As Biotech Layoffs Begin To Ease, Leading STEM Educator Sees Trend Among Those Still Not Being Promoted

After more than 22,000 cuts across large pharma last year, hiring is stabilizing. Industry veteran warns the recovery has its own promotion problem.

SAN DIEGO, CA, UNITED STATES, October 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The worst of the biopharma downturn appears to be over. Seventeen companies announced layoffs between April and June, roughly half the number reported in the first quarter and a fraction of the 64 announcements in the same period a year earlier, according to an analysis of Fierce Biotech data.

Over the course of 2025, the 17 pharmaceutical companies with at least $20 billion in annual revenue cut more than 22,000 positions between them.

Pamela Gardner, founder and CEO of Biotech Vendor Services, has spent 23 years running events where life sciences companies meet their suppliers, at research institutes and biopharma sites across the country. She is also a coach for mid-stage women in STEM to help them advance into visible leadership and get past these promotion barriers.

"When teams shrink, somebody absorbs the work and the recovery carries a risk that is easy to miss," Gardner said. "In my experience that is disproportionately the women, and they do it well. Then the hiring comes back and they are described as indispensable where they are, which sounds like praise and functions as a ceiling."

Gardner said the pattern is familiar to her from two decades of standing in those rooms.

"I have watched who gets heard in a meeting and who quietly leaves the industry three years later," she said. "Those are usually the same people."

According to McKinsey and LeanIn.Org for every 100 men who are promoted to manager, only 93 women are, and just 74 women of color. And the numbers get even worse for women further up the ladder, making it harder to rise when men hold significantly more management positions.

Research on advancement in life sciences has documented related patterns, including less sponsorship for women, fewer high-visibility assignments, and a greater share of work that is necessary but not promotable, such as coordination, mentoring, and committee service.

Gardner said the women she works with are rarely underperforming.

"They are exhausted," she said. "They are holding so many plates in the air that they are frightened of what happens if they let one go. And they have usually concluded that the answer is to work harder and take up less space."

She said that conclusion is the actual obstacle.

"If you blend in, nobody notices you. That was the whole point of my TEDx talk," Gardner said. "You cannot get promoted for being invisible, and you cannot be visible while you are trying to be agreeable."

Gardner runs The Art of Women Thriving in STEM, a program built around three shifts she describes as being free to be yourself, stopping the spinning plates, and being happy now.

She said the moment matters because organizations are making decisions again.

"Everybody spent two years in survival mode. The companies are coming out of it, and the promotion conversations are restarting," she said. "The women who ran everything during the cuts should be in those conversations, and a lot of them are not putting themselves there."

Gardner received the 2019 Athena Pinnacle Award and a 2021 San Diego Business Journal Business Women of the Year award and was recognized as one of 2021 San Diego Business Journal 500 Most Influential People Health & Science Category.

More at: https://www.bvsconnection.com

Pamela Gardner
Its Time To Get Visible
media@bvsconnection.com
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