GS6 Speakers

Director, Portia Ltd, UK.

Global impact through regional focus (download presentation here )
Gender Summits Overview: Collective Commitment and Action for Global Impact
How gender knowledge can promote innovation with socioeconomic impacts (download presentation here )
Parallel Session 3: Advancing Gender Sensitive Innovation Ecosystems

Elizabeth Pollitzer PhD is founder and Director of Portia, an organization devoted to improving gender equality in STEM and advancing the understanding of the gender dimension in STEM.  She has 20 years’ experience teaching and researching in the Department of Computing at Imperial College, University of London. Her original training was in Biophysics. She now applies this scientific background to promoting effective strategies for gender equality in STEM.  She is expert adviser on gender issues to the European Commission.

Dr  Pollitzer chaired the session on Career-life balance at the Gender Summit 4 EU 2014. This is an area she has extensive knowledge and experience of through the many different schemes that she helped design and implement, in particular to enable women trained in STEM to return to STEM after a family oriented career break.

Summary of talk for Gender Summit 6 Asia-Pacific
Parallel Session 3: Advancing Gender Sensitive Innovation Ecosystems

This presentation will explore areas where understanding of female-male biological (sex) and social (gender) differences promises to deliver important socioeconomic benefits through gender knowledge-aware innovation. Four categories of innovation will be considered: disruptive, architectural, routine, and radical. They are distinguished through the relationship between the technical competence and business models/policy strategy needed for implementation, i.e. do they exist or have to be developed. As an example, “gendered medicine” can be seen as ‘routine innovation’ – for instance, a German company Biotronik is already testing gender-sensitivity of their cardio rhythm management devices. A ‘disruptive’ innovation by contrast would target differences in metabolic profiles of women and men to develop female-male specific diagnostic biomarkers in order to improve efficacy of treatment of diseases linked to metabolic processes, such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s.