Pilar López Sancho: "At first I thought that the problem of women in science would be fixed in two years"

Pilar López Sancho (Madrid, 69 years old) has just received one of the most important awards that can go to a European physicist: the Emmy Noether prize, with which the European Physics Society recognizes those women with an important career in research in physics, together with the defense of women in this discipline.

In her case, and together with her more than forty years dedicated to research in condensed matter physics, there is her activity in the search for equality for women scientists.

López Sancho, a research professor at the Institute of Materials Science (CSIC), is discreetly behind most of the actions that have been carried out in Spain in the last 25 years in defense of women scientists.

She was co-founder, and president between 2010 and 2013,

the Association of Women Researchers and Technologists (AMIT);

promoter and president between 2008 and 2019, of the Commission for Women and Science of the CSIC and co-founder of the Group of Women in Physics of the Royal Physics Society of Spain.

This interview took place the day after she received the Emmy Noether award in Madrid.

“I am extremely grateful,” she explains, “and I feel better being

girl

I don't like being the center of attention very much, but the truth is that the act was beautiful”.

Pilar López Sancho is humble ("I don't know if I deserve an interview in EL PAÍS"), somewhat distant, with a distance from which one cannot tell if it is coldness or just shyness, and she is also precise, with the precision of physics.

During the entire interview, she does not allow to mention all the women with whom she has shared her years of scientific research and feminist struggle.

Ask.

In her appreciation speech upon receiving the award, she began by thanking her for the name she has of her, Emmy Noether.

Response.

It is that the choice of name is very fine.

Emmy Noether was not a physicist, she was a mathematician, she is the mother of modern algebra.

But in 1915, the scientist David Hilbert told Einstein that there was a conservation law in the General Theory of Relativity that he was not convinced of and that he was going to have Noether study it.

Two years later, Emmy Noether published an article with two theorems, in one she explained the mathematical bases of the theory of relativity and in the other she related symmetries to conservation laws.

That is Noether's theorem and almost all modern theories of physics are based on it, so its importance for physics is enormous.

But hardly anyone knows her and she never charged for her work because she was a woman.

Q.

In addition to your work as a researcher in condensed matter physics, you have dedicated a lot of effort to the fight for equality for women in science.

Were you always aware that discrimination existed?

A.

No, I wasn't until around 1999, which is when the ETAN report [the first report from the European Commission on the situation of women in the European science sector] was made public, which concluded that "the underrepresentation of women threatens the scientific goals of excellence, as well as being wasteful and unfair.”].

I also remember a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the same issue and with very similar conclusions.

That an institute of the category of MIT recognized that there was discrimination against women in its faculty makes you wonder why they were the excellent ones.

Q.

And what did you do?

R.

At that time, Flora de Pablo, also from the CSIC, had published an opinion article in EL PAÍS denouncing the same thing and we went to speak with the president of the CSIC who was then the physicist Rolf Tarrach.

His reaction was: “No, no.

In a scientific body there are no biases”.

But he agreed to make a working group.

That group was in charge of publishing the first statistics disaggregated by sex and it came out exactly the same as the ETAN report.

There were just over 30% women, but 70% of those women were in the lowest category.

So, Tarrach created an advisory commission that was very important because it put the problems on the table.

But we had to fight: the unions said that this was classism, the sociologists said that the data was not interpreted correctly...

Q.

At that time they also created the Association of Women Researchers and Technologists...

A.

Yes, it was the year 2001 when the idea of ​​creating the association arose.

But I have to say that it was Flora de Pablo, who has been very important, who worked tirelessly that summer to create it.

We were a few researchers.

Flora, Carmen Vela, María Ángeles Durán, Eulalia Pérez Sedeño, Agnes Gruart, among others… At first we went around the universities as if recounting the Gospel.

And there were times when very few people came.

But it has been important, very important.

Just like the CSIC Women and Science Commission.

Pilar López Sancho, at the organization's headquarters at the Autonomous University.

Luis Sevillano

Q.

More than twenty years have passed, are you still fighting for the same thing now?

R.

At first I thought that this would be fixed in two years.

The European Commission had created the Helsinki Group to make recommendations to solve the problem.

We had put it on the table.

But no, it's not fixed.

It is much more complex than you might think.

It is that we carry it inside, we have it normalized.

And in science it's more, I don't know how to say it, stubborn, because scientists think that they are not like that, that they are objective because their work is based on data.

It is as Tarrach said, that it was based on merit.

And yes, they are merits, but it depends on how you measure those merits.

Q.

And simultaneously with this feminist struggle, you have developed your scientific career.

What is the physics of condensed matter in which you investigate?

A.

It used to be called solid state physics.

And it is physics in which the atoms are forming crystalline structures, solids.

At first, I was working on surface physics.

He studied how techniques, for example X-rays or electrons, interacted with solid matter.

The surfaces are very important because they must be treated so that they do not have defects or so that they do not rust.

And then little by little, since the surfaces are two-dimensional, I went to low-dimensional materials because two-dimensional materials arose in which the properties totally change.

Electrons behave differently in a solid with a large volume and in a solid with a single shell, and this has very important applications.

Especially graphene.

Q.

Precisely, you have been investigating graphene for some time

A.

Yes, I make models to interpret electronic properties of these materials.

Lately I've been working on ribbons, which are strips of graphene that also have different properties depending on the orientation of the network.

I make the theory, but those tapes have already been made experimentally.

Since graphene is a hexagonal network, depending on whether it ends with zigzag atoms or ends in another way, it has different properties, to the point that one can be a conductor and the other an insulator.

All those things give a lot of play.

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