Several reasons have been proposed to explain such a trend. Despite many efforts and some progresses being made to reduce gender inequity in science, pursuing an academic career remains challenging for women.Īcross disciplines, the women-to-men ratio is known to decrease from early to advanced career stages ( Llorens et al., 2021). Such a simplistic point of view overlooked the many cultural, religious, and social hurdles that women had to overcome to produce new knowledge, including the lack of access to higher education and gender stereotypes that cause them to be perceived as less talented for science ( Leslie et al., 2015) and more inclined toward care-taking roles ( Ellemers, 2018). Throughout the history of science, women’s contributions have been consistently underrepresented, creating a misleading and unfair mindset: women are just not interested in scientific research ( Saini, 2017). Also, we highlight the need to perform a systematic assessment of the gender gap in the Latin American dementia community of researchers. We aim to acknowledge Latin American women’s work and bring visibility to the challenges they face throughout their careers in order to inform potential solutions. In this Perspective, we celebrate outstanding contributions from Argentinian, Chilean, and Colombian colleagues in dementia research and discuss barriers and opportunities identified by them.

Idiosyncratic difficulties of Latin American countries likely accentuate the gender gap. Despite many efforts and some progresses being made to reduce gender inequity in science, pursuing an academic career across disciplines, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementias, remains challenging for women. Women’s contributions to science have been consistently underrepresented throughout history. 5Center for Social and Cognitive Neuroscience (CSCN), School of Psychology, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Santiago, Chile.4Departamento de Psicología, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.

3Cognitive Neuroscience Center (CNC), Universidad de San Andres (UdeSA), Buenos Aires, Argentina.

2Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI), Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Dublin, Ireland.

1Latin American Brain Health Institute (BrainLat), Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Santiago, Chile.

Sol Fittipaldi 1,2,3 *, Sandra Baez 4, Carolina Gonzalez-Silva 1 and Claudia Duran-Aniotz 1,5

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