On July 28, the Giec could elect a woman as its head. This first illustrates the low presence of women in climate science, as evidenced by several researchers at franceinfo.
When asked if they’ve ever been the only woman in the room, they laugh. “I can’t imagine a woman telling you otherwise”replies Ko Barrett. “It’s true for all of us: the first thesis jury I went to, I was the only woman”, remembers Béatrice Marticorena. Vice-president of the IPCC and director of research at the CNRS, they both work in the still very masculine field of climate science. A figure bears witness to this: in thirty-five years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has never been chaired by a woman.
The group will replace its current president, the Korean Hoesung Lee, at its 59th session, which will be held in Nairobi (Kenya) from July 24 to 28. Among the four candidates this year are two women: the South African biogeographer Debra Roberts and the Brazilian mathematician Thelma Krug. “Electing a woman for the first time would be a strong message sent to all scientists. Because in this field, the balance is not there”defends the first.
A third of women in the latest IPCC report
Indeed, among the more than 700 authors of the last IPCC report, only 33% were women. “We’re here! We’ve done a huge part of the job”, wrote one of them, Friederike Otto, on Twitter, at the time of publication. And when you go up to the level of chapter co-chairs, those who separate the management of the different parts of the report, you can count two out of eight women.
Second from left in the photo: Valérie Masson-Delmotte, paleoclimatologist and current co-president of group 1 of the IPCC, which studies the physical principles of climate change. Already in 2013, for the previous report, it had noted this imbalance: “I felt it very strongly when I was a chapter coordinator. There were about thirty coordinators [dans le groupe 1], we were only three women. It struck me,” she laments.
The hierarchy, a “pierced pipe”
These few figures only illustrate a larger picture: women are in the minority in climate science. In France, internal figures consulted by franceinfo reveal that among all the researchers in the Ocean-Atmosphere field of the National Institute of Sciences of the Universe, 36% are women.
Béatrice Marticorena, co-chair of the CNRS parity and equality committee, goes into detail: at the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute (IPSL), devoted to climate science, “there are more female researchers of rank B (researchers, lecturers), with a proportion of 42% of women, than female researchers of rank A (university professors, directors of research), at 34%”. She denounces a “leaky pipe effect” as you move up the hierarchy. Until having no laboratory director within the eight bodies of the IPSL.
For these scientists, everything is played out even from childhood, when little girls are not encouraged to orient themselves professionally towards the sciences. “Women scientists are absent from textbooks”, regrets for example Valérie Masson-Delmotte. Glaciologist Heïdi Sevestre suffered from this lack of female representation in her field. “All my teachers were men, my classmates too. I had only one example of a female glaciologist: Madeleine Griselin. It was hard for me to imagine the profession”, she says. During expeditions to the polar regions, she was often the only woman. She therefore carried out, in 2021, a 100% female expedition to the Arctic.
But 100% female castings are rare. “We had to make our way in a very masculine environment“, told Penny Endersby, director of the Met Office, the British weather service, at a conference in Glasgow (Scotland). “During certain meetings, I happened to ask a man to express my idea, so that it would be heard”, adds Béatrice Marticorena. More recently, during discussions around the latest IPCC report, an incident marked Valérie Masson-Delmotte: “Scientists discussing and then a brilliant woman from Oxford speaks. She looks young and we ask her who her thesis director is. We don’t necessarily ask a man this question. She is the director of the laboratory…”
“There is sometimes this form of complicity between elderly men, who are emeritus professors, who call each other ‘professor’ to do themselves good and who always call women by their first name.”
Valérie Masson-Delmotte, climatologistat franceinfo
Fewer in number, women scientists are also paid less, reports Béatrice Marticorena. The CNRS has just completed a study on remuneration. “There are differences related to premiums, which are on average more important for men than for women”, points out the research director. Excellence bonuses which are around 3,000 euros per year and which are set to increase. “Women’s careers evolve more slowly. For the same length of career, they are paid less”she concludes.
How can these discrepancies be explained? At the CNRS, for example, the promotion criteria would disadvantage women. these “focus more on collective tasks: managing the network, the lab platform… rather than being the first to publish in Nature“, portrays Beatrice Marticorena. Elsewhere, the scientists questioned evoke the load of the family. “I had to take care of my elderly parents, it’s a real challenge when you aspire to career development”says Debra Roberts.
Too long a road to parity
However, the situation has changed in recent years. Parity committees like that of the CNRS are developing in the institutions. The Giec has, for its part, set up a “Gender Action Team” (GAT), a team that works to strengthen gender equality. “When the Giec was created at the end of the 1980s, we had around 8% women, now we have 33%. It’s not enough yet, but it’s an improvement”greets team president Ko Barrett.
Béatrice Marticorena paints a similar picture of French research: can do better. She takes the calculator: if, at the CNRS, 37% of the annual recruitment of researchers are women, that only adds about 100 women per year to a total of 11,000 researchers. Parity then remains out of reach. “In the rhetoric, things change, it is accepted that it is a problem to be solved. In practice, the pace of change is extremely slow”, she regrets. It is however necessary, say the researchers interviewed by franceinfo.
And it’s not just a numbers game, for Debra Roberts: “It is not enough to bring them into the room. You have to make sure that they are heard and that they can access management”she hammers.
“In my experience, women bring particular expertise in looking at issues of vulnerability and adaptation. And these are important parts of the climate equation.”
Ko Barrett, vice-president of the IPCCat franceinfo
Faced with the complexity of climate issues, everyone’s scientific expertise is necessary. The president of the GAT ventures an analogy: “If you’re building a house, you’re not just hiring a plumber to do it all. It’s complex, so it takes a diversity of perspectives and expertise. The same goes for climate science. It’s one of the most complex issues we face. So we really need a diversity of people involved in this.” Debra Roberts agrees: “Climate action must include all of society. We cannot ignore 50% of the world’s population!”