Women in STEM: Cultivating Scientific Confidence

For pharmaceutical manufacturing and biotech leaders, maintaining a robust pipeline of technical talent is essential for innovation. Elisabeth Gardiner, chief scientific officer at Tevard Biosciences, highlights that while the pharmaceutical industry relies on multidisciplinary talent—including experts in chemical engineering, data science, and regulatory science—there remains a significant gender gap in these critical roles.

“From an economic perspective, having talented, engaged people in STEM is a win for the United States and, obviously, for the world,” Gardiner says. “New technology and new medicines come from bright minds.”

What is the state of women in the pharmaceutical workforce

Despite the industry's growth, representation for women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has stagnated. Gardiner points to several concerning statistics regarding the current workforce:

• Gender imbalance. In the US, women comprise nearly half of the general workforce but occupy only 35% of STEM jobs .

• Pharma representation: Within the pharmaceutical industry specifically, women hold only 20–30% of STEM roles, meaning the sector remains approximately 70% male-dominated.

• Global stagnation. Globally, women make up 35% of STEM graduates, a figure that has remained unchanged for over a decade.

The confidence gap vs rising interest

According to Gardiner, a critical takeaway for industry stakeholders is the “confidence paradox.” While interest in STEM has increased over the past decade, the self-reported confidence of girls and women in their scientific and mathematical abilities has dropped from 70% to 60%. Current investments in the space may not be providing the specific confidence-building training or mentorship required to sustain a long-term career in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

How can companies build a future talent pipeline?

Gardiner argues that the pharmaceutical and biotech industries must support early, hands-on exposure to demystify complex concepts. Because STEM requires physical execution and repetition, early engagement helps students—particularly girls—see themselves as competent STEM learners.

For the manufacturing sector, this foundation is vital for several reasons. Early exposure builds the groundwork for essential skills like coding, automation, and experimental design.

Early interest guides students toward college majors in biochemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics, which are the primary feeders for pharmaceutical careers.

New medicines and global technologies depend on a talented, engaged workforce; therefore, engaging diverse “bright minds” is a strategic move. Going beyond general investment toward structured mentorship and training fosters scientific confidence from an early age.

About the speaker

Dr. Elisabeth Gardiner is chief scientific officer at Tevard Biosciences, joining the leadership team in 2025 to spearhead the company’s pioneering tRNA-based gene therapies for rare diseases with high unmet need. With more than 25 years in the biopharmaceutical industry, she has directed and managed drug discovery and development efforts yielding 11 investigational new drug filings, four Phase I/II trial candidates, and one Phase III candidate. Prior to Tevard, Dr. Gardiner held senior R&D leadership roles at Tactile Therapeutics, Alterome Therapeutics, Aravive, and Kinnate Biopharma, where she directed multidisciplinary teams and advanced programs from discovery to clinical-stage development across neurology, oncology, and rare disease. Dr. Gardiner gained experience in tRNA biology while working at aTyr Pharma and at Scripps Research Institute in the lab of Paul Schimmel. Dr. Gardiner’s commitment to the ethical development of effective and accessible medicines is her key focus in life. In addition to her professional work, Dr. Gardiner acts as a patient advocate in the rare disease and oncology space. She earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds a B.S. and an M.S. from Texas A&M University.

Transcript

Editor's note: This transcript is a lightly edited rendering of the original audio/video content. It may contain errors, informal language, or omissions as spoken in the original recording.

My name is Elisabeth Gardiner. I'm the Chief Scientific Officer of Tevard Biosciences. We're based in Boston, Massachusetts. Tevard Biosciences is a drug development company focused on rare disease.

We're specifically focused on genetic diseases caused by nonsense mutations that result in premature stop codons, which is a type of mutation that's actually responsible for 10–40% of all genetic disease.

We are hard at work trying to bring therapeutics to the clinic for genetically defined dilated cardiomyopathies and muscular dystrophies caused by nonsense mutations.

I think that encouraging people from all walks of life to enter STEM fields is really important.

Engaging with students when they're young and showing them that science is interesting, and then providing them with ideas and examples of the jobs that they can do in the STEM field is crucial to having a thriving scientific community in general, and incredibly important to human health and, and global technology.

From an economic perspective, having talented, engaged people in STEM is a win for the United States and, obviously, for the world. New technology and new medicines come from bright minds.

In particular, with women, studies have shown that girls report increased confidence if they're exposed to STEM early, and this allows them to have more scientific and technical confidence in their own abilities after being exposed to STEM in school. They start to see themselves as competent STEM learners, and I think that that's critical in whether or not they're going to pursue either advanced coursework, advanced education, or a STEM career.

STEM's something you really have to be able to physically execute, and it doesn't really matter whether you're doing math or you're doing computer programming or you're a doctor or a nurse or someone working in a lab, it requires [that] you understand the concept, but then it requires hands-on exposure and repetition. So doing that early is much better. You know, the earlier it can happen, the more your brain learns to think that way.

I think that it's something that some people's brains really like and are excited by. If you're never exposed to STEM, you don't know whether or not your brain is going to like it or not.

Pharmaceutical and biotech industries really rely heavy on deep scientific training, so biology, chemistry, engineering, data science, regulatory science.

Every STEM exposure has long-term effects on the workplace representation, and so you get exposed in elementary school or middle school or high school, then it may guide your choice of a college major. So, if your college major is biochemistry, molecular biology, chem—you know, some other type of chemistry, bioinformatics, computer science, chemical engineering, you're going to actually, after spending that time in college, probably go into a career that represents that learning. So that's exciting.

And from alignment for the pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical work actually relies on multidisciplinary technical talent, and STEM exposure early really builds a foundation.

So, whether you're working in a lab, whether you're just learning how to think and design experiments, from the perspective, of coding and automation, I mean, again, that requires exposure, it requires training, requires some sort of mentorship.

And then I think a lot of people are scared of, learning math and thinking about data, and so early exposure helps demystify it and make it a more straightforward concept for people.

Evidence shows that investment exists, but it's probably not sufficient to close the gender gap that exists currently, and that probably more needs to be done.

So globally, women make up about 35% of STEM graduates, and that's really across the board. And unfortunately, this 35% has not changed in over a decade. So, this is global monitoring, US monitoring. And in the US, actually, women comprise 48–49% of the workforce, but they occupy only 35% of STEM jobs, and in fact, only 20–30% of STEM roles in the pharmaceutical industry are actually held by women. And so that means that almost 70% of the STEM workforce in the pharmaceutical industry is still male dominated.

It's not a bad thing, but it just means that there is a definite difference in representation. One of the reasons why this may be occurring is that over the past 8–10years, although girls' and women's interests in STEM have actually increased, you actually see the global confidence that girls and women have in themselves in STEM fields has actually dropped.

And so, 10 years ago, if you asked young women how they felt, you know, "Do you feel like you're good at math and science?" You know, 70% percent of them said, "Yes, I feel like I'm good at math and science." But now it's only 60%, and that number appears to be dropping, and it's unclear why that is. Is there not the mentorship? Are they being discouraged? It's unclear.

So, what that suggests is that while interest is rising and there's clearly investment in this space, the investment is likely not matching the need, and it's not really providing the kind of confidence-building training that is going to be leading to a long-term career in the Pharmaceutical industry.