Glass ceilings remain in place for women working in battery research, and become harder to break through the more women progress in their careers, an online event was told. ‘Women in Battery Research – Pioneering Innovation and Equality’ brought together leading European women scientists in February. Andrew Draper reports.
There is generally greater female representation in battery research than in previous generations, but the most senior positions are harder to attain, the meeting heard. Women typically get smaller research grants than their male colleagues, their work is underrepresented in high profile journals and they are often passed over for promotion.
Role models are important
Female role models are important, many of the participants said. Several speakers noted that school children remain firmly rooted in gender stereotyping with boys attracted to science and engineering and girls humanities and the arts.
The event, in February, was organised by the Gender Equality Committee at Greece’s Hellenic Mediterranean University (HMU) to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Opening the session, Dr. Dimitra Vernardou, Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at HMU, said gender equality is central to the achievement of the United Nations 2030 agenda for sustainable development, adopted by UN member states in 2015. Gender equality and empowerment of women and girls is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Prof. Silvia Bodoardo of the Department of Applied Science and Technology at Italy’s Politecnico di Torino, said the inside of a battery cell has a lot of different components – from current collector to active materials, electrolyte and so on. “So any cell is a complex system, but batteries can be tailored depending on the application. So diversity is somehow already in the field of batteries,” she said.
Bodoardo’s work focuses on battery materials and she believes innovation is key. She started an electrochemistry group in 2015. Her university consists of engineers and architects only. She said the proportion of women decreases strongly the further they progress from entry level to full professor.
She said: “And this does not depend really on the performance… but it’s something that is like the glass ceiling that we have really to break to go further.
Bodoardo said in 2022, 40% of 2022 direct calls were assigned to female science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professors. She said there is a need to be in contact with young women to involve them in the world of batteries and engineering generally.
A recruitment project targeted at young women resulted in a 15% increase of women students at the university. They make up 27%, still less than the 35% KPI target. WeAreHERe is a network of women at Politecnico (students, technicians and lecturers) who promote the enrolment of girls in engineering programmes.
Worried about their daughter’s prospects
Kristina Edström, professor of inorganic chemistry at Uppsala University is coordinator of the EU’s Battery 2030+ research initiative and leads the Ångström Advanced Battery Centre at Uppsala, the largest battery research group in the Nordic region.
“I’ve been in battery research for a long time,” she said. She did her PhD in 1990 on solid electrolyte in sodium sulfur batteries. “And so I’ve seen many phases of batteries when batteries have been extremely boring and it has been very difficult to get funding…for me, it has been so obvious that I’m here because I love science.”
Ångström Advanced Battery Centre is a big group of around 100, including three professors, several associate professors and assistant professors. Edström found letters from her parents to their friends, saying how worried they were about their daughter’s prospects. Both parents were senior academics.
“They were so worried that I would choose when I was 15 to go to upper secondary school to study natural sciences. They thought it was so tough, and it’s so male dominated. Should I really do that? Are you really this type, you know, you are a bit sensitive.”
But she fell in love with science as a young child in the 1960s, especially after visiting the Science Museum in London. “It had enormous impact on me,” she said.
Edström said there was a lack of female role models for young women, but her chemistry teacher (now 87 and still in contact) was an important inspiration.
Ten years ago, there was a pilot trial in the teacher training faculty for science/engineering graduates to train the trainers and funding was secured for mainly female students wanting to teach 6–12 year-olds. But then the money started to run out and the instigators moved on and it ended.
“So that was really how you can try to use your influence as a person – that has nothing to do with women. You can do that if you are a man as well. But I think it was a group of women that were afraid of natural sciences, and they are the ones that are teaching our kids… I have worked for more than 50 years to try to get kids interested in science and technology, and we are still talking about it. We still need more of this.”
Believe in yourself
Reactions to pregnant scientists have moved on since her time as an expecting mum-to-be. Men taking paternity leave also shares the load. But she remembers her mother’s voice urging her to have more self-confidence and belief in herself.
“And I feel that that’s something I’ve had to say and tell a number of times to a number of my PhD students to really make them understand that they should trust the data they collect. They should trust their scientific results, that they actually are smart. I have done it one third of the time with my male PhD students, but almost always with my female ones.”
She said more female students are going on to do science PhDs and post-doctoral study, and the male-female balance is 50-50. She calls this “the enrichment phase” on the route to becoming a professor, which for women takes on average two years longer than for men, she added.
She called on industry to demonstrate to children that women can get good STEM jobs and this would also help attract women and girls into science.
Gender perspective and equality strategy
Dr. Zoraida Gonzalez from the Carbon Science and Technology Institute in Spain said there is an even balance in the numbers of men and women working at the institute. Women outnumber men in technician and service roles, however.
The governing bodies have a woman as president, and are highly involved including a gender perspective and implementation of an equality strategy.
Every year, a campaign runs to encourage women around the 11 February International Day of Women and Girls in Science date. Staff visit educational centres to give student talks, including to young women who could be interested in science.
The centre offers mentoring to young women researchers to help them into early-career networks. Scholarships are also available to university students and this has resulted in young women taking positions in redox flow battery research.
One-of-a-kind electrochemist
Prof. Tanja Kallio of Aalto University recounted how her family, in the 1990s, had also cast doubt on whether a female could manage at a technological university. Her love of science and encouragement by a professor propelled her on, despite the criticism of others.
After a lithium battery factory was established in Finland, Kallio was approached.
“So they came to actually to talk to me. They said that you are actually the only electrochemist doing material science related to electrochemical applications in Finland. We want you to also start investigating lithium-ion batteries,” she said.
She continues to collaborate with European industry on a range of battery types. She became an associate professor in 2015 and has an interest in interest in developing artificial interfaces for cathode materials, which enables an increase in the lifetime of factories.
At her university, some 25% of the professors overall are female. But in chemical engineering they are fewer, with 20% of the total. That balance has remained unchanged for a decade even though they have been working to get more female professors in, she said. At post-doctoral research level, the male-female balance is roughly equal, she said.
Seeing yourself in others
Prof. Julia Maibach from the division of materials physics at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology focuses on energy conversion storage materials, especially in terms of materials interaction phenomena and using photoelectron spectroscopy.
She teaches a course about large-scale facilities, and organised a study tour to one with 160-metre beamlines stretching into the next building. “And this is what I love about my job and what I want to pursue for as long as I can. To really share this passion and ignite this in the next generation of scientists.”
Eight of 10 students in her study group are women. She is keen to inspire future scientists and so asks her students to write up research in a way high school students can understand, in a journal called Frontiers for Young Minds. The pupils report back if they do not understand and the text is rewritten. A recent project has been describing lithium metal growth in batteries by talking about parking cars in available spaces.
Maibach had children relatively late in her career. She has encountered female role models such as Prof. Edström who actually also seemingly effortlessly combined academic career and family life. “Now, I know that I’m a mother myself, it’s not effortless, but they made it seem like this. And that is great that we have these support systems.”
The Department of Physics at Chalmers might be one of the least gender balanced departments she is working at. There is 50-50 balance at post-doctoral and PhD levels but at faculty level there is just one female professor. She referred to a role model statue on campus, ‘seeing yourself in others’. “The role model aspect I guess is really important. It certainly was for me.”
She said there is a project at Chalmers called Genie, the Gender Initiative for Excellence. It has three main goals:
- to increase the proportion of female faculty
- remove structural and cultural obstacles to women’s careers
- create a working environment that is diverse, inclusive, supportive, and excellent in research and teaching.
Genie has run for five years and has a budget of roughly €30 million ($32 million). When there are two top candidates for a position and one is from the underrepresented gender, Genie enables funds to hire both, Maibach said. “The goal for me, it’s not about just pushing females, but it is about both genders being well represented. It is about diversity and equality.”
Gender diversity in recruitment
Dr. Nathalie Marinaki is Head of Labs at Greece’s Sunlight Group. She said there are 22 women in manager positions there, a “very good number” for Greece and Europe. She believes women do well until career breaks around age 30 to have children. Social biases and cultural stereotyping are also a hindrance to progress. She said there has been a general increase in women in STEM positions.
She said Sunlight prioritises gender diversity in its recruitment efforts. “And it’s an environment in which I feel great and believe I could thrive.”
Dr. Marja Vilkman of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland works with new polymer materials for batteries for EVs and stationary energy storage. She told the session about the importance of a supportive environment. She referred to a “super supportive” professor while she was doing her doctorate in a group consisting of many mothers with babies.
“I remember that once he said something like, okay, it seems that this year we will have more babies than papers in our group. And it was in a very positive way, and it was even celebrated.”
Imposter syndrome and belonging
But women can have a tendency to feel an imposter syndrome and that they do not really deserve their positions, she said. “So I think one of the main things that we should do is indeed increase this sense of belonging,” she said. “And this is something that we can do by having role models and events like this and being visible and showing that you belong in this field.
Vilkman concluded: “We are on a good path, but the world is not yet perfectly equal. Let’s increase the sense of belonging of all genders in technical research fields!”
