The sparrow population is declining around the world. While they still appear in rural areas, you almost don't see them in cities any more.
So, why should I care, it's an invasive species anyhow? Well, because biodiversity measures environmental health. If cities around the world get to the point where sparrows find it hard to surrvive, it means the environment is very unhealthy, i.e., we have a problem. Now, dragging sparrows to cities from other areas will not solve our problem. They have left for a reason. Research published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found that a combination of poor diet and air pollution induced physical stress on house sparrows, leading to reduced reproductive success. Cities now lack both the spilled grain and natural seeds (we cut our grass often), and use poison to destroy unwanted vegetation and to kill bugs and other pests. This leads to starvation of the sparrow chicks and often to the poisoning and starvation of sparrows themselves.
Women are sometimes compared to sparrows, and it's not complimentary. I am, however, going to try to make this parallel useful. I will compare the sparrow decline and the decline of the number of women in science (and at the top of most fields). The number of women in science is very low as is the number of women in leadership positions. It decreased during the pandemic. Just like with the sparrows, the lack of women in science (and in leadership in general) is a sign of a problem. Diversity is a measure of the health of the environment, whether we are dealing with birds or humans. Women are half of the population. If the environment is healthy, it will contain sparrows. You will all agree it does not make sense to drag one or two sparrows to the middle of the city and claim to solve the sparrow decline. Well, similarly, hiring one or two women does not solve the lack of women in science problem. Neither does building huge committees, subpackages and subgroups to evaluate every hire. A change in the environment is required. This type of change improves the situation for everyone. Then if the environment is healthy, there will be women.
I once asked the leader of a project with many sub-packages in Zurich that aimed to help women stay in science for help when I did not receive maternity leave after the birth of my second child and had to quit science. I found out that the right exists only if the child is born within six weeks of the end of the contract (note that every country has its own set of rules; this is/was true for Switzerland). If James had been born on his due date or before that he would have had that right. However, James chose to be a week late, which was 7 days too late to have any rights. Then I asked the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the director of the Equality Section answered personally and told me she quit science because she had two children herself. I also asked the rector and pro-rector, social security office, etc and all of them assured me I had no right to maternity leave because my contract would have ended anyhow, which was true.
The university was quite aggressive in stating I had no right to maternity leave, and made me feel guilty instead of trying to change the system. They wrote I travelled in the summer and that I was paid. They said I actually quit earlier, and stated that I should be grateful they paid me as long as they did. I went to the US and gave a number of technical seminars, which were reimbursed, when I was 7 months pregnant with James. I also went to Romania before that so that I could leave my children with my mom. It was my last chance to give talks and be paid, and I took it. They wrote I should have staid unpaid in Switzerland after giving birth and not go to the US or Romania before that. I had the right to stay, but it would have used all my savings. They also said that while I told the institute/department I was pregnant, I did not report directly to human resouces and the department is under no oblitation to do so. In fact, for this reason most pregnancies of students and staff go unreported. Human resources did say that if they had known early enough they would have tried to work some special arrangement around the university rules and perhaps find a way to provide some maternity leave (my postdoctoral advisor at the time said nothing can be done because grants don't come with provisions for materinity leave, which is correct). My position had been for 5 years, and the rule in Switzerland is that if they extended it for any amount of time, they would have had to make it permanent, and then fire me with a 1 month old baby or something like that, which would have also made them look bad.
Oh, and there was no child care unless one registered in advance for more than a year. Again, the building I worked in had never seen a woman in a temporary position with children before me, and nothing changed with me or after me. I was able to work with my first child because my mother quit her job as a doctor to help. She is an outsdanding doctor who has saved more lives than she can count. So, she sacrificed her career and stopped saving lives to help me, but when my father's health was declining, she wanted to go back.
I even talked to some members of the press. One journalist thought about my story for three weeks, and then called me to tell me it was a non-story. I then got together with three other talented collegues, and wrote a technical article on women in scicence. I talked to a sociologist colleague at Portsmouth (they have the Athena Swan program) to try to get it published in one of their journals to get their attention. She said she was unaware things were that bad, read the paper, thought about it for six months and than said she had no time and passed me to another colleague, who thought about it for a year, then passed me to yet another person (who was finishing her thesis and clearly had no time). The last person said it can be at most a series of blog posts, which Christine (one of the co-authors) had suggested we do from the beginning. I was very tired of trying anything else at this point, and my formerly enthusiastic co-authors had lost interest. I tried to accept that what I wrote or said was clearly not going to change anything, and I moved on or thought I did. Just like with climate change everyone knows there is a problem, but nobody is willing to help in a way that actually makes a difference. And the higher one goes (rector, pro-rector, etc) the less they care -- postdocs and students are like insects for them. They want to keep their positions and be comfortable, they don't want to make changes that last. It does not matter how many insects they step on.
For sparrows, one of the problems is the lack of nesting spaces. You have shinny buildings and not enough trees. For women, making sure the women on your staff and your students have the right to maternity leave (and paternity leave) is a good first step for any university and for any company. All grants should have that (and not just fancy grants with a name). If an employee gives births, funds should be received for maternity leave. If the grant does not come with that, the university should ensure maternity leave. There should childcare on campus. Also, if a conference is organized, there should be child care so that parents can come with their children. It is not asking for the moon. It's simply asking for basic human rights. There should also be provisions in case of illness. Many scientists are not in their home country, and will not have the same rights as citizens. Particularly with mental health becoming more of a problem, universities should think about these issues and propose solutions that work.
In 2017, MIT succeeded in reaching 50% women (up from 13%) in Mechanical Engineering after modernizing their courses and their recruiting . Unfortunately, the experiment was not repeated at other universities around the world, or even in MIT's other departments. It, however, shows that the gap can be closed, but there is no willingness to do so. Just like with the fight for the environment: we play make believe games and give them fancy names. We don't try to solve problems. We pretend we do.
Why so few? Well, the females of most species have the desire to survive. This is why they take themselves out of toxic environments. All the males are not necessary. So, they are more likely to risk their lives and sanity and to lose it. It does not make the environment good or the men in it superior. I have three boys. I'd like them to be happy, and to do what they love while staying sane. Note that humans have managed to bypass this natural bias for survival and built toxic environments that have more women then men. In that sense one might call what's happening in science less toxic than the low number of men in some fields because it's a natural inclination, e.g., sociology, the fashion world, etc have many women, but seem way more toxic than the hard sciences to me.
I have always been shy. It has been difficult (and still is) to talk to strangers, to ask questions, and to speak in front of audiences. One way of coping with this is to imagine your audience as various animals (it also makes me laugh at random times when somebody is talking to me and I should not laugh). I sometimes imagine mine as horses with blinders on. Each looks at a wall. Some have very deep vision and understanding. So, they look at all the bumps and valleys on the wall in front of them and can understand them very well. Then they complain that the day only has 24 hours, and they have no time to look at parts of the wall that is not straight ahead of them. This lack of time is very common, and I understand it because I feel it myself. I will soon get an office with a blank wall that I will examine very carefully to make my institute and department happy.
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