Greenfield Profile

In the September issue of Discover Magazine I found an interview with Pharmacologist Susan Greenfield. She's quite accomplished:

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Fullerian Professor of Physiology and Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University, heads a team of scientists who are focused on the genetics of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. She is the first female director of the 204-year-old Royal Institution of Great Britain and a cofounder of two biotech start-ups that specialize in brain diseases. She holds a seat in the House of Lords, has hosted a BBC series on the brain, and wrote The Human Brain: A Guided Tour. Her next book will be titled Tomorrow's People.

And has this to say about women in biotech:

Why are there so few women in prominent biotech positions?

Greenfield: This is a particularly savage world. I think it's a particularly alpha-male type of environment. In biotech, people's body language is different, the way they talk, the way they walk. They are very aggressive. Women especially do have a problem working with the men. I'm happy doing that, because I'm a naturally aggressive type of person. But men have a problem too. Men at my company say I'm a difficult person to get along with, and I say, wait, if I were a man you wouldn't be saying this. I think that because biotech is such a roller coaster—because it's not a secure and stable environment—there's a lot of adrenaline, a lot of puffing up, a lot of showing off, and I think women are uncomfortable in that kind of environment.

And more. It's an interesting interview. "Happy people know what they want, but they are not ambitious. They are not the people who build civilizations," she says.