A giant leap for womankind

Abstract

Around the time that Nature Medicine launched 25 years ago, there was talk about the ‘leaky pipeline’ in biomedicine — a metaphor that describes how the number of women in the research workforce drops precipitously at ascending career stages, leaving few women in top leadership positions in labs. We’ve covered the topic continuously over the last quarter-century. In a 2001 article, we noted that “[d]ata show that women leave science careers twice as frequently as men” (Nat. Med. 7, 637, 2001), and a commentary we published a year later stated that “If the culture is to change, women must not only be recruited for senior faculty jobs, but also for key leadership positions in the administrations of medical research institutions” (Nat. Med. 8, 439–441, 2002). But the pipeline continues to leak.