Abtract
Since the beginning of the 21st century different international organisations study the evolution of the gender gap in our society, analysing its causes and recommending actions to close it. Despite their efforts and despite the evidence of the economic benefits of closing this gap, we have not yet succeeded. This gap, also present in the academic world in the scientific community, affects research results in a much deeper way than we imagined and in practically all fields of knowledge. This have caused the Standford University and the European Commission to join forces in the “Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering” Project aimed at developing the gender dimension in research, integrating sex, gender and intersectional analysis into basic and applied research.
This talk explores different aspects of the gender bias effects in research at the present time.
Biography
María del Pilar López Sancho was born in Madrid (Spain). She is a Professor in the Department of Materials Theory and Simulation at the Materials Science Institute of Madrid, part of the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC). She graduated in Physics from the Complutense University of Madrid and obtained her PhD in the same institution for her study of the interactions between gases and metals in the context of the Physics of surfaces. After that, she moved to Imperial College London for her postdoctoral research on the electronic properties of metals and models of chemisorption. Since 1986, she has been a scientific collaborator of CSIC in the Institute of Science of Materials, in Madrid.
During her successful scientific career, she has worked at numerous distinguished research centres around the world, such as the Interdisciplinary Research Center in Superconductivity in Cambridge (UK), the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara (USA), the Max Planck Institut für Physik Complexer Systeme in Dresden (Germany), the International Center for Condensed Matter Physics in Brasilia (Brazil), and the Aspen Center for Physics (USA). She has more than eighty publications in high-impact factor journals.
Apart from her outstanding scientific work, Pilar has been actively involved in gender equality in Science. Pilar was part of the first Board of Directors of the Spanish Association of Female Researchers and Technologists (AMIT) in 2001, becoming its director between 2010 and 2013. AMIT provides a network for women scientists and promotes gender equality in science, specially raising awareness of the unequal opportunities of women in science. She has chaired both the Commission of Women and Science in CSIC and the Women in Science Group of the Spanish Royal Society of Physics. She has also been involved in the Commission of Equality in CSIC .
In December 2022, she was awarded the Emmy Noether distinction for Women in Science by the European Society of Physics ‘for her contributions to the understanding of the electronic structure of low-dimensional materials and in recognition of her continuous, tireless and successful actions for the empowerment of women in physics’.
X INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM SRUK/CERU 