Listening to a webinar regarding women in management, I was struck by the panellist who remarked in irritation how her boss had once said ‘you must not have had any problems’ en route to the role she had. She was livid at this remark, and I can understand why. Success does not mean that there were no setbacks along the way. I do wonder whether a (male) boss would say anything similar to a male more junior colleague. To my mind the underlying implication when directed at a woman is that, if they had had any problems, they would likely have been derailed rather than keep going.
Sally Davies, former Chief Medical Officer who recently retired from her role as Master of Trinity College in Cambridge, summarised this well in an interview:
“Well, like most women of my age I’ve had to be better than the men to get the jobs, and then of course there is the inevitable you make and put forward an idea at a meeting and it’s only when a man says it that it’s taken up.”
That doesn’t sound like someone who’s never had any problems. Although she qualifies her remarks with ‘most women of my age’, suggesting the current generation of young women may not face the same issues, I fear I think that is too optimistic. Nothing I’ve heard from ECRs suggests they don’t have similar experiences.
I am reminded of this following an interview[1] I did this week with a journalist from the BBC World Service about why there were, yet again, no women Nobel prize winners in the STEM subjects this year. Where did the problems set in, I was asked. My personal belief is that they occur at every stage of a life essentially from birth. For women moving up the professional ladder, the thought process of any interviewer should be, not an assumption there have never been any problems, more a question about how they found the resilience to keep going in the face of inevitable hiccoughs or worse.
I watch the world of (classical) music as a kind of parallel world to science, with historically similar ways of writing women out of many roles. Marin Alsop, the US conductor, may have been the first woman to be appointed to lead a major American orchestra when she was appointed Musical Director for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, but this led to open hostility from some orchestra members. Instead of giving up this dream job and simply retreating, she worked with the orchestra to overcome their concerns and then went from strength to strength. If you read her Wikipedia page, the number of ‘firsts’ to her credit is extraordinary: she was the first female principal conductor of a British orchestra, the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms….and so on. However, if you watch interviews with her, it is clear how raw that experience at Baltimore was. No setbacks on the way to glory? Rubbish!
Sally Davies and Marin Alsop, in their different ways, did not give up on their path to leadership. Others may. It is too easy to be knocked off course. If you choose not to let ‘them’ win, you have to expend energy that could otherwise be directed at your science instead at manoeuvring, fitting in or finding allies to work with you. This could, of course, happen to men as well as women and to any minority in a situation where they feel excluded, but it does lead to time being eaten up and potentially a sapping of strength which others may not have had to overcome if their path has always been rose-strewn.
Take Nancy Hopkins, for instance. Not a Nobel Prize winner but an eminent life scientist at MIT. If you read Kate Zernike’s 2024 book The Exceptions about women faculty in the sciences there, it becomes clear, not just that she was treated most unreasonably, but that in order to gather evidence about the systemic differences in the way female faculty were treated, a lot of time and thought was required. Going around the labs at night to measure up the space allocated to male and female faculty to gather the evidence that women systematically got a raw deal took imagination as well as time. That she was willing to do this to make her case to MITs senior leadership, made a difference not just within her own faculty but with repercussions far wider when the ensuing report was made public, documenting the way women were systemically disadvantaged.
Hopkins was brave, energetic and yet still managed to outshine most of her male colleagues professionally. But to say she ‘must have had no problems’ would be ridiculous. I’m sure many women have done, in their own ways, what they can to level the playing field for them and those who come thereafter, but it will come as a cost. Does this play into why so few women get Nobel prizes in STEM? Probably not in a direct line, but the woman who is a team player, who fits in with the system so as not to be shafted or takes on the pastoral care and other ‘housekeeping’ that may be tossed in her direction, will be less likely to win this ultimate accolade (which, for all its glory and media attention, seems a very outdated kind of prize).
To be successful as a scientist can take many forms: to bring on the next generation, to contribute a small part to a wider whole, to inspire….it does not mean selfishness and treading on those more junior than you so that the prizes all come to you. Please do not follow the advice in entomologist E.O. Wilson’s quite old book (2013), Letters to a Young Scientist, (he was ‘merely’ a Pulitzer Prize winner, not a Nobel but ambition oozes through his book) to ‘Make excuses, dodge, plead, trade’ to get out of doing the important if boring tasks of administration. His book was all in favour of ambition and simply putting all one’s effort single-mindedly into one’s own research. The world would be a better place overall if the incentives in academia did more to encourage team working, support and a fair sharing of the load of making a department run well, rather than rewarding the selfish.
[1] I suspect this interview will only be available in a non-English translation, from what I was told
