Author: Kees van der Beek

Kees van der Beek, chair of the EPS Equal Opportunities Committee, spoke to María Pilar López Sancho (Madrid Institute for Materials Science – ICMM and Spanish Higher Council for Scientific Research - CSIC), winner of the Winter 2021 EPS Emmy Noether Distinction on her career, the effectiveness of advocacy of gender equality, cultural bias, and the future of action for equality.

Kees van der Beek (KvdB): My very warmest congratulations with the Winter 2021 Emmy Noether Distinction, awarded for your many contributions to solid state physics and to strengthening the position of women in physics! Could you tell us how you came to choose physics as a career path? Spanish society at the time was very different from now. What was it like for women to engage in a scientific career in the late nineteen-sixties, early nineteen-seventies?  Were there many women in physics or other sciences back then? 

María Pilar López Sancho(PLS):  At the time, most schools in Spain were of religious character, and both primary and secondary schools were separated by gender. Therefore, all my classmates were girls. At age 14, we had to make the decision of continuing our studies or not, and, if we did, whether we preferred humanities or the sciences. In my class, of those who choose the sciences, we were five girls to choose physics. As for me, this was because I wished to look beyond pure mathematics and study other areas of the natural sciences. It is a bit paradoxical that, as a result of the system of the day, and while we as women were certainly a minority in the scientific field, we were not few, or a small minority by any means. In chemistry in particular, there were many women. As for me, the first time I noticed that as women, we were a minority, was during my university studies and laboratory work at the university. Those years also corresponded to the final convulsions of Franco’s regime. University life was punctuated by intense political activity, and by external policing of university affairs. Nevertheless, I look back on those years dearly, because they were filled with comradeship, intensive learning, and the acquiring of very many formative experiences. 

After university, many of us, including myself, wanted to pursue theoretical physics, a field in which there were very few professional opportunities and very few professorial chairs in the late nineteen-seventies and the early nineteen-eighties. I therefore came to experimental physics, where I was immediately drawn to surface physics and the interaction of gases and molecules with metallic surfaces. You have to understand that the development of new experimental techniques such as Angle-Resolved Photo-Emission Spectroscopy (ARPES) at the time was absolutely spectacular. However, Spanish science was still badly funded in the day, so that many experimentalists such as myself moved to modelling of the latest spectacular results, and, from there, to theoretical condensed matter physics. I am nevertheless surrounded by laboratories and have thus maintained proximity with experimentalists at ICMM, but I think those links between theoreticians and experimentalists might have been, and should be stronger.

KvdB: How did you move into the field of low-dimensional materials? Was that a natural evolution given your environment?

PLS:  I had been working on the physical and the electronic properties of metals and had developed quite a few techniques that I could quite quickly apply to the cuprate high temperature superconductors discovered in 1986, and from there, to other highly correlated electronic systems as well as to carbon nanotubes. In parallel, several colleagues of mine had already worked on the hypothesis of Dirac-like electron physics such as surmised for two-dimensional carbon, or graphene, even before this was isolated. When it was, it was simply naturally to shift our attention to that system.

KvdB:Among the many areas of condensed matter topics that you have studied, which appealed the most to you as a particular challenge that you wanted to take up?  Are there areas that you would have liked to study but didn’t?

PLS: I think that twistronics and the currently much studied twisted bilayers and multilayers built of two-dimensional materials are extremely interesting and very challenging, not in the least through the necessity of taking very large numbers of atoms into account into any computational effort made on these systems. Besides that, I am most interested in the topological properties of electronic systems, and the relation between topology and disorder, which to me was really quite unexpected.

KvdB: Apart from a very successful career in physics, you have built a very rich “second career” in furthering gender equality and the cause of women physicists. How did you start? Was there a particular “flashpoint” that made you realise that you should do this?

PLS: For most of my career, I took no notice of gender issues and the position of women in physics. However, in 1999, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a report assessing gender segregation within their scientific faculty. When I read the results, I was astonished! How could gender bias and gender inequality thrive, or even exist, in such a prestigious institution? The MIT study was quickly followed by assessments of gender bias in scientific institutions in Europe and published by the European Commission. It was then that I, and other colleagues, realised that, at ICMM and in Spain, we were in a similar position, that there was indeed inequality in career progress, with not a single woman in the higher ranks of our institutions. I started to undertake action when I learned, in 1999, that the American Physical Society had acted upon the matter by founding their Committee on the Status of Women in Physics (CSWP), and demanded that the Royal Spanish Physical Society RSEF create a similar section – this happened in 2001. To build the case, we had gathered figures on the role and representation of women physicists in Spain that I presented to the RSEF. It was because of this that I got noticed, and that I was invited, along with three other RSEF colleagues, to attend the 2002 IUPAP First International Conference on Women in Physics in Paris. What an eye-opener that was! It was there that I met our colleagues who lead the first actions at MIT as well as many others, from countries all over the world, and that we decided, together, that physics should be done differently, and that we should do all we could to attract young women to a physics career. Once involved, I could not go back. I realized the importance of the issue, and before long had many responsibilities. These involved a lot of work, for I was not an expert in gender issues, nor were my collaborators, and we had little help. So indeed, our work amounted to almost a second research career!

KvdB: How did you balance your activity with your research? Could you achieve balance, or did you have to sacrifice some activities? Did you have reservations or second thoughts at some time?

PLS: I am a theoretical physicist, and do not head a permanent group. Therefore, my scientific production depends directly on the number of hours I personally put in. The thing is that, once I got involved in the Women and Science Commission (Comisión Mujeres y Ciencia) of CSIC and in the Association of Women Scientist and Technologists (AMIT), I was solicited for a much wider range of issues that I initially foresaw, urgent issues that demanded action. For example, there were many young women that encountered great difficulties reconciling maternity – there was, initially, no satisfactory regulation as to maternity leave – and their scientific career. If nothing were done, their career would collapse. Even if it was not my original role, these women had nowhere else to turn. It is my belief that we did a great deal for science by helping create conditions that allowed those women to continue. In doing so, I have met an incredible amount of very diverse and very interesting people from all scientific and social backgrounds, convinced of the importance of equality for science and society. This experience was extremely satisfactory to me and has more than made up for any scientific papers not published in the process.

KvdB:   As delegate president for the Women and Science Commission, how do you assess the impact that such a commission has, or can have? Indeed, once the commission makes proposals, the real work is only beginning.

PLS: The creation of the Women and Science Commission was very important because it was the first Spanish public office officially publishing figures on women in physics and women in science, and thus, to make the “diagnosis”. I would like to highlight the fundamental role of the then president of CSIC, Rolf Tarrach, a physicist who approved the formation of the Commission. His support demonstrated the importance of the attitude of men and authorities to equality.  Once the numbers were established, it became impossible to deny the reality of gender bias. From there on, we started to recommend gender-neutral language use in science. To my surprise, this encountered quite a lot of resistance, only recently have objections faded and have we come to a more equilibrated use of our language in a scientific environment. Since 2007, we have, in Spain, a law on gender equality, as well as established protocols on how to handle sexual or gender-based harassment. Thanks to initiatives such as of the Women and Science Commission that brought problems to the forefront, things are better now. Still, it has been and it remains very difficult to progress on gender issues, since bias is so strongly engrained. It is important to recognize the work done in this regard by the Women and Science Unit of the European Commission.

KvdB:  Isn’t furthering gender equality an issue of constant vigilance?

PLS: I would agree. With astonishment, I sometimes see that even when young colleagues organise a conference, they invite only male speakers, claiming that they cannot find any women! Fortunately, young women today are different. They are more vocal, they are more aware that we have laws now, laws that regulate and protect gender equality. They do not hesitate to appeal to these.

KvdB:  Having worked in the United Kingdom as well as in Spain, and having sat on the Helsinki Group on Women in Science, you have quite an important European experience. How would you situate Spain with respect to other European countries, with respect to the gender equality issue in science? From afar, Spain looks a leader, with nearly 50 % of women scientists and engineers. Does this mask remaining inequalities? In other European countries even the numbers are very low…

PLS: Indeed there is a difference between Mediterranean Europe and Northern Europe. For example, I remember that during my time at Imperial College in the late nineteen-seventies there were significantly less women physicists than in Spain.  A striking example is Turkey, where a large percentage of scientists – and physicists – are women. Many reasons have been advanced for this. One opposes the protestant- to catholic and other cultures, and the different social status of scientists in each. In protestant cultures, teachers’ and professors’ status would have been relatively higher with respect to the cleric, whereas in the latter women were perhaps more easily admitted to academic roles. Another factor, specific to Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Turkey, would the liberating effect after the fall of national dictatorships in the nineteen-seventies. The liberation of society empowered women and stimulated many to pursue the career they wanted, including academia. Still, even before that time, i.e. in the nineteen-sixties, many teachers in Spain were women.

A big problem is the propagation of role models. Even if a large proportion of primary school teachers in Spain are women, they tend to be more demanding towards boys than towards girls, according to education experts.

KvdB:  You have had a wonderful career in science as well as in furthering the cause of women scientists. If you would be solicited for a further role in either, would you accept? What would you still like to do?

PLS: At this time, I have resigned from both the Women and Science Commission of the CSIC and from the Group of Women Physicists (the Grupo Especializado de Mujeres en Física) of RSEF. I believe times have changed, and that there is a need for new people to step forward, people with new perspectives and new perceptions of society. We have been very successful in raising awareness and in changing the climate in our research organisations. What has to change now is the realisation that science, and engineering, is done not only for the benefit of men, but for that of the whole of society including women. Beyond adapting our institutions, the very object of a lot of research should take into account the reality of diversity. A good first step is the implementation of the diversity issue in projects, such as nowadays requested by the European Union. To progress though, experts are needed. Even if I truly want to help on all issues, I do not hold this expertise, and I think younger people should take the lead.

KvdB:  What recommendations or advice would you give young women in science?

PLS: Young women should be aware that differences do exist. They should also be aware that micro-bias exists, and that it can have a large effect on scientific practice and on society if it is not tackled in time. For example, it appears that the outcome of scientific evaluation depends on whether a male or a female CV is under consideration. Such bias is surely unconscious and unintentional, but, nevertheless, very real. To improve we need objectivity and transparency and everyone’s effort.

FLTR: Jesús Ricote, Pilar Aranda, Luis Viña, Pascuala García-Martínez, María Pilar López Sancho,
Kees van der Beek and José Ángel Martín Gago - image credit : Ángela R. Bonachera, ICMM.