"Taking sex and gender into account helps renew scientific knowledge"

Laurence Guyard, gender coordinator at the National Research Agency (ANR), Magalie Lesueur-Jannoyer, regional director for the Antilles and French Guiana at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), and Angela Zeller, the ANR's head of gender studies and European projects (2018-2024), are behind the book Le Genre en recherche. Évaluation et production des savoirs with its nine chapters and thirty contributors.

What was the background to your book's publication?

Magalie Lesueur-Jannoyer: Towards the end of the 2010s, the European Union noticed a flagrant lack of progress on the issue of professional gender equality among its research organisations. So the EU launched a call for projects for the period 2019-2023 to support these organisations in drawing up ambitious equality action plans and making sure gender issues are given more consideration in scientific research. The CIRAD's response was to set up a consortium with six other scientific and financial partners, including the ANR and two technical partners, which led to the launch of the European Gender Smart project.

Laurence Guyard: The situation was similar in France. The 2019 law on the transformation of the French civil service invited public sectors organisations to develop action plans for professional equality. The call for projects stipulated that consortia had to include at least one funding agency so the ANR jumped at the opportunity to benefit from the tools provided by the project's technical partners and collaborate with higher education and research establishments to develop its actions on this subject. During the discussions, the idea of a conference came up which was organised remotely in December 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The conference was such a success with its 600+ participants (mainly scientists from all disciplines along with some political figures) that we thought it'd be great to extend the idea by sharing our ideas as much as possible with this book which was published last December. 

The first national measures promoting parity were implemented ten years ago – how has gender equality evolved in French higher education and research since then? Where is there room for improvement?

L. G.: It's always very complex to measure the impact of public policies, not least because it's difficult to compare data and categories that can vary from one organisation to another so regular analyses do need to be run. The first part of our book focuses on the role of funding agencies in reporting on the practices of female and male scientists when responding to calls for proposals and also in making sure gender bias does not creep into selection processes. The first chapter presents all the mechanisms the ANR have implemented and underlines the importance of the analyses we've been carrying out for the last ten years particularly of the Generic Call for Proposals (AAPG1 ). This is open to all scientific disciplines and takes up nearly 80% of our intervention budget. It's important to carry out long-term analyses like these because they show how practices are evolving. Actually, we've seen a steady increase in the number of annual project submissions by women for this call for proposals. In 2015, 28% of the research projects submitted were led by women but that proportion will be up to almost 35% for 2024.

This lower visibility for women mirrors the situation in existing scientific communities and is more specifically due to the strong stereotypes and ideological barriers that colour all social activities, particularly professional orientations. Our book covers this idea, particularly in chapter 6. Parity is very often considered the solution but it doesn't guarantee the absence of gender bias in assessments, for example by a scientific evaluation committee. In fact, both women and men have unconscious gender biases and it's not straightforward to become aware of them. That's why the dedicated training courses we've set up at the ANR are so important and we're going to reinforce them by also rolling out diversified teaching aids. However, it's still important to achieve relative parity for other reasons. Gender diversity leads to a greater openness to scientific approaches that could otherwise be sexually differentiated. It also means women can benefit from the advantages of taking part in assessment committees in the same ways as men, in terms of enriching your CV, building up a network, understanding more about what a committee expects to increase your own chances of success with a response to a call and so on.

Angela Zeller: An experimental phase of the AAPG run between 2020 and 2021 encouraged research projects to include the question of sex2  and/or gender3  to gauge the factors scientific communities consider to be sex and/or gender-related. Over 90% of research projects spontaneously responded to this invitation which shows that a real movement has been set in motion and that there's a growing awareness of the inequalities between women and men in higher education and research.

However, the analysis also revealed that some scientists still mix up notions of sex, gender and parity and also that the majority of male researchers associate these notions with HR issues linked to equality in team composition more than their female counterparts. It should however be noted that the issue of integrating the sex/and or gender dimension is the most widespread in the humanities, social sciences and life sciences where it can also constitute an object of study in its itself.

• 1This stands for “Appel à projets générique” in French.
• 2Sex refers to a person
• 3//anr.fr/en/anrs-role-in-research/commitments/gender-aspects )

Your book shows that excluding women from scientific careers and research subjects has a knock-on effect on the production of scientific knowledge and even further. Could you give us a few examples?

M. L-J.: The first direct impact is seen in the pay gap between men and women researchers. In principle, public sector pay scales are the same for everyone but in fact there's still an average 10-15% gap in favour of men. This discrepancy increases with career progression and promotions which are marked by gender bias against women and can reach 40 to 45% for management positions in some organisations.

A. Z.: From a scientific standpoint, the question of sex and/or gender needs now to be considered a "useful category of analysis" capable of renewing knowledge as this is a real scientific necessity. In this respect, the ANR's SexDiff project on sex determination and ovarian differentiation presented in chapter 7 of our book aims to fill a gap in our knowledge of these issues and could potentially lead to certain pathologies being managed more effectively.

M. L-J.: When the issue of sex and/or gender is fully taken into account, it can actually make a real difference to research results. I'll take two research projects covered in our book as examples. The first, RTBFoods, is in agronomy and development economics and concluded that the varietal selection of roots, tubers (manioc, yam and sweet potato) and bananas in sub-Saharan Africa needs to take gender into account from their production to their consumption. In fact, the majority of agronomic projects concentrate on production and agricultural yields which is an activity mainly carried out by men in these countries. This means such studies miss out issues linked to selling these productions in local markets and processing in kitchens which are seen as tasks for women and represent a whole area of innovation in these sectors. In other words, new varieties are more easily adopted and accepted by local populations if they're easy to cook and according to how they're valued on the local markets – which are generally the preserve of women – rather than because of agricultural yields and disease resistance characteristics. And to achieve this, the research team reinforced its own gender mix to be able to talk properly to these women in countries where generally they don't have much opportunity to express themselves in public.

The other project, in Burkina Faso, more effectively assessed the levers for diversifying the diets of Burkinabe women who had less access than men and children to a variety of meals. Most previous economic studies concentrated on agricultural income and did not take into account access to fields or outside meals, the social position of women in polygamous households or the age of members of households. The Relax project's multi-disciplinary reflexive approach has helped us find out more about the complexity of the agriculture-food nexus including gender-related issues and enhance the methods rolled out in the field and used in the project's governance. 

At the end of the day, how inclusive a research team is also determines the production of knowledge itself and scientific creativity.