complex, she shared during a livestreamed press conference on March 15. Her crewmates could trail Mann via long hair strands accidentally stuck on International Space Station Velcro to where she was working on science in the orbital lab. Mann hadn't grown up expecting to be in space, let alone deal with such microgravity inconveniences, she shared with Space.com. The U.S. Marine aviator was the first Native American woman to leave Earth; Mann is a member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in northern California. But after Mann's decades of hard work (and a little luck) got her to the ISS, she went on to spend hours in space talking about her journey from test pilot to space commander with students (including Native American students) around the world.

After debunking many myths around male and female brains, Gina Rippon’s research interests now include gender gaps in science and why they persist, even in allegedly gender-equal societies. Gina Rippon was a paid-up member of the “male-female brain brigade” earlier in her career as a cognitive neuroscientist, but changed tack, she says, after discovering there was not a lot of sound research behind the well-established belief that male and female brains are biologically different. In the fourth episode of this podcast series Tales from the Synapse, Rippon explores the role of social conditioning to explain why boys and girls might respond differently to pink and blue objects, why girls aged nine describe maths “as a boy thing,” and why the same girls shun games that are aimed at children “who are really, really smart.” Rippon, Professor Emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University in Birmingham, UK and author of the 2019 book The Gendered Brain , is also interested in why women continue to be under-represented in science even in countries that purport to be gender-equal. Her forthcoming second book investigates why girls and women on the autism spectrum have historically been overlooked. Viewing the condition through a gendered lens hampers our understanding of it, she argues.

JSI is a member of the Athena project consortium fort he implementation of gender equality plans in research organisations. This project has received fuding from European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. The third issue of the Athena project newsletter is now available, which provides information on the events and activities JSI and our project partners have carried out over the past months.

A SWE Global Affiliate is a community of women engineers outside of the United States who wish to expand SWE’s mission. Global Affiliates are local networks that aim to meet the needs of women engineers in their community to help their advancement – whether through organizing professional development events, hosting outreach activities, connecting women with career opportunities, or other activities unique to their area. SWE Global Affiliates may be formed by university students on their campus or by professionals within a geographic area (city, region, or province). Global Affiliates may be made up of SWE members and non-members, and their status as an affiliate allows the group to use the name of the Society for group functions. Once formed, Global Affiliates renew their status and report new leaders annually.

An important part of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in science is helping to ensure that life events and situations don’t disproportionately affect an individual’s ability to build a successful research career. Unfortunately, a promising scientist’s career path may at times be interrupted by life events such as pregnancy, childbirth, adoption, serious illness, or family caregiving responsibilities. NIH understands that providing support for researchers during critical life events advances a more diverse and creative workforce.The good news is that the NIH Research Continuity and Retention Supplements program is available to help early-career investigators during these crucial life junctures. Two Program Director/Principal Investigator categories are eligible for the continuity and retention supplements program: Mentored career development (K) awardees and First-time recipients of research project grants. The supplemental funding provides flexible support within the scope of the parent project. Funds may be used for additional personnel, computational services, supplies and equipment, or other resources needed to sustain the investigator’s research.

Nora Sun is on a mission to boost girls' access to STEM studies and careers. When Nora Sun was a child, her grandfather created bedtime stories for her about what they called "two galaxy-hopping astronauts." The stories about White Cap and Green Cap - inspired by two Lego figures she played with, one with a white cap, the other a green cap - led Sun to dream of being an astronaut when she grew up. "I relinquished the dream after I discovered that being an astronaut required intense physical training. I am very unathletic," Sun, now 17 and a high school senior, said. But her childhood love for all things science stuck. She lives part-time in Jacksonville with her mother, Yujie Zhao, but attends high school in Chicago where she lives with grandfather Baozheng Zhaoshe and has already made a name for herself as an aspiring research scientist.