Jettisoning One’s Past

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Athene Donald

When you have been inhabiting any space for a substantial length of time it tends to be somewhat dispiriting and challenging to move out and move on.  Quite unconnected with any of the other moves I’ve written about recently (here and here), I am also going to be moving from one rather large office to what I suspect will be a rather smaller one in the weeks ahead. So, it is time for a clear out.

After around 10 years in this office, according to one of those well-known laws of Nature, I have expanded to fill the space available. Some of the space is occupied by mounds of REF paperwork, which should soon be unnecessary as the die will have been cast upon submission. Some of the space is occupied by kind gifts from Oriental visitors, which have no obvious home other than a corner of the desk. Much is occupied by material I am loth to throw away, yet equally know that I ought to. This category includes details of many past conferences attended, reports (hard copy) that I feel sure will one day come in useful and paperwork (and, if going far enough back, artwork in the form of glossy micrographs and line drawings) associated with journal papers long in print – or worse those that never quite saw the light of day for one reason or another. I know as soon as I throw them out I will regret it: I will suddenly receive a request from someone requesting to know was it 1988 or 1989 that that memorable debate happened at conference X or I will want to reproduce a figure electronically of one of those old glossy photographs that demonstrate what one could do with an electron microscope before the digital age. All these categories of material I will linger over and keep as much as I can because, well, you never know when it will come in useful do you?

However, much of my office – about 3 four-drawer filing cabinets worth to be precise – I think can usefully be used as landfill. This consists of a fairly long career’s worth of Xeroxed or printed papers from the era when they weren’t available on the web. Papers dating back to my PhD days on grain boundary embrittlement are unlikely to feature in my future research and even if, for some obscure reason, I suddenly felt an urge to remind myself of the intricacies of faceting in copper grain boundaries, I would not need to rummage through my filing cabinets when no doubt I could find the information on JStor. So, a drastic pruning of anything metallurgical looks as if it is called for. But as soon as I commit that to paper I realise that a current project on organic photovoltaics is suddenly turning into a study of what’s going on at the metal electrodes, so maybe even that would be unwise.

Then there are the papers dating back to the days when I transformed myself into a polymer physicist, when I read voraciously (because I was so pig ignorant of the field) and finally fell in love with research; this, note you, was during my 2nd postdoc –  I was a late developer. These papers, (many of which are preprints because that was how they were circulated when Papers ASAP did not exist, nor preprints come in virtual web-based form) I will throw out with regret. I regard those years as the key formative ones for my career, when I felt that I never knew what exciting things lurked just  around the metaphorical corner of my research or what puzzle each new sample might throw up as I imaged it in the electron microscope. That was a heady period as I found my researcher’s feet and, as I see it, grew up into a serious practicing scientist. It will be hard to throw all that away even if I haven’t looked through any of the papers in years.

There are also drawers connected with random bits of my more recent work. Brief forays into areas that never quite took off. Areas such as plant cell walls, resulting in a not very exciting thesis or two rather too full of null results for much enthusiasm, however competent the students; or papers covering the story of chocolate (or rather the absence of any story for the student), where much X-ray beam time at the synchrotron source at Daresbury never did reveal any secrets as to why chocolate extruded at room temperature was so very different from the normal melt-processed variety.

Finally there are the more substantial areas which nevertheless are behind me. Notably this includes the years of papers on starch, when my own research seems to have been very productive however bizarre a topic for a physicist this may seem to be. These years continued until I realised I couldn’t see how my kind of physics could provide any further insights; the idea of examining yet another cultivar or mutant just couldn’t excite me any more.  All of these – and many other topics – I think can readily be dispensed with. But it will need an awful lot of bin bags to get them out of my office. It will be time consuming and a wrench, but will have to be done. A necessary task and one that will neatly, albeit briefly, plug the gap in my life I will shortly feel as the REF burden passes on to the official committees.

Posted in Academia, Science Culture | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Cold-calling in the Job Market

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Athene Donald

A week ago there was a minute cause for celebration with the news that the number of women on FTSE100 Boards of Directors had reached the stunning level of 19%. At least that figure is heading in the right direction and, although I am opposed to quotas, the threat of their introduction still hangs over the City.  (In case you’ve forgotten, the goal proposed 2 years ago was a figure of 25% by 2015.) Six boards still have not a single woman on them and fund managers at Legal and General are threatening to vote against the chairmen of such companies. How do boards decide who is going to join them? How do they draw up a list of plausible candidates? My guess is that, as with many other high level appointments in universities, companies or a new Chief for a Research Council, head hunters are employed. If they come up with no women with strong credentials who are interested in the position is it the fault of the head hunters, or is it simply that women don’t want these jobs or lack the courage to pursue them?

Over a year ago I wrote about the apparent absence of women on a couple of high profile guestimates of shortlists for high profile posts and pointed out that one should be careful about reading too much into such absences. I’m not going to rehearse those arguments again but I’d like to build on that post in the wake of some discussions I have had with head hunters in the time since in various situations; this includes discussions initiated by one of the major companies (let me call it company A for shorthand) specialising in hires in higher education who approached me to ask for my thoughts in the context of work they are doing around diversity.

If you are a graduate student you probably have never had one of those mysterious conversations where a complete stranger rings you up cold from one of these firms – or sends you an email asking if you can find a time when they can ring you. When it first happens it can seem very strange. In my experience the conversation usually starts by the disembodied voice giving you a few details about the position they are handling – sometimes the description can be quite exhaustive and you start to wonder if they will ever get to the point – after which they ask you if you know anyone whose name should be considered.

Now at this point there is a potential bifurcation of response. If you are supremely confident you may assume they are really covertly asking if you are interested. If on the other hand you are of a more modest disposition you may take the question at face value and dredge your memory trying to think of anyone plausible who might want to become a dean of engineering in Kazakhstan or the CSA or whatever it might be. Based on my own suppositions and experience, coupled with a straw poll of one man and one woman over a glass of wine, I think not uncommonly the difference in response will align with gender. I think there is a coded message, a sub-text, in these conversations which different people will respond to in different ways. I don’t think this is helpful.

I personally find it much easier to deal with direct questions than wonder if I am suffering from over-confidence by thinking the phone-caller might be asking obliquely about my own interests. I don’t know why head hunters follow the etiquette they so often seem to do, but I believe it is in many instances counter-productive for both men and women, but possibly particularly if they want to catch the serious interest of a woman. This fact I passed on in my recent discussions with company A.  I should add, as I have got more senior, there has tended to be less and less beating about the bush about what is being suggested, but it is at the earliest stages when people are least likely to be confident that it is most important that there is total clarity about the terms of the interaction, not at later stages when they seem to be more prone to say ‘your name has been brought to our attention’.

A second point is that no one more senior than me has ever passed on any tips for how to deal with head hunters. Nor, I must confess, have I ever done this for anyone else. Perhaps it is like the British attitude towards money, simply not something that is ‘done’, though I have to wonder why. Possibly the whole community is confused and doesn’t have any tips to pass on. But as I approached my advisory meeting with company A I realised that perhaps, had I ever wanted to leave Cambridge, I would have been well advised to approach one of the specialist companies and let them know this was the case. Maybe, in one of these not infrequent conversations that I have with the companies, they could have indicated how to go about this by suggesting that even though I might not be interested in the particular post they had rung me about I should let them know if I was ever thinking about a move.  I don’t recall that such a suggestion has ever been made to me and likewise I have never enquired (but then, I didn’t want to leave Cambridge). What I am really saying is, the mystique of the communication between head hunter and target ‘huntee’ is almost certainly not helpful in encouraging a diverse field of candidates. Although it is of course possible that the rest of the world understands the rules of engagement and it is only me being stupid, I don’t believe this. I suspect many individuals – male and female – may equally not be getting the most out of these interactions.

I did learn something very valuable during my conversations with company A, something that would not be apparent in the Cambridge system but where the firm had obviously already worked out how they could be helpful to some individuals, probably women in particular, during recruitment. Many universities (although not my own) use head hunters to help them recruit professors. After interviews and once the offer of the position has been made, the companies come back into the loop to facilitate the negotiation of a package. Such negotiation is likely to include salary. If the person underestimates themselves/doesn’t like to brag or self-promote etc, then they may not ask for as good a deal as someone of a less modest persuasion. You can see where this is heading: the head hunters are in a position to do their bit to reduce the well-documented gender pay gap at professorial level. This strikes me as something very positive. It would also help to circumvent the problem identified in various studies (see e.g. here) that even if women do ask for a pay rise or equivalent they are penalised for doing so by those with whom they are negotiating. If an intermediary is used who is familiar with negotiating strategy, then there is more likely to be a happy outcome.

So I would summarise by saying

  1. As I said before, one should not conclude that absence of women on shortlists mean no women have been approached.
  2. That head hunters might have more success with certain types of character if they were explicit in what was being asked when cold calling, not leave it as a subtext.
  3. That head hunters could also make it clear that they could be approached by those looking to move and explain how this would best be done.
  4. That facilitating negotiations for those of modest temperament might contribute to a reduction in professorial (or equivalent) gender pay gap.

Now I will sit back and wait to be told by others that my understanding of the head hunter – huntee relationship is all wrong and that others’ comprehension of the interaction is very different. Fire away.

 

 

Posted in Careers, Equality | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Turning the Mirror on Oneself

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Athene Donald

What do you see when you look in the mirror? This is the question underlying the What I See Project, conceived by Edwina Dunn. Her concern is that we live in a society where, for many women, when we look in the mirror we are expected to look at – and even more and worse, be judged by – the superficial details, not what resides within. For young women around the world, this is a restrictive view of who we are and what we might be.  Her aim is to aid the empowerment of women by getting them to reflect on who they are beneath the surface and not be sucked into believing beauty is only skin deep.  This is an issue that resonates with me as I am all too aware young girls readily believe the media messages that their aspirations should amount to little more than be eye-candy to catch a boy, sexualised from an early age rather than focussed on what they are actually able to achieve in more concrete ways using their brains and not simply their bodies.

I have become involved with this project as an Ambassador, and you can find my own brief video for the project here, along with those of the other 17 women from the UK who have taken on this ambassadorial role. Amongst them are some powerful women (3 baronesses for instance) including fellow scientist Frances Ashcroft from Oxford.  Last week she and I joined the panel (along with Caroline Criado-Perez, Jody Day, Eileen Cooper  and Kelley Temple) for a Q and A session in the Science Museum for the launch of the project (see more here). The questions, slow to come at first from a mainly female audience who took a while to warm up/gain courage to quiz us, were ultimately quite deep and challenging. Let me simply home in on the one specifically STEM-related question. What, we were asked, is the right way to respond to the comment ‘You don’t look like a mathematician‘. I’d be interested in people’s views on this, which manifests itself in various forms (‘you look too young to be a doctor‘ is a common variant). The best I could come up with on the spot was to suggest challenging those who ask this question to say what they think a mathematician should look like, in the hopes it will make them realise the existence of their prejudices or appreciate the danger of stereotyping. I am sure, however, there are better ways of handling the question.

Continuing the theme of worrying about what one looks like, the next night I found myself bizarrely discussing, with a retired (male) head of a Cambridge college, whether men or women have a harder time with regard to getting their attire right in unfamiliar situations. The occasion was the dinner following the installation of the new master of Selwyn College Roger Mosey, freshly arrived from the BBC to take on this role, where I was acting as the Vice Chancellor’s deputy. I found it interesting that this man across the table from me felt that there were more pitfalls for a man (turning up in T-shirt and jeans, perhaps, when something more formal was required) than for women who have in general a greater and more continuous spectrum of alternatives. I have always thought that that very fact made our problems worse, but he clearly felt the opposite. It seemed a fairly peculiar dinner table conversation, but highlights the importance of our appearance and our dress to define who we are and identify what ostensible power we have and what position in the social and professional hierarchy we occupy, so linking straight back to the What I See project.

However that was not the most surreal part of my conversation that evening. Dutifully following the instructions of the seating plan I had found myself sitting between two recently retired (again male) college fellows from disciplines far from mine whom, as far as I was concerned, I had never met before. During the first course the one on my right remarked we had met previously on a mid-career training course run by the university. I am sure he must be right. He could cite one of the exercises we had carried out: write your own obituary to highlight to yourself how you see yourself – another connection with that mirror of Edwina Dunn’s project. He remembered I had been anxious about whether I would get promoted to professor, which indicates this is more than 15 years ago and yet he could still remember me. I found that unnerving but there was yet more to pile on.

Switching to talk to the gentleman on my left during the next course, we covered his field of research and then moved on to discuss the portraits in the hall – all of past Masters of course. At which point he announced he remembered physicist Alan Cook, one of these previous Selwyn masters, bringing me in to dinner. It took me some time to remember what the occasion can have been but I think it must have been an examiners’ dinner when Alan was the senior examiner and so hosted the dinner in his college. I can vaguely remember the occasion. So this ‘complete stranger’ too was claiming to remember me, in this case probably from even longer ago, maybe 20 years. Again, I feel pretty certain my dinner table companion must have been correct.

The moral of this story for women is that we do actually have some advantages in the academic world. Since there are so (still) so lamentably few of us, we are memorable. I don’t believe I was unforgettable because I stood on the table and danced at the dinner in a drunken haze, because that’s not my way and I didn’t. Nor, I hope, did I let off steam at the training course about my colleagues in ways that made me stick in the first man’s memory, although that could conceivably be true if I thought I was discussing my life amongst total strangers, albeit ones in the small fishpond that is Cambridge. So it must have been just because I was the only woman both on that training course and on that board of examiners that I stood out in people’s memories, although I still find it unnerving that 15-20 years on their memories are so vivid as to identify me readily in a totally different context.

However, women should realise as long as their numbers remain low in academia, they won’t simply blend in to the furniture. Uncomfortable though that often is, there are times (although this dinner was hardly one of them) where being unforgettable may mean you get that invitation, be it to talk at a conference, serve on some important committee or apply for an exciting job opportunity. It is often uncomfortable to stand out, particularly if we feel unsure as to who we are (or whether we feel we look attractive in the mirror to ourselves or anyone else) but sometimes, just sometimes, there may be advantages.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Moving On (Part II)

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Athene Donald

As readers will know, improving the situation for women in science is dear to my heart. One of the roles in which I’ve been able to make some sort of a contribution has been through chairing the Athena Forum. This group was set up in 2008 as a successor to the Athena Project, which kickstarted the whole Athena Swan process. The Athena Forum in its current incarnation no longer has direct links with the Athena Swan process, which is now overseen by the Equality Challenge Unit, but it still maintains the same ethos and motivation. Its mission is stated as

to provide a strategic oversight of developments that seek to, or have proven to, advance the career progression and representation of women in science, technology, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) in UK higher education.

Last week saw me step down as chair of the Athena Forum, which I have chaired since 2009. More than time for a new broom and I have passed the baton (or perhaps that should also be broom) on to Ottoline Leyser, whose wonderful booklet Mothers in Science: 64 Ways to Have it All she produced when she won the Rosalind Franklin award in 2007. I am quite sure that she will do a wonderful job as Chair and continue to move the agenda forward.

As many will know, last week also saw the announcement of the latest batch of Athena Swan awards and it is encouraging to note that more and more universities are signing up and departments winning awards.  However, this is not an ‘if you enter you win‘ competition and, hidden beneath the successes there are departments (possibly even universities) that are failing in their applications. This has to be a good thing, in one sense since it means that securing an award really does indicate that an institution is embracing change.

Despite the progress that has been made, despite all the Athena Swan applicants that have been successful, there is no doubt there is still a need for such an organisation to maintain pressure on funders and universities alike. The very fact that some departments and universities have, in various rounds, lost their awards shows that progress is not yet deeply ingrained everywhere and organisations that think they can get by simply by ticking boxes and then never thinking about the matter again need to think again. However it is nevertheless the case that improvelents are being made. It may be frustratingly slow, there may be all kinds of endemic problems in our society way beyond the higher education sector that are likely to continue to prove intractable (gender segregation of toys, low aspirations from teachers and parents alike when it comes to girls doing science and lack of role models being some obvious ones for school children, putting them off from ever starting on the STEM career path) but, reading a legacy report of the original Athena Project for my last Forum meeting does highlight that there is visible progress. The report will go up on the web in due course, but it needs more polishing yet.

After the Athena Forum committee meeting there was a workshop hosted by them at the Royal Society to which a number of funders came to discuss the ongoing issues and the extent to which they can influence change. In some instances there may be easy wins. One might think of the RCUK statement in this light, in so far as it is now a very obvious stick with which organisations can in principle be beaten. I daresay in practice it was a non-trivial task to find a form of words all research councils could agree to as with any political communiqué.  In other situations it may be much harder for funders to effect change in institutions when it is individuals that they actually fund. They also need to make sure that their own practices are as excellent as they can be for their own internal employees and the committees (from Research Council councils down) that they run. Data is currently being collected as a follow-up to the previous Report on Good Practice by UK Research Funders to see how far things have moved in general on this front.

Sarah Dickinson from Athena Swan gave a presentation at this workshop, passing on some tips from her experience of submissions and some analysis of success rates. The organisation is currently running a pilot both for Research Council Institutes and, more recently, for non-STEM departments. All this means that the impacts delivered by Athena Swan should be starting to impact soon on other disciplines where, as my recent foray into Philosophy departments has revealed, all is very much not well.

However let me conclude with a few random questions that were raised in my mind at the workshop and from reading recent media stories. I’d be interested to hear people’s views because these are very much not black and white issues.

1 Sarah Dickinson said that a Head of Department sending emails late at night sends the wrong message because it implies everyone else should also be working late at night. While I understand why this could be interpreted this way, it also seems to me that one of the joys of academia is that one has a lot of flexibility about when one chooses to work. If it suits someone to leave work mid-afternoon to go and pick up the kids and then spend the evening with them, but go back to work once they’re in bed, that strikes me as perfectly reasonable. I remember once expressing concern about a grant administrator who was sending me late night emails and they pointed out that that was the way they chose to work for this very reason. Clearly no head of department should expect or require anyone to work at what would normally be described as antisocial hours, but if they choose to do so then that should be fine (and of course it may be the head of department whose work pattern is as I’ve described above).  What do people think about Sarah’s statement?

2 For women about to go on maternity leave what assumptions should one make? I had always thought the correct assumption was that they would do nothing unless one was told otherwise – it should be entirely their choice – but managed to cause grave offence by taking this line recently. I have certainly known women who have absolutely held to the line that their research group can just get by on their own for the full period of their leave without any contact from the PI. I can’t imagine that I would have felt comfortable doing that for a year. Indeed I didn’t: I continued to see my students and read their work during my 3-4 months of leave, but the choice has to be the individual woman’s. Nevertheless it took me completely by surprise so to upset someone by starting from a position of assuming nothing. How do others approach this?

3 From the press I came across a story about ‘mumpreneurs‘, women who set up businesses from home whilst looking after their family. Clearly what they are doing is impressive, but does a new word really have to be invented for this, which is so clearly gendered? Entrepreneurs is a perfectly good ungendered word, unlike so many words in our language, so why create a new one? I can understand that individuals might want to stress their entrepreneurial activities were home-based rather than run out of an office, but how about ‘entrepreneur-from-home’ which remains entirely gender-neutral? After all, perhaps it’s the dad who stays at home (particularly with the new paternity laws) so why specify which parent is involved? Is it relevant to the business plan?

So, answers please to this rather random set of questions!

 

Posted in Equality, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 23 Comments

Moving On to Pastures New

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Athene Donald

Every student, undergraduate or postgraduate, at the University of Cambridge has to be a member of one of the university’s 31 colleges.  To outsiders the college system may seem a little mysterious: how do they differ from Halls of Residence or ‘dorms’? But they do, they most certainly do. They are autonomous and governed by their own sets of Statutes and Ordinances, quite separate from those that control the actions of the University itself. Each has its own character and idiosyncrasies composed of a combination of the ideas of its founders, the traditions (and state of finances) built up over its life – whose duration can range from many centuries to mere decades – and its fellowship, past and present.  Much of the teaching within the Cambridge system is done in colleges through the supervision system, small group teaching with perhaps 3 students to each supervisor (numbers vary by college and subject) and each college will have many internal societies of its own, its own JCR and so on.

I now am set to embark on a new adventure with a new college, my third during my Cambridge life, having been pre-elected as the Master of Churchill College, a role I will take up in October 2014. This represents a tremendous honour and privilege as well as a daunting challenge. I have a year to contemplate this new role and to endeavour to learn as much as possible about my new community and the specific nature of the college which, as I will explain below, is unique within the Cambridge system.

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Photo: Courtesy of Churchill College

When I first applied to Cambridge as an undergraduate, my choice of college was hugely constrained: there were only three I could apply to because colleges back then were all single sex. So, I could choose between Girton, Newnham and what was then known as New Hall (now Murray Edwards). Of these one couldn’t apply to both Girton and Newnham and, for reasons lost in the mists of time, I had always had Girton in my sights. Somehow I thought I knew back then something about the difference between New Hall and Girton: after all by the time I applied the latter was already a century old whereas New Hall had less than two decades under its belt. I recall this influenced my choice of clothes for the dreaded interviews. Although I don’t remember the details I think this had something to do with the length of my skirt and a slightly more hippy look for New Hall. Whether this had any effect on the outcome I don’t know; I was admitted to both colleges, but chose to stay with my original choice of Girton. As an undergraduate there I didn’t regret this for a moment, supported through my (frequent) moments of doubt and confusion by a wonderful Director of Studies, Christine McKie, whom I wrote about before.

Girton was a pioneer, the first college created for women (although it is now mixed). My second college, where I was offered a (non-stipendiary) Fellowship when I returned to Cambridge after 4 years in the USA, was Robinson College. Equally a pioneer, it is the only (undergraduate) college to have been founded as a mixed college, back in 1979 when I was away from Cambridge. Right from the outset the original Warden – chemist Jack (now Lord) Lewis  – sought to make sure its fellowship had a good gender mix too and worked hard to recruit women in the sciences. At one point I suspect it had the majority of female lecturers in the STEM subjects across the University: that meant about 4 of us (it could hardly be like that now!). It too has been a very happy home for me. Its history is brief, its alumni (and wine cellar) still relatively young. It lacks generations of rich alumni and the wealthy patrons from kings and queens down that the oldest colleges possess, not to mention no vast estates across the country which have equally created a rich endowment for some. Nevertheless it sits in beautiful mature gardens – the terms of its planning consent meant many well-established trees had to be preserved – and is conveniently located for me at the Cavendish, being on the west side of town. A further advantage of its location is that it is well off the tourist trail, so students are not interrupted by loud voices of visitors outside or suffer the indignities of being peered at through the windows by them.

I shall leave Robinson with regret next year. But the new challenge of Churchill beckons, albeit a year off. Churchill is unique amongst all the colleges because, by its statute, both its students and Fellowship are required to be 70% scientists and technologists. As a college it was founded in 1960 as the national and Commonwealth memorial to Sir Winston Churchill. Another statute requires that each new Master is appointed by the Sovereign, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister and so there has been much formality associated with the publication of the recent press release which had to await a letter from Downing Street.

Churchill is a large college with nearly 500 undergraduates and slightly more than half that number of graduate students (known, unusually, as advanced students within the college). The Churchill Archives Centre  is housed on the site, an amazingly rich collection of papers of many of the famous scientists of the 20th century including a generous sprinkling of Nobel Prize winners (such as Sir John Cockcroft, the first Master, one of whose daughters incidentally taught me Religious Knowledge at school); plus of course numerous politicians including Sir Winston himself and Maggie Thatcher. I am looking forward to an opportunity to delve into these archives, both to inform myself and to find apposite quotes for the plethora of speeches I suspect I may be called upon to make during my tenure.

Despite the majority of the college being on the science side, it appears clear that there is no sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’ between the disciplines. Included as part of the Further Particulars for the job, there was an explicit statement of the college mission which included the phrase ‘to build bridges between the three estates of Science and Technology, the Arts and Humanities and the world of Commerce and Industry‘. To do this will be both exciting and non-trivial, but it is certainly a wonderful goal.

Finally, I should perhaps point out one of the other quirks of the Cambridge system, hidden in the text that I have written. As Master, my role is as a ‘Head of House’. Other colleges (‘houses’ ) use different terms to describe their heads. Girton has a Mistress, Newnham a Principal, Robinson (as I said previously) a Warden, Kings a Provost and Wolfson a President. Master is probably the commonest title and I see no reason to change it just because I’m a woman (and I am certainly not the first female to hold the title of Master within Collegiate Cambridge; I suspect Sandra Dawson as head of Sidney Sussex may have had that honour and there are currently several in post). It is a role with an ancient title rather than that the title itself saying anything overtly sexist. I’m not sure there has been a male Mistress at any college so far, but Girton has certainly had a male Vice Mistress (try not to snigger).

So, my centre of gravity will shift in the months ahead. How that will affect my blogging remains to be seen, but members of the college are well aware of this writing propensity of mine and seem content.

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