No bathroom for women and sung at work: what Brazilian scientists face

For every 10 researchers in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in Brazil, only 3 are women. The data belong to Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

To help change this reality, the French multinational cosmetics company L’Oréal annually holds the For Women in Science award, jointly with Unesco and the ABC (Brazilian Academy of Sciences). On the last 30th, the 17th edition was held in the country, with the selection of seven winners, each awarded a grant of R$ 50,000. To date, the award has invested R$5.1 million in the projects of the Brazilian scientists.

Globally, L’Oréal has held the award for 25 years. Five scientists are recognized each year, one in each region of the world, for their contributions to science throughout their careers. The value of the grant is €100,000.

According to the company, 52 national and regional programs are held annually, in more than 110 countries, to enhance the role of women in science. To date, 3,900 researchers worldwide have been contemplated – five of them have already received the Nobel Prize. The most recent were the Americans Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.

Many of the contemplated faced machismo and moral or sexual harassment throughout their career, since it is a predominantly male area. Check out the stories of three of the seven winners this year in Brazil:

Daiane Aparecida Zuanetti, 41, doctor in statistics

Daiane Aparecida Zuanetti, 41, still remembers, as a child, being shocked by her older brother’s unwillingness to study. “I’ve always loved books,” says the second of three children, who has studied public school all her life. Her parents studied until elementary school. “My mother always told me that the more I could study and learn, the greater my economic, social and political liberation would be.”

Born in Porto Ferreira (SP), she traveled 50 km every day to UFSCAR (Federal University of São Carlos), also in the interior of São Paulo, to study statistics. “After the master’s degree, I didn’t want to amend the doctorate. I thought it would be better to try a job in the private sector, so as not to stay only in academic training”, she says.

She worked for seven years in a bank, but decided to leave because she didn’t want to continue as an executive. She missed the university benches. She returned to São Carlos and started her doctorate. Today she is a professor at the university and leads a research group.

Winner in the Mathematics category of the L’Oréal award, Daiane’s project proposes effective statistical methods for describing trends and making predictions based on genetic data. “Through these techniques, we can identify which genetic factors determine, for example, the appearance of a disease, or risk factors for a disease, or, even, that someone is resistant to a certain disease. This has a potential impact on the way we diagnose and treat these evils”, he says.

Among undergraduate students, she notices a gender balance. “But in the Department of Statistics, of the 23 professors, only 4 are women”, she says. “It’s sad, because I see that part of my students don’t consider themselves qualified, they think they are average”, she says. Prejudice also comes from male students, she says.

“Some think they can confront me in a much more incisive way than they do with male professors, in search of a grade reassessment, for example”, he says. Daiane is not intimidated. “After going through the financial market, I learned to shout to be heard,” she jokes.

But she has no doubt that misogyny is expressed in subtle ways. “In the exchange of emails from a study group, I gave my opinion. A researcher, in sequence, said practically the same as me. A second researcher replied to him, saying that he agreed with the argument. It was as if I had no opinion” , remember.

Not everything, however, is between the lines. Daiane recalls the case of a professor friend who was arranging her books in a room at the university and heard from a colleague: “Look, you also have books! I thought it was just makeup.”

Fernanda Selingardi Matias, 35, doctor in physics

Of the seven winners of the 17th edition of the For Women in Science award, only physicist Fernanda Selingardi Matias, 35, was unable to attend the award ceremony, in Rio, at the end of November. The reason: Caio was born on November 20, ten days before the event. He was the second child of the woman from Pernambuco, who now lives in Maceió (AL) and is a researcher at UFAL (Federal University of Alagoas). The oldest is a year and a half old.

“I wanted to have one right after the other, because I would have to pause my career”, he says. “So, let it be a one-off deal,” says the woman, who is married to a physicist she started dating while still in college. “I felt that I was respected by colleagues more for being his girlfriend at the time than for being a woman.”

Fernanda recalls that women are a minority in physics classes. “I entered with three other colleagues and, at the end of graduation, it was just me and one more”, says Fernanda, who had to look for a women’s bathroom on the ground floor of the university. “On the floor of our room, there was only a men’s bathroom”, she says.

For her, it is important that the university is a space where diversity is discussed. “It is essential that university students understand that episodes of moral or sexual harassment are not personal, they happen to everyone, and they need to have a support network so they don’t get intimidated”, says Fernanda.

“A student who arrives at the university, coming from a humble family, may not have the courage to denounce a professor, for example, but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be left without support. She has to rely on the professors themselves”, says she, who has already been questioned by a colleague: “You’re a feminist, but you’re not a feminazi, are you?”

Between her Master’s and Doctorate in Physics at UFPE (Federal University of Pernambuco), she took a course in Computational Neuroscience in Japan, PhD in co-tutorship with Spain. The postdoc in cognitive neuroscience in France. Unraveling brain activity was the theme of her project, one of the winners of the L’Oréal award.

“We use tools from physics, mathematics, statistics and computation to study the brain and the nervous system,” says she, an expert in the physics of complex systems. “This helps us better understand how we think and learn and, in the future, may aid in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders and other neurological problems.”

Fernanda’s idea is to find a way to automate the classification of the different stages of sleep, something that today needs to be done by a doctor. By making this classification faster, it would be possible to monitor, for example, the state of consciousness of patients under general anesthesia during surgery.

Gisely Cardoso de Melo, 41, doctor of tropical medicine

Gisely was never a “nerd”. In school, she enjoyed chemistry and biology, which led to her degree in pharmacy-biochemistry, but she had other interests as a teenager. At the time, her mother, Maria Augusta, realized that the common distractions of age could be a risk to her daughter’s future and gave the sentence: she was prohibited from dating from Monday to Friday. All for her to become the first in her family to earn a college degree.

Graduated from UEM (State University of Maringá), she was not excited to continue in the South of the country, due to the high competition in public tenders. “I really wanted to work”, says she, who took a public exam for the Health Department of Manaus and passed. She attended her master’s and doctorate at UEA (University of the State of Amazonas).

Winner of the L’Oréal award in the Life Sciences category, Gisely, a researcher at the Dr. Heitor Vieira Dourado, with his project, wants to help the population of the Amazon region.

His studies investigate two hypotheses for the recurrence of malaria caused by the agent Plasmodium vivax. The first one is the polymorphism, the variation of the CYP2D6 gene. The second is patients’ non-adherence to the seven-day medical treatment. In many cases, the patient becomes ill again without having been infected. The problem is that malaria recurrences impact not only the health of the individual, but also public health, as they make it difficult to control and eliminate the disease and increase spending on health care.

The most affected region in Brazil is precisely the Amazon, which concentrates 99% of malaria cases in the country. In 2020, the disease affected 241 million people, especially on the African continent, according to the WHO (World Health Organization).

“We want to know and better understand the recurrence of malaria through Plasmodium vivaxto elaborate strategies for the elimination of malaria and to search for new treatments”, says Gisely, who wants to show the scientific community that it is possible to develop quality research in the North of Brazil.

Gisely said she had already been the target of prejudice due to being brown and sexual harassment in academia, even by students. Married and with an 8-year-old daughter, what bothered her the most until today, however, was the difficulty in reconciling motherhood and work.

“After I had a daughter, I was excluded from study groups”, she says. “It’s really very difficult to reconcile personal and professional life, especially when the children are young, due to travel and commitments outside working hours, you need to have a well-structured support network”, she says. “But people have to understand that, after you become a mother, you remain the same, with the same potential and knowledge.”