Abstract
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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.