The IAEA Director General opened the Conference on Women in the Nuclear Sphere of Ukraine

The IAEA Director General opened the Conference on Women in the Nuclear Sphere of Ukraine and announced the IAEA Marie Skladowska-Curie Sectoral Scholarship Program for Master’s students.

During the speech at the opening of the II Annual Conference “Women in Nuclear Ukraine”, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi congratulated the women of Ukraine on the establishment
of the representative office of women in Ukraine’s nuclear sector “WIN Ukraine”.

Mr Grossi noted that gender parity was one of the first commitments he made to the Agency in the coming years, immediately after his appointment. He also expressed his conviction that this ambitious goal would be achieved.
Nuclear energy makes an important contribution to solving global problems, including food security, health, energy and clean water. All this disproportionately affects women. This is just one of the reasons why I find the under-representation of women in our industry particularly unacceptable. In order to do our job well, we must constantly innovate, either to fight the pandemic or to ensure that our inspectors have access to key nuclear facilities around the world,” said Mr Grossi.

The head of the IAEA drew attention to the results of a number of academic studies, which illustrate the awareness of many of us that the diversity of team composition is innovatively better. To understand and address the wide range of issues that the nuclear sector is dealing with, it is very important that we bring together a wide variety of experiences and perspectives. And to achieve more balanced gender diversity in IAEA and other important nuclear organizations, it
is necessary to increase the number of women studying STEM.

Rafael Grossi spoke about the recently launched IAEA Marie Skladowska-Curie Fellowship Program, that provides financial support to young women pursuing a master’s degree in nuclear energy, with the top 100 fellows coming
from 71 member states, including Ukraine.

According to Rafael Grossi, the Program’s research covers many areas: from nuclear technology to nuclear medicine, from nuclear safety to nuclear legislation and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, the main task of which
is to build a large network of professional women.

Representatives of WIN Ukraine, in turn, noted that the organization will fully contribute to the dissemination of the Program in the relevant environment and will provide informational support to the event.