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Women thrive in the biosciences at the University of Arizona – especially at the BIO5 Institute.

Some 70 of the 222 faculty affiliated with BIO5 are women. This includes the institute’s No. 2 and No. 3 administrators, associate director Carol Barnes and assistant director Jennifer Barton, as well as former director Vicki Chandler, who headed BIO5 when its current facility, the Thomas W. Keating Bioresearch Building, was built.

Women play key roles in top-drawer BIO5 initiatives such as the $50 million iPlant Collaborative and the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CaTS-I). iPlant tackles “grand challenges” in the plant sciences and CaTS-I seeks to drastically close the time gap for medical research to become patient treatment.

Fernando Martinez, current BIO5 Institute director, said women are promoted based on merit, not to reach a gender quota.

“Women feel particularly attracted by the collaborative nature of BIO5,” Martinez said. “Women in science tend to like collaborative work. It’s what we are. They bring to BIO5 what we were founded for.”

Women in science face hurdles beyond simply breaking into a largely male field. There’s maternity leave and subsequent childcare, but even before that, at a much younger age, there are the crucial junior high school years – where girls’ interest in science and mathematics plummets.

“It’s the female teachers uncomfortable with math and science that pass it on to students,” said Jennifer Barton, head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Arizona Cancer Center. She oversees Jr. BIOTECH project at BIO5, where middle school teachers in Tucson, Yuma and Flagstaff are trained to teach science.

Girls with parents in the sciences have a huge advantage for breaking into science themselves.

“As a child, I met engineers in my home and at company parties,” Barton said. Her mother is a chemist with a math emphasis, her father is an aerospace engineer and all four brothers are engineers.

Samantha Kendrick, a Ph.D. candidate in cancer biology, has a mother and aunt who are in nursing. They motivated her that women can play a role in medicine and science. But she believes girls with non-scientist parents shouldn’t be discouraged.

“I’ve always had a passion for science,” Kendrick said. “If you have been given a gift and passion, the sky is the limit. All you need is the motivation and dedication.”

UA plant scientist Chieri Kubota experienced the flip side of women in science. She left her native Japan in the early 1990s specifically because she saw no hope for a woman with a Ph.D. to get hired in Japan.

“I was thinking of opportunities in the U.S. even in the first year of my Ph.D. studies,” Kubota said.

She worked a year at Clemson University and six months in Quebec City before, much to her surprise, she got an offer from a Japanese university for an assistant professorship. She returned to Japan for six years before coming to UA in 2002.  Since then, Japan has leapfrogged ahead of the U.S. in some regards.

“Because I know how Japan is trying to improve the situation, I quickly learned women in science here need more support,” Kubota said.

“Some of the programs they have there don’t exist here. When they have maternity leave, they can hire supporting people (during their absence). They have a much longer maternity leave. It’s very common to find day care centers or kindergarten in the colleges in Japan. Very few have that here.