A summit in Canberra is examining why Australian women are dropping out of science and engineering, often when they are at the peak of their careers.

Organisers of the today's summit say this brain drain is costing the country both culturally and economically.

Neuroscientist Catherine Leamey, who is taking some time off after having her first baby nine months ago, says she will go back to work later this year with some trepidation.

"I did [undergraduate] and honours at New South Wales University and then I did a PhD and then I did a post-doc at MIT in the US. Then I came back and got a lectureship at Sydney University and now I'm a senior lecturer," she said.

"Your ability to raise funding, which is what you need to do to be able to do science, is by producing papers and having had a baby, it will affect that in many, many ways," she said.

"It will continue to affect us for some time to come."

Anna-Maria Arabia, the head of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), says a scientist's success is based on their publication rate.

"But it is a publication rate that may have been calculated over the number of years that they have been in research since their PhD where perhaps five of those years may have been out of the workforce to raise children," she said.

Dr Leamey says many women simply give up on research when they return to work.

"Once they have a child, they pretty much just decide, OK, I will become a teaching academic and stop doing research just because it just gets too hard," she said.

"They can't raise funding and they sort of get basically fed up with the whole process."

Ms Arabia says the summit, organised by FASTS, aims to address that problem, which is a common story for many women scientists in their 30s and 40s.

"In all scientific disciplines, the evidence shows that there is significant under-representation of women, particularly at senior levels," she said.

"Within publicly funded research organisations particularly we see a low level of women: in some cases, less than 10 per cent at senior levels."

Ms Arabia says having a career after a baby is not the only issue for women in science.

"In the physical sciences and in engineering, we have greater under-representation even at more junior levels because women aren't entering the workforce having not studied science and engineering," she said.

This means women cannot fill the shortfall of scientists and engineers who are in demand to service the mining boom or help build the proposed giant telescope.

For that reason, Ms Arabia says the summit is not looking at the problem as a women's issue, but rather as being about productivity, the economy and our culture.

"We are looking at leaders within the scientific community to commit to action to address the under-representation of women in science and engineering," she said.