Real Life Barbie Dolls

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Athene Donald

Have you come across the T shirts with the encouraging words

I’m too PRETTY to do MATH

blazoned across them in cute pink lettering? No, nor had I until they were brought to my attention by a member of the London Mathematical Society. The LMS is not happy about these products, and I can’t say I blame them. But how do you do anything effectively about them? Such as get them withdrawn from sale?

Maybe the LMS can learn something from the tale of the Barbie doll and her involvement with maths (this is the UK, so I won’t call it math!). About 20 years ago the manufacturers of Barbie, Mattel, produced a doll which said

Math class is tough.

There was quite a lot of fuss in the US. The Barbie Liberation Organisation doctored dolls (and also the ‘boy’s toy’ GI Joe) swapping their phrases around and returning the altered dolls to the toy store shelves. The shops then resold them to children who had to invent scenarios for Barbies who yelled “Vengeance is mine!” and G.I. Joes who daydreamed “Let’s plan our dream wedding!”. “Call your local TV news” stickers on the back ensured that the media would have genuine recipients to interview as soon as the news broke. By 1992 the dolls had the offending phrase about math removed from their vocabulary, as written up by the business press.

Fast forward to 2010 and we have Computer Engineer Barbie on the market as versatile and eternally youthful Barbie’s 126th career option. Her accessories, still tastefully pink, were apparently chosen (as Mattel points out) with the help of the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering. Her figure is as woman-defyingly impossible as ever, and her footware makes no concession to the practicalities of most workplaces, but I guess this is progress of sorts.

But we won’t get girls thinking about computing or engineering as a career, as long as pre-teens are bombarded with messages saying that maths does not happily coexist with their femininity. That if they do maths they are by definition not ‘pretty’ – so their future lives will, by implication, be devoid of boyfriends and happiness. What can be done to stop these products (not just T-shirts, but also socks and mobile phone covers apparently, as a quick bit of googling showed up) being available? Can some people-power, as was brought to bear on Mattel, stop DavidandGoliath marketing these offensive objects? The company’s byline may say that

our apparel is stupid

but I think most pre-teens’ sense of irony will not be developed enough to appreciate the message that is being touted should not be taken literally. I am heartened to see that Mumsnet are in on the act of writing letters of complaint and my guess is they are a pretty formidable campaigning tool. But if anyone has bright ideas about what the LMS might care to do, or how to kickstart a bit of direct action of their own, Gwynneth Stallard is the Chair of the LMS Women in Mathematics Committee.

The offending Tshirt on sale from DavidandGoliath

Not completely unrelated, I have just come across a recent analysis of advertisements for boys’ and girl’s toys, which highlights just what subliminal – or perhaps not-so-subliminal – messages are being directed at both children and their parents through the medium of ads. Word clouds for the two sexes presents a very visual way of seeing what messages the children will be receiving. Guess what, the top two words for boys are ‘battle’ and ‘power’, whereas for girls it’s ‘love’ and ‘magic’! You’d never believe the two sexes lived in the same world, experiencing the same challenges given such massive differences in what is thought appropriate to put the emphasis on.  But if girls are expected to thrive on magic rather than power, and use that to get them to the top, I’m afraid equality is a long way off and we won’t be seeing a steep rise in girls pursuing maths and science careers.

Posted in Equality, Science Culture | Tagged , , , , , | 25 Comments

Charles Darwin’s Grandfather

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Athene Donald

My friends know that Erasmus Darwin is one of my heroes. Much less well known than his grandson Charles, and whose work is of course far more ephemeral, nevertheless he is a true Renaissance Man – or more strictly an Enlightenment Man.  When a couple of years ago I was invited to appear on Radio 4’s A Good Read, the biography of him by Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin A Life of Unequalled Achievement was my natural choice.  If you don’t know the format of the programme, and I certainly didn’t until the invitation to join in turned up in my inbox, two invitees join the presenter (in my case Kate Mosse) to discuss each other’s choices. So, I had to choose a book which wouldn’t be too impenetrable for non-scientists (the other invitee on my programme turned out to be the gardener Alys Fowler) although I was determined to choose a science book. I guess the programme counts as a form of Public Awareness of Science/Outreach activity; that was certainly how I saw it.

When I had first read the book I was just stunned by the character who emerged from it.  Everyone has heard of Charles Darwin, but his grandfather turns out to be every bit as interesting a character. Indeed I would say in terms of character, rather than influence and impact, more so. By profession he was a physician, and a very successful one, so that towards the end of his life he was even being sought by the King, although he refused to go to London. He lived all his life in the Midlands where he was much involved with the early stages of the industrial revolution, being friends with many of the key players including James Watt of steam engine fame.  What this book brings out, in a relaxed kind of way, is just how much he did across an enormous range of fields, and what a larger than life character he must have been.  Erasmus Darwin also features in the much more widely-read book The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow, but as he is only one of the Men of the title, he doesn’t come across anything like so vividly in that book.

As a scientist in the 21st century, all one can hope to do is be an expert in a rather narrow field.  Not true of Erasmus Darwin who in his spare time, as it were, and beyond his day job of physicking did so much.  Some of it would these days be termed ‘entrepreneurial’ such as writing pamphlets (anonymously, because he feared it would damage his status as a physician) to advocate canals, or designing a boat lift. He designed and built a copying machine which clearly worked; he got involved with some iron works – somewhat at arm’s length – since good quality nails were so vital to the developing economy.  And so it goes on.  Through his friends in the Lunar Society, of which he was a key member, there were many opportunities to tie in with industry and industrialists such as Wedgewood and Boulton.  He was one of the leading lights of this group of influential men, clearly very charismatic despite a pronounced stutter. He was also involved with ‘purer’ science. Of particular note was his work on gases – stemming from his interest in steam engines with Watt – and meteorology. Much of his work was way ahead of his time, and often not now associated with his name.  His System of Vegetables was a scholarly translation of Linnaeus, very thorough and introducing a variety of new words into the English language, which are still there (bract and leaflet for instance).

But much of his science was less scholarly, more original and apparently highly intuitive so that it was almost inspired guesswork which turned out to be right long afterwards. As King-Hele (himself an eminent physicist) puts it

‘Erasmus sparkles with illuminating insights that I cannot explain.’

This is certainly the case in terms of his ideas about evolution. He temporarily inserted on his coat of arms the motto ‘e conchis omnia’ – everything from shells – to indicate, rather quietly, that he thought there was some ‘primary filament’ from which all life was derived. But the establishment, in the form of his neighbour in Lichfield Canon Seward, quickly put a stop to this. Nevertheless in his later life he came back to the ideas and developed them in his poetry.

Perhaps in some ways this is the most surprising part of his character overall.   He finally ‘comes out’ as a poet, having initially feared that this would impact on the trust people had in  him as a doctor, and produces an enormous poem called the Botanic Garden. I love the turn of phrase that King-Hele introduces at this point:

‘he was a sexy poet, presenting a bizarre tale of gaudily dressed characters engrossed in various forms of polygamy’

referring to his poem the Loves of the Plants (one half of the Botanic Garden), which was a serious attempt to present the Linnaean classification system of plants in verse form.  Suddenly he was catapulted into being the foremost poet of his day, one to whom the Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge owed a significant debt, although they subsequently turned against him.  I can’t find myself in sympathy with the limited bits of poetry quoted in the book, rhyming couplets tend to leave me cold. Nevertheless it is remarkable that he can express ideas hinting at evolution in a sextuplet, 50 odd years before his grandson published his own much better formed ideas on the subject:

‘First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.’

The poets who had been encouraged and inspired by him subsequently turned against him, as did Society more generally, because he was a true man of the Enlightenment, a deist not an orthodox Christian, who opposed slavery, supported female education and both the American and French revolutions. As society got nervous about the impact of the changes in France and the war with Napoleon, someone who had openly and in his poems supported the revolution became suspect. A rather sad end to his life.

Looking at Erasmus Darwin from the vantage point of a 21st century scientist, I can only be staggered by the tremendous breadth of his interests and the energy he devoted to it – and he was able to do this because he had sufficient wealth to build neat bits of apparatus at home, and time to travel around the Midlands to converse with friends like the Wedgewood’s. He comes alive in the book as a bon-viveur, a polymath, a great friend – and indeed lover – but also a caring family man who mourned the untimely deaths of his first wife and two of his sons. It is not coincidental that the first time I ever commented on a blog it was to stick up for him. I certainly feel Erasmus Darwin was a true hero and superman, rather in the mould of Peter Wimsey in terms of the breadth of his capabilities though without ever having played in the Varsity Match at Lords. But he was a real-life hero, whose influence may be less obvious than his grandson’s, although it is nevertheless very real.

Erasmus Darwin Books

A System of Vegetables – translation of Linnaeus allegedly by a Botanical Society in Lichfield. And later The Families of Plants
The Botanic Garden  Anonymous I (Published second) The Economy of Vegetation
II The Loves of the Plants
Zoonomia or The loves of organic life
A plan for the conduct of female education in boarding schools
Phytologia or the Philosphy of Agriculture and Gardening
The Temple of Nature or the Origin of Society.


Posted in Communicating Science, History of Science | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

I can hear you’re getting emotional

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Athene Donald

In the comments for my last post, J0ns1m0ns remarked that he thought the issue of mode of speaking at committee meetings was perhaps a bit of a red herring, but I fear inappropriate remarks and behaviour persist and shouldn’t, indeed mustn’t be ignored. In some senses they are the tip of an iceberg. Despite my relative seniority I am not exempt from being at the receiving end of them. I would like to share two recent examples, I hope appropriately anonymised, and see if readers have tips to share for how to handle these situations, any means they may have discovered which are effective. I know that, despite years of apparent survival in the academic world, there are still situations in which I find myself at a loss for an appropriate response to inappropriate behaviour.

The first example is summed up by the title of this post. It arose, not at a committee meeting, but during a phone conversation with a male colleague and within the last year. We were in disagreement. A document was being produced, the initial version of which I felt had serious flaws. It took some time to convince others in the decision-making chain of this, but once I did there was general agreement that the document must be modified to take these concerns into account. The phone conversation arose when two of us were subsequently discussing the amended document, which I felt still fell short of what was required. Clearly, some way into the conversation, both of us were getting frustrated. Nevertheless I was gob-smacked to be told that the guy at the other end could

hear I was getting emotional,

implying it sounded as if I was about to burst into tears. An extraordinarily effective ploy – for him – because it completely stopped me in my tracks, not least because it was so far removed from what I was thinking or feeling. I was even more annoyed with myself afterwards because, had I been more quick-witted, I could have said

and I can hear you’re getting angry

– which he was.  The standard double bind of women’s emotion being unacceptable (even had it been present in me), but men’s anger is apparently OK, the point I was trying to make in the earlier post. L’esprit de l’escalier always comes too late; it was a missed opportunity for me to counter his assertion. Unfortunately, whether his ploy was deliberate or unconscious, I feel it enabled him to win that round on the phone. Nevertheless, and in reality much more importantly, I won the battle since the document was duly changed further to remove the pitfalls I saw in it, despite his apparent attempt to throw me off course.

The second example also happened relatively recently, but exemplifies something that has happened too frequently to me in various guises. I was at a reception after an event – in this case outside Cambridge, although the location is irrelevant – and someone wanted to take photos for their own publicity purposes. At the time I was talking to a grey-haired complete stranger (I never discovered his name). What did he do at the thought of a camera being pointed in our direction? He put his arm round my waist! I muttered,

I don’t think that’s appropriate

and moved away but, the unfortunate truism that nice girls don’t make a fuss, meant that I didn’t feel slapping him round the face was procedurally correct, though I was sorely tempted.

It is not the first time that a camera being pointed in my direction has led to someone in the vicinity thinking that draping an arm around me is the correct thing to do. This floors me. Men, please, please realise professional women do not necessarily (ever?) think this is a compliment. A box of chocolates, with or without the camera being focussed in my direction, would definitely be better received if a compliment is what is in your mind. Otherwise, well I’m sorry I really don’t know why, in a professional situation, this is regarded as in the least way appropriate. But I also don’t know how to stop it in ways that are not perceived as aggressive and end up making me look at least as stupid as the male malefactor. I’ve had a long time to try to devise a strategy, because this happens – even with the grey strands in my hair – far more often than I would like, with or without a camera. Worse, it usually occurs in situations where the male is probably counting on me not being prepared to erupt in their face including, in one case, when I was sitting across the table from a vice chancellor (who didn’t bat an eyelid, which hardly improved the situation).

So Jon, I can’t agree with you, bad behaviour in committees or elsewhere, must not be tolerated and it does matter. These examples not only demean me as a professional, trivial though they are in some ways and certainly in comparison with the horrors some women get subjected to, but they are damaging because in effect they render me – or any woman in a similar position – powerless. And that may be the perpetrator’s intention. How can I continue a high level dialogue when someone is so infringing my personal space and treating me without respect? How can I look like a serious member of the academic community when I am reduced to bimbo status by that wandering arm? And if this happens to me, as a professor, what must the younger researchers have to put up with at these same hands (or arms)? Is it surprising we have such a leaky pipeline in academic science when this sort of thing is allowed to persist? I have kept silent long enough and at least my blog gives me a chance to voice my extreme annoyance whilst keeping names out of any complaint expressed. Men who behave like this should not have it all their own way. Suggestions please, for appropriate responses and put-downs!


Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 38 Comments

Progress at MIT

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Athene Donald

This week saw the publication of a report from MIT entitled: A Report on the Status of Women Faculty in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT, 2011. This is a follow up report to an earlier ground-breaking report published in 1999 and details, not only what is described as ‘an overwhelmingly positive view’, but also some of the issues that remain. Indeed it appears that new problems have arisen as a rather direct consequence of actions taken earlier. Nevertheless not only has MIT made very significant steps in improving the climate for women working there on the faculty, but it should be applauded for its very public statements – both in 1999 and this year – about what it hasn’t (yet) got right. The self-examination and reflection that the institution has gone through is something that many other institutions around the world could profit from emulating.

I first came across the earlier Report soon after its publication, when it was brought to my attention by a (male) professor at MIT who asked me if its findings tallied with my own experiences. At that time I was already a fairly senior professor at Cambridge, having just been elected to the Royal Society, but I hadn’t really given much thought to my gender. I had just kept my head down and got on with the job, thinking things that didn’t feel comfortable or ‘right’ were due to my own failings not systemic issues. To some extent, the MIT report sensitised me to my situation – and for that I was not particularly grateful at the time. The abstract in the 1999 report says

In contrast to junior women, many tenured women faculty feel marginalized and excluded from a significant role in their departments. Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers at MIT.

I realised this was true of me. I had reached a standing where I might have been expected to be better integrated into the decision-making process than I seemed to be, and I hadn’t fully appreciated this. As the MIT women found – in their case often about resources and salaries – when they compared notes they realised that issues that they had thought were peculiar to them, were in fact generic and happened to many women. I looked around me, and I think I realised that my own institution at the time probably wasn’t that different. At MIT the pressure the female faculty were able to bring to bear, collectively, on the leadership of the institution has led to many changes for the better, which to some extent the new report is able to celebrate. The very fact that I have been appointed my own University’s Gender Equality Champion is equally testament to the seriousness with which the issue is now addressed here. However, both there and in my own institution ‘we are not there yet’, as the report says.

The new report is well worth a read. It is full of insight into the complexities of trying to resolve the issues that beset the levelling of the playing field for women in academic science. I would like to highlight a few of these, bearing in mind that some issues don’t really directly translate to the UK and so I won’t discuss them further. Included under this heading I would include issues about tenure clocks, which I discussed previously and some of the resourcing issues (since salaries aren’t negotiated at all levels in quite the same way).

MIT has seen an overall increase in female faculty numbers over this period from a mere 10% to around 19% in the Faculty of Science and it is quite clear that this in itself is felt as having led to a very different climate for all women, reducing some of the isolation that was initially felt. However, the numbers are still not particularly impressive given that this School will include the biological sciences where the undergraduate population will be at least evenly split between the genders. (The comparable figure in the School of Engineering is 16%). However anxiety remains around hiring policies, with a

perception that standards for hiring and promotion of women faculty are lower than for male faculty

This is a completely pernicious perception, that is sufficiently intangible it is hard to counter yet can linger in people’s minds and damage the self-confidence of recent hires, as summed up by the quote

I felt I was invited to interview because I was dazzling, but now I wonder…

This is akin to the problems I discussed about positive discrimination and the deliberate hiring of people from minorities in the earlier post. (Interestingly, the issue of the difference in how letters of recommendation are written for men and women is highlighted in the Report as part of the problem; this is a topic I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, and one day I’ll get around to it.). So, by increasing the percentage of women faculty, others assume this has been done by positive discrimination, thereby giving the women an easier ride into the system. As I say, pernicious, particularly since no one is likely to say explicitly to a new female hire ‘you’re not as good as the rest of us’, merely act that way indirectly. I believe this is an obvious potential pitfall, and the senior management need to make clear, every time a hire is made, that no barriers have been lowered to make it easier for a woman to be appointed, and stamp on any comments made in their hearing that might suggest people don’t believe this to be the case.

I was more interested in the perhaps rather subtle point about ‘expected behaviour’, which illustrates another trap for women.

There is an expectation of niceness, sweetness. It’s everywhere. Students, collaborators all make this mistake.

Act that way, and you won’t get very far. But if you don’t then the behaviour is seen as inappropriately aggressive, and may also be counterproductive. Additionally, not all women wanted to be expected to be willing to talk about work-life balance or be a mentor; some did, but others saw this as equally unwelcome stereotyping. Nevertheless, the junior faculty certainly wanted to be mentored (although it was pointed out that this was not peculiar to women). Interestingly, if regrettably, the recommendations really didn’t tackle this particular set of challenges. I think it is undoubtedly the case that what is seen as acceptable behaviour in a man, which might for instance, include raised voices at a committee meeting would, if done by a woman be seen as not acceptable. But sitting saying nothing, although perhaps regarded as OK behaviour, is really not going to be productive in any situation. Every woman has to work out for herself, where her own comfort zone and personality places her in the spectrum of behaviour and constantly assess whether this is working for her. It is exhausting and a minefield and I wish I knew what the right answer was.

MIT has clearly done an excellent job of increasing the representation of women at the highest levels, and involving women in decision-making committees throughout the institution. Unfortunately that comes at a cost (one I know only too well). It means that the relatively few senior women can end up with an extremely high workload of committees or, as the report describes it, a ‘burden of service’. As one woman put it

I have felt scientifically sacrificed serving the Institute and the department, and not appreciated.

It is a real double-bind. Women should be represented, it is in part the appropriate counter to the marginalisation mentioned earlier, but if it means you have no time to talk to your PhD students or write grant applications it does become a personal sacrifice, detrimental to your career, to satisfy some nebulous ‘public good’. My answer to this would be women should only agree to serve on committees when they have something specific to offer, such as relevant experience, and not just to fulfil some quota to satisfy the powers that be. For myself I have learnt to act that way and would encourage other women not always to be flattered into doing something of no interest, relevance or useful outcome to them. A little selfishness doesn’t come amiss in this situation.

So, the report is an interesting overview of a moving target; a climate of improvement can be seen but with new issues constantly emerging. Women academics – and indeed men too – reading this should probably make multiple copies of the report and distribute it around their own departments and institutions to demonstrate both, that change can be made without sacrificing quality of output, and that senior management really can make a difference to the climate for women. Furthermore, MIT women have amply demonstrated the power of gathering data and sharing information, thereby putting pressure on the leadership to work out constructive steps to improve matters. MIT collectively has also shown that holding up one’s hand and saying mea culpa is actually a really powerful message which has and will continue to resonate in many individual breasts as well as across whole institutions.

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

Onions and Unconscious Bias

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Athene Donald

I have written before about my work on carrots, and it’s also the case that I have published on onions, in rather the same spirit as the carrot work: an environmental scanning electron microscopy study of onion failure, as well as a thorough study of maintaining viability of onion cells in the electron microscope under different conditions of imaging. They are a lovely system to work with because it is rather easy to get a sample a single cell thick – that layer just inside the skin that slips off so easily when slicing onions.

However, I am no expert in the field of onion science, so I was slightly surprised to receive an email recently beginning

We have learned of your published research on onions. We would like to invite your participation in our publishing program. In particular, I have in mind a new research or review article for an edited collection (invitation only) being assembled under my overall direction tentatively entitled

Onion Consumption and Health

I am ashamed to admit my first reaction was to laugh. The acceptable reason for laughter would be self-mockery, the amusement that someone thought I was expert enough about onions to write a review article, particularly as relating to consumption and health (neither topics which featured in my papers). However, I suspect there was another underlying stimulus for my laughter, the feeling that a monograph on onions was not serious. It is too easy to think that food is not an important subject for scientific study, but I ought to know better myself for the very reason that I have spent many years researching different aspects of food. I always used to get very irritated when others were baffled why I thought, as a physicist, this was appropriate behaviour. So why did I fall into exactly the same trap this time?

The health-giving properties of onions are no laughing matter, because onions are rather good for us. They contain flavonols, a class of polyphenols; epidemiological studies on polyphenols in general have shown that they can protect against vascular dysfunction, promote vascular health and reduce cardiovascular disease risk. Basically, as far as I understand it, eating onions, like drinking red wine (though possibly less enjoyably) allows us to ingest anti-oxidants which give us some protection against cell damage. So, a monograph on onion consumption and health should be of interest to many. My erstwhile onion-collaborators at the Institute of Food Research are interested in the health benefits, but also in understanding how to use them as a link in the creation of a sustainable food chain. One example of this is to find novel uses of waste products from standard routes of food-processing. This could, for instance, include onion skins and other plant-based organic waste co-products (including used brewers’ grain). The aim is to turn this into added value products, maybe food, animal feed or pharmaceutical products and ingredients in the form of biopolymers, phytochemicals, nutrients and micronutrients.

All this shows us not only that onions are good for us, but scientists are additionally interested in how their inedible bits could be put to good use and not just thrown away. So why did I fall into the trap of laughing at that email? I’m afraid it was because I can follow the herd instinct when not concentrating and, momentarily, think that a physicist should work on ‘real’materials like silicon or buckyballs.

UK readers who watch Have I Got News for You will be familiar with the ‘missing words round’ from some ‘guest publication’ at the end of the show, when some specialist publication is implicitly sneered at for its minority interest: Worm Digest Magazine or the Concrete Canoe Magazine would fit right in there. But it’s unconscious bias that makes us do the sneering. One person’s serious scientific project is another’s butt of a joke. Unconscious bias, as I’ve mentioned before in the context of gender, means we make assumptions without realising it. It is all too frequently at work, and if you don’t believe it visit the Project Implicit website and take one of their Implicit Association Tests – you’ll almost certainly be taken aback by the outcomes.

So did you laugh at the idea of Worm Digest Magazine? Their website claims

We are working together in a global context to disseminate earthworm information in a responsible way. We want to spearhead action in the world regarding earthworms that has genuine impact on the environment and issues of technology, scientific research, business, agriculture, literature and education.

Or what about The Concrete Canoe Magazine? Again, referring to the website we find

The concrete canoe competition is a wonderful project for all students in civil engineering.

And

Concrete Canoe Magazine (CCM) has for main objective to allow students involved in the concrete canoe project to have a magazine dedicated to their beloved project in which they can find relevant information on new techniques and breakthroughs made by different teams or individuals.

[sic, it’s not from an English-speaking university]
So the former magazine appears to be seriously environmental in its goals, the latter an educational resource for engineering students.

I’m afraid Onion Consumption and Nutrition would fit the same mould, looking ‘daft’ but actually really serious. From time to time we should all reflect on whether we are being led astray to sneer at, mark down or turn away from something that is not within our normal comfort zone but about which we really shouldn’t be making such judgements.

Posted in Interdisciplinary Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 9 Comments