Editorial pubs.acs.org/OPRD
Women in Process R&D
I
opposite in the United States, and when it comes authors from outside Europe and the United States, it is very hard to distinguish the gender of the senior author. Nevertheless, I would like to see women making a bigger impact on the journal, both as authors of papers and as members of the EAB. So, any volunteers, ladies? Or suggestions, gentlemen?
recently returned from a trip to China where I was working with a company in which the Vice President, the Director of R&D, and most of the senior scientists were female. At the training course I gave to the company, most of the discussion and the questioning was done by women, and they all demonstrated a great talent. Similarly, in my dealings with the American Chemical Society (ACS), most of my contacts in the publications division are women, and some of these are chemists. Also, in my own office at Scientific Update, we have more women than men; in fact, for the first decade of the company I was the only man. In my work as an expert witness, I have more contact with lawyers who are women than with those who are men. However, in process R&D, the number of female chemists and chemical engineers with whom I come into contact is quite small; although I have no actual statistics, the gender ratio between women and men in this sector of the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries seems heavily skewed towards men. Thus, on Organic Process Research & Development’s (OPRD’s) Editorial Advisory Board (EAB), women make up only about 10% of the members. This is not because we favor men in the appointments system, it is just that so few women are recommended to me (and of course that could be part of the problem). Therefore, I would like to hear from female chemists and engineers who would be interested in joining our EAB, which meets once a year in the United States (usually at Informex) and once a year in Europe (London or Cambridge). Additionally, I would like to have recommendations for female members of the EAB from male colleagues. The duties of the EAB are, amongst other things, (1) to advise the editor and ACS about policies for OPRD, (2) to suggest areas where the journal can improve, (3) to advise on proposals for improving the quality of the journal and for developing special feature sections, and (4) to promote the journal whenever the EAB member has the opportunity. EAB members are involved in soliciting papers for the journal and sometimes act as guest editors for special feature sections. The most important quality for an EAB member to have is the energy and willingness to spend time outside their actual occupation to encourage colleagues and personal contacts to write up their work and submit it for publication in the journal as well as to get involved with special issues and to suggest future directions of the journal. Of course for women scientists/ engineers with family this time spent outside the normal job may be an issue, but most of the current female EAB members have had to cope with this problem. As the saying goes, when you want a job done, ask a busy person, because when you have 100 tasks to do adding another only increases the work load by 1%; for a person with only one task, the workload is doubled. It would be interesting to see the male/female ratio of the senior authors of papers published in OPRD, but this task is probably too difficult to undertake since the gender of authors is not known, and names are not always a guide, even for Anglo-Saxon names. Whereas Robin and Sydney are almost exclusively male names in the United Kingdom, this is the © 2013 American Chemical Society
■
Trevor Laird, Editor AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Published: September 17, 2013 1220
dx.doi.org/10.1021/op400251p | Org. Process Res. Dev. 2013, 17, 1220−1220
