1/Obviously it's too early to speculate on how coronavirus will change our society in the long term.

But I have a thought about how it might subtly change gender roles...

2/Coronavirus makes it seem more likely that the 21st century will really be the Century of Bioscience -- that biology will move to the forefront of both social importance and innovation, overtaking physical sciences and merging with information technology.

3/And that means that our relevant technical experts will, increasingly, be women.

Women already receive a majority of bioscience PhDs, and their dominance has been growing in recent years. For Master's degrees the disparity is even greater.

https://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/CGS_GED18_Report_web.pdf

4/Obviously, it takes decades for that pattern to work its way through academia and the tenure system. But soon, most of the technical experts that we rely on to protect us from disease and invent critical new bioscience technologies will be women.

5/If this happens, it will probably change our idea of what a "scientist" looks like. Images of Einstein at a chalkboard will probably give way to a picture of a woman in a lab coat.

6/That in turn could erode the idea -- still depressingly common, though most will rarely admit it -- that when push comes to shove it's men we turn to to save civilization from dire threats. It's increasingly women who will crush the pandemics of the future...

7/Now, even if men continue to be a minority of bioscience experts, a few might be louder and more confident, and capture the limelight more. :-(

Or men might flood into bioscience as they did into computer science.

So there are lots of ways this prediction could fail...

8/I also expect this shift to shine more light on biases in hiring, tenure and promotion in bioscience fields, both at universities and at private companies. Gender bias will be increasingly unacceptable when millions of lives are on the line...

9/In any case, just something to think about. It's about time that women became the stereotypical face of science, and recent events seem to increase the chance it'll happen in the coming decades!

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