Portuguese Women Lead Microbiology Research but Remain Locked Out of Top Jobs

Industrial microbiology sits at the heart of food safety, fermentation technology, antimicrobial resistance surveillance, and sustainable biotechnology, yet leadership in the field remains disproportionately male. Only 26 percent of full professors in Europe are women, despite women making up the majority of life-science graduates. Portugal offers a particularly telling paradox. Since the 1974 democratic revolution, sustained investment in science has pushed Portuguese women close to parity in doctoral output, and they even hold the majority of principal investigator positions in national competitive funding. Nonetheless, only 24 percent of Portuguese full professors are women, and a clear vertical scissors effect persists, with women’s representation shrinking at each career stage. A new perspective article published in Frontiers in Industrial Microbiology argues that this contradiction is highly visible in industrial microbiology, where career advancement depends not just on publications but on access to technology transfer, patenting, and industry-facing leadership roles. Specifically, the authors contend that women’s strong participation in scientific output has not yet been matched by comparable representation in these leadership positions.

The historical trajectory is remarkable. In 1974, women accounted for 11 of the 87 doctorates recorded in Portugal, roughly 12.6 percent, and represented approximately 18 percent of all doctorates awarded during the 1970s. 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. The Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, established in 1997, has played a key role by funding fellowships and grants that gave women independent research paths. By the early 2000s, women accounted for around half of all PhDs awarded in Portugal, and today they lead research groups all over the country, from the north to the Azores and Madeira islands.

Funding data reinforce this picture of strong participation. In FCT’s 2023 and 2021 IC&DT project competitions, women led the majority of nationally funded projects, at 58.1 percent and 55.2 percent of principal investigators respectively. In the 2023 PT2030 IC&DT call, whose results were published in 2025, women accounted for 54 percent of principal investigators among submitted applications and 58.1 percent among funded projects. This is consistent with She Figures 2024, which reports that women’s overall research-funding success rate in Portugal was 1.4 percentage points higher than men’s in 2022. Between 56 and 59 percent of FCT doctoral, postdoctoral, and research fellowships were awarded to women as of 2019. The bottleneck lies further along the pipeline: only 24 percent of Portuguese full professors are women, against 48 percent of assistant-level academic staff, and women hold just 20 percent of rectorships and university presidencies nationally.

To illustrate the depth of women-led science, the authors curated a set of studies from 2014 to 2026 where the first or last author is a woman, spanning four thematic areas. The first is the microbial ecology of traditional fermented foods. Portugal has a rich variety of PDO cheeses like Serra da Estrela, Azeitão, and Nisa, and dry-cured sausages like Paio do Alentejo and Salpicão, each with its own unique microbial community of lactic acid bacteria, coagulase negative staphylococci, yeasts, and moulds. At the Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária da Universidade de Lisboa, Teresa Semedo-Lemsaddek’s group has used conventional microbiology along with omics tools, including comparative genomics and metagenomics, to characterize enterococci and other lactic acid bacteria from Portuguese cheeses, fermented meats, and poultry production systems. Enterococcus species play a dual and often contradictory role: 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, and has also examined bacterial persisters, dormant cells capable of surviving exposure to antimicrobials and sanitizers, an emerging concern for food safety.

At the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto, Paula Teixeira, Full Professor in Food Microbiology and leader of the CBQF Food and Nutrition group, has built a long-running food microbiology program focused on pathogens. Her research covers the ecology, stress resistance, pathogenesis, and control of Listeria monocytogenes in food production environments, including the characterization of a cheese-related listeriosis outbreak in Portugal. The group has also studied probiotic lactobacilli from traditional Portuguese fermented foods. In the Azores, Célia Silva’s team at the Universidade dos Açores has investigated exopolysaccharide-producing lactic acid bacteria strains from local cheeses as functional starters to improve texture and water retention in low-fat cheeses, while reviewing the broader biotechnological potential and food safety relevance of these microorganisms.

The second thematic area is starter culture development and fermentation technology. 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, preserving the authentic sensory profile while improving microbiological safety. 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, work performed in close collaboration with Maria João Fraqueza at FMV-ULisboa, whose expertise in meat science underpinned the definition of starter culture protocols. A recent European network project has focused on mapping fermented foods across Europe and the associated fermentation technologies, as well as the health benefits these foods provide. Work on Madeira Island includes the characterization of indigenous non-Saccharomyces yeast fermentation and its impact on the chemical and phenolic composition of Madeira wine.

The third area is biofilm biology and pathogen persistence in food environments. Biofilms are one of the biggest problems in food safety because pathogens embedded in them resist sanitation and antimicrobials and can contaminate food. At the Instituto Nacional de Investigação Agrária e Veterinária, in collaboration with LEPABE at the Universidade do Porto and CEB at the Universidade do Minho, Carina Almeida built a research program at the intersection of food safety, biofilm microbiology, and molecular diagnostics, using peptide nucleic acid fluorescence in situ hybridization and related nucleic acid mimic technologies to rapidly detect foodborne pathogens in biofilm environments. At LEPABE, Luciana Gomes has worked on engineered surfaces that prevent microbial adhesion, with recent work showing that biomimetic surfaces can significantly reduce Escherichia coli attachment and retention on food contact materials. Research at CBQF on Listeria monocytogenes has documented links between antimicrobial resistance patterns and stress tolerance in strains from food processing environments, directly supporting risk assessment.

The fourth area is antimicrobial resistance surveillance under a One Health framework. The World Health Organization considers antimicrobial resistance one of the biggest threats to global public health, and the food chain is a major reservoir and transmission route for resistant bacteria and their resistance genes. At the Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Maria José Saavedra, founder and scientific coordinator of the Antimicrobials, Biocides & Biofilms Laboratory, has built an internationally recognized program studying 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 human, veterinary, food, and environmental compartments. Datasets cover Aeromonas species, Enterobacteriaceae, Campylobacter, Enterococcus, Staphylococcus, and carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae from Portuguese hospitals, where genome-wide longitudinal analyses traced the predominance of KPC-2 and OXA-48 lineages in northern Portugal. A decade-long study on Campylobacter in humans and animals showed a persistent and growing prevalence of fluoroquinolone resistance, and the group has extended surveillance to rivers, freshwater mussels, and marine gastropods as reservoirs and bioindicators of resistant bacteria.

One striking methodological feature of this women-led research is how well classical microbiology is combined with advanced molecular and omics tools. Culture-based methods remain important for isolating strains and assessing safety, but they are now backed by whole genome sequencing, metagenomics, resistome profiling, and comparative genomics. Sequencing whole genomes of food isolates lets researchers identify species, count resistance and virulence genes, find mobile genetic elements, and see how strains relate to clinical and environmental ones, information directly useful for regulators and industry. Portuguese women-led groups at FMV-ULisboa, CBQF-UCP, UTAD, and INIAV were among the early adopters of whole genome sequencing in Portugal. Portugal also holds the second-highest share of women patent inventors in Europe, at 27 percent against a European average of 13.2 percent, a genuinely positive indicator that nonetheless coexists with the leadership gap and raises the question of 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.

The authors close with a concrete research and policy agenda rather than broad calls for inclusion. They propose gender-disaggregated bibliometric and patent analyses specific to industrial microbiology, tracking first and last authorship, patent inventorship, and principal-investigator status over the same 2014 to 2026 period; longitudinal tracking of funding and promotion outcomes by gender within this subfield to identify where the main bottleneck occurs, whether in promotion criteria, evaluation panels, or access to leadership opportunities; systematic evaluation of whether existing initiatives such as Portugal’s Scientific Employment Stimulus and the European GENDERACTION Plus project have measurably improved retention and career progression; and qualitative research on mentoring, professional networks, and the composition of evaluation panels extended to microbiology-specific research groups and industry consortia. The argument is that closing the gender gap in industrial microbiology is not simply a matter of social justice, it is a structural requirement to improve scientific and economic competitiveness, particularly as the field faces managing antimicrobial resistance across global food systems, making fermentation processes more sustainable, and preserving traditional food heritage.

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

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

Article References: Semedo-Lemsaddek, T., Laranjo, M., & Saavedra, M. J. (2026). Women in Portuguese industrial microbiology: a fifty-year perspective on progress and persistent barriers. Frontiers in Industrial Microbiology, 4, Article 1939832. https://doi.org/10.3389/finmi.2026.1939832

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/finmi.2026.1939832

Keywords: Women, Portuguese, industrial, microbiology, fifty-year, perspective, progress, persistent, barriers, scientific research