“State universities in the Philippines, especially UP, are one of the best places to pursue science if you are a woman. Apart from the academe being generally gender blind, the enactment of the Expanded Maternity Leave Law in 2019 now levels the playing field for married or expecting lady scientists.”

This is what Dr. Maricor Soriano, an applied physics professor at the National Institute of Physics, believes as she was one of the women who experienced the benefits of being a woman scientist in the country and witnessed significant changes for women in the workforce.

“In Finland where I had my postdoc from 1998 to 2000, I was amazed that maternal leaves were as long as four months and fathers can share child-rearing duties through paternal leaves. Since then, I desperately wanted it to be the same for our country. And now it’s a reality!”

Dr. Soriano started her special connection with science when she used to observe and assist her father, an engineer, in making and assembling things from scratch. This influenced her to become a tinkerer and encouraged her to pursue Physics, despite initially wanting to become a medical doctor.

Dr. Soriano’s research specialty is color, video and image processing. She is currently the principal investigator of the Video and Image Processing Laboratory in NIP. Her laboratory creates hardware and software tools and technology to answer different institutions or agencies’ imaging needs. Her laboratory caters multidisciplinary requests, from art museums, marine science researchers, medical doctors, anthropologists, archaeologists, etc. One remarkable technology she helped develop is ARRAS, a coral reef imaging technology, which mapped 2,000km of coral reefs around the Philippines.

She also serves as the program leader of “STAMINA4Space,” funded by the Department of Science and Technology where they make the satellite bus and optical payloads locally for a future Diwata 3.

Dr. Soriano believes that although there have been improvements over the years, Physics is still a male-dominated field, and three factors she can think of are: gender stereotyping, lack of role models, and the institutional gender bias of certain research areas. “It should not be the sole responsibility of women to assert themselves and make adjustments in their careers in science. Let us also ask men in scientific labs , and also in STEM industries to make the environment more conducive and welcoming to women,” she says.

She also pointed out that employers from different industries should stop their discrimination—if ever existent—to women who are married or are about to have kids. She has witnessed that pregnant ladies are discriminated upon by their employers who think hiring married women is unstrategic. She says that this kind of thinking is absurd especially that this pandemic has proven that people can still be productive even at home.

“My role model in life is my mom. She is a teacher and when I was a baby, her school was just across the road. During her lunch break, she would come home and she would breastfeed me and my brother, and then return to her classes after. When I learned of this years later,  it ingrained in me a lifelong respect for working mothers.”

Dr. Soriano hopes that more and more young girls will be interested in pursuing science and engineering because she believes that women have a big role in bringing together researchers from different fields. She shares a research study about feminine and masculine work values where the results state that women are more collaborative; men are more independent and women tend to work as a team; men are more competitive.

“Dealing with intricate systems, processes, and negotiations in STAMINA4Space made me realize that our innate collaborativeness is an advantage in space science and  engineering.”

Dr. Soriano is an advocate of self-learning. She believes that the future of education is self-learning. With the Internet being available as an online resource, anything can be learned if one just has the right amount of interest and discipline.

Dr. Agnes T. Paras, Professor at the Institute of Mathematics and conferred UP Scientist I, has been fond of mathematics since she was young. “It was a subject that I enjoyed and was willing to devote more time to,” she recalls.

Dr. Paras entered UP as a geology major, much to the dismay of her father, who thinks it is a male-dominated scientific field. She eventually shifted to BS Mathematics to pursue her interest in math, which made her father happy and hope she would end up as a professor.

From the moment she graduated, Dr. Paras continued the dreams of her father to become a professor and obtained her Ph.D. in Mathematics at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, U.S.A.

Dr. Paras is an algebraist. She started her research in infinite abelian groups, and ring and module theory. She eventually shifted her studies to matrix analysis, an area combining matrix theory and complex analysis, concentrating on the algebraic aspects of matrix theory.

Mathematics has long been dreaded as a difficult subject by undergraduates. “We should understand that professors, in any field, won’t spoon-feed all the information. You learn math by doing it and making your own realizations, not just by listening and memorizing,” she emphasizes.

To anybody who finds math difficult, Dr. Paras highlights the importance of analyzing and studying the concept first, and to do the assigned exercises. “To learn math, one must be able to understand the definitions and principles. Once these are clear, work on the exercises to have a deeper appreciation of what is going on. The fun part of math is being able to appreciate the elegance of a proof or a solution, and arriving at a perspective which simplifies the problem at hand”, she says.

According to Dr. Paras, the UP Diliman Institute of Mathematics has more male faculty members compared to women, almost twice as many. However, if we compare it to Mathematics institutions from other countries, the percentage is significantly higher. Despite more women involved in mathematics in the country, Dr. Paras says that societal expectations are still holding back women in pursuing a full-time career in Mathematics. “More is demanded from women in our society, especially mothers,” she says.

Dr. Paras hopes the next generations embrace scientific mindsets to be the norm. “In the Philippines, many use superstition, religion and folklore to explain the things happening around us. I believe we are getting left behind because of this mindset.” she highlights.

An addition to the list of women scientists who also took the challenge of being mothers is Prof. Cyril Salang, Ph.D. of the Materials Science and Engineering Program (MSEP). She has a doctorate degree in Physics and is currently an Assistant Professor at the university.

Dr. Salang’s high school mentors, who showed exceptional skills in physics and mathematics, were the ones who first piqued her interest in science and eventually encouraged her to take up a degree in Physics. These mentors, who were mostly females, were big inspirations to her because they debunked her “old” perception that only men can be good at math and be scientists.

“As educators, we should discourage gender stereotyping and putting gender labels on career paths our students may take. We should realize that these perceptions will affect the choices our students make. Their interests should matter in choosing their careers.”

While taking up her doctorate degree in 2008, Dr. Salang also started teaching in the National Institute of Physics (NIP). She stayed in NIP for almost 5 years and was re-hired in 2019 to work in MSEP. She has been with the College of Science and UP for a total of 6.5 years. Her research interests include semiconductor growth via molecular beam epitaxy and she is currently venturing into two-dimensional nanomaterials such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride.

As she was pursuing higher studies, one of Dr. Salang’s goals was to contribute to the body of knowledge. And she was lucky enough that she became a part of the Condensed Matter Physics Laboratory, where her mentors and colleagues supported this goal.

After successfully entering the world of Physics and having fulfilled many of her scientific goals, Dr. Salang is now facing a new challenge: being a first-time mother. She knew that choosing to become a mom and to continue her career would entail challenges. True enough, she admits that it is a struggle to juggle her responsibilities in her family and career, but Dr. Salang is proud that despite this, she is happy with her choice of being a scientist mom.

“I’m blessed I have a supportive husband who understands me and my needs as a working mother. Our first months as parents were tough, but we always found a way to be there for our child and, at the same time, be able to do our respective jobs. It has been a big transition, but I am happy.”

Dr. Salang also expresses her gratefulness to the faculty and staff in MSEP for being understanding colleagues, and commends UP, which abides by the Magna Carta of Women. Being in this supportive environment somehow made it easier for her to manage her schedule as a working mother. Dr. Salang believes that women should be free to choose whether they want to be a housewife, work outside of home, or even do both.

Dr. Salang also reiterates that perseverance, determination, and practice—not only innate abilities—will make a person a good scientist. “I think everyone has a chance to do science. As long as you have the passion, you should never stop dreaming that you can contribute not only to the body of knowledge, but also to new technologies that can benefit society.”