“If I had known this fact, I would have applied for that job, and maybe a lot more,” we were recently told by a female postdoc – let’s just call her X, after the chromosome – who has finally started to look for an exit from the rat race of short-contract academic positions.

The job she was talking about had gone to a male candidate with less experience than she has. “I had seen the announcement, but it felt so specific in its requirements,” she added.

Her response reminded us of physicist Donna Strickland’s response to the question, put to her after she won the Nobel Prize in 2018, of why she still wasn’t a full professor: “I never applied.” Since then, a big body of social science research has established that women tend to be more pessimistic about their own abilities and less willing than men , especially when superlatives are heavily used in the job advertisements.

Research on these behavioural tendencies has been carried out to understand the gender wage gap, but, as international students and women in STEM, we have begun to recognise that it is also part of the explanation of the familiar “leaky pipeline” into senior academic roles.

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While policies on paper mandate gender equality, female participation in STEM remains unchanged, and the wage gap widens. As the 2024 Unesco points out, it is not simply a matter of waiting for more women to enter the STEM workforce; we have already waited a decade with little change.

While many white male scientists’ sense of powers their efforts to , many women experience the build-up of feelings of inadequacy after years of persistent “othering”, especially when ethnic, racial and national identities further heighten the barriers (and ). As international scholars of colour, we repeatedly struggle with social cues and cultural clichés in our host countries, and we have felt inadequate on more than one occasion.

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For many women academics, female mentorship can be for opportunities and resources. Female mentors are to be more empathetic to gender struggles and domestic duties, as well as being more inclusive of social identities, providing a safer space and more equitable resource allocation for early career women to .

But until her current postdoc, all X’s mentors had been male. How are people such as X going to be trained to steer an academic environment when their male mentors have never experienced the gendered inequities that hinder academic growth for young women beyond the scope of institutional support?

After all, despite its abundance, policy ultimately does not reshape the informal norms, expectations and networks that govern opportunity. Supervisors and senior colleagues have to move from passive, formal mentorship to intentional allyship: active sponsorship of marginalised students, nominating trainees for talks and awards, initiating collaborations, and being deliberate about authorship practices.

Informal female mentorship has played an important role in our current trajectories. Choosing a BIPOC female senior grad student as a student mentor helped one of us (SD) gain perspective on future employment opportunities, fellowships and funding available to under-represented groups. Meanwhile, participating in the programme (SN) has provided access to senior, experienced researchers from private and public sectors.

Building strong professional networks is, inarguably, important for academic success, but female early career researchers struggle to convert professional connections into long-term collaborations because they are forged within informal gatherings that remain gendered spaces with unequal membership.

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Having senior female researchers participate at these informal meetings, be it after-work drinks or lab retreats, results in more gender-neutral spaces. And an effective and immediate step all departments can take to equalise scientists’ sense of belonging is to organise social hours for female scientists to talk. At the very least, this contributes to a feeling of belonging.

Even in formal settings where we all have a seat at the table, feeling invisible is not an unfamiliar sentiment experienced by many female academics. Be it group meetings or seminars, dominant male voices from others. This “sound barrier” isn’t specific to academia, and combating it requires active allies who can intervene to ensure that everyone gets to speak, gets credited for original ideas and engages equitably.

The enforcement by seminar organisers of three rules would help enormously. First, people must be named explicitly when a speaker is building on their idea. Second, meetings should be paused when someone gets interrupted or talked over. Third, the final five minutes should be set aside to accommodate questions and contributions from under-represented groups, allowing many who hadn’t summoned the courage before to have a chance to voice their opinions and increase their visibility – which can be the decisive factor in who gets access to opportunities.

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Seminars or workshops highlighting the impact of stereotypes are also a much-needed and . There is growing evidence that targeted awareness, when grounded in data and specific examples, can materially change outcomes. that acknowledging gender biases in evaluating CVs is enough to counteract biases in evaluators; such workshops must be strongly recommended, if not made mandatory.

Institutions must also actively redress the fact that student advising and DEI activities, which are by female and minority faculty, are rarely rewarded in career growth. Supervisors must track service commitments explicitly and advocate for institutional recognition of mentoring and DEI work. Effective allies need to learn to notice and redistribute invisible labour.

Such allyship is a muscle. To build its strength, it needs to be exercised repeatedly, with intention. All academics need to educate themselves about the leaks that the statistics show are still abundant in the pipeline of female scientists. And they then need to take personal responsibility for doing all they can to fix them.

Saismit Naik is a PhD student in evolution at ISEM, the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences of Montpellier, and Satavisha De is a PhD student in ecology at the University of Texas at Austin.

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