Old notices
These pages collect together notices posted on the IUCr web site in past years. They are retained for archival interest, but there is no guarantee (or likelihood) that many of the web links found in these notices will still be active.
International Women's Day 8th March
Participants in the Molecular Dimensions' Women in Crystallography session at IUCr2017. From left to right: Rebecca Eno (speaker), Claire Naylor (organiser), Martha Brennich (speaker), Gayathri Pananghat (speaker), Elspeth Garman (speaker), Julia Contreras (speaker). Photo courtesy Molecular Dimensions.
Thursday 8th March is International Women's Day, and a good time both to celebrate the achievements of women in Crystallography and to take stock of whether the IUCr as an organization is doing enough to ensure gender equality. Helen Maynard-Casely, Christine Beavers, Claire Murray and Amber Thompson have kindly contributed an article to our Crystallites blog that reminds us of just how successful and influential women crystallographers have been, but also raises some serious questions. This follows an email from Elspeth Garman (co-signed by many others) to the Executive Committee that urged the IUCr to take action on gender equality. In response to Elspeth’s email, the Executive Committee of the IUCr proposed a policy on gender equality that was approved by the General Assembly at Hyderabad. Subsequently, the rules for sponsorship of meetings by the IUCr were amended to reflect this. IUCr Commission Chairs are now required to consider gender balance in addition to geographical and subject balance when nominating candidates for the International Programme Committee (IPC) for Prague 2020. Together with the appointment of a female IPC Chair, Ivana Smatanova, it is hoped that this will ensure a good balance of speakers in Prague.
Since her election to the Executive Committee in Hyderabad, Jenny Martin is doing an excellent job of keeping gender equality at the forefront of the Executive Committee’s thinking, but are the IUCr moving quickly enough? Why not go to the Crystallites blog now and tell us what you think?
More information on International Women’s Day and how it is celebrated around the World can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women's_Day
And some ideas for how you could celebrate it are here: https://www.internationalwomensday.com/
