International's Women Day - Taking Stock

Not us, nor our daughters, nor our granddaughters, but perhaps our great, great granddaughters, 80 years from now, will come of age in a world with global gender equality, according to projections by the World Economic Forum. There's much to debate about those projections, but in tribute to International Women’s Day, I thought our readers might appreciate a compilation of country comparisons – where does your country stand today with respect to gender equity?

Inspiring New Policies from Spain for Gender Parity in STEM

Last week I attended an International Astronomical Union conference on Active Galactic Nuclei, hosted by the Armenian Academy of Sciences. Over dinner, Pepa Masegosa Gallegoa, woman astronomer from Spain, described some of the initiatives her country has undertaken to improve the gender ratio in the sciences in her country.

• Equal ratio of men and women on review panels, committees, etc.
• Concerted effort to increase the number of women in Spain’s Academy of Science. Just this past year, the number has risen from a few percent to ~15 percent!
• Four month paid family leave for both parents (this is not new to Spain, but I still wanted to include it in their list of positive policies)^1.
• Providing a ‘stop the clock’ equivalent for grants/fellowships/etc. restricted to applicants within a certain number of years post a given career stage. ‘Stop the clock’, in this case, refers to providing an additional year for each child past the usual date you can apply for these awards. 
• Recommending and encouraging that parents place the year of when they have a child on to their CVs, so that it becomes a normal part of the process to take into account the impact of having a child on productivity.

Maternity Leave: International Comparison

Source: "Children's Chances: How Countries Can Move From Surviving to Thriving" by Jody Heymann With Kristen McNeill

For info on the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy Special Session on Family Leave Policies for graduate students and postdocs, click here and check out the associated wiki.