Come on, girls: science is your vocation!
11 February is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
The increment of scientific knowledge and gender equality are essential for progress, including the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
In order to provide a full and equal access to an academic career for women of all ages, and ensure further achievement of gender equality and empowerment, back in 2015 the UN General Assembly declared to celebrate 11 February as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (resolution A/RES/70/212)
On this memorable occasion, the FAO Moscow Office interviewed Irina Donnik, Professor, Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician, PhD of Biological Sciences, and Maria Konyushkova, expert on sustainable soil management of the Global Soil Partnership (FAO), senior researcher at the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
According to the UN data, women account only for 12 percent of all members of national science academies. Describing the situation in Russia, Irina Donnik cites the following figures: “The role of women in Russian science is significant. Women scientists make up 40 percent of our scientific community. In agricultural science, among the full-fledged members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), there are 5.5 percent of women academicians, and about 10 percent of women are RAS corresponding members.”
“It seems to me that it is specifically in the agricultural science in Russia that women predominate. Despite the sometimes difficult living conditions during field research, women have a manifest need to work on land, to participate with gusto in laboratory and field soil research,” shares her thoughts Maria Konyushkova.
Over the past decades, the global society has made significant strides in ensuring women’s inclusion. However, women and girls are still often excluded from participating on a wider scale in scientific work. Solving such household issues as ensuring places in nurseries and kindergartens, as well as flexible work schedules will help ensure a more relevant access for women to scientific activities in Russia, Irina Donnik believes. Maria Konyushkova shares this opinion and adds, “The biggest difficulty that I have not overcome so far is the constant search for a balance between work and children.”
According to Irina Donnik, women are best represented in Russia in medical, historical and philological sciences. In such cutting-edge fields as artificial intelligence, only one in five specialists (22 percent) are women. An example of a woman scientist to academician Irina Donnik is a prominent Russian neurophysiologist academician Natalia Petrovna Bekhtereva, a prominent scholar in neurophysiology.
“My path of becoming a scientist, a specialist has been greatly influenced by the supervisor of my thesis paper, Yevgenia Ivanovna Pankova, Doctor of Agricultural Sciences at the Dokuchaev Soil Science Institute, – recalls Maria Konyushkova. – I learned a lot about working with international organizations from Gulchehra Murshidovna Khasankhanova from Tashkent. She was the Chairperson of the FAO Eurasian Soil Partnership (ESP) and we were in regular contact on our work when I was employed by the ESP Secretariat.”
“Determination, the desire to achieve results, and to be able to spend off-work time on scientific research” are an integral part of a girl’s and a woman’s work on building a successful career in science, notes Irina Donnik.
Maria Konyushkova places emphasis on interest in science and sincere curiosity about the processes and mechanisms of what is happening around us. “Among professional qualities, good knowledge of foreign languages, particularly English, the skill of working with computer programmes processing large amounts of data, the ability to adapt to new conditions and requirements, the competence of writing texts in a proper academic style are of high importance these days. And the main skill is to never give up, have a positive attitude to criticism, work on mistakes and be easy-going about the work already done, without any piety. You finish one thing, and then you move to the next one,” she concluded.
Short biographical profiles:
Irina Mikhailovna Donnik, Doctor of Biological Sciences (1997), Professor (1998), Member of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences (2010), Russian Academy of Sciences (2013), Vice-President of RAS since 2017. She has authored over 650 scientific papers, including 40 monographs, 20 textbooks and has more than 80 patents for inventions.
Maria Valeryevna Konyushkova, PhD of Agricultural Science (2010), Soil Scientist. She graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University, Department of Soil Science (2003). She started her scientific career at the Dokuchaev Soil Science Institute. From 2012 to 2019 she worked as an expert soil scientist at the Eurasian Centre for Food Security at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Since 2021, she has been a consultant at FAO (Rome) on sustainable soil management. She has carried out field research in southern Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, and Iran. She is the author of over 200 publications, about 40 of which are included in journals indexed in Web of Science / Scopus.
#WomeninScience
____________________________
The views expressed in this information product are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).