An Education in Education (and Policy)

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Athene Donald

For the last three and a half years I have been chairing the Royal Society’s Education Committee. Under Secretary of State Michael Gove, education in England has been going through a tumultuous time (other parts of the UK have been going through their own periods of turmoil). Consultation after consultation has poured out from the Department for Education (DfE) offices to which we have tried to respond. Changes to the curriculum and to assessment have been rushed through and the consequences of all this will take years to ascertain. However, I think it would be true to say that the education community collectively is far from happy that their views have been adequately listened to or that any of the responses to the myriad consultations have made significant impact on the policy as finally implemented.

The Royal Society is one member of the group collectively known as SCORE, the Science Community Representing Education. If you look at the SCORE web pages you will be able to find the responses that have been jointly submitted to DfE on everything from practical work to the curriculum content. Most of them express grave reservations about some part of the new proposals or another. Relevant to a recent post of mine on experimental work, one of the more recent concerns was tied to the removal of practical assessment in science A levels’ overall grade. SCORE believes this risks schools spending less time than is needed on teaching practical skills, something crucial both to excite the students and to enable them to acquire the techniques and know-how necessary if they intend to pursue science further.

One may hope that teachers and schools will be heading for a period of relative tranquillity as all the changes Gove has rushed through bed down, but first they have to acclimatise themselves to the new landscape of curricula and assessment taking place simultaneously right through the school system. One of the things that seems to be universally deplored (at least outside DfE) is the conflation of assessing the child with assessing the school. As long as league tables are essentially based on exam results there will be the tendency, one might almost say the necessity for a school’s survival, to work at getting those children near any particular critical assessment boundary ‘up’ at the expense of the weaker and stronger who sit outside this critical zone. As long as it is only absolute grades (whether denoted by letters or numbers) that count, rather than a value-added contribution or seeing well-educated well-rounded students, we will see teachers having little choice but to teach to the test.

The Royal Society will be launching its major new report ‘Vision for Science and Mathematics Education‘ on June 26th, representing several years of intense work, evidence-gathering and consultations. I have been heavily involved in the committee which has been preparing the report – under the chairmanship of Martin Taylor – and it has been a fascinating experience. I sincerely hope it will lead to a more interesting dialogue with policy-makers about what this country needs if it is to produce both well-educated and scientifically-confident citizens as well as the scientists of tomorrow. But I will leave detailed discussion of the report until after its launch.

Both through the preparation of this report and more generally as Education Committee Chair I have had opportunities for interactions with policy-makers that had not come my way before. I wish they had. It has certainly been enlightening, though the experiences have not always been comfortable and occasionally positively surreal. What motivates ministers and civil servants can be very different from what a scientist would see as the ‘obvious’ driver and there is little point in pretending it is or could be otherwise. But unless you see this in action it is hard to appreciate how or why that should be.

To give one specific example of this let me cite the recently launched DfE initiative led, with all the best of intentions by the education minister Elizabeth Truss. This is the initiative which goes by the name of YourLife launched last month in an attempt to get more girls to stick with maths and physics at A levels and to consider careers in non-traditional fields notably engineering. How could that not be close to my heart? Its target age group is 14-16 year olds. When challenged as to why this age group was selected when career choices are often made, consciously or not, at the younger age of 11-12 (something research for the Vision Report threw up and so was fresh in my mind), a group of us were told that this was because they could then derive some easy metrics as to whether the Campaign was having any effect. So, for the policy-maker, quantifiable metrics and targets trump optimum outcomes in a very explicit way.

At one level, the purist scientist level, this is ridiculous but it makes perfect sense for the politician. That is why I believe we should be exposing many more of our talented young researchers to the world of policy through internships (such as at POST and GO-Science) and other more fleeting opportunities. It is why dialogues such as those that took place at the recent Circling the Square conference are important and why I’m excited to be involved with Cambridge University’s student-run Science Policy Exchange. It is too easy for scientists only to look at the ‘facts’ as they see it and not at the broader implications for those who have to implement them and sell them to their political masters or constituents.

I am quite sure my three and a half years leading on the Royal Society’s Education brief has improved my own education in ways I absolutely did not anticipate when initially invited to take on the role. I have, of course, learned much about schools, assessments, curricula and inspections. Those are the hard core facts I needed to be familiar with. But I have also learned, at least I hope I have, how to be more persuasive with those whose motivations are different, how to interpret nuanced civil-servant-speak and when to be blunt and insistent. I am quite sure on many occasions I have failed to hide impatience at what may seem unnecessary circumlocutions or evasiveness, but in other ways I have learned that going in feet first is often a stupid tactic however attractive it may seem at first sight. I have a long way to go in being a political master and, up to a point, I don’t want to be one, but the role has been challenging in a new way and immensely interesting.

You haven’t heard much about it on this blog because, as long as I could be thought to be the voice of the Royal Society on this front it would have been inappropriate to disclose much. You may hear more about it in the future now that I have stepped down. But what I can say is that it has absolutely reinforced my belief that, seizing opportunities is rarely a foolish thing to do even if what is being offered may feel not an immediately natural fit for what one has done before. I came to this role, not as an education expert but (I believe) regarded as a safe pair of hands to take the lead and as someone who wouldn’t, as it was put to me, ‘go native’: someone who could safely look after a major committee. I hope I have delivered against that. I am intensely grateful to those who had confidence in me and gave me, accidentally as it were, a new set of skills to take on to my next role.

Posted in Education, Science Policy | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Embedding the Gender Agenda

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Athene Donald

I feel as if I have been involved with gender issues forever, but this is just the bad habit one has of reimagining personal history. Probably acting wisely, in fact for most of my professional career I just got on with my physics trying not to focus on the fact that, as a woman, I was invariably in a small minority in any given room. Not infrequently that minority consisted solely of me, particularly relatively early on. It was in fact only in 2007 I engaged in my first explicitly gender-related role when I became Director of WiSETI, Cambridge University’s Women in Engineering, Science and Technology Initiative. To some extent I took this on in a fit of pique, prompted by circumstances that I needn’t bore you with but which were undoubtedly, at least in part, down to my gender being the ‘wrong’ one.

This autumn I will be stepping down as the University’s Gender Equality Champion, a role which seemed naturally to grow out of my involvement with WiSETI and the opportunities that provided for me to speak out about local issues, imbalances and inequities. Relinquishing this role, which I have formally been doing for 4 years, is part of my deliberate rebalancing of my ‘portfolio’ as I take up the reins at Churchill College. However, 4 years is probably a sensible stint: long enough to familiarise myself with the problems and the structures in which they are embedded; time to persuade others what might make a difference and to identify mechanisms which might make these changes possible. However I hope not so long that I have become jaded and ineffective. Nevertheless it will be good to have new people coming in with fresh perspectives.

One natural consequence of moving on is to reflect on what has and hasn’t been achieved that might have been on my initial ‘to do’ list had I had anything as concrete as that in mind when I started. And a recent meeting of the Council of the School of Physical Sciences (to which I am co-opted as a member of University Council, another role I will be relinquishing this autumn) encapsulated for me both where significant pleasing progress has been made and where we are still stuck. I can’t help feeling this little vignette must be playing out in similar ways in many situations around the HE sector, although exactly where each organisation is along the implicit timeline will no doubt vary.

At some point before I was a regular attendee at these meetings, I was invited along to discuss gender issues. That dates it to after 2007 when I became Director of WiSETi and before autumn 2009 when I joined University Council, so let’s say 2008: 6 years ago. At that time it was clear that in Physical Sciences (which in this context includes Maths both pure and applied, Geography, Materials Science and Earth Sciences as well as Physics and Chemistry) we had problems. Low numbers at every level, a leaky pipeline to make things worse and, from my own experience, some fairly ill-thought through practices at appointments and committees in general. I presented some facts, statistics and observations to what was (I’m 99% sure) an all-male group and was listened to politely. Yes, they agreed, it wasn’t really good enough was it. And then they moved on to the next item on the agenda. (Again, I may be rewriting things a bit here because I have no documentary evidence, but this is my strong impression). Gender issues were something separate, special, needed to be given air time but not actually of sufficient importance to register highly with anyone or to need to be a recurrent topic of discussion.

Contrast this with my experience last week. By this point the School has an Equality and Diversity (E+D) Forum which meets termly to discuss these and other diversity issues. A paper was presented by the current Chair, Anne Davies (Professor of Mathematical Physics) recommending that all individuals (academics and academic-related) involved in appointments should be required to take – and pass – the University’s online E+D training module. Discussion around the table showed that everyone was absolutely behind this and indeed pushed to see this strengthened and applied to all appointment levels, not just for staff appointments. This, to their minds, was a no-brainer. Progress indeed from the passive response I had received all those years ago. There is no longer the need to explain gender issues as something special; everyone round that table ‘gets’ it and knows we need to work even harder to make sure everyone else takes it on board too. The actual actions may seem small, but their significance is much greater and demonstrate that thinking about gender has become embedded in the collective psyche.

But, where things are less rosy is that that damn pipeline has not had long enough to stop leaking. The women round the table were me (co-opted), Anne presenting the paper, the Director of Education (Rachael Padman, who also happens to be a University Council member) and the School Finance Officer Susan Wright; the core of the Council of the School is heads of institution who are a nice homogenous bunch of white men, with the only non-white attendee being the School’s Deputy Secretary Kusam Leal, who happened to be absent that day. There has been a female head in the School, Susan Owens who last year completed her term as Head of Geography, but I think she has been the only one. Which comes back, not only to the crucial need for appointments committees to be aware of gender issues and unconscious bias when individuals are first appointed, but for departments collectively to be aware of these factors when our wonderfully obscure and democratic Cambridge mechanisms for nominating new heads are whirring away. All the unconscious bias studies about the way women’s competence is judged are likely to be at play (see here for a recent summary of the head hunters view of the gender angle in senior appointments), making it that much harder for any woman to assume such a senior role.

Cambridge more widely has certainly had some very notable female heads of department, including Ann Dowling (Engineering, who is now taking up the role of President of the Royal Academy of Engineering). But we have a long way to go and not just in the sciences. As recognition of this fact, my gender equality role will be strengthened as I step down, by splitting it. I have found it well nigh impossible to be familiar with the practices and culture in all the different parts of the university. To make this task more feasible two Champions will be appointed, one on the STEM side, one on the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences side. These individuals will be supported by School Champions, two from each of the six Schools: a male and a female. In this way a much more extensive network will be able to continue to press both centrally and on the local issues they see as most important.

I genuinely believe we are constructing a structure where equality issues will be properly addressed and mainstreamed. The momentum is, and should be, unstoppable. The commitment from the top is very real and the support the gender work has had from both the Vice Chancellor and Jeremy Sanders, the relevant PVC, has been wonderful. Fixing the problems will not come easily or fast, but there is a recognition across the University that the problems are real and mustn’t be ignored. Once upon a time these issues would have been seen as simply down to a bunch of whingeing women who needed to be placated but otherwise ignored. As an example of this somewhat naïve view I will, perhaps unfairly, single out a comment made to me by the then VC, Alec (now Lord) Broers after an early WiSETI dinner which he was hosting (thereby clearly demonstrating his commitment to what we were espousing) in the early 2000’s. I had been having a bit of a moan about local issues and was confronted with ‘But Athene, I thought we’d sorted Physics out when we made you Professor‘. We have moved on. I am quite sure neither he, nor anyone else, would think creating a single female professor was a solution to any particular part of the problem these days.

As I get ready to step down I do feel some optimism about the direction of travel.

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Student Satisfaction Good, Student Learning Better

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Athene Donald

Reading the responses from students to one’s teaching is all too often painful. Even for a course that has gone reasonably well you will probably get as many panning you for making it too simple as complaining it was impossibly hard. Indeed, given a bunch of responses like that you can probably assume you got it about right, since it is likely to be impossible to please everyone regardless of their backgrounds. If you have made any slip-ups in the handouts, even ones as trivial as a missing bracket or subscript which have instantly been corrected in person in the lectures, you are still liable to be stung by received criticism, possibly even by invective. And then there are the casual insults. Some which have come my way may be more due to my gender than my teaching style. Two stand out as being particularly irrelevant, almost funny but not quite, commenting on my dress style: ‘where does she get her clothes, the Oxfam shop?’ and ‘she looks like a women’s lib officer’. If someone can let me know what such a person wears then I’ll know quite how insulted to be, though I’m sure it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

Therein lies a key problem with using student questionnaires as a measure of quality of the teaching. Studies have shown (see e.g. Basow and Silberg for university lecturers and Potvin et al regarding high school students attitudes to male and female science teachers) that students tend to evaluate female lecturers as less competent than equivalent male ones. Likewise, black teachers are scored worse than white faculty (see here). In other words, unconscious bias is rife here whether or not explicit comments about dress sense – or any other attribute – are made. As a minority, individuals will be judged more harshly whatever their actual skill level.

Of course students like lecturers who make them feel comfortable, make them think that a high class lecture is being given regardless of whether they are actually learning anything. A classic experiment in 1970 (giving rise to something known as the Dr Fox effect) charged an actor to give a lecture full of meaningless jargon but in a very ‘expressive’ way. The students thought he (I assume it was a male actor) was great, despite the fact the material covered was meaningless junk. (Sound a bit like Alan Sokal’s considerably later spoof during the Science Wars?). Thus a satisfied student audience is no recipe for learning success.

A culturally out-of-step lecturer can receive scathing feedback because the audience don’t feel at ease with an alien style. As an example I’d cite a British lecturer I knew with a well-developed sarcastic wit lightly laced with irony who was loathed by an American audience who did not understand the implicit humour at all; loathed to the extent that he was nearly denied tenure regardless of any underlying excellence. Furthermore, some courses are inherently more interesting to their audience than others simply because some are there as necessary scaffolds on which to build the more interesting material. Those giving the latter will almost inevitably fare better than the former regardless of how charismatic or competent (not the same thing) they are.

And, as the Dr Fox experiment and later equivalent studies demonstrate, whether a lecturer is liked has little to do with what the students actually take in or how they will do in any subsequent assessment. This was neatly summed up in an email I received recently from a relatively early career lecturer who sadly said ‘but I got some horrible horrible student feedback on my teaching, but now I am marking their exams and they have done really well….so although they hate me they actually learned a lot…which makes it more bearable.’ I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is an inverse relationship between student evaluations and exam performance but I’m not sure there is any neat direct correlation either.

Which means that a VC who introduces a policy saying that lecturers whose feedback falls below some specific numerical score will be required to attend an ‘informal capability meeting’ is going to be on shaky ground. This, according to the THE, is what is being contemplated at the University of Surrey. As the sub-header to the article says, lecturers will be ‘at [the] mercy of students‘ if this plan goes ahead. Of course any university leadership should wish to push up the standards of their teaching and it is reasonable to expect lecturers to pull their socks up if they are doing badly. But simply using a crude average of some hostile students’ feedback may not be an optimum strategy.

Now of course feedback can be constructive. I will ever be grateful to the student who (many years ago I hasten to say) mildly pointed out I had written an equation containing the letter ‘c’ on both sides: in one case I was using it to mean some constant, in the other the speed of light. Amazingly I hadn’t noticed what I was doing since both seemed so naturally ‘right’, but the students had every right to complain; it was incompetent. Other feedback may be similarly constructive when something that seems natural to a lecturer is all wrong, particularly if there is a generational change in expectations. Additionally, everyone knows a lecturer who is inaudible beyond the first two rows (who should certainly use a mike), or who is invariably late and disorganised, either of whom may – or may not – get slated in evaluations. But the ones who really need attention are the ones whose lectures are full of undefined jargon, utter an incoherent stream of consciousness tirade or who assume far more knowledge than the class actually has been able to acquire. Simply using some raw numerical metric, without digging beneath the surface to analyse what factors are feeding into the score, strikes me as unwise and unlikely actually to lead to better outcomes for the students or the university.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Mood Music

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Athene Donald

‘Are you dead or just revising?’ was a telling question I remember seeing as graffiti on a wall in Cambridge many years ago. This is the time of year when that question seems particularly pertinent. Signs abound in college courts and corridors reminding passers-by to reduce noise to a minimum and many areas are out of bounds to visitors and tourists alike. To revise is to require a hushed environment without the intrusion of voices or crashes and bangs. Is that right?

I suspect many students actually work with loud music thudding through their earphones. Voices are most intrusive when the conversation is audible – maybe even intriguing – and intermittent. (I write this on a train when a small family drama is unfolding behind me, with sad words, suppressed tears and an attempt at covering up to reassure the accompanying young children: it’s deeply distracting, even disturbing, and I have resorted to my own earphones and some Villa-Lobos to try to obscure what’s going on.) However, the white noise of a persistent lawnmower or steady traffic flow is unlikely to be nearly so bad for the solid thought required for revision as brief bursts of giggling tourist laughter or the on-off noise of a pneumatic drill.

Nevertheless, excessive quiet isn’t necessarily conducive to concentration in my view. Having many years ago slipped into the (bad) habit of working in my departmental office at the weekend, I have tried out various strategies. I love the fact that I can work without the distraction of meetings, phone calls or people dropping by. Even the flood of emails is reduced at weekends. It is my opportunity to have several hours of solid concentration, at least in principle. In practice it doesn’t always work out like that and the web is as much a distraction for me as for anyone else. But one of the ways I use the web is to listen to streaming radio from a classical music station in the US. It, unlike our very own Classic FM, has few advertisements and plays long works in their entirety. At the hours I’m listening to it it also doesn’t run to interviews with performers, plays or operas like Radio 3. It simply plays long chunks of charmingly eclectic music – not simply recycle a limited selection of the same old chestnuts – with occasional interruptions for brief news and weather reports.

I like it and often have it on as background. If I’m concentrating hard I hardly notice it until I suddenly become aware that it is playing something that is maddeningly familiar but that I can’t name, or else that their weather forecast is predicting something strikingly different (warmer or colder) than our temperate climes. Nevertheless, there will be many Saturdays when I feel no need for this stay and comfort and am perfectly able simply to plug away at Powerpoint, manuscripts or email without the need for uplifting music. The general quietness around me does not disturb me.

Compare that with my current situation. Despite being advised I would soon be moving office (with the consequent angst I described here), the move has now been deferred for a couple of years. The clear-out I had started was unnecessary, although I now have several empty filing cabinets which potentially I could start filling again. However, although I personally am not moving there are moves afoot. As a result the large open plan office off which my own office opens has been cleared. Cleared not just of people but of furniture. Redecoration is in hand, but for some weeks this stalled. Outside my office was a large, empty and echoing chamber. I felt as if I was working in a morgue and most unpleasant it has been, made worse by the poor state of repair and decoration of the space being exposed by the emptiness. This unfortunate state of affairs has definitely impinged on my ways of working. Steady silence, echoing footfalls if anyone does pass, day in day out for some weeks has been depressing. During the working week I feel embarrassed about tuning in to my streaming radio and so I don’t. I sit there in an uncomfortable distracting silence constantly aware of the surrounding nothingness and feeling much less able to concentrate than usual.

So, for all you students sitting with head allegedly down revising (but clearly playing on the web or you wouldn’t be reading this), find your own correct level of silence. Getting attuned to the right tunes or simply being happy to hear the chirruping of birds outside, find out what makes you most effective. Don’t be fooled by college attempts to make you sit in stony silence if that’s the wrong thing for you. Mood music matters.

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Past Women in Science, Present Digital Age

Posted on May 26, 2014 by Athene Donald

Following on from my last post I’d like to discuss experiences of a very different interdisciplinary meeting which I went to after immediately after the STS one I described there (I suspect I will return to that theme another time). I should say at the outset this was a much more upbeat experience. Organised by WiSRNET (Women in Science Research Network) it was entitled Revealing Lives: Women in Science 1830-2000 and the primary research question it sought to address, according to the website, was ‘ How are we to recover, interpret and understand women’s experiences in science?’. It brought together approximately equal numbers of scientists and historians (of science) all sharing common interests. Unlike the Nottingham conference, this second meeting was conducted in an entirely convivial atmosphere, with a great buzz in the room.

My role was to give a keynote about the present state of affairs for women in science, not least as regards women and the Royal Society, the location of the meeting (for more on this topic see one of my recent posts). As I said as I started my presentation, it was unusual to see so many women in the building (and only a sprinkling of men, which was a shame), in a room whose portraiture showed only men, in the form of recent past Presidents of the RS. There were a variety of sessions, including ones on narratives of individual women. The other keynote was by Cambridge colleague Patricia Fara, who gave a talk on female scientists around the time of the first world war appropriately titled ‘A lab of one’s own?’, something few of the women she described could have aspired to let alone attain.

I’ll just focus here on the session headed ‘Doing Women’s History in a Digital Age’, which was a panel discussion involving a representative from Trowelblazers (Brenna Hassett), Rebekah Higgitt from the Guardian’s The H Word blog, Jacy Young  from Psychology’s Feminist Voices, the University of Leicester’s Sally Horrocks from the Oral History of British Science and Charissa Varma  from the Darwin and Gender Project (part of the larger Darwin Correspondence project based at Cambridge). They came from very different backgrounds – 2 historians and 3 scientists – doing very different projects in very different ways. Ranging from the well-funded Oral History project, which had all the resources to handle large volumes of audio data plus the delicate issues about copyright and permissions effectively, via the Darwin project where the gender aspects were just one part of a huge whole, to the projects largely led by early career researchers who had fallen in love with tracing women past and present in their fields (archaeology, paleontology, geosciences and the like for Trowelblazers and, rather obviously, psychology for Psychology’s Feminist Voices) and ending up with historian Rebekah Higgitt, writing for Guardian Science blogs (and not specifically about women in science).

The contrast between background, scale, finance and medium made for an interesting panel session with such a wide range of perspectives to share. But it was also clear how much enthusiasm each brought to their respective projects, almost in an inverse relationship to the money they had to hand! The debate focussed on how their use of media affected their scholarship and how they handled the public sphere. Interestingly, misogyny did not seem to have affected any of the individuals perniciously despite it often being prevalent in online discussions.

To my mind, the Trowelblazers is a particularly interesting project. It simply grew out of the fascination of 4 early career women (from 3 countries, communicating via Twitter) and has blossomed into a wonderful archive of early women ‘wielding trowels’. For instance, an amazing diagram was shown of the connections between many female researchers and Dorothy Garrod, who became the first female professor at Cambridge when she was elected to the Disley Chair of Archaeology in 1939. (This at a time when women were still not admitted to full degrees at the university, but it was an election which served to illustrate just how irrational that position was. They were finally admitted in 1948, before that being only able to hold titular degrees and rejoicing in the unfortunate appellation of ‘BA Tits’.) I can’t find this diagram on the Trowelblazers’ website but it demonstrated just how many women made up the network spiralling out from Garrod at the centre. I did wonder whether my undergraduate tutor at Girton, Joan Oates, was to be found within the network, a woman who did much work in modern Iraq and Iran where she mingled with Agatha Christie amongst others.

Two questions stood out for me from the discussions. Firstly, Trowelblazers had organised a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to train up new editors focussing, at the session, on some of the women missing from Wikipedia or with incomplete entries. I have myself been involved with two similar events (see e.g. here), which are great fun, although I have not been able to stick around long enough actually to get trained up myself. I would like to know how effective these sessions are in the long term in meeting their aims. The events are certainly proliferating but is there evidence to demonstrate that those trained up continue to use the skills they’ve acquired and that, beyond the time of the actual events, women’s entries are being improved systematically? One member of the audience suggested this was the case, but it would be good to know the facts.

My second, not unrelated question, is how representative the narratives being told are. We, inevitably, can only learn about those women for whom there is a substantive record (probably a written one), the more the better. It was noticeable that a few names turned up in several talks but will those women who don’t get onto Trowelblazers or Psychology’s Feminist Voices, for instance, vanish even more effectively because researchers will turn to these collections and not look elsewhere? It is the standard ‘only look under the lamp post’ problem but the more information that is readily available, the more the rest will be in danger of disappearing.

Why was there such a buzz at the meeting? I suppose because everyone present just wanted to share their knowledge and there was no undercurrent of history being better (or worse) than science. As a scientist I may not use the knowledge I gained within my daily working practice, but I learned some neat stuff. For instance Patricia Fara introduced us to Helen Gwynn-Vaughan , a botanist/ mycologist who was a leader in the WAAC‘s during the first world war, thereby becoming the first woman to obtain a military CBE, and who complained about the absence, indeed the interdiction, of pockets in the uniforms for women. (The standard absence of pockets in women’s clothes still irritates me greatly!). There was the heady and tabloid-worthy story of Hedy Lamarr, a story of sex and beauty, Hollywood, Nazis, music – and patents – which deserves a post of its own. I was reminded more than once that we should not think in terms of heroines in science, because none of them operated simply on their own or could possibly have thought of themselves in the way it is too easy for us, decades or centuries later, to consider them. Ada Lovelace, she of Ada Lovelace Day, was particularly singled out as someone we should avoid thinking of as heroic or indeed as a computer programmer.

But I think the buzz was also because it was in general uplifting to learn about these pioneering women, many of whom had to contend with huge obstacles and negative messages and yet still managed to get serious work done. It is good to reclaim these historic figures and realise there are really quite a lot of them out there, particularly by the early 20th century. I’m not sure they necessarily serve as useful role models for today, but they do serve as intriguing examples of where a bit of bloody-mindedness and determination in the face of opposition can get you.

 

Posted in History of Science, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment