"What's a nice girl like you doing with a Nobel Prize?" Elizabeth Blackburn, "Australia's first women Nobel Laureate and women's scientific leadership

In 2009 Elizabeth Blackburn (along with two of her American

colleagues) won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, confirming her

position as a global scientific leader. She was immediately celebrated as

Australia’s first woman Nobel laureate. However, although 2009 was a

‘bumper’ year for women Nobel laureates, with five winners in total, the media

coverage soon became highly negative and discouraging. Much discussion

focused not on Blackburn’s scientific work but on her gender – the difficulties

it was assumed she must have faced individually as a woman scientist, and her

wider leadership role in encouraging and supporting other women to overcome

these obstacles. In this chapter I suggest the continuing highly negative ways

the possibilities for women’s participation and leadership in science are

discussed are counterproductive. Journalistic, policy and scholarly discussions

of the ‘problem’ of women in science misconstrue the extent of women’s

participation in the field and the nature of their experiences. In all these spheres,

science continues to be understood and represented as an unhappy place for

women to be. This misrepresentation, I argue, undercuts the leadership roles

women scientists are seeking.