Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

I'm Manuela Saragossa.

Coming up, so you want a career in the sciences.

Don't be silly, you're a woman.

Once you get into grad school, not only are people questioning whether or not you should be there,

but then they start to question your leadership skills and whether you can be in charge of students

or projects.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, named after the Victorian woman known as the world's first computer

programmer, a day that celebrates women working in science, technology, engineering and maths.

So we're looking at the history of women who tried to foster a career in those

fields and ask, is it any easier today? That's all in Business Daily from the BBC.

How hard is it to forge a career in the sciences if you're a woman? In a moment, it may depend on where you are in the world and just how

financially lucrative and prestigious your field of research is. First, though, Professor

Alessandro Strumia recently worked at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Centre in Geneva,

home to the Large Hadron Collider. Last week, he told a room full of female academics and researchers at CERN

that it was harder to be hired as a man than as a woman.

I had to give this talk, where they say very bad things against men, they discriminate and so on.

So I did the simple checks that I believe everybody should have done before making these claims.

And with some surprise, I find that maybe it looks like maybe it's the opposite.

If you want to be hired, it's easier if you are women than men.

Professor Struner speaking there to the BBC shortly after giving his controversial talk at

CERN in which he claimed that physics was, in his words, built by men, and that women were

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