The Schlumberger Foundation's Faculty for the Future fellowship programme, established in 2004, has a design that differs from most major women-in-STEM fellowships in ways that deserve careful attention. Where most fellowship programmes for women in science target women in a single country, a single career stage, or a single field, Faculty for the Future is specifically international, specifically focused on women from developing and emerging-economy countries, and specifically aimed at the doctoral and postdoctoral stage — the critical period when women researchers in low-income countries either build the international research profile that enables a significant academic career or lose the momentum that makes that profile possible.
By 2021, the programme had supported over 700 women scientists from more than 100 countries. The cumulative scale placed it among the larger fellowship investments in women's STEM research careers globally. This retrospective examines how the programme was designed, what the design choices implied about its theory of change, and what comparison with the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science programme reveals about different approaches to the same problem.
The Programme Design and Its Theory of Change
Faculty for the Future operates on a specific theory of change: the most consequential intervention for women's STEM participation in developing nations is to support individual women through doctoral or postdoctoral training at world-class research institutions — wherever those institutions are globally — and then create conditions for those women to return to and strengthen their home-country research institutions. The programme's return requirement, which asks fellows to commit to returning to their home countries and contributing to their national research systems, is the design element that distinguishes it from pure talent-export programmes.
This design reflects a diagnosis of the brain-drain problem that organisations like WIGSAT had been discussing since at least the GASAT conferences of the 2000s. Training developing-country women scientists at elite institutions in the global North was not, on its own, a development strategy — it was a recruitment strategy for those elite institutions. The value of the training to the home country depended on whether the trained scientists returned and had conditions sufficient to put their training to productive use. Faculty for the Future's return expectation, while not legally enforceable, created a moral and reputational commitment that the programme tracked and that distinguished its fellows from simply well-funded researchers.
Field Coverage and Geographic Distribution
Faculty for the Future fellowships covered a wide range of STEM fields, with particular concentration in the natural sciences, engineering, and applied fields. The programme's connection to the Schlumberger Foundation (the philanthropic arm of the energy services company) might suggest a concentration in earth sciences and engineering, but the programme's actual field distribution was broader, reflecting a deliberate choice to serve women researchers across STEM rather than only in fields of commercial relevance to the parent company.
Geographically, the programme's fellows were drawn from across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Arab States, with no single region dominating. The region-by-region distribution reflected the programme's international design intent: it was not a scholarship for women in one part of the world who had been identified as likely to benefit from education in another, but a genuinely global fellowship drawing from the developing world's scientific talent pool wherever it existed.
The practical effect of this geographic breadth was that Faculty for the Future was reaching women in contexts where the alternative fellowship landscape was thin. Women researchers from sub-Saharan Africa, from Central Asian developing nations, from Pacific Island countries — not the regions that featured prominently in most international fellowship competitions — were represented in the Faculty for the Future cohort. This was a meaningful contribution to the equity of the global fellowship landscape.
Comparison with the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Programme
Placing Faculty for the Future alongside the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science programme illuminates both programmes' design choices through contrast. The L'Oréal-UNESCO programme operates at multiple career stages — from PhD student through established researcher — and covers all world regions including Western Europe and other high-income areas. Its laureate awards recognise established women scientists; its fellowships support earlier-career researchers through national committees with varying capacity.
Faculty for the Future is more narrowly targeted: exclusively to women from developing and emerging economies, exclusively at the doctoral and postdoctoral stage, and explicitly with the return-to-home requirement. This narrower targeting meant that Faculty for the Future was addressing a more specific problem with more concentrated resources.
The funding amounts also differed: Faculty for the Future fellowships were designed to cover the full cost of doctoral or postdoctoral research at the host institution, including living expenses and travel — a level of support that enabled fellows to focus entirely on their research without needing to hold other employment. The L'Oréal-UNESCO national fellowships varied considerably in amount across countries, with some national programmes providing support at a level comparable to Faculty for the Future and others providing smaller, supplementary grants.
What the Evidence Shows About Outcomes
The Faculty for the Future programme had, by 2021, accumulated a body of alumni data that the Schlumberger Foundation published periodically. The headline figures — alumni who had returned to home-country institutions, alumni who had achieved faculty positions, alumni who had gone on to lead their own research groups — were positive. Interpreting these figures required the same caution that applied to any fellowship outcome analysis: the programme selected already-strong researchers, and the counterfactual was not directly observable.
The return rate was the figure that most directly tested the programme's theory of change. Schlumberger Foundation's published materials had consistently reported high return rates — the majority of alumni returning to developing-country institutions after completing their fellowship-supported research — though the definition of "returning" and the duration over which return was tracked varied. What was clearer was that alumni networks in several countries had formed, creating the kind of peer community among women scientists with international training that was one of the programme's secondary goals.
The Programme's Place in the Larger Ecosystem
Faculty for the Future was one programme addressing one part of a larger problem. It could not address the conditions at the home-country institutions to which fellows were expected to return — the inadequacy of laboratory infrastructure, the cultural dynamics of departments where women were few and often unwelcome, the salary structures that made academic positions uncompetitive with industry or international employment. A fellow who returned to a home institution with a strong research profile and a genuine commitment to building local scientific capacity could be defeated by institutional conditions that the fellowship had no mechanism to change.
This was not a critique of the programme but a description of the limits of individual fellowship interventions — limits that applied equally to L'Oréal-UNESCO, to AAUW fellowships, and to most other individual-level interventions in women's STEM career development. The structural conditions — research infrastructure, institutional culture, funding mechanisms, the quality of secondary and undergraduate education that filled the pipeline — were beyond the reach of fellowship programmes operating at the individual level.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future?
A fellowship programme established in 2004 that supports women from developing and emerging economies to pursue doctoral or postdoctoral research in STEM at world-class institutions globally. By 2021, over 700 women scientists had been supported. The programme includes a return commitment asking fellows to contribute to their home-country research institutions.
What distinguishes Faculty for the Future from other major women-in-STEM fellowships?
Its exclusive focus on women from developing and emerging economies, its concentration at the doctoral/postdoctoral stage, its full-cost funding model, and its home-country return expectation distinguish it from broader international fellowships. It is specifically designed to address the brain-drain problem in developing-world science.
How does Faculty for the Future compare to the L'Oréal-UNESCO programme?
Faculty for the Future is more narrowly targeted (only developing-country women, only doctoral/postdoctoral stage, full-cost funding, return requirement). L'Oréal-UNESCO operates at multiple career stages, covers all world regions, uses a national committee structure with variable funding levels, and includes a laureate awards programme for established researchers.