About 100 delegates  workshopped solutions during a two-day event hosted by the Australian Academy of Science as part of its new initiative, the Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) Forum.

The steering committee's co-chairman, Professor Nalini Joshi, said Australia could mirror the United Kingdom's "extraordinarily effective" Athena SWAN Charter, developed in 2005 to address the chronic under-representation and loss of female talent in the scientific workforce.

The UK charter rates the gender equity policies of the institutions that sign up and awards them bronze, silver or gold status as they reflect on why they have the number of women they do, propose actions to improve, and measure the changes.

The initiative took off when the UK's chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davis, said institutions had to be at a minimum silver level to receive medical research funding, prompting a "huge scramble" from organisations signing up and progressing through the awards, Professor Joshi said.

Delegates at the forum hope to begin a pilot program in Australia and already, institutions including the University of Newcastle were interested in getting on board to stop the "haemorrhaging" of talented women from the STEM fields.

"If you look at the distribution of IQ in a population the proportion of people who have a higher IQ is fairly evenly distributed between men and women," Professor Joshi said.

"When we lose women in large numbers we are losing a significant percentage of the population with the talent, the drive, the interest, in these areas.

"If Australia wants to improve its productivity and become a technologically and scientifically sophisticated society we have to keep those numbers instead of losing them on the female side."

Professor Joshi said there was goodwill to fix the gender imbalance and the issue had been talked about since the 1990s but the numbers remained alarming and in some fields had worsened.

In the natural and physical sciences there were more women than men at the undergraduate level, Professor Joshi said, but at the professorial category the number of women dropped off to about 10 per cent.

In other sectors such as engineering, men outnumbered women at every level.

Biomedical researcher Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea, who was part of the SAGE Forum, said her career, like that of many  women in her industry, was still recovering from the disruption of the birth of her child and a major health condition.

"If you've had career disruptions or phases where you've lost productivity it stays with you for your whole career … kind of like a black mark."

She said in her field the proportion of women proceeding to senior levels was very low resulting in a loss of talent, diverse ideas, and role models for young women.

Dr Evans-Galea applauded the National Health and Medical Research Council's (NHMRC) move towards requiring institutions to have a gender equity policy in order to receive funding.

"I think this is historic change happening in the science sector and it marries really well with the goals of the broader community, particularly politically in terms of the G20," Dr Evans-Galea said.

She said the initiative needed male champions to speak out in support of women in science.

Nobel Prize winner Professor Brian Schmidt also co-chairs the SAGE Forum steering committee.

He said change will be resisted by some in the research sector, but organisations that fail to address gender equity will find it harder to attract the best and brightest.

Professor Joshi said it was often simple "logical" changes that could make the biggest difference such as arranging meeting times within family-friendly hours, but she criticised token measures such as reporting gender numbers as "ticking the boxes" while practices discouraging female participation remained invisible.