Women in Portuguese industrial microbiology: a fifty-year perspective on progress and persistent barriers

1 Introduction

Microbiology has become one of the most strategically important branches of the life sciences. Industrial microbiology covers food fermentation, bioprocessing, pharmaceutical production, environmental biotechnology, and tracking antimicrobial resistance. All of these tie directly to global challenges such as food security, public health, and environmental sustainability.

Even though industrial microbiology is highly relevant, it has been shaped mostly by men, like most Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Worldwide, fewer than 33% of researchers are women. In Europe, only 26% of full professors (the top academic rank) are women, even though women make up the majority of life science graduates at bachelor’s and master’s levels (European Commission, 2025; Larivière et al., 2013). In fact, many women start strong but drop out along the way. The reasons include unconscious bias when grants and papers are reviewed, unequal sharing of family duties, less access to mentoring and professional networks, and old-fashioned norms inside universities (Ceci and Williams, 2011; Nielsen et al., 2018).

Portugal offers a particularly instructive case for studying these dynamics. Before the 1974 Revolution, women were already present among doctorate recipients, though under-represented; we return to the precise figures, and to why the distinction matters, in Section 2. After democracy arrived and Portugal aligned with European institutions, women’s participation in research accelerated markedly, and by the early 2000s women accounted for around half of all PhDs awarded in Portugal. Today, women lead research groups all over the country, from the north to the Azores and Madeira islands. Nevertheless, the “scissors effect” (high numbers at student and early career levels, then a steep drop at senior levels) continues: women’s representation drops sharply at senior levels, a pattern seen across Europe (European Commission, 2025). Contrary to this scenario, Portuguese women have made important contributions to industrial microbiology.

This perspective takes a specific position on that pattern: parity in scientific output is not the same as parity in structural power, and industrial microbiology is a particularly informative site in which to examine that gap, because career advancement in this subfield depends on more than authorship, it also depends on access to technology transfer, patenting, consultancy, and industry-facing leadership roles that translate research into practice. We argue that the persistence of a “scissors effect” in Portuguese industrial microbiology, despite near-parity or even female majorities in some funding and authorship metrics (Section 2), reflects the same institutional and cultural barriers documented across European science more broadly, and that closing this specific translational gap, rather than simply increasing the count of women-authored papers, should be the explicit target of future research and policy updates.

A methodological clarification on scope is also warranted. Antimicrobial resistance surveillance, One Health research, and environmental microbiology (Sections 3.4 and 3.5) are not, strictly speaking, industrial microbiology sub-disciplines; we decided to include them because they generate the upstream evidence (hazard identification, resistance-gene tracking, environmental reservoirs) on which industrial risk assessment, food-chain safety standards, and biotechnological innovation directly depend. The aim of this perspective article is to look into four important research topics of industrial microbiology, so defined. We chose examples from several Portuguese institutions to show the range of women-led science; this is not a complete list of every group, but a purpose-driven selection of studies from 2014 to 2026 where the first or last author is a woman.

For clarity, the fifty-year period referenced in the title spans the period since the 1974 democratic revolution, which forms the historical background discussed in Section 2; the curated literature reviewed here to illustrate current research activity is, however, drawn from the narrower 2014–2026 window, reflecting the period in which multi-omics and multi-sector surveillance approaches became standard practice in the field.

The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 gives historical and structural context; Section 3 covers the main research themes; Section 4 looks at methodological integration; Section 5 discusses the leadership and empowerment gap and proposes a concrete research and policy agenda (Section 5.1); and Section 6 concludes with the argument this perspective sets out to defend.

2 Women in Portuguese science: a historical and structural view

The growth in women’s participation in Portuguese research since 1974 has been remarkable. In 1974, women accounted for 11 of the 87 doctorates recorded (12.6%), whereas women represented approximately 18% of all doctorates awarded during the 1970s (GPEARI/MCTES, 2011; Fiolhais, 2018). Women were therefore already present, although under-represented, among doctorate holders before the transition to democracy. What changed after 1974 was a marked increase of women in doctoral research, driven by state investment in education, European integration, and laws promoting gender equity (Amâncio, 2005). The Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), established in 1997, has played a key role by funding fellowships and grants that gave women independent research paths.

In the life sciences, and especially microbiology, Portugal has among the highest rates of women’s participation in Europe. Studies of authorship show near parity in co-authorship, with more women appearing as first and corresponding authors in food science, veterinary microbiology, and environmental microbiology. Funding data reinforce this picture, though a distinction should be drawn between project leadership in FCT’s competitive IC&DT (Investigação Científica e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico) project competitions and individual doctoral or postdoctoral fellowships: in FCT’s 2023 and 2021 IC&DT project competitions, women led the majority of nationally funded projects (58.1% and 55.2% of principal investigators, respectively) (Direção-Geral de Estatísticas da Educação e Ciência, 2024; FCT, 2025; Visão, 2021), and 56–59% of FCT doctoral, postdoctoral, and research fellowships were awarded to women as of 2019 (Torres et al., 2024).

At the national level, currently available evidence does not indicate a lower success rate for women in competitive research funding: in the 2023 PT2030 IC&DT call, whose results were published in 2025, women accounted for 54% of principal investigators among submitted applications (FCT, 2024) and 58.1% among funded projects (FCT, 2025). This is consistent with She Figures 2024 (European Commission, 2025), which reports that women’s overall research-funding success rate in Portugal was 1.4 percentage points higher than men’s in 2022. FCT fellowship data likewise indicate strong participation by women in early-career funding, although the proportions of fellowships awarded do not, by themselves, establish gender-specific success rates without corresponding application denominators. Equivalent microbiology-specific data, and gender-disaggregated information on the amounts requested and awarded, are not publicly available.

The bottleneck lies further along the pipeline: only 24% of Portuguese full professors are women, against 48% of assistant-level academic staff, and women hold just 20% of rectorships and university presidencies nationally (Torres et al., 2024). This mirrors the pan-European “scissors effect” (European Commission, 2025). No public source currently disaggregates full-professor or research-leadership figures specifically for microbiology, which is itself a gap in the national evidence base that we return to in Section 5.1.

Beyond formal funding and promotion statistics, professional empowerment operates through less visible mechanisms: access to informal mentoring networks, invitations to serve on evaluation panels and editorial boards, and inclusion in the collaborative circles through which grant consortia and industry contracts are assembled. These mechanisms are difficult to quantify, but qualitative research on Portuguese higher education consistently identifies them as a proximate cause of the gap between women’s numerical presence and their access to positions of institutional power (Torres et al., 2024). For industrial microbiology specifically, an additional and under-studied dimension is access to technology transfer and entrepreneurship: Portugal has the second-highest share of women patent inventors in Europe, at 27% against a European average of 13.2% (Compete 2030, 2025), a genuinely positive indicator that nonetheless coexists with the leadership gap described above, and that raises a question we flag as a priority for future research: whether patenting activity by Portuguese women microbiologists translates into leadership of commercialization, or remains, like authorship, a form of participation that stops short of institutional power.

These structural realities make it timely and necessary to highlight the contributions of women, like this perspective article does. Bibliometric evidence shows that papers with women as authors get cited less often than similar work by men, partly because of lower visibility and weaker networks (Larivière et al., 2013). By putting the work of women in the center and under focus, the scientific community can start to fix these systemic biases.

The persistent gap between rising numbers and leadership representation is summarized by Entradas (2023), who reflects on her own experience as a woman scientist in Portugal. She notes that despite significant progress in opening the door to women’s participation in science, it remains challenging for women to pursue a viable career path in research and ascend the hierarchy. Beyond the glass ceiling, top positions are still reserved for a predominantly male old guard. Yet pioneering women have shown that changes can happen and have opened the door for us to collectively continue this important work (Entradas, 2023).

3 Research topics: what Portuguese women have investigated in industrial microbiology

The four thematic areas below constitute an illustrative case study of the range of women-led contributions to industrial microbiology in Portugal; read together and in light of the national evidence presented in Section 2, they also suggest a pattern worth highlighting. Women are named as first or last authors at every career stage represented here, including at the level of research-group leadership, yet this authorship-level leadership does not translate into comparable representation in full professorships or institutional decision-making power.

3.1 Microbial ecology and characterization of traditional fermented foods

Portugal has a rich variety of traditional fermented foods. These include PDO cheeses like Serra da Estrela, Azeitão, and Nisa, and dry-cured sausages like Paio do Alentejo, Salpicão, Chouriço, or Linguiça. Each product has its own unique microbial community made up of lactic acid bacteria (LAB), coagulase negative staphylococci (CNS), yeasts, and moulds. These microbes reflect local conditions, raw materials, and traditional production methods.

Portuguese women researchers have been very active in studying these communities. At the Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária da Universidade de Lisboa (FMV-ULisboa), Teresa Semedo-Lemsaddek’s group has used conventional microbiology along with omics tools, including comparative genomics and metagenomics, to study food-associated microbiota, characterizing enterococci and other lactic acid bacteria (LAB) from Portuguese cheeses, fermented meats, and poultry production systems (Soares-Santos et al., 2015; Santos et al., 2017; Serrano et al., 2026). A review combining traditional and omics-based approaches catalogued the full diversity and dynamics of microbial communities in Portuguese traditional cheeses (Serrano et al., 2024a). Enterococcus spp. play a dual and often contradictory role in this context: they contribute to cheese ripening, yet some strains carry virulence and antimicrobial resistance genes. The group characterized strains isolated from Azeitão and Nisa PDO cheeses, capturing this duality in detail (Rocha et al., 2021; Serrano et al., 2024b). This body of work on the ecology, safety, and biofilm behaviour of food-associated Enterococcus has been built over several decades in close collaboration with Maria Teresa Barreto-Crespo (iBET – Instituto de Biologia Experimental e Tecnológica, and ITQB NOVA – Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), whose expertise in environmental and food microbiology has shaped joint studies spanning biofilm formation and disinfection on food-contact surfaces, bacterial persistence, and the microbial diversity of Portuguese PDO cheeses (Craveiro et al., 2015; Serrano et al., 2024b, 2025, 2026).

Another line of work focuses on bacterial persisters, dormant cells capable of surviving exposure to antimicrobials and sanitizers, which represent an emerging concern for food safety (Serrano et al., 2025). The team has also reviewed the advantages and limitations of non-starter LAB from traditional fermented foods, including their potential as starter cultures or probiotics, proposing a useful framework for evaluating these microorganisms beyond a simple safe/unsafe classification (Grujović et al., 2022). In a related effort, they characterized potential probiotic LAB isolated from sauerkraut (Touret et al., 2018).

At the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP-Porto), Paula Teixeira, Full Professor in Food Microbiology and leader of the CBQF Food and Nutrition group, and her team have built a long running food microbiology program focused on pathogens. Their research covers the ecology, stress resistance, pathogenesis, and control of Listeria monocytogenes in food production environments. They even characterized a cheese related listeriosis outbreak in Portugal (Ferreira et al., 2015). The group also studied probiotic lactobacilli from traditional Portuguese fermented foods (Barbosa et al., 2014; Ferreira et al., 2014; Grujović et al., 2025).

In the Azores, a productive group at the Universidade dos Açores (UAc) through the Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Research and Technology (IITAA) has focused on the microbial diversity of artisanal Azorean dairy products. They have characterized exopolysaccharide (EPS) producing and bacteriocin producing LAB strains from local cheeses. Within this group, Célia Silva’s team has investigated these EPS-producing strains as functional starters to improve texture and water retention in low-fat cheeses, while also reviewing the broader biotechnological potential and food safety relevance of LAB more generally (Jurášková et al., 2022; Silva and Ribeiro, 2024).

3.2 Starter culture development and fermentation technology

Building on this microbial characterization, the next step is to develop tailor-made starter cultures. At the Universidade de Évora, Marta Laranjo’s research showed that autochthonous starter cultures (strains isolated from the local meat matrix) work better than commercial ones. They keep the authentic sensory profile while improving microbiological safety (Laranjo et al., 2017, 2019), also with the association of aromatic and medicinal plants (Laranjo et al., 2022). For meat sausages like Paio do Alentejo and Salpicão, the team optimized inoculation protocols that reduce biogenic amine accumulation and help beneficial microbes outcompete unwanted ones (Laranjo et al., 2019; Laranjo, 2023). This work has been performed in close collaboration with Maria João Fraqueza (FMV-ULisboa), whose expertise in meat science and food technology underpinned the definition of starter culture protocols and the characterization of autochthonous enterococci in traditional fermented sausages (Laranjo et al., 2017; Santos et al., 2017).

A collaborative review with Portuguese and international groups covered the use of non-starter LAB as candidate starters or probiotics, giving a balanced framework for evaluating their pros and cons compared to commercial options (Grujović et al., 2022). Another recent review looked at probiotics in foods: their benefits, technical challenges, and regulations (Grujović et al., 2025).

A recent project (https://fermentedfoods.eu/) with a network of multiple research groups in different European countries has focused on the mapping of fermented foods across Europe and the associated fermentation technologies (Papademas et al., 2026), as well as the health benefits provided by these fermented foods (Todorovic et al., 2024). Illustrating this geographic extent further, work on Madeira Island fermentation includes the characterization of indigenous non-Saccharomyces yeast fermentation and its impact on the chemical and phenolic composition of Madeira wine, carried out through the Universidade da Madeira and ISOPlexis, in collaboration with the Câmara de Lobos winery (Miranda et al., 2023).

3.3 Biofilm biology and pathogen persistence in food environments

Biofilms are one of the biggest problems associated with food safety. Pathogens in biofilms are very difficult to destroy, resist sanitation and antimicrobials, and can contaminate food. Portuguese women researchers have made important contributions in this field.

At the Instituto Nacional de Investigação Agrária e Veterinária (INIAV), in collaboration with LEPABE (Laboratory for Process Engineering, Environment, Biotechnology and Energy) at the Universidade do Porto and CEB (Centre of Biological Engineering) at the Universidade do Minho, Carina Almeida built a research program at the intersection of food safety, biofilm microbiology, and molecular diagnostics. Reflecting the broader recognition of women’s leadership in this field, Almeida co-edited a dedicated editorial on women in biofilm research (Almeida and Bakaletz, 2022). This work used peptide nucleic acid fluorescence in situ hybridization (PNA FISH) and related nucleic acid mimic technologies to rapidly and accurately detect foodborne pathogens in biofilm environments. At LEPABE, Luciana Gomes has worked on engineered surfaces that prevent microbial adhesion and biofilm development in food processing equipment and water systems. For instance, recent work by Carvalho et al. (2026) showed that biomimetic surfaces can significantly reduce Escherichia coli attachment and retention on food contact materials, offering a novel strategy for biofilm control.

At FMV-ULisboa, biofilm formation by Enterococcus spp. from Portuguese traditional cheeses was characterized in dedicated studies, building on the group’s earlier work on biofilm dynamics and disinfectant efficacy in food-related environments, including a study on Aeromonas biofilms on stainless steel surfaces (Craveiro et al., 2015; Serrano et al., 2024b). There was considerable strain-to-strain variability, which means biofilm assessment should be a standard part of safety evaluations for strains intended for use as starters or probiotics (Serrano et al., 2024b). This work ties into broader research on managing persister cells in food environments to reduce biofilm-related contamination (Serrano et al., 2025).

Research at CBQF–UCP on Listeria monocytogenes has helped us understand how biofilms help pathogens persist. The team documented links between antimicrobial resistance patterns and stress tolerance in strains from food processing environments, and characterized virulence across clonal complexes, which directly supports risk assessment (Ferreira et al., 2014, 2015). Manuela Oliveira has also worked extensively on bacterial biofilms, antimicrobial resistance, and food safety within a One Health framework. Her early work on biofilm-forming ability and antimicrobial resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa of veterinary origin highlighted the importance of the animal environment as a reservoir for resistant biofilm formers (Oliveira et al., 2010), a line of inquiry she has continued to develop, more recently extending it to the microbiological management of complex polymicrobial biofilms in clinical settings, underscoring the cross-cutting relevance of biofilm and resistance dynamics across animal, food, and human health contexts (Oliveira et al., 2025).

3.4 Antimicrobial resistance: molecular epidemiology and the one health framework

The World Health Organization says antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest threats to global public health (O'Neill, 2016; Murray et al., 2022). The food chain is a major reservoir and transmission route for AMR bacteria and their resistance genes, which directly links industrial microbiology to public health. Portuguese women researchers have made big contributions through multi-sector surveillance that looks at resistance in human/clinical, veterinary, food, and environmental samples.

Some of the foundational studies supporting the research trajectories described below date from the 1990s and 2000s; we cite them to situate individual researchers’ longer-term contributions within the field, and not as part of the curated 2014–2026 corpus that forms the core evidence base of this perspective.

At Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD), Maria José Saavedra, founder and scientific coordinator of the Antimicrobials, Biocides & Biofilms Laboratory (AB2Lab-CITAB), and her group have built an internationally recognized AMR program. They study resistance mechanisms (with particular emphasis on beta-lactam resistance and carbapenemase production), horizontal gene transfer, biofilm associated resistance, and the molecular epidemiology of multidrug resistant bacteria across different ecological compartments. Datasets cover Aeromonas spp. (Demarta et al., 2008), Enterobacteriaceae, Campylobacter spp., Enterococcus spp., and Staphylococcus spp. (Abreu et al., 2015) and carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae from Portuguese hospitals, where genome-wide longitudinal analyses traced the evolution and spread of carbapenem resistance and the predominance of KPC-2 and OXA-48 lineages in northern Portugal (Lopes et al., 2020; Elias et al., 2025) from food, livestock, pets, wildlife, water, and patients. A decade-long study on Campylobacter spp. in humans and animals showed a persistent and growing prevalence of fluoroquinolone resistance in Portugal, highlighting the urgent need for integrated monitoring (Barata et al., 2024). Consistent with a One Health perspective, the group has extended AMR surveillance to aquatic and coastal ecosystems, showing that rivers, freshwater mussels, and marine gastropods act as reservoirs and bioindicators of multidrug-resistant bacteria and resistance genes (Gomes et al., 2021; Saavedra et al., 2022; Santos et al., 2025). This ecological breadth directly links industrial and food microbiology to environmental resistance reservoirs, a connection of growing relevance to food-chain safety. The group has also looked at natural antimicrobial compounds from plants, fungi, and agri-food by-products (including plant-derived polyphenols and photodynamic phytochemical-antimicrobial combinations) as adjuvants and alternatives to conventional antimicrobials against multidrug-resistant and biofilm-forming pathogens relevant to food and clinical settings as possible additions to conventional antimicrobials in farm animals. The international standing of this work is reflected in Saavedra’s role as national coordinator of the COST Action EURESTOP (European Network for diagnosis and treatment of antimicrobial-resistant bacterial infections), which situates Portuguese women-led AMR research within a wider European effort against resistant infections. This line of research on natural antimicrobial compounds has also been extended to aquaculture, through collaborative work with Cláudia Serra (CIIMAR – Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, University of Porto), who coordinates the Microbiology and Biotechnology in Aquaculture research group. Together, the team isolated and characterized fish-gut Bacillus spp. as a source of natural antimicrobial compounds active against bacterial pathogens of farmed fish, identifying isolates with anti-growth, anti-biofilm, and anti-quorum-sensing activity as promising candidates for probiotic or bioactive-compound applications in aquaculture (Santos et al., 2021), extending this women-led research line from the food chain into aquatic animal production systems. This body of AMR surveillance work sits upstream of industrial application (shaping food-chain risk assessment and regulatory standards) rather than constituting industrial microbiology in the strict sense.

The link between food microbiota characterization and AMR research is also clear at FMV-ULisboa, where food associated Enterococcus isolates are routinely evaluated for resistance and virulence genes and compared with clinical and environmental strains. Surveillance of Enterococcus spp. from Azeitão and Nisa PDO cheeses gave resistance profiles for isolates from those specific production areas (Rocha et al., 2021). At CBQF-UCP, characterizing AMR in foodborne pathogens, including vancomycin resistant enterococci and Listeria strains from food processing environments, reinforced the need to include resistance as a key part of pathogen risk assessment across the food chain (Barbosa et al., 2014; Ferreira et al., 2014).

Across the wider Portuguese landscape, several other women-led AMR teams have made significant contributions. Sandra Quinteira has worked for over 25 years on the epidemiology of antimicrobial resistance across many ecological niches within a One Health context. Early work on the diversity of Tn1546 and its role in the dissemination of vancomycin resistant enterococci in Portugal, co-authored by Quinteira, laid the foundation for understanding how mobile genetic elements drive AMR spread (Novais et al., 2008). Ana Raquel Freitas has been active in AMR research for more than 15 years; recent work by Almeida-Santos et al. (2025) on the continued evolution and spread of vancomycin resistant Enterococcus faecium in Portugal underscores the urgent need for integrated surveillance (Almeida-Santos et al., 2025). Célia M. Manaia (UCP) has led research on the environmental side of AMR, including wastewater and agricultural systems as resistance reservoirs. Isabel Sá-Correia (IST-ULisboa), a Full Professor and former President of the Portuguese Society of Microbiology, has worked on yeast toxicogenomics and multidrug resistance mechanisms in environmental and industrial contexts; her foundational work on the PDR5 multidrug resistance transporter in yeast remains highly influential (Balzi et al., 1994). Hermínia de Lencastre (Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica António Xavier, ITQB NOVA, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) and Maria Salomé Gomes (Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar, ICBAS, University of Porto) have each led influential programs in molecular microbiology and host-pathogen interactions, further strengthening the national AMR research landscape.

3.5 Environmental microbiology and aquatic systems

Beyond food systems, Portuguese women researchers have also done important work on the microbiology of water. Studies of AMR spread in rivers, drinking water networks, and coastal ecosystems have shown that the environment is a major reservoir for AMR genes. A comprehensive review of microbiological challenges in drinking water, covering pathogens, biofilm dynamics in distribution systems, and how emerging contaminants survive conventional disinfection, came from a collaboration between UTAD and partner institutions (Afonso et al., 2025). These findings support the idea of multi-sector surveillance by showing the continuity between agrifood, clinical, and environmental resistance reservoirs. As with the AMR work discussed in Section 3.4, this environmental microbiology aspect is not strictly part of industrial microbiology. We decided to include it because environmental reservoirs are closely connected to the risks encountered along the food chain and can therefore provide important context for food safety and industrial risk assessment.

4 Methodological innovation and integration

One thing that stands out in women-led industrial microbiology research in Portugal is how well they combine classical microbiology with advanced molecular and omics tools. Culture based methods are still important for isolating strains, checking traits, and assessing safety. But now they are often backed up by Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS), metagenomics, resistome profiling, and comparative genomics. This combination lets Portuguese groups answer questions about strain identity, functional potential, and population structure at a resolution that earlier researchers could only dream of.

Using WGS as a routine tool for safety assessment and epidemiological tracing is especially noteworthy. By sequencing whole genomes of food isolates, researchers can identify the species, count resistance and virulence genes, find mobile genetic elements, and see how strains relate to clinical and environmental ones. That information is directly useful for regulators and industry: it helps decide whether a strain is safe to use in food production and gives early warnings about emerging resistant lineages. Portuguese women-led groups at FMV-ULisboa, CBQF-UCP, UTAD, and INIAV were among the early adopters of WGS in Portugal, as shown by the omics frameworks applied to Portuguese traditional cheese microbiota (Serrano et al., 2024a, 2026) and the genotyping of Campylobacter isolates over a decade (Barata et al., 2024).

The development of PNA FISH and related NAM technologies at INIAV/LEPABE is another frontier in methodological innovation. These methodologies offer rapid, highly specific pathogen detection in complex food matrices and biofilm environments. EPS characterization, developed at the Universidade dos Açores for functional dairy starters, adds another dimension to the omics toolkit, helping identify bioactive compounds with direct uses in food technology and health promotion (Jurášková et al., 2022). Not every study we cited used every possible omics method; we simply reported what each original paper actually described.

5 Challenges and opportunities: keeping and growing women’s leadership

Despite the progress documented in Section 3, and the positive trends in funding and authorship positions discussed in Section 2, structural and cultural barriers continue to shape women’s progression into senior research and industry leadership roles in Portuguese industrial microbiology. As highlighted in the Introduction, our focus is therefore not simply on the number of women contributing to research, but on the persistent gap between participation and progression to leadership. The “scissors effect” illustrates how biases and structural barriers can accumulate throughout academic and professional careers, contributing to this widening gap (European Commission, 2025).

The early career phase seems especially critical. Women are less likely than men to turn postdoc positions into permanent academic jobs. Reasons include less access to informal mentoring, heavier teaching and administrative loads, and the fact that family formation often happens right when careers need the most attention. Policies that offer flexible working arrangements, support for caregiving, and actively counter unconscious bias in hiring and promotion can help. In Portugal, the FCT “Individual Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus” has tried to address job precarity, and FCT’s involvement in European projects like GENDERACTION Plus (https://genderaction.eu/) supports capacity building for inclusive research careers. Still, hard evidence on how these measures affect women’s retention in microbiology specifically is limited, which is something worth studying in the future.

International collaboration has created both opportunities and challenges for Portuguese women researchers. Access to international networks, joint publications, and competitive European funding has strengthened their research profiles, consistent with evidence that gender-heterogeneous research teams tend to produce higher-quality science (Campbell et al., 2013). This is evident in the international co-authorship on food and veterinary microbiology papers from Portugal, including collaborations with several European and North American groups in the recent review literature on traditional fermented foods and probiotics (Grujović et al., 2022, 2025; Todorovic et al., 2024). Editorial board memberships and co-editor roles held by Portuguese women in journals like the International Journal of Food Microbiology, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, and Frontiers in Microbiology show the international recognition they earned.

5.1 A future research and policy agenda

We suggest the following as concrete, verifiable directions for future work, rather than broad calls for greater inclusion.

• Map women’s career progression in Portuguese industrial microbiology. A systematic, gender-disaggregated analysis of publications and patents could provide a clearer picture of where women are progressing and where gaps remain. This should focus specifically on Portuguese industrial microbiology, rather than the life sciences, and track indicators such as first and last authorship, patent inventorship, and principal-investigator status over the same 2014–2026 period considered in this perspective.
• Follow career progression over time. Since women already show strong participation in early-career funding, it would be valuable to examine whether this translates into progression to full professorship and leadership of research units in microbiology. Longitudinal data could help identify where the main bottleneck occurs, whether in promotion criteria, evaluation panels, access to leadership opportunities, or at an earlier stage of the career.
• Assess whether existing initiatives are making a measurable difference. Rather than focusing only on participation or uptake, future studies should examine outcomes: whether programmes such as Portugal’s Scientific Employment Stimulus and initiatives such as GENDERACTION Plus have improved the retention and career progression of women in microbiology.
• Look beyond academia and examine the path to commercial leadership. Portugal’s relatively strong position in women’s patent inventorship provides an interesting starting point for examining what happens beyond inventorship. Tracking patenting, licensing, spin-off creation, and leadership roles could reveal whether women microbiologists are also progressing into positions where they influence commercialization and innovation, rather than contributing primarily as inventors.
• Explore the less visible factors shaping career progression. Qualitative research on mentoring, access to professional networks, and the composition of evaluation panels has already been conducted across Portuguese higher education more broadly (Torres et al., 2024). Extending this work to microbiology-specific research groups and industry consortia could help identify barriers that are difficult to capture through bibliometric or funding data alone, particularly where microbiology-specific evidence is still lacking.

6 Conclusions

Portuguese women researchers have made substantial, well-documented contributions across the microbial ecology of traditional fermented foods, starter culture development, biofilm biology, and antimicrobial resistance surveillance under a One Health framework. However, the argument of this perspective is not simply to show that these contributions exist and deserve recognition. It is that Portuguese data reveal a specific and under-examined contradiction: women already lead the majority of nationally funded research projects and a substantial share of PhD and postdoctoral fellowships, and Portugal has one of Europe’s highest shares of women patent inventors, but only a quarter of full professors and a fifth of university presidents are women, and no microbiology-specific data exist to show whether this national pattern is better or worse within our own field. Making the scientific contributions of women visible is necessary, but not sufficient. What is missing is a research and policy agenda that tracks whether authorship-level parity is converting into institutional and industrial leadership, and that identifies where in the pipeline (promotion criteria, network access, technology-transfer structures) that conversion is failing. Answering this question, rather than simply pointing to women’s publication record, would provide the evidence needed to show that greater gender balance in industrial microbiology is not merely an aspiration, but a necessary response to documented structural barriers.

Structural barriers to career progression remain, and the gap between women’s numerical presence at early-career levels and their representation in senior positions still needs policy attention. Visibility platforms like this article collection serve an important purpose: by making the contributions of women explicit and accessible, they challenge the assumption that the default scientist is male, and they give role models to the next generation considering careers in microbiology and other STEM fields.

This perspective has limitations we should acknowledge. The selection of institutions and publications is illustrative, and not exhaustive. Because the three authors are affiliated with some of the institutions featured, our choices inevitably reflect our own research networks. We have tried to balance this by including work from other research units or institutions with which none of us is affiliated. A systematic bibliometric analysis of gender representation across all Portuguese industrial microbiology groups would give a more complete picture, and we think that is an important direction for future work. This perspective is intentionally selective: we prioritized studies where the first or last author is a woman, to highlight the work led by women researchers. A second limitation concerns the scope of the field. By including AMR, One Health, and environmental microbiology, we have necessarily moved beyond a strict definition of industrial microbiology. We believe their inclusion is justified because of their close links to food-chain risks and biotechnological applications. However, from a narrower perspective, these areas could be seen as complementary areas rather than as core components of industrial microbiology.

In conclusion, industrial microbiology faces significant challenges ahead: managing AMR across global food systems, making fermentation processes more sustainable, preserving traditional food and gastronomic heritage, and integrating planetary sustainability into biotechnological innovation, in line with the broader global push toward science-driven, sustainable development (UNESCO, 2021). Meeting these challenges will require the full intellectual diversity of the scientific community, ensuring that the future of industrial microbiology is shaped by an open-minded engagement with diverse experiences and perspectives, where research outputs meet innovation challenges.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Flora Valeria Romeo, Council for Agricultural Research and Agricultural Economy Analysis | CREA, Italy

Reviewed by: Lidia Natalia Trusilewicz, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain