Research investment must benefit women too

European spending on research and innovation should benefit women and men equally, Elizabeth Pollitzer, director of Portia, an organization promoting gender equality in science, writes in a letter to the Financial Times this week.

Pollitzer points out that in this week’s open letter urging EU leaders to protect funding for research and innovation, only three of the 47 Nobel laureates and Fields medal winners who signed the letter were women. She said: “This imbalance is indicative of the unequal way that past investment in science has benefited women and men. Only at PhD level has parity between women and men been achieved so far.”