Leen Kawas: The Barriers Women Face in Science—And How to Break Them
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The story of women in science is often told in two parts: the remarkable breakthroughs and the quiet attrition. Names rise to prominence, but behind each one is a longer list of those who left the field—discouraged, sidelined, or simply exhausted. Leen Kawas has lived on both sides of that tension.
As a scientist, entrepreneur, and venture investor, Leen Kawas has built a career defined by advancement. She co-founded Athira Pharma and led it to a successful IPO, raised over $400 million in capital, and now invests in early-stage life science ventures through Propel Bio Partners. Her credentials place her among the top echelon of biotech leadership. But her presence in that space remains rare—and that, she believes, is the problem.
Kawas doesn’t speak about gender imbalance as an abstraction. She speaks about it as an operational constraint. A system-wide inefficiency that quietly drains the field of talent, ideas, and long-term capacity. Women enter STEM fields in comparable numbers to men, but as the years go on, they vanish—especially from leadership tracks. The reasons are rarely dramatic. More often, they’re cumulative. Unequal mentorship. Subtle exclusion from informal networks. Assumptions about credibility. Structural rigidity in work environments that leave little room for caregiving or nonlinear paths.
Kawas sees these forces not as individual failures, but as design flaws. And like any good scientist, she looks for the mechanism behind the pattern.
One of the most pervasive barriers, she says, is access—access to capital, to decision-making rooms, to people who can amplify a career instead of simply observing it. In biotech, where progress is expensive and slow, gatekeeping often starts early. A woman-led team may have data, traction, and a compelling vision, but still face skepticism about scalability, risk tolerance, or technical depth. The feedback may not be overtly biased. But it’s patterned. And the pattern becomes a filter.
Kawas has pushed back against that filter—not just by succeeding within it, but by changing its parameters. At Propel Bio Partners, she actively seeks out diverse founding teams. Not because diversity is a checkbox, but because it produces better science. Broader questions. More rigorous thinking. In her view, funding decisions shape the future of the industry. If only a narrow profile of founders gets support, the innovation pipeline narrows too.
Mentorship is another piece. Kawas points out that women often receive different kinds of guidance—less strategic, more operational. They’re told how to manage a lab, not how to raise a Series A. How to collaborate, not how to negotiate equity. This divergence may seem small, but over time, it accumulates into a gap in confidence, positioning, and ultimately power.
In this interview with Principal Post, she advocates for what she calls “transfer of institutional knowledge”—the unwritten playbooks that circulate among insiders but rarely reach those outside traditional networks. How term sheets actually work. How to navigate a board dynamic. How to prepare a regulatory narrative that resonates with both the FDA and investors. These are the skills that build lasting influence. And they are rarely taught.
Still, Kawas is careful not to cast women as a monolith. She recognizes that barriers compound differently for women of color, for first-generation scientists, for those entering from nontraditional backgrounds. Breaking those barriers, she says, means redesigning the structures—grantmaking bodies, hiring pipelines, lab hierarchies—that currently rely on sameness to reduce risk.
It also means expanding the definition of what leadership looks like. Kawas has seen how often leadership is conflated with a specific tone—confident but not assertive, visionary but not disruptive. Women who don’t match that tone are often labeled “not quite ready” or “better suited for a supporting role.” She calls this a misreading of potential. The best leaders, in her experience, come with a variety of styles. What matters is clarity of thinking and the ability to navigate complexity—not how well someone fits a familiar mold.
To shift these dynamics, Kawas argues, institutions need to move beyond performative gestures. Diversity statements are not enough. Real change happens in who gets hired, funded, promoted, and retained. In who’s asked to present the findings. In who’s in the room when direction is being set.
At this point in her career, Kawas occupies many of those rooms. But she doesn’t treat her access as an endpoint. She treats it as leverage. To raise different questions. To champion overlooked talent. To create feedback loops that don’t just reward those who’ve already made it, but support those still climbing.
She knows the cost of inaction. Every time a talented woman leaves science, a dataset is lost. A hypothesis goes untested. A potential breakthrough is delayed. And over time, the field becomes less representative of the world it aims to heal.
The barriers women face in science are real. But they are not immutable. They are built into systems, which means they can be redesigned. Leen Kawas offers one model—not by solving everything at once, but by addressing what’s in front of her with precision: the investment decision, the hiring call, the mentoring conversation, the meeting agenda.
This is how change happens. Quietly. Systematically. Until the room itself looks different. Until science is no longer something women enter with caution—but something they shape from the start.
Learn more about what Kawas is currently up to at inherentbio.com.