1674029369 From Cuzco to Canada Latina scientists thriving far from home

From Cuzco to Canada: Latina scientists thriving far from home (together).

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When Yanet Valdez Tejeira decided to become an immunologist in 1993, the profession didn’t even exist in her native Peru. So he decided to migrate. First he went briefly to the United States and later to Vancouver, Canada, where he received his PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of British Columbia. “I was very concerned with understanding what happens to our body, how we defend ourselves against infectious diseases,” he says today, 26 years after the migration. Although her country might give her some tools to answer this question, she knew she would do more in Canada, where there are more resources for research.

Little did I know then that science can be a hostile world for women. Even today, Unicef ​​indicates that fields classified as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, for its English acronym) continue to show high gender disparity. Only 35% of those enrolled in universities in these fields are women, while 72% of researchers worldwide are men.

When it comes to publishing scientific articles, one of the strategies to gain more prestige and visibility, the perspective does not change. Last June, the respected journal Nature published a study entitled “Women get less scientific credits than men,” which found that women are much less likely to appear in a publication or patent than their male counterparts and that “the scientific contributions by women Women are systematically less likely to be recognized.

From Cuzco to Canada Latina scientists thriving far from homeidalia candelas

“As a woman, the path is taken differently,” says Dr. Valdez. “Even more so if you’re Latina. I don’t know of any other immunologist here in Canada who looks like me, with dark hair and brunette skin. You don’t have a picture of someone doing what you do and what you look like.” And it is that being a woman brings with it the challenges of being Latina. In 2008, Plos One magazine published a study, which showed that scientific articles signed by Latin American authors received fewer citations than those whose first author was a European.

When he was younger, Valdez chose to ignore these issues in order to survive. “Equality was an issue that was not talked about and they recommended paying no attention and not making noise.” But after seeing the documentary Picture a Scientist, which shows the harassment of women scientists, she was able to see her life again: the inequality, the double effort, the microaggressions. “I went back to look at my story and saw every aspect of it,” she says.

Based on his experience, he was certain that this part of his job should consist of fighting to remove these barriers. Four years ago, she founded the Canadian Immunology Society’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, of which she is currently President. In 2021 he managed to have one of the central panels of the annual congress of the society on gender, racism and diversity. “That happened at the beginning of the whole conference and before the main plenary, and the atmosphere changed. Since we had shown with experience and data that these prejudices are unconscious, there was a different attitude towards the scientists during the event. For example, the men no longer interrupted the women during conversations,” she recalls.

In addition, dr. Valdez is part of the Canadian Immigrant and International Women in Science (IWS) network, founded by several scientists, including Colombian Edna Patricia Matta, PhD in biochemistry from McGill University, who now lives in Ottawa. Matta remembers exactly what it was like to migrate for science. She worked in laboratories without speaking English, she learned to crystallize proteins with tools she had never seen in her country, they suggested to her that she did not have the skills to be a scientist and the for her researcher in charge told her that he was in love with her. By rejecting it, he tried to boycott it. “In 2018 we realized that we are many scientists with a migration background, so we founded the IWS to support us, to help us,” says Matta. “You think you’re at a disadvantage, but with the internet you understand that it’s not about intelligence or knowledge, it’s just about resources and having someone to help you navigate.”

Diasporas organizing

Patricia Castillo, marine biologist and PhD in biomedicine from the University of Murcia, Spain, knows very well what it means to migrate for science. Born and raised in Ecuador, he moved to various cities to pursue research, including traveling through the iconic and Darwinian island of Galapagos. He received his PhD in Spain, conducted research in the UK and France and worked for three and a half years at the University of Aix-Marseille, also in France, before returning to Ecuador in 2014. “We talk a lot about science, but not about how it changes our lives,” he says, recalling how his professional career has also led him to discover other cultures, cuisines and customs.

She returned to her country, attracted by the Prometeo project, which aimed to create jobs for Ecuadorian and international scientists to achieve knowledge transfer, but she collided head-on with reality when she discovered that the program was only a year lasted. The oil price crisis depleted the resources that had been allocated to science. He later offered his research to different universities for months until he managed to connect with one. Castillo is also co-founder of the Ecuadorian network of women scholars, a “safe space” to bring situations of inequality to the table. “Talk about how we experience common ground inside or outside the country, but realize that it’s not our problem, it’s the system that’s failing,” he says.

1674029362 600 From Cuzco to Canada Latina scientists thriving far from homeidalia candelas

Networking is important for any scholar, but even more useful for women and Latinas in the diaspora. “They are key because they help to share resources, find people who see themselves as a unit with the same needs, and carry out projects together,” says Luisa Echevarría, an expert in science diplomacy and a member of the Barranquilla Women’s Organization. Colombia in Science for the Developing World (OWSD), which also includes Castillo and Matta. In an article he published in Frontiers magazine about the scientific diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean, he explains how they can go from a brain drain to an opportunity for countries: an exchange of knowledge or brains.

They are also, as another study of the Mexican diaspora, this time in Plos One magazine, points out, a way for Southern scholars to make themselves visible. After comparing the production of scientists who stayed in Mexico and those who migrated to the Global North, they found that the latter had a greater impact on both their production and collaborations.

But as Echeverría says, “Latin America is definitely deserted [atrasada] in mapping their scientific diaspora”. We don’t know how many there are or what they’re doing, and we don’t know if they organized themselves. In the research she led, they found only 27 initiatives in the region. “In the results we saw that the southern countries of South America are the most active, but also because they have government support, like Argentina, which has the Raíces program,” he says. The problem is that between gender bias and the lack of organization to overcome it, the hardest hit is science itself, which loses the opportunity to be more diverse itself.