Rising to the challenge.

AuteurGolini, Catherine Richards
Fonction Business feature

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With three women holding top government offices this year, it is an appropriate time to feature five other females who have achieved considerable professional success in Switzerland. Their accomplishments are all the more pertinent, as they work in areas where women are traditionally under-represented. From science and engineering to education and architecture, these women inspire with their stories of talent, determination and self-belief.

Their areas of expertise are as extraordinary and diverse as the women themselves. In a journey across Switzerland, I meet five female pioneers, who are redefining some of the world's most male-dominated professions: five remarkable women, each a success in their field; each with an inspiring story to tell.

The particle physicist

Dr. Pauline Gagnon is a particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment--the ATLAS detector, some 45-metres long and a colossal 25-metres high, searches for new discoveries in the headon collisions of protons--at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. A French Canadian, Gagnon has been at CERN for 15 years. Employed by the University of Indiana, she is one of 3,000 physicists from 173 universities and laboratories worldwide that collaborate on the experiment.

Her route into science was less direct than some. "I stopped studying after my degree and became a physics teacher. Then I moved into science writing. It wasn't until I was 30 that I made the decision to go back to school, get a master's [degree] and then a PhD."

I asked Gagnon if teaching had been a career choice dictated by gender. "Yes, probably. Nobody encouraged me [to become a physicist], not even when I was an undergraduate. And I had a double impediment: not only was I female I was also French Canadian!" At the time, according to Gagnon, French Canadians were not promoted in academia or the workplace in the same way as their English-speaking countrymen.

In a little over a decade there's been a marked increase in the number of female physicists at CERN, an increase which reflects a similar growth in the number of female physics graduates worldwide. "Eighteen per cent of the physicists currently involved in the ATLAS experiment are women. A decade ago women here represented much less of the workforce," Gagnon notes.

In March, with CERN support, she organised a special event to celebrate the progress of women in physics. The objective was simple: to send a clear message that particle physics is a field where women play an active role at the forefront of experimental research.

"It's always been a...

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