17 junio 2021
Campus Bilbao
Despite efforts to eliminate gender disparities in research and innovation, women continue to be under-represented in this field. When considering all disciplines, only a third of researchers in the EU are women and only 15 % in the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Women also represent less than 10 % of patent holders and founded only 8 % of European start-ups. Furthermore, only 25 % of European start-ups were founded by a team that included at least one woman. In the 119 years of the Nobel Prize, it has been awarded 876 times to men, 58 times to women, and 28 times to organizations.
That is why, within the framework of the H2020 Gearing Roles project, the University of Deusto has launched the Nobel Run board game that, with a playful and innovative approach, wants to question and transform gender stereotypes and inequality in science.
The objective of the game is to manage a research team to get the Nobel Prize. At the beginning, the participants just have their effort, a small local project and the help of a PhD student (“predoc”). As the game progresses, they get more projects, research team and can publish in prestigious magazines. The mechanic used is deck-building, in which a basic starting deck improves round by round thanks to the new cards participants get. Relevant scientists and inventors will help by also telling part of their story. For example, Mary Somerville, Ada Lovelace’s mentor (also present in the game), will imply extra effort because there is nothing more valuable than a good mentor or Hedy Lamarr, inventor of frequency hopping spread spectrum, will provide extra data. Other cards can have negative effects such as Rosalind Franklin’s, with which participants can take data away from rivals just as the decisive photos that she had obtained were stolen (the famous Photograph 51) and whose results she had not yet published. That was the essential piece of the puzzle that Watson and Crick were missing. Even so, they only thanked her in a brief quote at the bottom of their paper.
The game, recommended for people over 10 years old, 2 to 4 people and lasting approximately 30 minutes, has been developed by Pablo Garaizar and Lorena Fernández, Director of Digital Identity at the University of Deusto (both members of the Gender Interdisciplinary Research Platform) and illustrated by Íñigo Maestro. It already has the Ludia seal for meeting all the quality criteria (skills and competencies developed, accessibility, quality of the components, mechanics, manual, recommended age, etc.).
The crowdfunding campaign, started on June 17, can be accessed in this Webpage.
