Women have already conquered physics, now academia must stop losing them | Prof. Avi Domb

Among the photos of the Israeli team at the International Physics Olympiad, recently held in Colombia, the picture of Ruth Kozlovsky, a 10th-grade student who won a gold medal, stood out. Although she was the only girl on the team, her achievement illustrates the significant change brought about by the inclusion of girls in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

If in the past the perception was that these were "masculine" professions, today reality proves otherwise. We see this in hackathon workshops for women and in the national physics olympiad that we conduct with the Administration of Religious Education, where the rate of participants is approaching 50%. The main challenge is no longer at the entrance gate, but at the next stage: retaining and promoting women in academia and research. If we do not know how to retain this human resource in the advanced stages of an academic career, the impressive success we see today in schools will not translate into long-term scientific leadership.

The fact that more and more students are choosing excellence tracks in exact sciences today, winning international medals, and leading technological ventures, shows that the old debate about the capabilities of women in science was settled long ago. The problem is that we succeed in bringing talented women to the threshold of a research career, but struggle to retain them at the stages where they are required to decide between professional advancement and starting a family. This is the failure that public policy needs to solve.

The difficulty begins mainly in advanced degrees and experimental research, which require years of continuity, daily work in laboratories, team management, and the recruitment of research grants. For young female researchers, the years of intensive training sometimes overlap with the years of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children, creating objective time constraints that can delay a research career.

The solution is not in affirmative action, but in correcting the incentive mechanism: public funding of dedicated scholarships for women in advanced degrees will remove the economic barrier and allow for selection based on excellence alone. At the same time, career advancement tracks must be adapted to the realities of life without compromising on the academic standard. The evaluation of a researcher cannot be based only on the number of publications, but also on their quality, scientific impact, and their ability to raise grants. A researcher whose research period overlapped with pregnancy, childbirth, or raising children should not be evaluated as if she had the same research continuity as a researcher who did not face those constraints.

This is not just an issue of equal opportunity, but a national interest. At a time when Israel is dealing with a shortage of researchers, scientists, and engineers, every outstanding researcher who drops out of the track due to structural barriers is a loss for academia and industry. Investing in removing these barriers is a strategic investment in human capital, innovation, and Israel's competitiveness.

The author is the president of the Lev Academic Center.