Women in Science and Engineering: Reclaiming the Authority Gap
18:00, Tuesday, August 30th, Main Auditorium
We encourage people of all genders and career stages to attend.
Thank you for coming to the WISE event. Please, take 2 minutes to complete a survey. Thank you for helping us improve! You can scan a QR code below, or on the WISE flyers posted around the venue, or follow a link to https://app.sli.do and enter the event number 3644258
“The authority gap is the mother of all gender gaps. If women aren’t taken as seriously as men, they are going to be paid less, promoted less and held back in their careers. They are going to feel less confident and less entitled to success.”
Marie Ann Sieghart, author
Our theme for this year is The Gender Authority Gap, an implicit yet pervasive element to women’s daily interactions with co-workers, vendors, and mentors alike. The event will start with a keynote presentation by Prof Averil Macdonald, OBE, followed by a panel discussion with audience Q&A.
Keynote Speaker
Professor Averil Macdonald, OBE DSc D.Univ CPhys FInstP FRSA is an emeritus Professor at the University of Reading, recently retired Professor of Inclusion and Equality at University of Birmingham, and recipient of many awards, including an OBE for services to women in science.
Panel Members
Prof. Averil MacDonald will join a panel of experts in a discussion on the Authority Gap, and how it may be addressed in our organisations, institutes and communities. The panel will address questions from the audience, submitted live or in advance of the event. You may email your questions in advance to LINAC2022 WISE. Please note that due to time restrictions we may not be able to discuss all submitted questions.
Dr Kate Carruthers Thomas is a Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham City University, researching gender inequalities and contemporary higher education. Dr Thomas is also the Birmingham City University lead for the Athena Swan Charter.
Dr. Yolandi Woest is a lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Pretoria and a former visiting scholar of Bath Spa University, UK. Her research activities include identity studies and gender and language in education. She is a stakeholder in the UP-PUA university bridging program which aims to bridge the gap between school and university in STEM-related subjects.
Lillemor Dahlgren is the gender equality and equal rights work coordinator at the Faculty of Science at the University of Gothenburg. Previously, she was in charge of the GMGA program (gender mainstreaming in government agencies) supporting government agencies and universities in Sweden. Back then, Lillemor also represented Sweden in the Gender Equality Commission at the Council of Europe.
Elizabeth Donnelly, MSc FRSA MRAeS MINCOSE is Chief Executive Officer of The Women’s Engineering Society. She graduated from the Open University with an MSc, specializing in systems thinking and led skills policy in the aerospace industry in the UK before establishing her own consultancy.
Experience from the community: request for stories
Do you have a personal, first-hand account of the authority gap affecting your professional life?
The gender authority gap is the subconscious bias that assumes women are less capable than their male counterparts until they prove otherwise. This burden of proving one’s competence hinders communication and collaboration in the workplace.
We invite you to submit your experiences related to presumptions of authority. The collection of stories will be filtered by the WISE organizing committee into themes that our panel of experts will help guide us on.
To submit a narrative please fill out the form below or visit: https://forms.gle/GBQnby9pKCwLENRb6
Stories
To raise awareness of this daily experience, we would also like to anonymously share your stories on this page and at the conference venue. Please take care to omit personal information from the text to protect the privacy of all involved. We will check the text to the best of our abilities and reserve the right to not publish submitted stories.
Organizing and advisory committee
| Anna Shabalina (chair) | Senior SRF Engineer, PIP-II HB650 cavity lead, STFC Daresbury Lab, UK |
| Ariel Arnott | Science & Engineering Associate, SLAC National Lab, USA |
| Kayla Ninh | Resonate Inelastic X-Ray Scattering Instrument Area Manager, SLAC National Laboratory USA |
| Steven Jamison | Professor in novel methods of particle acceleration, Lancaster University, UK |
| Tessa Charles | Lecturer in accelerator physics, University of Liverpool, UK. |
