Baroness Greenfield has a bone to pick with me. Journalists always comment on her personal appearance in the same breath as her science and it is getting annoying, she says. Why does anyone care?

“I see things written and it says ‘woman scientist says’ or worse, ‘mini-skirted woman scientist says’. Yes, I wear mini-skirts and spend money on clothes because that’s who I am. But it’s neither here nor there.”

People cannot seem to get their heads around the notion of a glamorous scientist, but reach the top of any career ladder and a woman’s image is fair game for comment, especially by other women - think Cherie Blair.

Susan Greenfield, right, remains philosophical. “Perhaps it shows schoolgirls that you don’t have to be a white middle-aged man to do science.”

Chance to reach for the stars

Women are seeking choice, challenge and change, says Glenda Stone

Background

• Cast the net far and wide

• Work and play in harmony

• Even top jobs can be flexible for everyone

• Guided path to a higher rank

Background

• Keeping women on the career ladder

• The spy who came in over the gender divide

• Global network adds a vital string to their bow

• Avoid a waste of talent

At 58, Greenfield does a lot more than just science. Despite her protestations, her famous dress sense is never far from the surface. She divides her time between Oxford, where she chairs a research group at the Department of Pharmacology (“jeans and T-shirts”) working on treatments for neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and London, where she is the director of the Royal Institution (“black trouser suit and heels”).

She also fits in numerous media appearances, her list of external appointments includes being a trustee of the Alexandria library in Egypt, and she was once voted Honorary Australian of the Year.

First and foremost, she is a scientist, though, and part of her fame stems from the scarcity of women in her position. Her concern for the comparative lack of women in science, engineering and technology is such that in 2002 she prepared a report on the subject for the Government.

The real obstacle, she says, is not the image of science or schools’ inability to engage girls. It is the fact that the research profession does not easily allow for time out to have children. Competing with men who do not have to take time off at a crucial point in a career means that women starting a family are far less likely to secure a permanent position.

“The biggest bottleneck is the woman in her late twenties who’s thinking about having children,” she says. “Late twenties is very young in researcher terms and you don’t normally get tenure until your thirties. So just when you’re at your most productive and carving out your own identity you lose your grip.”

She avoided the problem by not having a family (“I never really wanted kids”) and was offered a lectureship in her early thirties. At the time only 6 per cent of recipients were women.

Greenfield’s solution is for the Government to ring-fence “serious money” for awards and fellowships specifically for people who have primary responsibility for childcare – “it could be a man” – to enable them to take two years off. She chairs fellowships from L’Oréal, the cosmetics group, which do just that, but says it is a drop in the ocean.

She is concerned not merely about diversity targets. In a society dependent on science and technology, the lack of women represents a waste of valuable talent and money. “We are disenfranchising 50 per cent of expensively educated scientists.”

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