Women Who Changed Science, Business, and Sustainability - But You've Never Heard of Them

A few weeks ago, it was International Women’s Day which of course meant the usual corporate fanfare where they say how much they support women while simultaneously asking women to MC their events for free.

It should go without saying that we are a long way off of closing the gender gaps in pay and investment and reaching gender equity…sadly it doesn’t and a lot of people need reminding.

Last year for this episode I spent a lot of time highlighting all the issues, so I thought this year instead I’d actually highlight the amazing women who have had world changing influences both in the past and now. And then I’ll talk about what’s wrong today and how we could fix it.

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Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place without the judgement and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place.

A couple of weeks ago, it was International Women's Day and your feed was probably full of corporations posting these vague empowerment messages or the coffee day they hosted or for some reason, pancake cupcakes, all while continuing to underpay, underfund and frankly, underappreciate women.

I personally find International Women's Day incredibly grating. I got three speaking requests this year to speak for free, which I always find hilariously ironic. And despite the fact that that's called out every year, companies still do it. I have no problem speaking for free at schools and non-profits, but when it's a big company like a big four accounting firm, then a bit weird.

Now last year, I focused this episode on how women are so underfunded in business despite outperforming male-led companies. But this time, I was kind of sick of beating that drum. I wanted to do something a little bit more positive.

So today, I'm talking about all the women who are or who have driven change in science, sustainability, and business. Women have been at the forefront of groundbreaking decisions since forever, way before you'd actually know. And so many of their discoveries and inventions have been credited to other people, and I don't have time to get into all of that, but so much of what women have done throughout history has been forgotten, and that's a real shame.

This is the kind of conversation we need to have, right, not just more super diversity panels. It's talking about the impact women have made, the barriers they face, why you don't know about that impact they've made, and what we can do to change it.

So let's start with science, my personal love.

Women have been shaping science for centuries, but of course you wouldn't know it from history books, right? If you ask someone to name a woman scientist, they'll almost certainly say Mary Curie, and she was incredible without question.

Now, if you know anything about the DNA, you'll know about Watson and Crick, who discovered the double helix formation of DNA. But you may not know of Rosalind Franklin, who was a massive part of that team, and is not credited with that discovery at all.

Then you've got Esther Lederberg. She was a microbiologist and discovered something that they called the Lambda Bacteriophage. Now, phages are viruses that infect bacteria, and I have a personal fascination with them. There's an excellent book called The Good Virus, if you're interested.

She not only discovered that bacteriophage, but along with her husband, she also developed a way to transfer colonies of bacteria from one petri dish to another, which is something called replica plating. And that enabled us to study antibiotic resistance, which is kind of important. And in fact, that method is still used today.

That work was part of the reason that Joshua Lederberg got a Nobel Prize, which he shared with two other blokes. She didn't get any credit for any of the work she did.

I could wax lyrical about this for ages. There's so many women out there who worked alongside men and were given none of the credit because that's just how it works. And that is enraging, because whenever you have this conversation on social media, there's always men who say, yeah, but look at men, everything's been created by men. Men did this.

At the end of the day, men have controlled society for so long and that means they controlled the narrative and the conversation about who did what and when. What you know of history is probably wrong. They say history is written by the victors for a reason.

Here are some more recent discoveries.

So there's an amazing woman called Rachel Carson, and she is kind of the founding mother of environmentalism. She wrote a book called The Silent Spring, which talked about the massively horrific effects of pesticides like DDT, which led to major environmental reforms and regulations, and basically has enabled a safer way of life for many of us.

And that was despite tremendous hardship. I mean, chemical companies actively tried to discredit her, because obviously they did, that's their thing. They were calling her hysterical, because that's 101 against women, right? But she wasn't — she was absolutely right. And her work has absolutely sparked the modern environmental movement and changed the way we regulate chemicals in nature.

Then there's Wangari Maathai, and I really hope I have said that correctly. Now, she was the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. She founded something called the Green Belt Movement, which planted millions and millions of trees across Kenya and empowered women to take control of their own environment.

And again, her activism didn't come without consequences. She was arrested, she was beaten, and she was publicly ridiculed by the government. And you just really think governments should, you know, know better, but of course, we're seeing that at the moment governments don't.

But despite that, she didn't stop. She carried on, because she knew environmental justice was obviously about more than just trees. It was human rights, it was corruption, it was power — and she changed the game.

Tu Youyou is a Chinese scientist and she's discovered something called Artemisinin. That's really hard to say, but regardless of how you say it, it's also one of the most effective treatments for malaria in history. And she saved millions and millions of lives, because of course the mosquito is the animal that kills more people on earth than anything else.

And yet she was barely acknowledged for decades, because her work was based on traditional Chinese medicine rather than Western scientific methods, and it wasn't until 2015, just a few years ago, that she finally got a Nobel Prize for it. She is 94. What an amazing woman.

This is Dr Joanne Chory, who's a plant biologist and she's working on — oh, oh, some of you are going to get grumpy — but she's working on genetically modifying crops to absorb and store more carbon dioxide. Now, if successful, that would be — I hate to use the term, it's overused — but it could be a genuine game changer in tackling climate change.

But yeah, she is struggling to get any recognition and funding in the field despite the immense urgency — because she's not a man.

And then we have Dr Patricia S. Wright. She's a primatologist. She discovered an entirely new species of lemur and then led efforts to protect Madagascar's rainforests. And it's actually thanks to her that one of the country's biggest national parks exists today.

Conservation science, despite what a lot of people think — because it's biology and, as someone at university told me a few years ago, the soft easy science — it's still a male-dominated field. So she had to fight against more of that nonsense.

So you're probably thinking, wow, that's amazing, that's just a few examples — and that is just a few examples. Again, I could go on.

But despite all this objectively good stuff they're doing, women are still battling an uphill fight.

Dr Leilani Walker has put it pretty bluntly. You know, universities, academic systems — they were built hundreds of years ago, and they were built at a time when the average academical researcher was basically a straight white man who had a wife at home to look after children. And it basically means that anyone who doesn't fit into that mould — whether culturally, whether it's gender, sexuality, disability, any kind of difference — will tend to make your life a little bit difficult in that space.

And actually the issue isn't getting into science — it's staying in it.

So women start out in STEM studies at similar rates to men, but just a few years after they graduate — and the higher up you go — the fewer women you see in leadership positions.

There's a few reasons for it.

There's obviously bias in hiring and funding. Women-led research gets less funding, period. It's been studied over and over and over again. It's not because what they're studying has less merit — it's often because it's focused on problems that women specifically face, which definitely gets less funding. But it's also because women themselves are doing it.

There is something called the double shift. So women are expected within these organisations to do more admin. They're the ones who organise the Christmas party. They're also the ones that need to do more mentoring — and you want to, as a woman in the workplace, right, because you see other younger women and they desperately need help. But all of that falls to the women, and as a SEWR woman, it's a lot of work.

And then, of course, there's all the diversity work — but none of those things count towards promotions. So they just take up time without leading to career growth.

And then of course, there's care and responsibilities. Academia is certainly not built for parents — and that burden falls massively, disproportionately on women.

And as Dr Walker herself says:

"Obviously, having children is a really big one, but I think we also underestimate caring for older family members as well. All of these caring responsibilities still, traditionally — it's like gravity — they just tend to fall on women."

And then, of course, there's another issue that's perhaps a little bit left field — but there's a lot of pushback on what's considered valid research.

And I will admit, years and years ago when I was a science purist, I was really ignorant to methodologies and things to study outside the Western view of science — because learning and loving science at school and then going to, you know, the first couple of years of university, it was all very specifically Western. The books I read were very Western.

And it's only in recent years — and now as I'm back at university working towards a PhD — that I realised finally, certainly in my university anyway, they've started to implement much more focus on other aspects outside traditional Western scientific frameworks. More Māori knowledge systems. More Indigenous wisdom.

But the problem is, if you are researching anything outside that traditional Western framework, you do get more pushback still. There is this pervasive idea that there's only one way to do science — and that is absolutely outdated — but it very much shapes the way funding, recognition and publishing work.

So a lot needs to change in academia and science.

We need structural change — not just mentorship programmes — but actual shifts in hiring, funding, and how success is measured. And that's hard to do because bias is very hard to combat. In fact, it's hard to get people to even admit they have unconscious bias — and we all do.

Something called cluster hiring is suggested. Instead of hiring just one person from one underserved community, instead hiring groups of them. So hiring Māori and Pasifika academics in groups so they're not isolated in institutions that are built for and by Pākehā men.

You imagine being on your own. Being on your own is never a comfortable position — and that is what these people are facing.

There's also this weird hierarchical promotion style in science, which is basically how many papers you've published and all these boxes to tick. But that's not really how it works. That doesn't measure someone's true contribution.

So career progression needs to take this into consideration — what someone has actually done, not just how many papers they've had published.

Women in science have, without question, changed the world — and will continue to do so — but imagine what they could do if they weren't constantly battling a system that wasn't designed for them.

And that is absolutely true of everything, including business. Because women aren't just driving change in science, they're also changing business, right?

But if you listened to last year's episode or have you heard me talk about this, it's still totally rigged and full of BS. Women-led businesses get a fraction of the investment that men-led businesses do. And when I say fraction, I don't mean like half or a quarter, but last year, women-led businesses got 1.8% of VC investment.

1.8%, yeah.

And yet, when you see some of the businesses that VCs have thrown millions of dollars at — led by men who have no experience and just ideas without any basis in solving a problem or a need — it becomes very enraging.

And I mean, gosh, if your business is sustainability-focused, it's even worse. Investors will tell you it's too niche and then throw millions of dollars at some business bro or crypto scam.

And I think a good example of this is actually Patagonia.

Yvon Chouinard is Patagonia's founder and he is held up as the ethical business icon, right? But he's never actually really run the company. And look, I'm all for this. This is great — you know, having the idea and then stepping aside and letting someone else run it. It's fabulous.

But Patagonia became the global leader you know it as under the CEO-ship of a woman called Rose Marcario.

Now it was under her leadership that revenue doubled, the environmental issues scaled up, and she proved that businesses can be both profitable and purpose-driven. Yet very few people know about Rose in favour of her male founder.

Have you ever heard of a woman called Lorna Rutto?

She's a Kenyan entrepreneur who founded something called EcoPost, which turns plastic waste into durable fence posts. Yes, it's something that's happened in many countries around the world. She was one of the earliest to do it and she tackled plastic pollution, created jobs and built a profitable business — all while investors continued to overlook her and other sustainability-driven companies.

A little bit closer to home, for those of you in Aotearoa — Peri Drysdale is a remarkable entrepreneur based in Ōtautahi, Christchurch, and she founded a company called Untouched World, which I'm sure so many of you would be familiar with.

It was Aotearoa's first fashion brand that was recognised by the UN — as you know, you do — for sustainability. She pioneered regenerative farming, ethical production, well before most people — let alone most brands — even knew what they meant.

So despite mountains of evidence that female-led companies outperform male-led ones, women-founded impact brands are still fighting to be taken seriously.

And that 1.8%? That's not an improvement. It was 1.9% of VC investing that went to women the year before last. It has been around this 2% mark for years and years and years.

We've been talking about it for years and years and years — and nothing changes.

To say that it is frustrating is really an understatement.

And yet again, you see all these trite posts from businesses on LinkedIn about how they support and love their women — and yet none of these stats change.

And then you, as a woman trying to have conversations with people about this, just get accused of being, well, so many things really — but aggressive or unpleasant.

There's no way to start having these conversations without people getting incredibly defensive.

And what Dr Leilani said about academia applies to business too. Basically, that kind of mould persists to a certain extent to this day. Things have gotten better, obviously, but we still see the academic system rewarding the average trajectory of that type of person.

Obviously there are lots of reasons for this.

The gender funding gap — I think I've probably talked about it enough — investors will overwhelmingly favour male-led start-ups. They are more likely to ask male founders questions like, "Oh, so where do you see this taking you in three years' time? What do you think the market size is? What are the opportunities?"

Questions they'll ask women are things about failure and risk. So naturally the conversations are pitched differently. One is much more optimistic, therefore probably resulting in more investment. And one is much more negative.

And I've seen this myself.

There's also the likability penalty — and this is a little bit what I was talking about a minute ago about having these conversations, right?

Women are judged as too aggressive if they are confident, or if they defend themselves, or if they stand up for other people — they're aggressive. It's not that they're assertive. A woman is either passive or aggressive. There is no just holding their own. That's not how people perceive it.

But if they're not confident — if they do try and lead with compassion and empathy, a little bit like, say, Jacinda Ardern — they're not leadership material. There's no winning.

That's going to be a very hard perception to change. But if we all look out for it, it's absolutely something to change.

And I'm actually trying to call people in when I see these things. Someone makes a comment about someone on TV — "Would you say that about a bloke?" It's not necessarily a super aggressive question, but it just — hopefully, depending on who they are — makes them think about what it is they said.

Or, "Is she aggressive, or is she just defending herself?"

Asking people questions when they make comments about things doesn't necessarily have to result in war, but it does sometimes — depending on the person and if they're open to it — make them think about their own thoughts.

Obviously, there's a lack of representation in business. There are far fewer women in leadership roles. There are more CEOs named John leading companies in the Fortune 500 than there are women.

And again, just to remind you — study upon study shows that women are just as good, if not better than, male leaders.

Again, there are ways to change this — and I suppose they're changing a little bit — but it's very slow.

We need more women in investment roles. This is an obvious win, but it's also not as obvious as you think, because of course women have unconscious bias too — and they're almost less likely to admit it than men.

When you have women sitting on VC boards, they are slightly more likely to invest in women — but actually not as much as you would have thought.

We need stronger networks for female founders.

Women need access to things like funding and mentorship and industry opportunities, right? And that comes from knowing people. It comes from networks — which is, look, an F word in my opinion. Not just more empowerment workshops or coffee groups or cupcake-making things.

There are so many business networks and they are almost all male-dominated — and we need to open their access to more women.

We need policies that support women in business — like stronger parental leave ones. The career penalty for having children is massive and still falls overwhelmingly on women.

We need to put more of that VC capital specifically aside for female-led businesses — and I can just hear the screaming from the anti-DE&I crowd — but I'll get to that soon.

Companies should think about tying executive bonuses to things like diversity targets. I mean, if leadership teams don't improve at this, pay them less — and watch how fast things change then.

And before you say, "Oh, but then you're just giving people something that they don't deserve," that's not how it works.

They've got to stop expecting unpaid labour. Women — and especially women of colour — are expected to take on that extra work I was talking about. So it's like the mentoring, and it's also the DE&I efforts, the community engagement — all of that is supposed to be free.

Stop expecting women to plan all of the things outside normal business day-to-day activities.

Finally, we need to fix recruitment pipelines — or pipelines in general, right?

There is no shortage of talented, accomplished women, but the problem is that these leadership roles keep going to the same people.

And one of my favourite examples is I'm a judge for an award here in Aotearoa — a business award — and every year we struggle to get women through, despite the fact that I know so many women who absolutely deserve to win it, but they don't apply.

I think there's two reasons for that. One is I don't think this award actually does very well at reaching out to women. But two, it's a little bit like the whole "men will apply for a job if they meet 60% of the requirements, whereas women will only do it if they meet 95%."

I think it's very much the same thing. These women don't think that they deserve to be anywhere near these awards and they shouldn't enter.

We need to encourage women to get involved in these sorts of things and we need to reach out to them more. We need to find where they are and have a think about the recruitment, and we need to think about all our pipelines to ensure we catch a far greater group of people.

And yet, in spite of this, diversity, equity, inclusion — so DEI efforts — are facing massive backlash, right? Especially in the USA.

But it's good, because I do know that Target dropped its DEI almost immediately upon Trump's inauguration. Clearly they were really wedded to it.

And the boycott has had an impact on their results. And that's bloody brilliant. It just goes to show you that consumer power is everything.

But it also goes to show you that people actually give a shit about this stuff. They understand that it works.

So when people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are screaming about bloody wokeness — which is, I don't even want to get back into that — and how it's ruining business... it's total nonsense.

Do you know who runs SpaceX?

And I appreciate it's had some pretty high-profile failures at the moment, but the woman behind SpaceX is one of the most incredible women. She's the COO, called Gwynne Shotwell. She is incredible. She runs a rocket company, because let’s face it, Elon Musk is never ever there, is he? He's too busy ruining America.

And it's even funnier when you think about the people who are complaining that DEI lowers standards, right? They're the ones who promote nepotism, cronyism and mediocrity in leadership — because they just play with their friends.

Donald Trump has quite literally put an anti-vaccine, anti-science moron in position to run America's health. That's going to go really well long term.

In fact, it's already going well, because they've got outbreaks of disease everywhere — and I'm not saying the outbreaks are his fault — but the massively dropping rates of vaccination are.

Repeated research from companies like McKinsey & Co, the Harvard Business Review and so on has repeatedly shown that diverse teams perform better, make smarter decisions, and have greater financial rewards. It's that simple.

The question is: when someone says DEI is destroying companies, you've got to ask yourself — who actually benefits when this leadership stays homogenous?

There was an article in the NBR the other day about how women are not starting enough startups, and the comments were exactly as you'd expect — all from blokes — saying along the lines of:

"Maybe women shouldn't start businesses. Maybe they're not built for it. We should stop trying to put the square peg in the round hole."

Every single one of them failing to acknowledge that in the article they pointed out why women are less likely to start businesses — which is everything I've just talked about.

So instead of bothering to look at the reasons behind it, they just went to the default, which was, "Oh, women and men are too different."

And that brings me to my last point, which is I wanted to debunk the most common excuses against gender equity. I talk about it a lot, and these are really the same arguments I hear.

Number one: "Women choose lower paying jobs, and that's why there's a pay gap."

No, they don't. Women are actively and passively pushed into lower-paid sectors like caring, because of bias and societal expectations, and a lack of support for careers in STEM, leadership and finance.

Even when they are in the same industries and roles, the gender pay gap still exists.

The gender pay gap exists, guys. It doesn't matter if you don't want it to or you don't believe it — it's still there.

Number two: "Women take time off to have babies, and that's their choice."

Not really. First of all, not all women have children. Second, men don't face anywhere near the same career penalties when they have families — because it's expected that the woman will stay home and do most of the caregiving.

And even in situations where men take the time off and look after children, they are not penalised as much when they go back to work.

In countries where they have decent parental leave for both parents, that's more fairly shared — the career gap shrinks. But it never goes away.

And this isn't about choice — it's about really old, outdated structures that punish women for things men get a free pass on.

It is still considered odd by the majority of people for a bloke to be the stay-at-home dad. And you are lying to yourself if you think that it's not.

And that is a shame — because I know plenty of men who would be fantastic stay-at-home dads, and plenty of women who want to continue with their careers.

We're supposed to have moved on into a society of choice, and yet there's still this BS judgement there.

I did like this one — because you know, you did have to assume there was a bit of logic behind this, right?

"But if women were truly paid less, companies would hire them more because they wanted to save money."

Sure, but you're assuming the hiring is purely logical — which it isn't.

Hiring decisions are massively influenced by bias. And as I've said before, everybody has unconscious bias. You have to recognise it and fight against it and educate yourself every single day — and most people don't want to.

It's also influenced by things like networking — so who you know. And then there's just these entrenched systems that favour men. And all of this boils down to the fact that they are much more likely to hire men for the higher-paid roles.

Study after study shows that hiring managers assume men are more competent, even when looking at identical CVs.

There are a couple of famous studies out there where they had several identical CVs in terms of experience, and they put male and female names at the top. Even though the CVs were effectively identical, they picked the male every time.

The next is: "Women are not good at business leadership."

Except they actually are.

Data and studies consistently show us that female-led businesses are more profitable. They have a higher return on investment, and they are more likely to survive long-term.

Sort of the opposite of what you think, right?

They're also better with money — which flies in the face of the idea that women are out there buying clothing and spending money on frivolous things like nail polish.

Women are just as good — if not better — at business than men.

And that, of course, led to my final — and I kind of think this is my favourite — argument, because it's kind of the funniest:

"But women are too emotional to lead."

That's what they say, right?

So let's talk about emotions.

Is anger an emotion? You bet it is. And yet the only reason men are not considered emotional is because they have managed to lead a wonderful PR campaign — not a literal one, obviously — but that means that people don't view anger as an emotion.

So the raging man is not emotional. He's rightfully cross about something. It's okay to put your fist through a wall because you're mad that something didn't go through.

But a woman? That would be unhinged. That would be hysterical. Woman crying in the workplace? Absolutely not. Far too fragile to run a business.

The biggest financial crashes and corporate failures in history have been caused by reckless, overconfident male-led decision-making.

I don't want to keep bringing this up as an example, but there's quite a lot of ego and emotion driving some big decisions in the richest country on earth, isn't there, at the moment?

At the end of the day, women-led teams perform better in collaboration, they're more likely to make ethical decisions, and they are much better at long-term planning.

Maybe we should be asking if men are too emotional to run things.

And at the end of the day, gender equity isn't about fixing women — it's about fixing the system that wasn't designed for us.

And sure, there is change happening — but it's not changing fast enough.

I read a statistic the other day that said it's going to take the next five generations for the gender pay gap to be closed.

So I think it's probably fair to say that the sun will have expanded and absorbed Earth — which is going to happen in about 4 billion years — before the investment pay gap is resolved.

If we want real progress, we need to encourage everybody to seriously think about the things that they think. And that sounds weird — thinking about your thoughts — but it's something I actually really enjoy doing.

Where are your thoughts coming from? Do they have any basis in reality?

I love to have these philosophical debates with my dad, actually. Obviously he's part of the older generation, but he's a very progressive thinker. He uses his brain. He thinks with science. He understands that things evolve, and we talk about things he used to think about. We talk about the societal beliefs that he grew up in. He explains the thinking behind them. And then we have a chat about the realities of it and how people are manipulated into believing these things without even knowing it's happening.

And it's fascinating. It's actually a really cool way to see the other side of the thinking, if that makes sense. Because the only way we're actually gonna change the game — move the needle, whatever you wanna use — is by bringing everybody along on the journey.

I'm so tired of seeing everybody fight about it. And I understand, because some people just make you so cross, and comments just make you so cross.

But the best way to get people on your side is to get them thinking — and you're not going to do that by being combative or defensive. Which is super easy to say, really hard to do.

But at the end of the day, it's time to stop expecting women to work twice as hard for half the recognition and start demanding that we build a system that actually works for everyone.

And before people say it's too hard, we can't change it — guys, we built the system in the first place.

Women are leading some of the most ethical, innovative, sustainable businesses in the world. They are driving some of the most incredible scientific discoveries. And that's great, but we need to stop just celebrating the exceptions and start fixing those frictions.

And to those of you who are not on board with this discussion, the first thing you can do is just start paying attention. Look at who gets funded. Look who gets hired. Look who runs certain companies. Look who gets left out.

Something that stuck out to me the other day is with this very concerning NZME shake-up — which is a media company in Aotearoa — a billionaire who's trying to take over and change the board has appointed five men. Five white men. There is no diversity on that board at all — and no one mentions it. And yet, if it was five women, people would have a breakdown.

There you go.

So kia ora, thank you for listening. I hope this maybe sparked a little bit of thought — maybe about your own thoughts. Sounded a little bit Inception-y, but thinking about how you think is actually fascinating.

See you next time. Mā te wā.

And there you go. I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune.

If that's your jam — fabulous.

But sustainability at its heart is just using what you need.

If you enjoyed this episode, please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button.

Kia ora, and I'll see you next week.

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