The full video produced by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Women and Science was released today. Go here to enjoy roughly 7.5 minutes with five different and highly accomplished women ranging from an ethnomusicologist to a spinal cord researcher to the president of the University of Alberta. Personally, I found the evolutionary biologist (I think she studies spiders) who described her area of research as being about self-sacrifice and cannibalism quite intriguing. There’s also Suzanne Fortier, the president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (a major funding agency for Canadian science), discussing careers, balance, and a life in science.

Accompanying the video are stories by Elizabeth Howell. Here’s an excerpt from the webpage,

When Karen Kidd thinks back on the women who inspired her as a young scientist, she can’t come up with any.

“All the researchers I worked with were men. I didn’t have a female mentor until more recently,” says Kidd, an ecotoxicologist at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John who earned her PhD in 1996.

She doesn’t feel her experience impeded her career, but the Canada Research Chair in Chemical Contamination of Food Webs acknowledges that there is a need for more women in science. And she recognizes that there are barriers which sometimes keep them away.

“Self-promotion and marketing — I think that’s what we [women] tend to do poorly,” she says. “It’s important to get out there and show others what you’re capable of. I think it’s really critical in this field, because it’s a competitive field for receiving grants and getting published. You have to be willing to sell yourself and defend your work.”