Why is it important to encourage women to go into science and technology?
I would say that there are three main answers. One is that you get better science. There’s a lot of evidence that teams—this is in the business world—that have men and women in them have better production, better results, and it’s true in science too. The other thing is, just from a business-model perspective, our country is half women. But, if our workforce is ignoring half the population, then that’s not good for the country economically. So, just on an economic level, we need to expand the workforce, and that could include women. Then there’s a social-justice argument, which is that people who are in the sciences make more money than people who have gone through the arts, for example. If we have anything structurally that’s excluding girls from going into the sciences, then we actually are excluding them from lucrative careers. Why do sex and gender need to be taken into account more in health research? Both sex and gender can have an influence over risk factors for diseases, trajec
