The NEA Calls For More Women in the Nuclear Sector.

[NNadir]

Happily, out of the 19 graduate students and post docs in in the nuclear engineering lab where my son is working, 9 are women.

Overall though, the industry is lagging:

NEA report quantifies need to attract and retain women in the nuclear sector

Excerpts:

Women including Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Lise Meitner, Chien-Shiung Wu, and Katharine Way were key pioneers in nuclear science and technology, but today the visibility of women in the nuclear sector remains low. Women make up just one-quarter of people employed in the nuclear sector, and for STEM positions in that field specifically, they also make up just one-quarter of the workforce. About 8,000 of those women responded to an a survey from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, and their responses have been captured in Gender Balance in the Nuclear Sector, a new report from the OECD NEA.

For my money, Lise Meitner, and not Otto Hahn, is the discoverer of nuclear fission.

The article continues:

March 8, International Women’s Day, is the date the NEA chose to release the first publicly available international data on gender balance in the nuclear sector. William D. Magwood IV, director general of the NEA, kicked off an NEA webinar to introduce the report—the result of three years of effort by an NEA task group. “When the group met for the first time before the pandemic,” he said, “they realized that there was insufficient data to understand the problem. . . . So the group set out to do a survey—two surveys, in fact: a human resources survey and a public opinion survey—and the results of those two surveys are what we have in the report that we're launching today.”

Magwood said he learned a lot in the process. “To me the biggest education wasn't really from the data. . . . It was what I learned along the way as we went through this exercise and talked to women from around the world and heard stories about women in the nuclear sector who had to put up with really unconscionable remarks being made about them by male colleagues in the workplace, which wasn't something I heard once but many, many times throughout this process. I saw from one of our member countries in Europe that the pay differential for the exact same work was 40 percent between men and women. How does that happen in the modern world? I heard things that quite frankly I found shocking and embarrassing and would not have known if we had not gone through this exercise.”

The NEA Gender Balance Task Group concluded that women employed in the nuclear sector want to advance their careers but face challenges such as a lack of flexible work practices for those with family responsibilities as well as gender stereotyping. Despite those challenges, the majority of women surveyed said that they would encourage other women to pursue a career in the nuclear sector. Those women are needed, as nuclear energy is poised for expansion around the world.


Fiona Rayment, chief science and technology officer of the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory, chaired the task group that conducted the study. “With the ever-increasing importance of energy security while minimizing carbon emissions, a solution including nuclear energy is receiving greater focus,” she said. “Meeting these challenges requires a broad range of skills that can be delivered through a neurodiverse workforce, and creating gender balance across the international nuclear sector is a key element in achieving this. My hope is that this report enables the sector to have a springboard to move to greater gender balance in the years ahead, driving the neurodiversity the sector is craving...”

...Collective wisdom: During the report launch webinar, Rayment, described the task group’s plans to create a policy framework that will use the report’s data to track progress with a “strategic framework of attract, retain, and advance.”

There is an opportunity, she said, “to leverage government influence on the nuclear sector, aligning priorities and mobilizing the resources accordingly. In terms of who we're going to target, we're targeting government agencies, contractors, and funding recipients within the nuclear sector. A broad range of organizations are being invited to engage with us and implement this framework going forward.”

Rayment moderated a panel discussion including Melina Belinco, Women in Nuclear (WiN) global vice president and deputy manager of international organizations for the Canadian National Energy Alliance; Yeonhee Hah, vice president for global activities at the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety; Lisa McBride, vice president and country leader at GE Hitachi SMR Canada and president, WiN Canada; Aditi Verma, assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan; and Neil Wilmshurst, senior vice president of energy system resources at EPRI. The panelists agreed that achieving gender balance within the nuclear sector will be difficult—but achievable.

McBride, whose company recently secured a contract for a small modular reactor new build at the Darlington site in Ontario, said, “I think we need to not overlook the fact that women already do make valuable contributions to this industry. It's important and incumbent upon organizations to profile the critical role that women play, which helps advance and retain. If you can see it, you can be it. . . . We do really complex things in this industry, far more complex than getting an equal seat at the table for women. So to me this is really about being committed to change and understanding what the change journey looks like. Yes, it is hard, but we do harder things than this literally every day in this industry...”

Now that the climate disaster is upon us and rapidly accelerating and going out of control, we'll need "all hands on deck."

We need that 50% of the population on our engineering teams.

Faster is better.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. And let's add Maria Goeppert Mayer to that list.

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200808/physicshistory.cfm

[NNadir]

2. Yes, of course. I recently referred to her in a lecture I gave on used nuclear fuels.

The existence of nuclear "magic numbers" has a fair amount to do with how those fuels are composed.