Mentoring: Getting Personal?

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Athene Donald

Should one worry about confidentiality in the context of a mentoring relationship? Should line managers be one’s mentor? These were amongst the questions posed during the panel discussion in which I participated (along with Lab Director Jim Smith and Anne O’Garra, Head of their Division of Immunoregulation) at last week’s Wikipedia ‘edit-a-thon’ at the National Institute of Medical Research at Mill Hill. This event, the first of six such edit-a-thon’s planned by the MRC, was timed to coincide with Rosalind Franklin’s birthday: she would have been 93 on the day. Her sister Jennifer Glynn, author of a memoir about Franklin, wrote a letter I was asked to read out at the event.

I didn’t participate in the editing session itself, somewhat frustratingly. The aim of these sessions is to train up new editors so that they can continue to make contributions in the future, and to do this by working on entries of female scientists whose current Wikipedia write-ups are paltry. The series follows on from the very successful event hosted at the Royal Society last autumn.  With fellow Occam’s Typewriter blogger Frank Norman, the librarian at Mill Hill who was one of the initiators of this event, I have written a description of the how and why of the occasion for the Guardian Occam’s Corner blog, so here I’ll confine myself to discussing some of the issues raised in the panel discussion. (Frank has also written up more about the edit-a-thon over on his own blog).  My role on the day was to give a talk to highlight some of the important issues women in science may currently face and actions management of an institution might consider to counter these challenges, this talk to act as a lead-in to the subsequent discussion (my slides are also now posted on the MRC website along with some photographs from the day). I was also interviewed about the event for the Cambridge News.

So, to return to mentoring, what really is the role of the mentor and the mentee? My thoughts are based on experience and observation rather than from involvement in any formal scheme, but then I am no particular fan of formal schemes on this front. Although in principle they sound fine, in practice they only work when serendipitously there is a good match between the two partners.  If mentors are simply allocated by senior management there is no reason for this to work out in practice. Talking to an assigned someone who is senior to you and who may have loads of experience but no particular empathy or congeniality may make any problems seem worse rather than better. I have never forgotten the story once told to me of a conversation which went along the lines of the junior party explaining the things that were worrying him, to be greeted with ‘yes, those do sound like problems’ – but no advice on how to handle them from the mentor. This is not a recipe for success.

In the olden days, as it were, when mentoring as such was not a term in use, (some) people used to take others under their wing, nurture them and bring on their careers. This led to the danger of creating an ‘old boys’ club’; although there was no need for it to be so, it often was. But it did mean that the lucky few got nurtured/mentored whilst the unlucky remainder were left out in the cold.  Too often those who got overlooked or were more actively ignored were those who were not junior clones of those at the top. Such a system typically disadvantages women, but also of course many others who – for whatever reason – do not resemble the top guys or are seen as ‘unworthy’ in some way.

So there is a real challenge in devising a system which is able to support and accommodate all, whilst still making sure the pairings work. I have no idea how this particular circle can be squared. Maybe having an assigned mentor is better than having none at all; maybe this can provide a route in to find other individuals ahead of you in your field. I know how fortunate I have been to have had wonderful (male) mentors who advised me early on and who were there for many years thereafter; now, in one case, limited by frailty and the other by 6000 miles (although one never stops needing advice, a point I’ve discussed before). I was fortunate since these mentors were, in the chronologically earlier case my boss/line manager and in the second my head of department and they just took on the roles imperceptibly without being asked and without any question or demur.

Now, in principle and despite my own experience, I don’t think line managers are the right people to be formal mentors. Line managers should do the job automatically (but too often don’t) of nurturing, passing on advice and opportunities and generally promoting your career – just as I found in my own earlier years. But, having someone else who is more removed from your immediate sphere can perhaps give more objective insight and, particularly if relationships are not working out as well as you’d like, they can be a useful external voice to try to assess why things are going awry with your line manager and to help you find coping strategies. They can also advise you when to push because you’re not being given the opportunities you’d like, or whether you’re in fact being unreasonably demanding, a conversation you cannot have possibly have with your line manager.

But, whoever your mentor is, I do not think you should be disclosing confidential material. This particular question arose in the panel discussion in the context of discussing sensitive issues with someone who may also be writing letters of reference for you. This is, of course, another reason for separating out the mentor and supervisor roles. But if there are, for instance, health issues affecting your work currently there should be appropriate HR protocols in place to handle this. If there have been health issues in the past you may want to leave them there unless they become relevant again in the present. I don’t think mentors are people you should pour your soul out to about your turbulent love life, your drinking habits or the more embarrassing parts (and photos) of your past. Keep that information for your mates down the pub and use your mentor to provide facts on career progression and to supply advice about whether you are on the right track for your chosen goals – and what to do if you are not.

One of the volunteer Wikipedia editors also sought advice on how best to continue to mentor those would-be editors he’d been working with on the day. For him the challenge was that he wouldn’t be able to have face to face meetings with them. Does this matter? I suspect that, once having established face-to-face contact and established some rapport, any means of future communication should be viable, be it email, Skype or phone. I sincerely hope he can continue to work with the eager batch of new editors to support them to get more confident about their work in updating Wikipedia entries, be it about women scientists or anything else.

Finally I would like to mention the comment from the floor – literally, as the room was so packed there were many sitting on the carpet – about how to ‘stand up’ for yourself as a mother. This speaker said forcefully and to loud applause, how she had pointed out in an interview that her skills as a mother were highly relevant to her work as a scientific leader. For instance, she was used to organising a team (to make sure her children were always cared for), could lead this team to good effect and so on. This is advice that parents of small children who are struggling to feel confident about what they have to offer a potential employer should keep in mind. Think positively about all those transferable skills you are acquiring on the side and work out how to sell them constructively. Maybe that was the most important point to come out of the whole discussion.

Added 31-7-13 Links to the slides for my talk and Jennifer Glynn’s letter uploaded to the MRC website have now been added, as has a link to the Cambridge News article about the edit-a-thon published on 30-7-13.

 

 

Posted in Communicating Science, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Knowing What You Know (and What You Don’t)

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Athene Donald

This whole blog of mine was meant to be about interdisciplinary science. At least, when I started it up, 3 years ago next month, that was what I had in mind as my major theme. In fact, like so much of my life, it hasn’t panned out quite as envisaged. In the early days there were a number of posts on the topic; more recently practically none. So, time to redress that balance. I have been at a conference this week, organised under the auspices of the EPSRC-funded Network on the Physics of Life (I’m on its steering committee). Its aim is to start shaping the dialogue about what the UK Physics community can offer in solving biological problems. In part, acting as a network, its role is to bring researchers together to find innovative ways of moving the field – and it’s pretty broad – forward. In part it aims, through focussed workshops and discussion sessions, to identify major challenges where the tools (conceptual as well as experimental) of the physicist can usefully tackle important biological problems.

This week’s first plenary event focussed on The Living Cell and was a mixture of talks and discussion. The discussion amongst the attendees in break-out groups was targeted at identifying possible topics for future meetings. In particular we want to identify themes that bridge the different lengthscales relevant to ‘life’, so from within a single cell up to the multicellular and whole organism level. We also want to make sure we have plenty of biologists amongst our attendees to keep us on the straight and narrow when it comes to biology. To paraphrase what Viola Vogel (one of our keynote speakers) said, physicists need to learn enough biology to be able to ask relevant biological questions, not merely ones they can simplify enough to solve.

For a physicist to become fluent in biology – or the same in reverse – takes time and effort. I hope the time when physicists thought all problems could be solved by sufficient simplification (see this xkcd cartoon) are long past, but I wouldn’t be too sure. Biology and physics may differ very substantially in the way they see problems, and that is exactly why conversations between them can be so rewarding once the language barrier is overcome; this needs to include the translation of acronyms, but also must include getting to grips with words that appear to be the same but have different connotations and those that are utterly unfamiliar.

Nevertheless, even the most bilingual of biological physicists (or equally physical biologists) is probably only going to have knowledge associated with some small area. Perhaps they are expert in lipids and cell membranes, or molecular machines such as kinesin, or the extracellular matrix; but they are unlikely to be expert in all of them. Unfortunately collectively there are too many ‘or’s’ like this, so it is impossible for any one of us to be an expert in more than a small niche area. What we can do is try to look for connections, use the skills we have to ask the unexpected questions of our colleagues and see if approaches used in one field can helpfully be applied elsewhere. It is this last ‘philosophy’ that has led my Cambridge colleague Ben Simons, a theoretical physicist whose background lies in chaos theory, to develop completely new ways of thinking about stem cell differentiation thereby leading to a rethink in the (biological) stem cell community. In some ways his theories are incredibly simple, essentially equivalent to work from the nineteenth century on how surnames propagate or die out, but their application to stem cell colonies meant the overturning of received wisdom – if I understand this right!

To digress briefly, regular readers of this blog may know that Erasmus Darwin  is one of my heroes. He was a polymath, a physician by day, an innovator and entrepreneur in his spare time with interests ranging from carriage axles to meteorology, as well as a well-known poet in his day. Thomas Young, he of Young’s slits and modulus, was another physician (rather less successful than Darwin) who managed to cover an enormous range of sciences including optics (physics) and the mechanism of vision (biology) as well as elasticity and who also had a hand in decoding the Rosetta Stone. Not for nothing was a recent biography of him by Andrew Robinson entitled ‘The Last Man who Knew Everything‘.

This epithet should be contrasted with the title of another physicist’s biography I’ve just finished reading: ‘The Man who Changed Everything‘ , a book by Basil Mahon about the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Having read this I realise that as an undergraduate physicist his name had been liberally sprinkled over my courses without me really taking in that fact. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of velocities in gases was a key memory from my first year courses. Of course at that point I also encountered Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism as I struggled with the ideas of div, grad and curl from vector calculus. Maxwell relations – those equations linking differentials of thermodynamic functions – featured in the second year.  Somewhere along the line I must have been introduced to that friendly, impish character of Maxwell’s demon, who sits next to small slits to try to mess up the second law of thermodynamics, as an early example of a gedanken experiment. I didn’t realise Maxwell also played a key part in developing dimensional analysis too, an approach that seems obvious now but was much more obscure to me at the start of my undergraduate life.

Maxwell had very broad interests and an ongoing area of experimentation throughout his life was in colour. To him we owe the idea that all spectral colours can be made up of red, green and blue (the RGB palette familiar from Photoshop for instance), unlike the way paint colours add, and he created ingenious ways to study the make-up of the whole spectral range of colours. Indeed he took the first colour photograph, using red, green and blue filters to superimpose images, although the fact that this worked turns out to have been fortuitous, at least according to this biography.

But was he genuinely interdisciplinary or merely a fantastically gifted physical scientist? And if not what is he doing featuring in this post (other than because I have a deep admiration for polymaths)?  Like Young, his interests in image formation included an interest in the eye itself. He developed apparatus for studying the eye, an early ophthalmoscope (although not the very first which had been developed by Helmholtz a little before) and used it to study the yellow spot (macula lutea) which is an opaque area on the retina.  Indeed his discovery of the RGB system arose from his interest in colour vision and how we perceive colours.

Maxwell of course was the first head of my own Cavendish Laboratory, the man who was instrumental in the design of the old buildings in the centre of Cambridge. His time there was cut short by his death at only 48 but during his life what a huge amount he managed to accomplish. He knew the importance of knowing what you do know and what you don’t; of having the tenacity to tease out the simple from the messy and complicated and to know who to turn to when information from outside one’s own area of expertise is required. These are all skills we should work at acquiring, all the more so if we aspire to move from our own discipline to work in another, facilitating working with others whose backgrounds may be very different from our own.

Posted in History of Science, Interdisciplinary Science | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Conferences, Childcare and Uncomfortable Stereotypes

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Athene Donald

The comment stream on my recent post  about the lack of female invited speakers at conferences was illuminating.  This lack of women on the conference podium appears not to stem simply from women not being invited, according to a recent paper, but because if they are far more likely than men to decline invitations when they receive them.  The comment stream got lively when it came to explanations: was it simply down to issues over childcare or did this act as a surrogate ‘excuse’ for a feeling many had that conferences were simply unpleasant places for women, not worth the effort and ‘cost’ of attending? It seems to me that these two explanations are not as distinct as perhaps some of the heated comments implied, a thought in part provoked by reading this paper  (Unstable Identity Compatibility: How Gender Rejection Sensitivity Undermines the Success of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Fields by Sheana Ahlqvist, Bonita London and Lisa Rosenthal) about gender identity and the challenges this can cause for women in STEM. These same ideas about the importance of childcare versus working environment are also implicit in some of the discussion stream on the recent Guardian Higher Education web discussion about the visibility of women in STEM, in which I participated.

I will not attempt to discuss the pros and cons of professional childcare providers, nor whether mothers are too prone to assume responsibility for childcare rather than expect their partners to get fully stuck in. Both may be factors in individual family’s decisions about conference attendance and be of overwhelming significance in particular situations, but I want to explore a rather different aspect.  The paper I refer to above, which appeared online in Psychological Science at the start of the month, discusses the way young female college students’ confidence fluctuates over time according to their experiences and their own ‘gender rejection sensitivity’. This phrase describes how much individuals anticipate rejection simply by virtue of their gender and so is an attempt to quantify how likely women are to feel disadvantaged in different situations. The paper is behind a paywall and the main thesis is not particularly relevant to the points I want to make. What struck me was to be found in the introductory background material and the references cited therein. These sections highlighted how those who are not simply in a minority but also a minority acting in a non-stereotypical role, may feel a strong internal disconnect between their actions and how they believe they are expected to act. In the context of this blog it therefore demonstrated the extent to which women in STEM can feel constantly at odds with expected behaviour, and consequently disadvantaged and sensitive. To quote a few lines (note that I have removed the references from the original passage):

It has been well documented that individuals who pursue non-traditional academic and career paths are exposed to various forms of social-identity threat, including being a member of the numeric minority, lacking members of one’s in-group in positions of authority (e.g., professors or research advisors), feeling excluded from informal social networks or having peers who hold negative attitudes toward one’s group. Perceptions of bias seem to affect both sense of belonging and academic performance, two factors critical for long-term success in any field…..

For instance, women who perceive STEM careers as incompatible with female-typical communal goals express lower interest in STEM careers than do women who view them as compatible, even when controlling for STEM self-efficacy.

If you can get hold of the paper, and so read the introduction in full, I’d recommend you do. I found it very illuminating. Basically it spells out just how much the going may be perceived to be tough for women in science, almost (but not entirely) regardless of how their colleagues behave. It isn’t that we are all wimpish women who can’t take a joke when surrounded by men, it is that we are likely to be (unconsciously) feeling identity-threat which makes us sensitive and, possibly overly so. I recognize that feeling, even at such a late stage of my career. Maybe if more men found themselves in situations where they were alone in a room full of women – a situation described to me recently by a retired senior industrialist when he had attended Weightwatchers week after week – they would understand just how unwelcoming such situations may feel without any malice aforethought on the part of anyone present. Add in some slightly crass comment and the whole thing can seem just overwhelmingly unpleasant. I guess this is where the question of just how much you expect ‘rejection’ becomes important, i.e. how sensitive you may be to that crass comment when it arrives, as it so often will. And sometimes the comments are way beyond crass and just plain hostile.

To give a specific example of what I mean by a crass (though hardly worse) comment, let me relate one such that was made to me just a few weeks ago by a very senior figure who walks the corridors of power, with whom I had had occasion to interact many years back in different circles. When a third party enquired if we knew each other I said yes, and explained when, to which the retort came back from the man concerned that he ‘had the scars to prove it’. All one can do is laugh at such a remark, but it struck me as pretty offensive, the more so as our contacts had been so slight I found it hard to believe there were any legitimate grounds for it. Additionally, if I had been male I find it inconceivable such a retort would have been forthcoming; my guess is that if, in that case, I had ever got one over on this man, the last thing he would have done would have been to refer to it. Consequently, gender was at the heart of his remark; he was pointing out that by being a strong female I was not behaving as a female should. Or, alternatively, you can regard this anecdote as merely indicating I am blowing up the whole thing and it is because I anticipate ‘gender rejection’ I interpret his actions this way. I can’t tell myself which analysis is correct, but I certainly didn’t like it and that may be the only material factor.

I may have seemed to have strayed a long way from my original point of why women may not accept invitations to conferences, but it seems to me that the combination of negative experiences (along the lines of this anecdote or much worse) and finding oneself in a marked minority may be quite sufficient for women to say to themselves ‘why bother?’ It is then easy for them to justify this decision, not only to others but also internally, by explaining they don’t like to leave the kids.  After all, that is a stereotypically acceptable reason to give, something that is probably comforting when they are actually feeling stereotypically at odds with themselves. Obviously this scenario isn’t always an accurate description, but I don’t think the commenter on my blog who claimed that another commenter was changing their grounds (from childcare arguments to those around the culture she found at conferences) and just sounding feeble, really grasped quite what the reality may be like for women. It isn’t about their competence, brilliance, child-care arrangements or the willingness and ability of their partner to step in on the domestic front. It is the weariness of feeling that, after all the effort of putting a fantastic talk together and travelling long distances, they may still end up feeling excluded and denigrated which may lead them to decline invitations.

Men, please stamp on your colleagues being crass or worse and think how you might feel if you suddenly found yourself in a minority of around 10% surrounded by high-powered women!

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

The Seven Ages of an Academic Scientist

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Athene Donald

I have been meaning to write about the seven ages of the academic scientist (to adapt Jacques speech from As You Like It) for a while, but I had a sneaking suspicion this might not be an entirely original idea. A quick search of the web shows me that Jerry Coyne  (Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago) has had this idea before me – and maybe many others too. His blog indicates we are all free to replicate his ideas, so you can read his thoughts at the bottom of this blog. Mine do not share quite the same emphasis as his, so here goes with my own:

1 As a student one does one’s own experiments, often incompetently.

The supervisor patiently (or otherwise) points out artefacts, inconsistencies and pays bills for accidental breakages. They also find funding for travel for the student to present a poster that 2 people come to look at in a slightly inebriated state at the reception-cum-poster session at some conference with massively parallel sessions but little actual scientific interaction occurring. There the student mingles with other students and misses the next morning of the conference due to a heavy hangover.  The supervisor advises the student on how to give talks to the group that contain all the elements of beginning (goals), middle (results) and end (conclusions) and also ‘borrows’ the slide with the one credible set of results to present in their own major conference talk (to which the student is unable to travel as its location is in a delightful part of the world that is very expensive to travel to).

2 As a postdoc one acquires supervisory responsibilities for junior students’ projects

The postdoc is now expected to be an expert, but not an originator of ideas or funding. As the only one in the group who knows how to operate key pieces of apparatus, the postdoc is greatly valued.  The supervisor is very friendly as long as the results keep coming, but can get fierce when things go wrong, particularly if some important deadline is looming. The postdoc must maintain an appropriately subservient air at such times, whoever’s fault it is, as future references depend on a continuing harmonious relationship with the supervisor. They are allowed to travel to interesting conferences to present their own work, but almost certainly not that of the students who they are informally supervising. The postdoc may find such a complicated role vis-à-vis these students frustrating and/or confusing.

3 As a research fellow, there is a need to scrabble around frantically for research funding and a permanent position, whilst simultaneously maintaining academic excellence in the actual research.

The research fellow is still carrying out their own experiments, but time to do so is getting tight.  It is imperative to set up one’s own group, with substantial funding personally obtained, but this devours time which would ideally have been spent collecting new data and presenting the work at major conferences. They must learn to multitask so that all these balls can be juggled in the air simultaneously, whilst nevertheless making it appear effortless. Appearances are found to matter when it comes to obtaining a permanent position. As the term of the fellowship draws to its conclusion, writing job applications (and, with luck, attending interviews) take up yet more time. This should be a time of liberated independence; instead it can turn into a tense nightmare and a race against the clock to find a faculty position.

4 As a lecturer one discovers that the role actually requires lecturing.

Lecturing, it is found, requires huge amounts of time to produce vaguely decent lectures and notes whose delivery, nevertheless, get hammered in the end of term questionnaire. A belated attempt to attend a course videoing one’s performance highlights all kinds of nervous tics never before suspected. By this stage it is hard to eradicate the habits of pushing hair out of the eyes, picking up pencils and putting them down again without using them and speaking to the side of the room rather than actually to the students in the lecture hall to avoid eye contact. The rookie lecturer can find this all very depressing. Meanwhile, one is still supposed to be winning major grants. The chances of finding time to do one’s own experiments become vanishingly small unless one is prepared to work 24/7.

5 As a professor one finds time is spent on myriad committees, many of which have little to do with science as such.

It is time to work out one’s committee membership style: conscientious, enthusiastic or useless, what is it to be? Whichever style is adopted, perforce or by choice, will lead to consequences which may be more or less desirable depending on taste. Is the drive to do (or, more strictly, lead) research still paramount, or has the desire either to acquire power or contribute to the greater good taken over? Or perhaps the professor has lost their research way so completely that sitting on committees is a way of feeling they are still doing something useful, when all the drive that got them to the professoriat has withered away due to an endless series of grant and paper rejections and they find their field slipping away from the ‘cutting-edge’. They will certainly no longer be safe in a laboratory unless some kindly student takes them under their wing to reinstruct them in the modern ways. The more successful ones will still get asked to give major conference talks but the slides will be prepared by the postdocs, along with copious briefing notes.  The postdoc may not necessarily get any credit.

6 As a senior professor acquires some label which pigeon-holes them into the sort of task they will be increasingly asked to do.

Perhaps this is as a safe pair of hands to sort out some immediate crisis; perhaps deep thinker in demand to sit on an ethics or foresight committee; perhaps selfish bastard  in which case they will have succeeded in avoiding the tasks they dislike; perhaps soft touch  so that they are seen as a useful person to have on committees because they won’t cause trouble but go along with the majority; perhaps eccentric in which case they will probably be left alone because no one knows what they might do next.  It’s too late to change your professional spots by this point. As I said, there are consequences to the style one first adopts. Students will send out warning signals if the senior professor is heard approaching a laboratory. Some at this level give many plenary talks on work that represents the totality of their life’s work (this may have stopped some years before). It can get very boring for audiences if wheeled out too often without any updates. Occasionally they may be generous and pass on an invitation to a junior member of the team to present a talk in their place.

7 As a retired professor, the main task is not to interfere.

After dinner speeches and committees involving awards to those a generation or two below them come their way. Finally there is free time to talk to students again as some of the more time-consuming duties are no longer considered appropriate. Such as teach.  This period can be very invigorating, as once again it becomes clear why science was so attractive in the first place. Until, that is, the ultimate stage of second childishness comes to the fore and memory plays tricks with what is true. Then it is time to retreat to some far distant outpost, where students past or present can’t penetrate and embarrassment at one’s failings can be safely hidden away.

The Seven Ages of the Scientist by Jerry A. Coyne, reproduced from his blog

  1. As student, listens to advisor give talk on student’s own work
  2. As postdoc, gives talks about his/her own work
  3. As professor, gives talks about his/her students’ work
  4. Talks and writes about “the state of the field”
  5. Talks and writes about “the state of the field” eccentrically and incorrectly—always in a self-aggrandizing way.
  6. Gives after-dinner speeches and writes about society and the history of the field
  7. Writes articles about science and religion
Posted in Research, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

Banknote Battles

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Athene Donald

Last week I declined an invitation to go on Radio 4’s Today programme. I had good reasons for doing this, as I hope I’ll be able to convince you, but I still felt that I was letting the side down by not seizing the opportunity. Given the low proportion of women who are heard on the programme there was a part of me that thought, whatever the story, whatever my reasons for declining, I should have gritted my teeth and got on with it. I didn’t. And teeth are part of the reason. Gritting them was the last thing I wanted to do as I was living on painkillers due to toothache and had an early morning dentist’s appointment booked for the very morning they wanted me to participate. In principle, if timings had been as they said, it would have been viable if complicated for me to do both. I could have got the broadcast over on one side of Cambridge and nipped across (in the rush hour?  Nipping anywhere in Cambridge is pretty optimistic) to the other to get my tooth sorted. In my experience, the BBC’s timings often don’t turn out as they say. No way was I going to miss my appointment and with it the beginning of the end of my toothache. So I declined.

However, there was another reason for saying no – and it’s hard to know which had greater weight with me: I wasn’t particularly keen on the story I was being asked to speak to. The news had broken that the Bank of England had Jane Austen ‘in reserve’ to put on one of the new banknotes; they wanted to run a story about the importance of recognizing women more generally. That’s fine in principle but I have to admit I cannot get particularly worked up about the ‘women on banknotes’ campaign. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be delighted to see Jane Austen or some other remarkable woman or women appearing on the notes. I am a great Austen fan and have to ration how often I read her novels so that custom does not stale her infinite variety or, at least (in my case) their ability to cheer. Her novels are definite comfort- reading for me.

The problem for me is that I feel there are many more important battles to win, more female role models to celebrate and promote in many different situations. I don’t believe a young girl will ever aspire to be the face that appears on a banknote, whereas we should want them to aspire to be actual professionals – engineers, physicists, FTSE100 Directors or surgeons, whatever takes their fancy (with the possible exception of aspiring to be a WAG which, realistically, I fear many do). These strike me as more important situations in which it is imperative the imagery reflects those, still disappointingly few, who have risen through the ranks. The campaign for a female Doctor Who strikes me as a better battle to fight too. A young girl who aspires to be a female Time Lord (I’m sorry, I baulk at the idea of a Time Lady; it doesn’t convey at all the same sense of mastery, sounding too like a tea lady) is aspiring to power and knowledge. Good things to aim at, much more so than passively sitting on a banknote.

For my generation of young viewers, the women who first appeared on Doctor Who seemed merely to be required to scream, get in the way and look helpless, usually (if memory serves me right) in a white plastic miniskirt. There was, as I recall, always a second side-kick who was male and somewhat more helpful to the Doctor, although ultimately their role was often to rescue that nuisance of a girl. In 50 years some progress has been made, but having a woman take over from Matt Smith would complete the progression. So that battle, albeit still a symbolic totem rather than an actual flesh and blood role model, has more support from me.

The second problem for me regarding the banknote issue is that it is clear that over the centuries there are far more famous and influential men for the Bank of England to choose from. I know that there are many women who did amazing things, often barely recognized let alone celebrated, over the centuries, but as household names they are few and far between. The reasons for the campaign are obvious but requiring there to be a woman on one of the banknotes is a form of quota, which I remain ambivalent about. Fighting the battle today for boardroom positions, or getting more women to senior positions in academia or in the High Court is a battle higher up my mental list of priorities. I feel it is more important to tackle changing behaviour at work and changing societal expectations right from birth, than worrying about a face on a banknote. After all, I couldn’t reliably name those who are currently on the notes I frequently handle (which means, not the £50 note!).  I do know that Elizabeth Fry is on one of them but not which one without checking. I wonder how many people know who’s on which currently.

Now the BBC reporter who contacted me said they wanted to broaden the discussion out from the specifics to the more general, but it would still have necessarily started with a position with which I am not particularly in sympathy. That is not a good point from which to kick off an interview. So I declined. I don’t know if they did indeed cover a broader range of situations than simply the banknotes. Indeed I don’t know if they ran the story at all: after all, I was on my way to the dentist’s…..

Posted in Equality | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments