Janet Taylor’s (1804-1870) was not a name I was familiar with until rather recently. She was quite the pioneer, however, despite the hurdles she had to face as a woman committed to delivering improvements in navigation for British sailors. A biography of her life, Mistress of Science: the story of the remarkable Janet Taylor, pioneer of sea navigation enlightened me. She set about improving the lot of the British sailor, by setting up a ‘Nautical Academy’ which offered training in those subjects a mariner would need. This included “a complete course on Navigation, including Trigonometry, and its application to Navigation”, but also how to use the instruments and tables that mariners of the time needed to understand. Furthermore, she published a number of books to provide more accuracy in these tables that were used across shipping to establish a ship’s position.
The first book she published about this, Luni-Solar and Horary Tables, was designed to permit an accurate calculation of longitude using the so-called lunar method, but with the improvement of allowing for the earth’s spheroidal shape, which she was one of the first to highlight (as opposed to a simple sphere). The book was given an anonymous review in the Nautical Magazine, which highlights the way people approached her work. To put it mildly, it was not favourable, referring to the book as ‘useless’ and of ‘disproportionate accuracy’. But, her gender had undoubtedly played a part in the reviewer’s mind, as he (it must have been a he!), commented:
The work before us being the production of one of the fair sex, and, we believe, a first effort, disposed us to treat it, as in gallantry we were bound to do, with every indulgence….
This condescending statement, as well as all the other criticisms in the review, did not go down well with Taylor, who wrote a lengthy rebuttal which in turn provoked a further rebuttal of the rebuttal….Over a difficult career of many years, her persistence paid off and she gained increasing stature within the field, and her Academy proved successful despite the odds. (It was not for nothing it was originally labelled with her husband’s name, to try to overcome suspicion of work led by one of the ‘fair sex’, although George Taylor was more the logistics lead rather than the brains of the operation.) That sort of condescension towards the ‘fair sex’ still can be found today in most walks of life. I was reminded of it by a reference I saw to Rebecca Solnit’s book Men Explain Things to Me, and the original 2012 essay which provoked the book’s title, in which she recounts how a man tried to tell her all about Eadweard Muybridge, having read a review of a book about him. On and on this man went, despite interjections that Solnit was indeed the author. That story, and others like it, in time provoked the new word ‘mansplaining’, but there are of course many ways in which condescension plays out.
Not giving women their proper titles is one version that turns up all over the place. I wrote about one particular interaction of mine with the local media where this played out some years ago. One of the funnier versions I encountered was back in the days when I used Twitter. Sir Joe Bloggs (I forget what his name actually was) had just been appointed to do a review of something gender-related (and equally, I forget what that was after this distance in time), and I put out a tweet saying what a good thing that Joe Bloggs was going to do this review. To which, some jerk responded saying ‘Sir Joe Bloggs to you’, or something to that effect. Foolishly, I responded stating as a Dame I thought I could drop his title, to which the reply was ‘No’. Why not? Does this jerk not understand the relative standings of Dame and Knight? Clearly not. And, as a passing moan, I will mention those tedious pull-down lists on online forms that list different forms of title, may often have ‘Professor Sir’ as a choice, but much less often ‘Professor Dame’…Oh well, I’m not particularly keen on the slightly absurd title of Dame, but – in the current much-used phrase in a different context – parity of esteem suggests you should either have neither choice or both.
Condescension features in so many stories of women’s lives, and science is no exception. It may be more than 50 years ago since Jim Watson wrote disparagingly about ‘Rosy’ Franklin in The Triple Helix, but comments about women’s dress, as well as their scientific abilities, still are frequent. The presumption that if a man and a woman turn up to a meeting, the male is the senior player is another common variant of this. To give another recent example I heard about, in my own university, it concerned a gifted early career researcher, someone working in a hot topic and much in demand by both the media and Government. Yet when she was looking for a college affiliation within the Cambridge system, one college offered her a teaching fellowship, with its requisite substantial time commitment to teaching, at the expense of her research. In response to her pushback, that that was not what she was looking for, she was told that as a woman they had assumed that would be sufficient. Needless to say, she went elsewhere. The College in question will have been the loser (and, suffice it to say, it is one of the colleges well known for its backward attitudes towards women).
Of course, it’s a case of ‘not all men’. Nevertheless, the reality is that many of the men who do this are probably blithely unaware that they are so blinkered and biased. I will end with one more anecdote of my own. Some years ago, I attended a dinner for the Honorary Graduands of a particular university. There were a number of us and, carelessly I’d say, the Vice Chancellor presiding did not do any formal introductions. Two men, who undoubtedly would have regarded themselves as of the ‘Great and Good’ of London (not scientists) clearly decided I was some obscure hanger-on, presumably another honorary graduand’s partner or guest, and talked across me. Indeed, they chose to talk about genetics about which it was clear they knew little. But would they let me get a word in edgeways to correct them? Of course not. Unlike Solnit, I haven’t written a book on the subject that was being described to me, but nevertheless it was painful to listen to them getting facts wrong while ignoring my attempts to intervene. It was only a single dinner, and I was never going (I hope) to see these clowns again, but it was certainly tedious. And, I would say, representative of too many men’s attitudes to too many women. Condescension did not go out with the end of the Victorian era after Janet Taylor died, nor mid-last-century after Rosalind Franklin died. It is, sadly, going strong.
