Gender balance is not just a women’s problem, but an issue for everybody: Phaedria Marie St. Hilaire

Gender balance is not just a women’s problem or women’s issue, but an issue for everybody: Phaedria Marie St. Hilaire

Bias in its various forms needs to be overcome to ensure equitable representation of women at the highest levels of leadership and decision-making, Phaedria Marie St. Hilaire, co-founder of the Denmark-based Professional Women of Colour (ProWoc) and angel investor, has said.

“If you want gender balance, bias must be addressed,” Dr. St. Hilaire, who is CEO and chief consultant at Phaedria Marie Consulting, said, giving an invited talk on ‘Navigating careers in STEM from a gender equality perspective’ at the University of Kerala on Wednesday evening.

Bias is expressed in different forms; linked among others to affinity, age and gender. “So all of these might play unconsciously, and we have to overcome them if we want to have a more equitable distribution of women at the higher levels,” she said, underscoring the need for overcoming the bias in areas like recruiting and funding.

A PhD holder in Chemistry, Dr. St. Hilaire is in Thiruvananthapuram with her husband, the Nobel laureate Morten P. Meldal of Copenhagen University.

She said there is a need for more women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths). “If you look at engineering, computer science, and maths, you do have fewer women. I think it’s a bit of a danger not to have women in those spaces because engineering, computer science, and maths are the fields of the future. Of course chemistry will contribute, and biology will, but there’s a huge emphasis on machine learning and AI and data science, and data analytics. And you find that there are few women in these,” she said.

Citing data, she said women are under-represented in academia. She noted that only 35% of all higher education faculty globally are women. In US colleges and universities, women hold just 26% of full professorships. In India, only 22% of women in academia are full-time professors.

Similarly, there’s a higher proportion of women at the entry level in companies, but their representation declines the higher up one goes. In leadership where decisions are made there are fewer women. “How can you make solutions that are inclusive of everybody if you don’t have that representation?” she said.