Association

Associazione Donne e Scienza is a non-profit cultural organisation that gathers women scientists working at Higher Education Institutions and Public Research Organisations in Italy. Disciplines vary from physics and engineering to biology and chemistry, and include also social sciences, education, ICT and scientific journalism.

Associazione Donne e Scienza promotes women’s participation in scientific research to contribute and generate debate on contemporary science with a gender perspective.

Advisory board

Sveva Avveduto president – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Roma
Giuliana Rubbia vicepresident – Physicist – Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia
Monica Zoppè treasurer – Biologist – Istituto di Fisiologia Clinica del CNR di Pisa
Silvana Badaloni – Physicist – Facoltà di Ingegneria dell’Università di Padova
Lucia Martinelli – Museo delle Scienze di Trento
Elisa Molinari – Physicist – Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Maria Luigia Paciello – Physicist – Istituto Nazionale Fisica Nucleare, Roma

Past presidents and advisors

Our history

Association Donne e Scienza was funded in December 2003 by a group of scientists and scholars from several disciplines. Since the Eighties this group of
women has promoted activities on women in science and has developed it’s own analysis of contemporary science.

Founders statement

We are women scientists from different disciplines that for ten years have been meeting regularly at the Documentation Centre for women in Bologna. Some of us came from feminism, some others had different political backgrounds. In those years we were critical and aware that science is not neutral. Later on we became conscious that there wasn’t a gender neutrality as well, although we were referring to an advanced and open minded cultural area such as research and knowledge development. Denouncing the progressive exclusion of women from scientific careers and top positions, as well as from key-roles and decisional seats, where research financing and orientation is decided, was weaved with the sense of our participation to it and a possible gendered science.

For these reasons we are truly intentioned to obtain positions, spaces and resources to prove our competences. We want to demonstrate that:

hierarchy means achievement of power and of responsibilities at the same time;
aggressiveness is not the way to power, personal qualities shown at work are;
the quality of work done is more important than the time employed to realize it;
scientific goals are not achieved on the base of competitiveness but on the base of relationships that guarantee freedom of thought.