Ada Lovelace Day’s founder, Suw Charman-Anderson, has been invited to be a member of the judging panel for a new award that recognises excellent in science research by women around the world.

Nature Research and The Estée Lauder Companies have launched two global awards today that seek to put a spotlight on both exceptional achievements of female scientists and those working to promote greater inclusiveness.

The inaugural Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Science and for Innovating Science, in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies, will recognise inspirational early-career female researchers and those who have worked to champion women and girls’ participation in science.

The Inspiring Science Award, for which Suw will be a judge, honours female scientists who have excelled in scientific discovery and have completed their PhD within the last ten years. The Innovating Science Award recognises an individual or an organisation that has led a grassroots initiative to support increased access to, or interest in, STEM subjects for girls and women around the globe.

Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications and judging panel member, said: “Given the inspirational advocacy for gender equality across society we’ve recently seen, it’s more important than ever that we do more to recognise and support the achievements of women in science, and that we encourage girls and women to engage with STEM subjects and pursue scientific careers. These awards will give a global platform to some of these women who may otherwise go unheralded, as well as celebrate the efforts of the leaders – women and men – behind initiatives supporting greater equality in the sciences.

“As Nature Research we are in a unique position to champion the achievements of researchers, and we have a responsibility to drive positive change in the research community. Our journals are committed to supporting gender equality, and we hope that through our connections with the research community we can identify some outstanding individuals deserving of these awards and use our international reach to share their stories.”

Suw said: “The importance of female role models in science cannot be overstated – girls and young women need to see that success is possible for people like them. The Inspiring Science Award will not just recognise excellence amongst women in research – it will also serve to create new role models to encourage girls and young women to consider a career in science.

“Ada Lovelace Day highlights the achievements of women in STEM, so I am delighted to be supporting these awards which will improve the visibility of women in science from around the world. An award that takes a global view and looks for nominees of all backgrounds is long overdue. Equality is not a ‘nice to have’ anymore, it is a ‘must have’, because diverse teams produce better results.”

Lisa Napolione, Senior Vice President, Global R&D, The Estée Lauder Companies and judging panel member said, “As a Company founded by a pioneering woman, supporting other women pioneers is at the core of who we are. We are thrilled to partner on these inaugural awards with Nature Research, an organisation that shares our values focusing on exceptional science and extraordinary scientists.

“We are so proud that more than half of our scientists and engineers in our global R&D teams are women. These scientists have revolutionised research in the beauty industry in a wide range of areas including cellular repair, circadian rhythm and epigenetics in skin. As we look to the future, ensuring a deep bench of research expertise among the next generation in emerging scientific areas is critical. We know first-hand that mentoring, and specifically mentoring of young women, is a strong contributor to long-term success, so we have built a scientific mentoring program into the Nature Research Awards. Our goal is to connect award recipients to scientific experts in their fields who have the unique skill set required to support and accelerate the awardee’s research progress.”

The winners of the awards will be announced in October. Both winners will receive up to $10,000 to spend on initiatives linked to the award and free training from Nature Masterclasses. The Inspiring Science Award winner will also receive grants of up to $5,200 to support open access publication of their research in a Springer Nature journal, and the Innovating Science Award winner will receive up to $5,200 to support events related to their initiative.

Nominations for the awards opened on April 9 and will close on June 11 2018. A longlist of ten nominees for each award will be announced on July 24, and a shortlist of five will be announced on September 4. Full details of the awards’ criteria and nomination processes are available at nature.com/researchawards.

Inspiring Science Award

The Inspiring Science Award welcomes nominations of exceptional female scientists and who are within ten years of completing their PhD. We encourage nominations from around the globe and from all subject areas. Candidates should be nominated by laboratory heads, department heads or someone else from their institute. This award is based on academic achievement, but our independent judging process and panel will ensure that those working in adverse circumstances or in regions where there is limited access to the scientific literature will not be unfairly disadvantaged. 

Innovating Science Award

The Innovating Science Award is open to anyone (individuals and groups) working on projects or initiatives that encourage girls or young women to become more aware of, or engaged in, any STEM subject in any region around the world. Nominations can be made directly by the candidate(s).

With news of the UK’s gender pay gap hitting the headlines, companies across the country are looking closely at how they treat women in the workforce. HR practices are, or should be, coming under scrutiny so that the right changes can be made to ensure that women are treated and paid fairly.

The UK’s Equality Act 2010 provides a legal framework within which businesses must work, but it does not and cannot cover the societal, cultural and psychological factors which influence how women are treated. Indeed, our understanding of these factors is still developing, and so the solutions we need to put in place are constantly evolving. For example, studies have shown that implicit bias training can backfire, making people believe that, because they’ve had training to reduce their unconscious biases, nothing they do going forward could be biased, which then leads to more biased behaviour.

Rather than prioritising an attempt to alter people’s subconscious attitudes, which at best is a long-term challenge, it is easier and more productive to begin by altering business processes and standards, to ‘bake in’ fairness and awareness. Changing behaviours in this way is also more long-lasting — staff come and go, and new staff need training, but good business processes persist regardless of staff turnover.

There are many places where an examination of business practices can yield results, but our recent work on our online jobs fair for women in STEM has revealed that there are a number of relatively simple ways to significantly improve recruitment, retention and promotion of women. From changing the language and imagery used in job ads and marketing, to enacting flexible and fractional working, to restructuring promotion pipelines, small changes add up to big effects.

If you would like help assessing your existing marketing materials and internal HR processes, then you can now engage Ada Lovelace Day founder, Suw Charman-Anderson to work remotely or in person. If you’d like to know more, just drop us a line.   

We are delighted to see several women in STEM getting recognition in the 2018 New Year Honours List for their dedication and achievements.

Credit: Anne-Katrin Purkiss

Helen Sharman OBE was made Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, Professor Pratibha Laxman Gai was made a Dame for services to chemical sciences and technology, and CBEs were awarded to Professor Caroline Dive, deputy director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, statistical epidemiologist Christl Donnelly, and engineer Professor Karen Holford, deputy vice chancellor of Cardiff University.

However, only 3 per cent of the awards went to science and technology recipients, and by our count, less than half of those went to women. Engineering was particularly poorly represented, and no one was honoured specifically for services to mathematics.

Since we know that there are plenty of excellent women doing fantastic work in STEM, we want to encourage you to nominate more women for future honours.

Credit: Intel Free Press/Isabelle Saldana

Honours are awarded to people who have made “life better for other people” or are “outstanding at what they do”. This cover activities and achievements like volunteering, making a difference to a community or area of work, innovation and improving lives for others. As well as detailing the reasons for your nomination, you should include all relevant work and volunteering they do, as well as awards they’ve received.

The Cabinet Office has helpfully provided a guide on how to write a nomination, with suggestions on the sorts of words and phrases that can help, as well as persuasive example paragraphs from previous nominations. Additionally, you should submit two supporting letters by people who know the nominee personally.

The application can include various types of evidence, such as articles about their work and photographs, to support your nomination. It can be completed online or you can print off a form and post it to them. Do note that the process differs if the person nominated lives or works outside of the UK.

There are no deadlines for submitting a nomination for an honour, but expect the process to take 12-18 months, due to the work required in considering and assessing each application. Additionally, the committee chooses the honour, so you cannot nominate for a particular award.

We hope that this inspires you to think about the women you know and put them forward for an honour!

The Finding Ada Online Careers for Women in STEM is a fabulous opportunity for employers and recruiters to talk to candidates from across the UK about graduate, early careers and returnship positions.

With the support of nearly 20 universities, including the UK’s biggest, the Open University, alongside three out of the four oldest – Oxford, St Andrews and Glasgow – employers will have access to candidates from the length and breadth of the country. We’re also recruiting early career and returning candidates from our extensive online community, and via partner organisations such as The IET.

This is the first online careers fair for women in STEM in the UK, and employers should get in early to make sure you reach this much sought after pool of the best and brightest candidates.

How does an online careers fair work?

Rather like an in-person careers fair, the event runs over a single day, from 9am until 5pm on Thursday, 1 February 2018. Candidates will request a conversation with the employers that interest them, and the system will match you up when both your recruiter and the candidate are free.

Conversations are video by default, but can be audio or text if the candidate doesn’t have enough bandwidth. You will then be able to follow up with the candidate if you want to take the conversation further.

If you want to take a look before you commit, there will be a free webinar hosted by GoIntro’s Jess Menzies to introduce the tool on Friday 27 October from 3pm to 3.30pm.

The webinar will be held using BlueJeans, which you can use either via their app or directly in your browser. To use the app, visit bluejeans.com and click “Get The BlueJeans App” at the top right of the screen. To use your browser, follow these instructions.

To join the webinar, visit https://bluejeans.com/640612605 at 3pm on 27 Oct.

Be a part of our fair

All employers and recruiters who hire a booth get 3 seats and unlimited job listings as standard, priced very competitively. As the fair is online, it is significantly cheaper than an in-person fair, with no costs for travel, hotel, or printed materials. And as you can engage with the fair from your desk, you have huge flexibility to multitask.

The online fair also allows you to talk to candidates from across the UK, all in one day, giving you a far broader reach than any in-person fair could possibly achieve! And because we’re targeting grads at bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels, as well as early career job hunters and returners, you can list a far broader variety of jobs than fairs that only focus on bachelor’s graduates.

If you would like to participate in our online careers fair, email Suw Charman-Anderson now for more information.

Take a look now!

You can visit our careers fair website now, and you can see how it works in the animation below.

Our friends Digital People in Peterborough (DPiP), in partnership with Allia Future Business Centre, are once again running Peterborough STEM Festival for 2017. The event is an opportunity to promote digital careers and science, technology, engineering and maths to young people.

Inspired by Ada Lovelace Day, they would like to particularly encourage those less represented in STEM, like girls, women and other social community groups. It is both family-oriented and free to attend.

The festival itself incorporates both a school’s day on Friday 29 September 2017, for STEM workshops and challenges, and a festival on Sunday 1 October, with demonstrations, activities and talks from STEM professionals.

Peterborough STEM Festival is dependent entirely on sponsors and volunteers, and they are looking for companies and businesses, particularly those in the Peterborough and Cambridgeshire area to help them with funding. It would be a great way to contribute to the local community, and they have a range of sponsorship packages available.