TRANSFORMATION
SARAH WILD: African women are locked out of tertiary science faculties
'If left to its own devices, our academic system will continue to perpetuate barriers to entry, and lock large swathes of SA’s population out of science’
We like to think science is free from influence, that it is an objective formula that we apply to the world to create new knowledge. Through empirical studies, we tell ourselves, we can find absolute and repeatable answers to our questions. But that’s just not true. The person asking the question matters. You and I could look at the same problem, see different facets of the issue, and put forward different ways of solving it. The richer the viewpoints, the better the outcome — the better the science. That is one of the reasons diversity matters in science: not because we need to tick quota boxes, but because if we don’t take advantage of this range of voices and ideas, we are poorer for it. Our science suffers and the progress we make using this science reflects the perspective of those doing the research, not those of the country. I recently investigated the number of African women science graduates being produced by our universities and, to put it bluntly, the numbers just aren’t ...
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