Welcome to the Glass Age

181 12. Gender Equality and Diversity in the Glass World A licia D urán Half of the brainpower on Earth is in the heads of women. …Today, the difficulty is to move from the acceptance of equal rights to the reality of equal opportunity. This transition will not be complete until women and men have equal opportunities for occupying position in power structures throughout the world. Donald J. Johnston, General Secretary OECD eminist economists and sociologists have developed two powerful metaphors to explain the employment situation of women. The glass ceiling explains the difficulty of many women to access the highest professional levels, the very low presence of women in positions of power and the lack of recognition of the work of many professional women. The sticky floor , on the other hand, refers to the large numbers of women condemned to occupy the lowest ranks of the occupational pyramid: temporary, part-time, low-wage jobs, considered “unskilled”, etc., a floor from which they cannot escape during their working lives and which is usually inherited from mothers to daughters [1]. The scientific world has historically mistreated women. Rosalind Franklin obtained the first X-ray image of DNA but Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize. Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars but her Ph.D thesis director was awarded with the Nobel Prize. And Marie Curie twice won the Nobel Prize, but only 3% of these prizes in medicine, physics or chemistry have been conceded to women. F