Another Year, Another IWD: What’s Changed?

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Athene Donald

Every year International Women’s Day sparks a momentary bout of reflection about the state of women in our society. The  House of Lords has an annual debate, for instance, this year about women in STEM.  Social media will showcase many women’s stories, past and present, highlighting both those known well and those less so. For myself, and I’m sure many like me, multiple invitations turn up on my desk inviting me to give a talk here or there (which typically clash so I cannot accept them all). But does anything fundamentally change?

At one level the answer is obviously yes. There are more women on FTSE Boards and running universities. The Supreme Court is not all male and about half of Cambridge colleges are now led by women, although some colleges are still at the stage of appointing their first female head (most recently Selwyn). Compared with when I was growing up, huge progress has been made. At another level, at the level of inherent attitudes to what men and women can do, there is still too much question about whether women are ‘up’ to any particular challenge. Leaving aside what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic, one can still see fainter echoes here.

Take the scrutiny over Rachel Reeves’ qualifications as an economist; no one questioned George Osborne’s or Jeremy Hunt’s experience or degree relevance. It is hard not to see this as a double standard being applied to a woman. Such scrutiny implicitly weakens her authority. Or the current anxiety over boys doing less well at school (of course something that everyone should be worried about), compared with decades of indifference when the gender gap was the other way round. I suspect the recent analysis of EPSRC grant data that shows that women are much more successful at obtaining fellowships than men (by some 80%; I’m not sure if there is a clear explanation of this yet) may provoke concern, despite the fact that university leadership and the professorial ranks remain stubbornly male, particularly in a subject like my own (Physics).

I would like to think progress was well and truly being made, but the reality is, when I go to talk – as I still do – to groups of young researchers about these issues, the same concerns raise their heads. How do I get taken seriously? What do I do when my supervisor isn’t supportive? Why is it always the women (and the minoritised ethnics) who have to do the heavy lifting in making improvements happen? The very fact that student women’s groups feel the need to invite me to talk about my own experiences is testament to the fact they don’t want to feel alone in what may feel like splendid isolation in some groups. In that sense, no, things have not progressed to the point where these are no longer matters of concern.

Then there is of course the small matter of the gender pay gap. In the 55 years since the original Equal Pay Act that Barbara Castle introduced in 1970, there is still – almost universally across sectors – a significant gender pay gap. Again, yes, it has been decreasing, but it still stands at 7%, according to the last ONS data. It has actually increased for managers, directors and senior officials, according to the same data. Some, but not all of this, will be down to grade/role segregation. This is just as true in the supposedly egalitarian Scandinavian countries, as this commentary on Norway demonstrates. But we must all worry whether the backlash against DEI initiatives in the USA spills over to our own shores. It is of course right to worry about the numbers of working-class boys becoming NEETS, but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that girls who do well at school may well find their subsequent progression up the career ladder stalls and that their pay falls behind their male contemporaries.

The reasons behind these social challenges are many and varied, and initiatives that help one part of our community may not work elsewhere. However, that we live in a society where equal pay for equal work does not automatically fall out from decisions in the workplace – by managers and HR departments – is a disgrace. This is not even a case of trying to work out whether ‘dinner ladies’ and ‘bin men’ are doing equally skilled jobs (as in the Birmingham City Council tribunal some years ago), but whether two people sitting at adjacent desks doing identical roles get paid the same. If one negotiates on hiring and the other doesn’t (stereotypically male and female traits), the difference in salary may perpetuate and even grow throughout a career, without anyone noticing or indeed intending such a discrepancy.

And finally, in this IWD rant, if society continues to assume the woman is the primary carer, even when it has been pointed out – to a school or nursery for instance – that it is the man who should be contacted in case of an emergency, for instance, we will continue to reinforce these stereotypes. As long as such assumptions are made, by the individual and by society, we are not making the best use of all our talents by looking at the reality not some out-of-date vision of what ‘should’ be.

When it comes to International Women’s Day, it is a good moment to pause and think both about how far gender equality has progressed, but also how it is stuck. For the specific case of women in STEM, let me do my annual IWD reminder of the list of things anyone, whatever their gender, age or occupation, can do to improve the situation for aspiring and practicing female scientists. I originally entitled this Just1Action4WIS (Just one action for women in science) and, although it’s all but ten years old now, it is still as important now as then.

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The Importance of Manufacturing

Posted on March 2, 2025 by Athene Donald

How many factories have you visited in your life? Do you have any sense of what goes on there? When I was a postdoc in the Cambridge Materials Science Department, helping out with undergraduate projects, I was offered a chance to visit what was then a major ICI production plant at Welwyn Garden City. Forget the fact that neither the factory nor indeed ICI exist now, this was an opportunity for me to visit a full-scale manufacturing site, where vast expanses of polymer film were produced. I leapt at the chance, naively mentioning during the visit that I had never been to a factory before. The ICI personnel seemed stunned. But why would I have?

Since then, I’ve been to a fair few such places. To Baxters on Speyside for a fun family day out, watching how soup and jam are produced from a safe distance. (At the time I refrained from pointing out my food physics credentials, despite my husband’s urging, to identify myself as a member of the Government Office for Science Food and Drink Foresight Panel, meant to be crystal-gazing at the future of the sector twenty years hence from the early ‘90’s.) To a breakfast cereal factory on the Welsh borders during my days of researching starch granule structure. That was a day memorable not least for being, however respectable, totally unsuitably dressed for climbing up and down ladders to look inside vats, dressed as I was in a skirt and heeled shoes. Back then I felt I needed to look serious if I was to be taken seriously (this would also have been in the ‘90’s). To later ICI factories, in Slough for paint and Teeside for more polymer films produced at phenomenal speeds….And so on.

However, impressive though large machinery is, and interesting though it is to see production lines, have I ever really stopped to think about manufacturing as a ‘thing’? Of course, the answer is no, not really. So much of what surrounds us it is all too easy to take for granted until it goes wrong (think of the glass vial shortage when there was a pressing need for them to store vaccines during the pandemic). Supply chains matter. Where some vital component comes from to complete an everyday product, suddenly becomes important when the Suez Canal gets blocked by a ship making a mess of a tricky manoeuvre. This we discovered the hard way during our house refurbishment, when all the replacement, fire-proof doors needed for our house renovation got stuck on the wrong side of the Canal. Who knew doors came from the other side of the world?

So, if you are in the same position of not having given manufacturing much thought, an easy solution is at hand. My Churchill and Cambridge colleague Tim Minshall, head of the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge, has just written an informative but easy-to-read book about the world of manufacturing: Your life is manufactured: How we make things, why it matters and how we can do it better. It is a great read, full of informative nuggets of information dispensed in a light-hearted but also serious way. I thoroughly recommend it.

As a society we constantly demand more: more stuff, more sophisticated stuff, more variety of stuff and so on. As academics we are often charged to be entrepreneurial, to take our discoveries out into the world of impact to make a better widget. But the reality is, there is a huge gulf between the germ of an idea, even if elegantly written up in some top-notch journal, and making something at scale at a cost that will sell and having sorted out all the logistics to make that happen. Few academics have that skillset and certainly not without a lot of trial and error to achieve a satisfactory end result.

Furthermore, these days anyone trying to produce some new product/widget needs to pay attention to the ‘cost’ in the broadest sense: to energy use and air miles, to impact on the planet and pollution. The last chapter in the book is concerned with what changes are ongoing and are needed to be developed so that, as the chapter title says, we ‘survive’ despite our apparently insatiable desire for more stuff. As he points out, manufacturing is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after electricity and heat production. We need seriously to tackle this issue, including by cutting back on our desires – as an example, buying fewer clothes and wearing them for longer is a good place to start. But we can also consider the production of the clothes we do buy so that they generate less (water in particular) pollution and make sure that far less ends up in landfill to rot over decades.

Food is of course essential, but we waste an awful lot of that too. In my time working on food all those years ago, people were already considering how to make better use of ‘waste’ from large-scale food production. I recall a cunning plan to use onion skins to make novel glues, for instance (apparently there is a lot of onion waste in the fast-food market). But all of us, even in our own homes, waste a lot of food. The figures of food wastage that we buy and then toss away because it’s past it’s sell-by date or rotted in the bottom of the refrigerator, is stunning, although admittedly the rotting vegetables probably don’t count as ‘manufactured’. Around 9.5 million tons of food waste is generated in the UK each year, the vast majority in domestic not commercial settings.  Globally around a third of food produced gets chucked. We could do so much better on this and many other fronts. Read the book if you want to know more about what you could do in changing how you live to waste less of the manufactured goods we are surrounded by.

I hope I’ve whetted your appetite. It’s an entertaining and informative book. Having talked to Tim during the writing process, I know he worried if he had got the balance right between being too technical and too ‘popular’. I’d say he’s found a pretty happy medium.

 

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International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2025

Posted on February 11, 2025 by Athene Donald

It is ten years since UNESCO declared today, February 11th, as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Less well-known, I suspect, than International Women’s Day, it has a more specific focus. Sadly, in its ten years of existence, progress against its goals has not been particularly marked, despite the importance of women and girls entering the world of science to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Indeed, one could hazard a guess that in some places (notably Afghanistan) things will have gone backwards, with girls denied education of any sort at secondary level, never mind in the sciences.

The UNESCO call for action focusses on three areas, calling for urgent multistakeholder collaborative actions to: dismantle gender stereotypes and biases in science; open educational pathways for girls in science; and create empowering workplace environments. The UK could look at its own culture and consider how well it is doing across these objectives. Better than Afghanistan obviously, but we’ve a long way to go to eradicate gender differences in terms of pathways and stereotypes. In the run-up to last year’s Day, Teach First carried out a survey of children’s attitudes to science and maths (for children between the ages of 11 and 16). They found that more than half of girls (54.3%) don’t feel confident learning maths, compared to two-fifths (41.2%) of boys, with the gap even wider for science, with more than four in ten girls (43%) not confident, compared with a quarter of boys (26%). What is it in our society and our teaching that leads to this substantial difference, and why are teachers unable to overcome the issues?

Note, this is a problem of confidence not ability. When it comes to GCSEs, girls outperform boys, but the lack of confidence continues to manifest itself in that fewer girls than boys progress to A Levels in the STEM subjects, with particular shortfalls in the ‘hard’ sciences such as Physics and Computing, as well as Further Maths. Of course, these numbers then translate into lower numbers entering university to study those subjects as well as Engineering. And yet, report after report highlights how diversity in a company’s workforce leads to better outcomes, be it in a company’s profits or innovation.

By celebrating both girls and women in science, February 11th specifically highlights the pipeline. If girls get deterred from any interest they may have in science early on, they are unlikely to enter the STEM professions later. Schools and teachers have a key role to play here, in identifying what it is in their school ethos that may be holding girls back. The IOP’s (now quite old) data showing how single sex schools are more likely to see girls progress to A Level than coeducational establishments, must tell us something about the school environment in general.  I’m not convinced that things have improved since that 2012 report.

A small-scale study from the USA highlighted that children (both boys and girls) as young as 6 or 7 already see boys as inherently ‘smarter’ than girls. This is something that our society should be capable of eradicating if it put its mind to it. The belief that you have to be especially clever in order to be able to do Physics (particularly if you are a girl) is, again, borne out by many studies. The ASPIRES2 cohort study, led by Louise Archer, surveyed many children between the ages of 14 and 19. It showed that girls who do physics are regarded as exceptional, possessing high levels of cultural, social and science capital. They are presumed not to be typically ‘girly’. Girls may not identify with this description, indeed they may not want to identify with it. Furthermore, Physics is represented – in textbooks and overall narrative – as a subject for men. A lack of explicit representation of women in physics can lead to the assumption that women are unable to work in physics, or are unsuited to it. Once again it is not necessarily ability that is in question here, so much as a feeling of belonging or wanting to belong to the exclusive sect that appears not to be for them. Similar attitudes can be seen in those whose cultural capital or socioeconomic background leads them to feel unwanted in the subject.

More needs to be done to analyse, not just what deters girls from entering Physics (and, by extension,  Engineering and probably Computing), quite a lot is known about this. Now we also need to know what interventions would make a difference and, crucially, at what age. How is that girls imbibe the notion so early that they are less smart than boys? What would make a difference? Is it in how teachers interact in the classroom? Or is it in the messages they receive through the various media (social and otherwise) and their homes? Could teachers, if innocent of conveying the message themselves, do a better job of actively counteracting society’s messages throughout school years? Would more stories of modern women (and not just Marie Curie and, slightly more recently, Katherine Johnson) have a visible impact on the enthusiasm girls evince for the STEM subjects?

I don’t know the answers to questions like these but I think collectively we need to find them. I do worry, however, that a headteacher who is frequently lauded (at least by the last government) as leading such an outstanding school as Michaela, and yet who is unaware – or at least unconcerned – that her school has a below-average percentage of girls studying Physics at A Level, is the tip of the iceberg in the teaching profession. If diversity is only considered in terms of behaviour in the classroom in their training, how are teachers – particularly non-science-specialist teachers – to recognize and deal with the problem? And do they have the bandwidth to do something about this when their lives are so full and stressed already?

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The Need to Join the Dots

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Athene Donald

Last week, I attended an event organised by The Productivity Institute and, more locally, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, as part of National Productivity Week. The meeting’s theme was Innovation and Infrastructure in the East. Note, despite the recent announcement by the Chancellor of the plans for the Oxford-Cambridge Corridor (which used, under the previous government, to be known as the Ox-Cam Arc and was first supported and then cancelled; it covers a swathe of country between Oxford and Cambridge, including the cities themselves) this meeting was about the east: Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. This part of the country is unusual in that it consists of a number of old market towns and many villages, not a large if sprawling urban conurbation of the likes of London, Birmingham or Manchester. Skills was mentioned a lot and with concern.

If you live in a fenland village, the chances are the buses are rare to non-existent, and travel to a college may therefore be a grave challenge.  Your social capital may not be great and the careers advice you’ve been able to access sparse and unhelpful. Your local college may or may not provide the courses you seek, or which would provide you with a good route to progression, for instance as a lab technician or plumber. Of course, if you come from a family with good social and cultural capital this may not matter, and you may simply be planning the linear route through A Levels and on to university somewhere far from home. Let us recall, around 50% of the 16 year-old population will not be going that way, though, many may not want to go far from their home and far too many will end up as NEETs (not in education, employment or training). Yet we need this 50% to be productive in our economy. The fancy labs of the Ox-Cam corridor will rely on technicians; the building of hundreds of thousands of houses in the region won’t happen without plumbers – and electricians, bricklayers, plasterers and so on. Growth will not happen, nor opportunity for all as the Government mission has it, if we ignore the needs of those for whom college and apprentices are the right route.

In this vein, the Commons Education Committee has just announced an enquiry into Further Education and Skills, which may cover some of this important ground. It should also be noted that the Industrial Strategy Green paper, published last autumn, put skills at the top of its list of potential barriers to investment (although saying surprisingly little explicitly about the issue in the bulk of the document). Skills has to sit at the heart of growth, alongside investment. It needs to be thought about in depth, and not just mentioned as something to be sorted without detailed planning.  How is this to happen?

The concern about training/education and how it joins up with what the country needs in its future workforce was also made quite plain last week in a different context. The CSA at DSIT (the Department of Science Innovation and Technology), Chris Johnson*, was speaking to the Science and Technology Committee chaired by Chi Onwurah, along with other departmental CSAs. Asked about his concerns, he had this to say:

The concern I have is that, with limited resources, how do we look to the next generation of scientists and engineers and make sure we have sufficient capability that is, at least in some approximation, of where we want to be in 5 or 10 years. And if we leave it to pure chance or the choices of the students, bluntly that may not align with where we need to be. How we can manage a national dialogue I think is the appropriate way forward…We need to be more upfront about the skillset we need going forward.

In that, he encapsulates many of the problems we are facing: limited money and a pipeline of talent in STEM that may not best fit the UK’s needs, whether it wants to be a ‘science superpower’ or a nation leading in AI, or prepared for cyberattacks and pandemics. How is that national dialogue going to be initiated? By whom and involving whom? Skills England is in the process of being set up and would seem to be one potential location. But it has been a long time in gestation so it is still hard to know how it may operate. This might be where the dialogue Chris Thomson wants might happen, but if it is solely an internal dialogue amongst its yet-to-be-announced members, it is unlikely to satisfy everyone. Furthermore, is it going to put its focus on those who do or don’t go to university? Focus on both is needed.

Mission-led government should help bring the different strands and arguments together, in this case skills will sit in part under the Opportunity Mission (led by the Department for Education), but – as with the Industrial Strategy – the Growth Mission will also need to be paying much attention to the issue. As Thomson said, we may not be heading in the right direction in terms of alignment of skilled workers (researchers and many other STEM trained workers) with the country’s needs if its economy is to grow. Locally, we need to be having this dialogue too – as the conversation at TPI’s meeting showed – recognizing that a solution to Manchester’s issues may differ greatly from what is appropriate in a transport-poor region of small towns and villages. Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich may be thriving, but if they are inaccessible to large numbers of potential students that will not help them or the economy.

* The CSA’s name was originally erroneously given as Chris Thompson (corrected 10-2-25)

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How Much Does the Scientific Ecosystem Change over Time?

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Athene Donald

Desmond Bernal was an outstanding crystallographer. Not himself a Nobel Prize winner, he set the likes of Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz on their own successful paths to that accolade. A Communist, he fell from grace during the 50’s and 60’s due to his unwavering commitment to the Russian regime and the (discredited) theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko. However, before and during the second world war he was one of the giants of British science, heavily involved with providing scientific advice to government during the war and appreciated as a polymath with a grasp of many subjects beyond his own field, and beyond science itself. He easily slipped from the analysis of X-ray patterns before the war into modelling bomb blasts and the statistics of the way they damaged life and property during the Blitz.

I have been rereading his biography (J.D.Bernal The Sage of Science by Andrew Brown) and that has pointed me to his massive and influential 1939 work The Social Function of Science. Inevitably, parts of this will have dated very badly, but there are an uncanny number of comments about the state of science in society then which still ring horribly true. People often talk about how the satirical 1908 description of Cambridge life from Francis Cornford (Microcosmographia: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician) echoes across the years, with its downbeat assessment of how business is done – or not – within the University and how to be influential, for instance. I think this ringing true equally applies to much of Bernal’s text, only now applicable across the country’s research ecosystem. It, however, was not at all satirical but deadly serious, intended as a call to action for society.

Most people practicing science in our universities would sympathise with the statement ‘Nor are the actual emoluments of the young research worker really adequate’ for instance. The 1930’s may not have had to endure the REF, but the publish or perish culture was clearly alive and well:

One more peculiarly damaging to science is the necessity incumbent upon all research workers to produce results and to see that they are published.…for it is on his published results by number and bulk as much as by excellence that his future depends…Another result is to burden scientific literature with masses of useless papers.

One should remember back then papers were not online. Wading through the Science Citation Index – a very substantial collection of tomes which was the necessary route for me and generations before (and after) to try to track down who had cited which paper/ whose papers had been cited – was hard work in a library, not something one could skim through at one’s desk, and useless papers just take up unnecessary space. Such papers are probably even more prevalent now, with predatory journals cluttering up reading matter with papers of dubious quality. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff as a young researcher, especially if you obey the DORA mantra and don’t look at citation indices?

Bernal was a friend of CP Snow’s, whose PhD thesis on The Structure of Single Molecules at one point passed through my hands when the Cambridge Colloid Group and its library were disbanded. Indeed Bernal ‘appeared’ as Constantine, a brilliant polymath scientist in Snow’s first novel The Search. It is therefore interesting to wonder what his influence was on Snow’s fury about the two cultures, exposed in the 1959 Rede Lecture of that name in Cambridge. Bernal writes, twenty years before, that ‘Among people of literary culture there is almost an affectation of knowing nothing about science.’ The worry is that may still persist, although my concern would be not that this impacts on literary culture so much as those who studied literature may then go on to control policy decisions involving science. Bernal worried about that too:

The lack of proper appreciation of science is not confined to the public at large; it is particularly powerful and dangerous in the fields of administration and politics.

It is not for nothing that Angela Maclean, as GCSA, has aspirations (seemingly met) of getting 50% of the civil servants entering through the Fast Stream route to come from a scientific discipline.

However, clearly Bernal has encountered some who have access to policy decisions when he makes the statement

Somebody who knows the Prime Minister suggests that something might be done for a particular branch of research, and in that typically English way scientific research carries on.

Whether it is somebody knowing the Prime Minister personally or some other Cabinet member, as they come and go, there may still be too much truth in that about what areas of research get moved up the funding agenda.

My motivation in turning to The Social Function of Science was to consider Bernal’s views on education. In the Brown biography these are given as (taken from another 1939 publication Science Teaching in General Education)

  1. To provide enough understanding of the place of science in society to enable the great majority that will not be actively engaged in scientific pursuits to collaborate intelligently with those who are, and to be able to cricise or appreciate the effect of science on society.
  2. To give a practical understanding of scientific method, sufficient to be applicable to the problems which the citizen has to face in his individual and social life.

Those aspirations seem valid today as much as 80+ years ago. However, Bernal obviously felt back then that what actually happens in schools falls far short of this, and the words he wrote may currently be of relevance to the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review. Bernal writes somewhat sardonically

Actually for the convenience of teachers and the requirements of the examination system, it is necessary that the pupils not only do not learn scientific method but learn precisely the reverse, that is, to believe on the authority of their masters or text-books exactly what they are told and to reproduce it when asked, whether it seems nonsense to them or not…the only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience….It is unfortunate that the easiest modes of testing knowledge and those which on the average will give the fairest results are precisely those that are the least valuable from the point of view of acquisition of scientific knowledge.

The phrase ‘teach to the test’ was clearly as appropriate then as now. Bernal, as an FRS, was no doubt very aware of the Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in Verba’, clearly at odds with the sentiment in that first sentence above.

Finally (in as far as I’ve just picked out a few sentences from the entire book) what about the stereotypes that schoolchildren may get exposed to? This is a topic on which I have previously said much, because I believe it is discouraging for many children when they cannot see examples of people like them. Bernal had thought about this ; his description here is also probably tending to the satirical when he writes

This does not usually take the form so often imagined, of the scientist as an other-worldly person who can only just manage to keep alive through the assistance of female relations.

I don’t believe that was a sexist comment in the modern meaning of the word. Bernal supported many female researchers, including Hodgkin as I’ve already mentioned. He was merely reflecting the inevitable norm of the day, of the male scientist with a stay-at-home wife (a domestic scene somewhat at odds with his own chaotic life, where he had many lovers including Hodgkin, and children by two of them. One of those I was at school with, perhaps reflected in my own interest in the man.)

Bernal is no longer revered in the way he was. He turned up in my undergraduate lectures as the man who tried to unravel the structure of liquids using plasticine spheres in a sack, to come up with the model of random close packing. I taught that too, when I lectured on Materials to undergraduate physicists. But his work on crystallography is so fundamental it is probably now invisible to many. As the biography – and his own writings – show, he was a man of many interesting parts.

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