Women in Chromatography: Balancing Science With Inclusion Advocacy

“Creating an inclusive environment benefits everyone and should involve everyone.”

— Kinjal Bhatt, Senior Scientist, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine

“It's not just you, but it's you inside a community.”

— Ina Varfaj, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Perugia

Advocacy work often lands on women in technical fields on top of an already full research load. Kinjal Bhatt and Ina Varfaj both reject the idea that this has to mean burnout, though they get there by different routes. For Bhatt, the key is not treating advocacy as separate from her job. She sees it as a natural extension of having benefited from other people's encouragement earlier in her career, and argues the responsibility for building an inclusive environment shouldn't sit only with women—men hold much of the power to shape how opportunities are given and decisions are made. She points to internal company initiatives and a Healthcare Businesswomen's Association leadership cohort as examples of large-scale efforts already underway, and stresses that simply spreading awareness of these opportunities is valuable in itself. Varfaj frames her approach around two simple rules: don't take on every challenge alone, and learn to say no. Sharing the load with a community, she says, turns what could be an individual burden into a shared, motivating effort, while saying no protects the limited time available for both science and advocacy. She's candid that balance isn't something achieved once and kept forever—it has to be re-optimized as circumstances change. Both return to the same closing idea: progress happens when women in the field move together rather than carrying the work individually. Bhatt adds that many women feel they need to prove themselves before being considered for the next opportunity, and that conversations like this one help keep that experience visible rather than something colleagues have to discover on their own.

To view more Women in Chromatography discussions, please click here.