MONEY talks. That makes it an obvious tool with which to tackle the dearth of women in senior science positions. Now, academic institutions that win awards for tackling gender inequality are front runners for funding – an incentive if there ever was one. But does this system address the deeper, cultural challenges faced by women in science?

Women make up roughly half of the UK’s science, engineering and technology undergraduates, and just over 40 per cent of research postgraduates. At the senior level, however, the percentage falls dramatically. Just .

“Women make up half of the UK’s science graduates, but 16.5 per cent of professors”

A lack of policies supporting equal opportunities and the nature of the academic working environment are held responsible for this “leaky pipeline“. The long hours put those who need to work flexibly or part-time at a disadvantage, making it difficult for female scientists to take career breaks to have children. At the same time, unconscious bias against women is rife in the scientific community. Even other .

The loss of female scientists could be hampering research, says Helen Wollaston, director of , a campaign to increase the proportion of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. “It’s about getting the best brains working in science,” she says. “If you’re only attracting half of the population, then obviously you’re missing out on potential talent.”

“If you’re only attracting half of the population then you are missing out on talent”

This is the logic behind – a charter launched by female academics in 2005 to tackle gender inequalities in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine. So far, 97 universities and research institutes have signed up for the initiative. These members are eligible for bronze, silver and gold awards, depending on their progress. To be awarded bronze, for example, an institution must collect data on their workforce, identify barriers faced by women and formulate an action plan to overcome them. Silver awards are granted to those that implement such a plan, and provide evidence on its effectiveness. Gold awards are reserved for institutions that demonstrate sustained good practice, and which can be described as “champions for gender equality”. Individual departments within the universities can apply for their own awards. An award lasts for three years, after which it must be renewed.

The promise of another accolade encouraged the slow and steady adoption of the charter. But things really kicked into gear when the Department of Health dropped a bombshell in 2011: . Frenzy ensued at Athena SWAN headquarters as the number of applications trebled.

Other funding bodies are following suit. In October last year, the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills announced a . And in January 2013, Research Councils UK issued a , hinting that making funds available exclusively to Athena SWAN award holders was a possibility in the future.

The resulting increase in the number of institutions signing up to the charter and gaining awards seems to be great news for boosting gender equality in science. The initiative provides universities with a clear framework for setting objectives, developing a strategy and monitoring its impact, says Wollaston. “It lays the foundations for cultural change,” she says.

But is this cultural change actually taking effect? Katie Perry, chief executive of the , which offers support to scientists returning to work after career breaks, thinks so. “I’ve seen a marked difference in the attitudes of senior management groups towards equality issues,” she says. “I don’t think they took them seriously four years ago, whereas now they all do.”

There are certainly success stories out there. Cardiff University’s medical school, for example, was one of the departments spurred into action by the NIHR funding announcement. Last year, the department received a bronze award for researching equality in the workforce and finding, for instance, that only 37 per cent of applications for promotions came from women. In response, the school introduced professional development workshops and mentorships aimed at female staff members. “The Athena SWAN process has facilitated discussions about equality in a way that has not been possible before,” says , who researches cancer and genetics at the school.

However, the system isn’t perfect, and some people are concerned that the allure of funding could shift an institution’s focus onto getting an award rather than genuinely committing to gender equality. “The mentality is that you get an Athena SWAN award by saying X, Y and Z, but not necessarily doing it,” says an equality and diversity advocate working in higher education, who wishes to remain anonymous. It is also becoming more common for a department’s human resources team to handle the application process, rather than the academics themselves, she says. As a result, the academic staff can lose ownership of the process and fail to fully embrace the principles of the award. “The HR team can impose change on a department, but if the department doesn’t own those changes, then the cultural change won’t happen,” she says.

Athena SWAN manager disputes the claim. “When you look at the make-up of the teams that put the submissions together, it shows that the academic community is owning it,” she says. Brennan, who has helped assess award applications, believes that those made solely by HR teams are easy to spot. “HR tend to be generic in their approach,” he says. “So you have to look at how bespoke the action plan is to the department.”

Perry, who also assesses applications, agrees. “It is clear if the applicants are treating it as a tick-box exercise,” she says, although she admits that her judgements are based on gut feeling.

Maintaining a watertight process will be even more important as departments become reliant on an award for funding. “There may well be appeals to the awards and questions about the process,” says Brennan. With this in mind, the , which now manages the Athena SWAN charter, is developing an appeals process that will allow applicants to report procedural irregularities or contest a panel decision.

Another challenge for Athena is keeping up the momentum it has now created. “It’s also absolutely vital that people don’t think ‘I’ve got my bronze award now I can sit back and do nothing’,” says , a physicist at the University of Cambridge who . “The next challenge is to make sure that people go on aspiring, and keep raising the bar.”

Perry believes that real change is on the horizon. “There were little pockets of good practice around the country,” she says. “But now we’re almost at the point where all the dots are being joined up.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Cheques and balances”

WHEN the tracheal cancer reappeared, doctors agreed that Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene’s golf ball-sized tumour was inoperable. So one of them suggested a treatment that was rather different: building him a new windpipe, from scratch.

Researchers around the world are making groundbreaking progress in engineering replacement organs. Since the first successes with bioengineered skin – which can be used for grafts to treat people with burns, for example – tissue engineers have created lab-grown cartilage, bone and, most recently, whole organs such as bladders.

“Scientists genuinely believe that in years to come, labs will be filled with rows of hearts and livers that can be taken off the shelf and tailored to you,” says Lindsey Dew, who has just started a PhD in . “Tissue engineering is the future of medicine.”

“In years to come, labs will be filled with rows of hearts and livers that can be taken off the shelf”

Building organs

Engineering an organ usually means starting with a scaffold to supply the basic structure. This is often donated. The team behind the world’s first bioengineered windpipe transplant, for example, started this way, stripping the donor’s cells from the structure before seeding it with stem cells from the recipient’s bone marrow. Stem cells can be encouraged to develop almost any type of cell, given the right environment, and once the recipient’s cells had populated the scaffold, it could be transplanted.

Unlike donated organs, those custom-made in this way are not rejected by the body. That means recipients are spared a lifetime of taking immune-suppressing drugs.

Tissue engineers now hope to bypass lengthy waits for donor organs by using synthetic scaffolds. One of the first successes came two years ago, when a team at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, transplanted a synthetic windpipe for the first time. Beyene was the lucky recipient.

The trachea was developed by and his colleagues at University College London. With a background in nuclear physics, Seifalian also studied nuclear medicine and biochemistry before settling on tissue engineering. “It’s the next generation of medical treatment,” he says. “When you’re developing organs, you’re saving lives and improving people’s lives. That got me excited.”

His team built the organ in just 10 days. Seifalian first crafted a glass mould of Beyene’s windpipe based on a CT scan, then the team used the mould to create a replica made from porous polymers. They coated this scaffold with growth factors – chemical cues to goad stem cells into becoming specific cell types – then soaked the structure in a solution of stem cells extracted from Beyene’s bone marrow. During this time, the cells take hold in the scaffold’s millions of tiny holes. Today, Beyene remains in good health. “It was the highlight of my life,” says Seifalian.

Since then, Seifalian’s team has built tear ducts and bypass grafts from similar materials. Lab-grown urethras, coronary arteries, heart valves and stents are next.

Other groups are creating new organs by printing them. Ben Shepherd and colleagues at , a bioengineering company based in San Diego, California, used a 3D printer loaded with human cells to build a functional “mini-liver”. Although only a few millimetres wide and a mere half a millimetre thick, it produced detoxification enzymes just like a full-sized liver.

Body shop

Seifalian’s long-term ambition is to scale up production. “It would be virtually like having a shop,” he says. “People could order an organ and I would make it and send it to them.” Organs such as windpipes, ears or noses would ideally still be made to measure, but blood vessels or heart valves could be manufactured in various standard sizes.

One of the main challenges is ensuring these newly built organs have enough of a blood supply to keep them alive. For her PhD project, Dew is developing experimental and computational models to look for ways to accelerate blood vessel growth in skin grafts.

“With tissue engineering, there’s a real push to take research out of the lab and into the clinic,” says Dew. “I love the idea that my work will have an impact on patients’ lives.”

A truly multidisciplinary subject, tissue engineering requires the skills of chemists and materials engineers to design and build organ scaffolds, physicists and mathematicians to model tissue growth, and biologists to monitor and control cell growth. “Sitting in my team now we have physicists, engineers, mathematicians, pharmacologists, biologists and surgeons, and we collaborate with other clinical staff,” says Seifalian.

At the moment, most UK tissue engineering research takes place in universities, and much of the funding comes from organisations supporting the development of bioengineered organs for drug testing, including the and the EU’s . NC3Rs provides at UK universities.

The biggest UK employers in industry are , a research company focused on wound care, and drug company Pfizer, whose research includes developing stem cell therapies for Crohn’s disease.

Postdocs can get in on the action by creating their own opportunities, says , who is attempting to engineer kidneys at the University of Edinburgh. “Find a really strong group that has not yet got tissue engineering and be the one who starts it,” he suggests.

“It’s a great time to pitch in,” says Shepherd. “You’re starting to see things happen that people have been talking about the last 10 to 15 years. It’s really exciting.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Grow your own”