Against all odds, Simone Badal McCreath dreamed of being a physician. Her mother had left the family when she was young. She and her stepmother didn’t get along. She grew up in a poor community and no one in her family had ever gone to college. “This is the developing world,” she says from her home in Jamaica. “You have challenges.”

But her father, an uneducated but “brilliant” shopkeeper, she says, wanted his children to get an education. It wasn’t easy. One of McCreath’s challenges in high school was a lack of science teachers, so it wasn’t until she arrived at the University of the West Indies that a light went off. She suddenly knew she wouldn’t be practicing medicine; she’d build a research career.

Ethan Rosenberg for USN&WR

“There was this one professor who taught biochemistry,” she says. “I remember falling in love with biochemistry right then and there. It wasn’t abstract. One chemical process has to happen before another one can happen. For example, first insulin releases; it travels to cells; blood sugar is affected. It made sense, and I fell in love with it.”

She and four other women faced and met their own unique challenges to go on to win the 2014 Elsevier Foundation Award for Early Career Women Scientists in the Developing World. The award, in its fourth year, is intended to give women in poor nations the international recognition that often leads to financial and peer support to advance their work. The five women, all chemists, were honored for their work that looks to nature for potential cures and treatments for cancer, malaria and other diseases.

“In sciences, academia and research, there’s value in recognition,” says David Ruth, executive director of the Elsevier Foundation. “Women are an untapped resource in the developing world.”

The global picture in general is grim for women in science and technology fields. The number of women working in those fields is on the decline. One study of some of the world’s largest economies, including the United States, the European Union, South Africa, Korea, Indonesia and India, found that in physics, computer sciences, and engineering the participation rate of women is 30 percent or less. In countries that have made an effort to increase the number of women studying science and technology, those efforts have not translated into more women actually working in the fields. “Access to education is not a solution in and of itself,” says Sophia Huyer, author of a 2012 report on a study of women in science and technology and executive director of Women in Global Science and Technology, an international organization that promotes women’s development in those fields.

Lindsey Cook for USN&WR/Source: The World Bank

Other things, like glass ceilings, lack of child care, and cultural obstacles against women in science, get in the way of career advancement. In the Arab world, for example, the number of women studying physics surpasses that of men, but that number drops dramatically at the faculty level in universities.

To see the ripple effect of greater numbers of women in specific fields of science, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations looked at women in agricultural science. “There are very low percentages of women in agricultural science, and therefore you have few women as extension agents,” Huyer says. “That means fewer female farmers are being reached with extension services, financing, land, information, fertilizer.”

The FAO estimates that increasing the number of women scientists reaching out to female farmers at the same level that male farmers are being reached by scientists would result in an increase in agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 percent to 4 percent; it could reduce the number of undernourished people by 12 percent to 17 percent; and reduce the number of undernourished people around the globe by 100 million to 150 million people.

In very poor countries, before women can become scientists, engineers, computer experts or mathematicians, they must be able to read and write. In Yemen, the literacy rate among women is only 46 percent compared to 80 percent among men. In Nigeria, about half of women can read and write, compared to 72 percent of men. Yet two of the award winners are from those countries.

Lindsey Cook for USN&WR/Source: The World Bank



These women have overcome obstacles far beyond basic reading and writing, and they have excelled. In many ways, their lives have been very different. McCreath came from humble beginnings, but her father persisted in urging her to study, to be deliberate and excellent at every task.

“One day, I was given the task to clean the stove,” she says. “I was young. I wanted to do a quick job and then go play. He inspected it, and made me do it over. He said, ‘Simone, whatever you do, take your time and do it well.’”

Eqbal Mohammed Abdu Dauqan of Yemen is the head of the medical laboratory sciences department at Al-Saeed University in Taizz, Yemen. She’s grateful that she comes from a family interested in education. “My father is in engineering. My mother is a housewife, but she was pushing me to finish my studies,” Dauqan says. “My older sister is a Ph.D. in geographic science. One cousin is an engineer.”

She had academic role models, but she is not yet juggling the work/family conundrum women around the world face. “I have delayed marriage until I’m more stable in my own career,” she says. “I have many friends, married and at the same time working. They are successful – but I don’t know how.”

No doubt, other women in science delay or forego marriage and families. One woman that Huyer met in the course of her research became a scientist because of an underlying insult. “I met a very senior scientist in Pakistan who told me that the reason she was able to go on with her studies was that her parents felt she was not pretty enough to get married,” Huyer says. “Her punch line was: ‘Not only did I have a career but I found as husband as well.’”

Despite their differences, there are common threads among the women honored this year and in previous years. Many of them talk about having had a mentor, Ruth says. But most of all, they uniformly talk about the support they have from others – husbands, children, parents and extended families.

“What’s striking is that you see a lot of women coming to get this award with their families,” Ruth says. “They have a support network. In parts of the world where gender is more of an issue, it takes more than just one individual to be able to succeed.”

McCreath made the joyful trip to Chicago for the February 2014 meeting of the AAAS, where she received her award, with her husband, Gregory McCreath, and her sister, Ruth Badal. “My husband is understanding, and not so demanding,” she says. “I see so many other women struggling to balance home life and career life.”

Taiwo Olayemi Elufioye made the trip from her home in Nigeria to Chicago alone. But, she says, “My husband is a pharmacist. He’s very, very supportive. That can be rare. I don’t take that for granted, at all.”

Elufioye’s mother was a teacher, her father an administrator at a university, and it was expected that she would go to college.

In Nigeria, she knows there is not equal opportunity for everyone. “But for us, our family, there was equal opportunity,” she says. “Everybody went to university in my family. Now, we have three doctors, and the others are getting their master’s.

“But in pharmacy, as you progress, females drop out of the profession. Women are still expected to be at home, doing the cooking, doing the washing, and taking care of the babies. In Africa, we have close family ties. You also have responsibilities to extended family, to in-laws. It can slow you down a bit.”

Researchers and chemists in developing countries are in a unique position to use what is available in their countries as the basis for research. For example, Elufioye’s research focuses on the medicinal properties of Nigerian plants in the treatment of malaria, cancer, wounds, memory loss and leprosy.

Nilufar Mamadalieva of Uzbekistan, another winner of the 2014 award, is examining the phytochemical and biological properties of medicinal plants in Central Asia.

And McCreath, who manages the biochemistry lab at the Natural Products Institute at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, is overseeing and designing a new cell culture lab. She hopes to use cell cultures from her own country’s population to investigate the cancer-fighting properties of these Jamaican natural compounds.

“Right now, we do work mainly on Caucasian cell lines,” she says. “We can do the research, but there’s no guarantee that it will work on our population.”

With a graduate student, McCreath is beginning to gather cells from the Jamaican population, at first concentrating her work on prostate cancer. “Jamaican men have among the highest rates of prostate cancer in the world,” she says. Such a database of cells from the local population presents an opportunity to do something in Jamaica, for Jamaican people, that would not be done elsewhere.