Conversations in Amazing Libraries

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Athene Donald

Remarkably, I have been in three magnificent rooms of books in the last week, starting off with the Wren Library in Cambridge’s Trinity College. The first photo (which I admit I have taken from Diane Coyle’s Bluesky feed) gives an impression of its massive shape. It’s very high ceilinged and consequently, as we discovered, also very cold. Equally, it’s extremely long with, apparently, 80,000 books still in situ and a wonderful smell of ancient leather tomes which greets you as soon as you walk into the space. I was there, along with Tabitha  Goldstaub, Director of Innovate Cambridge, and fellow Fellow of Churchill College and Bennett Professor of Public Policy Diane Coyle, to discuss ‘Why we need more women in science and beyond’ building on my book Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science.

Wren library Trinity College

Tabitha is the author of How To Talk To Robots: A Girls’ Guide To a Future Dominated by AI. She did not start off life in the world of tech, but got her degree in advertising, but she has moved further and further into this sphere, becoming increasingly worried, for instance, about the gender bias frequently lurking behind algorithms. Her fears about a tech world full of ‘bro’s’ as she put it, became very clear during our discussions. Diane is an economist, author of a number of books, and her concerns about the lack of women in her field have often been expressed there and elsewhere (e.g. see here). So, there was much common ground between the three of us, as we expressed worries about a world where women are so often ‘not in the room’, leading to decisions which may be biased, ignore half the population or be based on misconceptions.

Despite the chilly temperature in the library, there was a lively Q+A session with the audience after our introductory discussion, overlooked by austere male busts. I had to wonder how many books by female authors there were amongst the 80,000. The Trinity Librarian Nicholas Bell who introduced the event, tried valiantly to make a connection between the library and women in STEM, by pointing out the College possessed the papers of Ada Lovelace’s father, but I’m not sure that connection is very strong, given that Byron seems never to have met his daughter.

A couple of days later I found myself being interviewed in the Georgian Room at the Royal Institution (see the second photo) by Suze Kudu for Digital Science. As with the event in the Wren Library, this interview will appear on YouTube in due course, along with the lecture I gave, also about my book shortly after the interview with Suze, in the famous Royal Institution Lecture Theatre. The Georgian Room also contains a number of old tomes, although nothing like 80,000. Again, we wondered how many books by women graced the shelves. Not many, we guessed, and the portraiture also appeared to be only of males.Georgian room RI Unlike my previous lecture at the Royal Institution that I gave a decade or so ago, I was not required to wear evening dress, for which I was grateful. My thanks to Digital Science for sponsoring the lecture. Once again, there was a lively discussion in the Q+A session. Once again, the audience was largely female. I always like talking to audience members afterwards, as I sign their book copies, and I was particularly touched by the comments from one group: they told me how my blog had helped to get them through their PhDs. Years ago I reflected on the possibility of this blog amounting to some sort of online mentoring, and I guess their comments indicate, for some, that is exactly how it has been. I take that as a great compliment.

Finally, I ended up in a room not formally a library, but formerly the Reading Room in the Royal Society, although now it rejoices in the name of Wolfson 1. Busts adorned the room, along with splendid decoration but, finally, a woman could be spotted. The third photograph shows Mary Somerville, for a long time the only woman whose features were on display in the Society’s rooms. Far from true now with, for example, a painting of Jocelyn Bell Burnell being prominent in the entrance hall, portraits of Julia Higgins and Anne Maclaren both – I believe, although I’ve not checked recently – downstairs in the canteen amongst others. Anne was the first woman to be an Officer of the Society (she was the Foreign Secretary, as was Julia subsequently). However, Somerville’s bust was a breakthrough when it first was commissioned in 1832 (it was not received by the Society until 1842), preceding by more than a hundred years the admission of women to the Fellowship. A recent blogpost on the Royal Society’s site will tell you more about the origin of the bust.

Mary Somerville bust

I was in this particular room, not to talk about gender issues, but leading a round-table discussion considering what the PhD of the future might look like, and what needs to change, as part of the Royal Society’s Science 2040 project, aimed at imagining what an ideal overall system for science might look like in 2040. Suffice it to say, there were many views, many places where we could all identify the current system was far from ideal but with less agreement on where we would like to end up. I will be fascinated to see what the facilitators distil from our wide-ranging discussions. With Somerville watching over us, a woman whose education bore no relationship to modern structures, yet who made significant contributions to science through the translations and books she wrote, it was interesting to remember PhD’s just weren’t a ‘thing’ in her day anywhere in the world. Times have changed.

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Talking to Strangers

Posted on November 12, 2023 by Athene Donald

I was struck by an article in the Guardian written by Catherine Carr about the pleasure she derives from talking to strangers, which forms the basis of her podcast ‘Where are you going?’ (disclaimer, I’ve never listened to it or, indeed, come across it before today; perhaps I should). Conversations with strangers, she opines,

“are perhaps a cross between the confessional ….. and the last few ticks of the clock in the therapy room. Interviewees are always anonymous and – after we chat – we go our separate ways. Even though the conversation can become intimate very quickly, it is also only a brief moment shared, which then sort of closes up behind us.”

I can absolutely relate to this. I can remember some quite extraordinary conversations with people I have confidence I will never meet again. There was a usefully therapeutic conversation I had with a journalist in Paris. She and I had both been attending the L’Oreal For Women in Science awards (I as a member of the judging jury, she in her professional role of interviewing one of the prize-winners), but the ceremony was over and we ended up in the hotel bar, having sat next to each other on the official bus that had brought us back from UNESCO HQ where the ceremony had taken place. I have no memory of what we specifically discussed, possibly aided by some lubrication by alcohol, but I absolutely remember the pleasure of the conversation and the feeling of finding someone on the same wavelength with whom I could be open. I do remember worrying the next day that I had opened up to a journalist, a journalist who could make hay with whatever personal angst I had downloaded, but as far as I know she never did. (By this point, I neither remember her name nor the newspaper she represented).

That conversation had felt safe in a way talking to a colleague from my department, or indeed anywhere in my own professional sphere, probably could not have done. It was an accidental encounter with someone I found I clicked instantly with, but none the worse for it’s unplanned nature. Sadly, such meetings are rare, and far too often a chance conversation never gets beyond the easy exchange of facts. Or, as Carr put it, “Not the drinks party kind with all that, “Did you come on the B359 or via Porchester?””.

However, you never know what may transpire from a stray encounter. I am of the generation that travelled as a teenager and student quite often on my own and on trains. Back then there were no airpods and headphones into which one could sink and cut out the rest of mankind with loud music or, indeed, a podcast. It was not uncommon for casual conversations to be struck up with strangers to pass the tedium of the journey. It still happens a bit, as I spot on trains, but to a much lesser extent and I, for one, almost certainly will be working on my laptop to keep up with the dreaded email mountain. I don’t think I ever looked particularly encouraging (my sister seemed to manage far more of these conversations than I ever did; I was quite shy at 18), but one particular conversation sticks in my mind. I was reading Vera Brittain’s moving memoir  Testament of Youth, and the guy across from me asked me how far I’d got through it. He then helpfully told me that page xx (I forget the page number) would absolutely have me in tears. And he was probably right.

But perhaps the most important conversation I fell into was on a Greyhound Bus between Ithaca (I was living in the city; it’s where Cornell University is situated, where I was a postdoc in the Materials Science and Engineering Department) and New York City (where my husband then lived, and whom I was visiting for the weekend). This was at something of a turning point in my career, although I couldn’t know that at the time. I was in the second year of my second postdoc at Cornell, and an opening had arisen for a faculty position in any of the Engineering departments at Cornell, if a suitable woman could be found. These were the days of affirmative action in the USA, and this was the condition. My problem was that, the first two years I’d spent at Cornell had been an unmitigated disaster from an academic point of view. Essentially no papers, not even joint ones, and a poor relationship with the professor who’d employed me and who was still in the same department in which I continued to work. How could I make a case that I was worthy of consideration – as my current employer, my great mentor Ed Kramer, believed – when I had these two years of nothingness behind me and which would undoubtedly be used to question my abilities and potential?

It turned out that the woman I was sitting next to on the bus taught at Ithaca College, the other, but non-Ivy League university in the town. Somehow, I opened up about my quandary. Again, I don’t remember any details from our conversation, but over the approximately five hours of the bus journey, she encouraged me to be upfront. She felt I should write a clear statement stating my position. Based on her own experience of what she thought would be acceptable, she provided me with a framework to make my previous failure seem more explicable, even if not exactly justified, and to make a case for why I was worth taking a punt on to the faculty. I got off that bus feeling far more excited and positive than I had got on it. Pure chance, but I put her advice into action.

Ah, you might say, but you didn’t get that position and ended up back in England. That is only partially true. I applied for the job and, over an extended period, the faculty made their decision about who to appoint. Initially I wasn’t offered the position but, when their first choice (working in an area far from mine, which may have been relevant) turned them down they turned to me, by that time on a short-term fellowship in Cambridge. Ultimately, for reasons not least associated with my family all being in the UK, but also because of the opening up of the Royal Society’s University Research Fellowship scheme the summer before I would have left the country, I turned the Cornell position down. Having five years of guaranteed funding under the URF scheme meant the incentive to return to the USA decreased. So, in Cambridge I have been ever since.

I’m quite sure that random conversation with a woman – whose name I may never have known and whom I certainly never saw again – made a difference in both giving me confidence and a stronger application for the faculty position to set against those first two miserable years at Cornell. Talking to strangers, of course in safe situations only, can be strangely beneficial and perhaps therapeutic too.

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The Things You Don’t Know You Know

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Athene Donald

It is very easy, at any stage in a career, to look at your peers and think they have everything solved while you are wandering around in the dark. This is, of course, an illusion. They will be looking at you and, as likely as not, thinking exactly the same in reverse. That’s true, I believe, of everyone apart from an obnoxious few who have no idea of their (in)capabilities, and assume that everyone else is looking at them in awe. For myself, given my fellow heads of house (heads of the Cambridge colleges) come from a wide range of backgrounds, the majority of which are not academic, I find it all too easy to think ‘well they went on a change management course’, or whatever particular facet of leadership one currently feels one is lacking, and hence feel relatively ignorant about the case in hand. Of course, being an academic, I haven’t been on such a course but, in reality, they may be struggling to grasp the academic cycle or something similar which is, by this point, second nature to me. How would I know?

I was brought up by a mother who always suffered under the belief – as she frequently told me – that there were rules that she alone didn’t understand. I think this came from being a teenager in the Second World War, someone who got roped into adult situations without any instruction. For instance, she was a rare female member of the Royal Observer Corps as soon as she hit 16, but was also the daughter of the local head of the district team, so had an awkward path to negotiate. But she instilled in me this belief there were ‘rules’ I needed to find out if I were to succeed. And of course, I failed, because as often as not there are no such rules and everyone else is also muddling around trying to make the best of some complex situation or other.

Whatever stage of your career you’re at, therefore, it behoves you to remember things that others apparently know but are a closed book to you, are not the only things that matter. You will have a battery of knowledge up your sleeve that others are looking at and being impressed by. It may be that you have green fingers when it comes to making some particularly recalcitrant piece of equipment fire on all cylinders; perhaps it’s because in a previous role you had come across some obscure paper that has the precise answer to the question your team are struggling with. Maybe it’s that you’ve spoken at a conference before and can reassure the newest member of the team about what to expect, or perhaps it’s further removed from your research and concerns information on local schools or nurseries. The chances are you an ‘expert’ in something who can pass on that knowledge to someone who is feeling adrift. But it is all too easy to take this ‘expertise’ as given, and not notice that you have many skills to hand that others perhaps lack but would like to learn from you.

Nevertheless, at a moment in time when it’s you that’s feeling adrift, it is important to realise that a feeling of being out of your depth is not likely to be a permanent state of affairs. And yet, just as it’s far too easy to fall into the trap of only remembering the negative comments (those that stick like Velcro) when perhaps you got something not quite right, and forget the times when you were the one with the knowledge others were seeking.

One of the behaviours that we should all worry about is when a belief in our own excellence becomes inflated. As fellow head of house Simon McDonald (Master of Christ’s) puts it when discussing the process of making appointments with fellow senior diplomats

‘We behaved as if we were a circle of perfection. Assuming ourselves to be perfect, we looked assiduously for candidates in our own image. We labelled such candidates the ‘full package’…. Of all the odd ideas expressed in our talent meetings, this seems to me the oddest. No one is the full package.’

So, remember that. You may be ignorant about some aspect of your current role, but no one around you is perfect, nor the ‘full package’. You are not alone in sometimes, even frequently, feeling you don’t know what is going on. Equally, you almost certainly know more than you, yourself, recognize.

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Being Festive about Women in STEM

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Athene Donald

Last week I attended an event at Murray Edwards College, a Women in STEM Festival. Dorothy Byrne, their President though not herself a scientist (she studied Philosophy at Manchester), had done a fantastic job in bringing together a wide range of speakers to discuss the thorny topic of the lack of women across the STEM disciplines. Should pride of place go to the discussion she chaired between the Vice Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge? For the first time both are women, and both come from a science background. Irene Tracey is Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience at Oxford (as well as former Warden of Merton College) and Debbie Prentice, rather freshly arrived in Cambridge from Princeton where she was Provost, is a psychologist. To hear them talk about their ambitions in their roles, and their wish to see collaborations grow between their universities, was refreshing. They emphasized the importance of ensuring the academic environment does not allow so many female academics to ‘leak’ from the career ladder (see the write-up already published in the THE) and making sure there are on-ramps at different stages in a career.

Or maybe the highpoint was Chi Onwurah’s slightly breathless visit to talk about her career as an engineer (she studied Electrical Engineering at Imperial, a place she appears not to be very fond of judging by remarks I heard her make previously when I interviewed her during the pandemic). Not only did she talk about the satisfaction she got from her engineering career, including setting up the networking infrastructure in Nigeria encompassing her father’s home town, but also about what an incoming Labour Government has its eyes on doing in this space. She talked with great passion and commitment and, of course, is – through her role as a Shadow Minister for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – well-placed to see these ideas come to fruition. Someone definitely committed to facilitating careers for women in STEM.

Her talk was followed by that from another key woman in the engineering world, Hayatuun Sillem, CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering, another person with the opportunity to make a real difference for nascent engineers. After her speech she joined a panel discussing STEM careers ‘image problem’, as the programme put it. All speakers were clear that engineering covered so many areas but, sadly, too many teachers did not know the breadth of opportunities that the field opened up. As Hayatuun put it, there is a hard hat problem in images (for instance on Google), as well as a lack of gender diversity. Indeed, she pointed out there was more diversity in hat colour than sex to be found in such photographs.

I am quite sure that for many in the audience – itself diverse in age although less so in gender, ranging from Murray Edwards’ alumnae from the college’s earliest years to KS4 girls from schools in Cambridge and the East End of London – the highlight was the inaugural talk from Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Jocelyn was characteristically modest, but her wry comments about some of the statistics she presented highlighted the problems women still face in their careers. One point she identified that I had never myself previously put into the ‘unconscious bias’ category, is the habitual way forms requesting people to identify their sex as M or F, always put the M box to tick first. Not, as she pointed out, alphabetical order but a symptom of bias. My somewhat similar bête noire is when lists (e.g. of committee members) identify the woman with an F, while not identifying the male as anything: male by default as the head of my university’s HR put it some years ago when I complained. I am not convinced the practice has been wholly eradicated though. Allowing for non-binary choices may mean all such identifying initials disappear in the future.

There was far too much that was excellent to spell it all out, but the one additional point I will make which worries me was identified explicitly in the Q+A after my own talk about my book. Aren’t you preaching to the converted? was the question. And of course the answer was yes: within the specific audience at the Festival who were, I believe, all invited and who were overwhelmingly female, this was definitely the case. But also more generally, the wider world does not necessarily notice the issues which arise in this arena. I’ve said before, I wish I could find a way of reaching teachers, because I believe the problems of stereotyping around what boys and girls ‘should’ do and find interesting arise at very early ages. Teachers have the opportunity to try to counter the stereotypes portrayed in the media and in the way toys are marketed but, as far as I can see, advice to do so, let alone how to do so, do not form part of a teacher’s training. Certainly, the remarks Katharine Birbalsingh made to the Commons Diversity in STEM enquiry last year showed how ill-informed even highly-rated (head)teachers can be.

But there is also the problem of women talking to themselves. That there were few men there, as at so many similar talks, is also a concern. Women cannot solve this problem by themselves. Men have to understand the loss to the economy and to scientific research, as well as the damage to the individuals who lose out due to our current structures. And then, they need to recognize what needs to change. Many women are fed up with fighting this fight; many men seem oblivious to how the system propagates so that women need to go on fighting. When I talk, for instance to student or early career researcher talks, I am always pleased to see the men in the audience nodding at my arguments, but sometimes they may be thin on the ground.

And finally, and perhaps more controversially, is it right that an event should have no male speakers? Many a conference has been pilloried for not having an adequate percentage of female speakers. Although I totally understand why there were no men on the platform in Murray Edwards and all the women I heard (I missed the final afternoon) were absolutely outstanding in their talks and discussions (I exclude myself!), nevertheless, this is a problem for the whole population and we should all be talking about it, thrashing out solutions together. I always feel conflicted about this, just as I do when I’m asked, as I was, about whether an all-woman’s college – as Murray Edwards still is at student level – has a place in the UK today. I understand why some people still feel it has, and appreciate the splendid things it does, and yet…we don’t want to reinvent all male colleges. I worry about the asymmetry of this situation.

 

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Voice: Finding Yours

Posted on October 23, 2023 by Athene Donald

Last week I was the protagonist in the curious ritual called a ‘post-prandial’ talk at my College (Churchill). In other words, after the whole Fellowship had met for the formal governance activity known as ‘Governing Body’, and after dinner (prandium is actually the Latin word for the midday meal, but somewhere along the way this name for the after-dinner seminar has stuck), I had to give my talk. The last time I had to go through this particular ordeal was as part of the interview process for the job of Master at Churchill, when I was asked to talk for about 20 minutes to a general audience of the Fellowship (ie scientists and non-scientists alike, who all had a vote as to who they wanted to be the next Master back in 2013) about my research after dinner. A challenge to make it both exciting to the former and accessible as well as accessible to the latter. Now 10 years later, I was asked, at about 3-days notice, to step in and talk about anything I wanted (I chose some of the work I’ve been doing about science policy) to a similar generalist audience.

Of course, the first thing to get through on such an occasion, is dinner, with quizzing from some younger members of the College. “Do I still get nervous?” – yes. “Really?” – yes, and as I said to them, it’s definitely worse talking to your friends and colleagues than to a much larger group of complete strangers who you’ll never see again. How do the nerves manifest themselves? My voice does not often shake these days (I’m sure it used to). But in the circumstances of the Labour Party Conference Fringe event I wrote about in my last post, undoubtedly my fluency departed, as confirmed afterwards by a friend in the audience. On that occasion, I was largely reading from my scripted notes, to make sure I covered all the bases that I intended, rather than ad-libbing around a Powerpoint presentation. Since the notes had had to be hastily amended in scrawled handwriting, as I described before, I felt both thrown out and overly anxious. My speech was more jerky than fluent as I tried to piece it together into something coherent. On this more recent occasion in College, with a rapidly written Powerpoint to hand, once I’d got underway I felt the words flowed quite easily (I had not drunk much of the wine proffered over dinner; flow is different from slurring).

My observations on my own research students and postdocs suggests a shy demeanour and/or nerves does not necessarily manifest itself in any visible or audible signs, nor is an excellent presentation predicated on daily exuded confidence. One of my Friday dinner companions remarked their voice tended to rise when tense, but you’d have to know the person well to detect that. However, there is no doubt that voice pitch can matter, at least to some people. I have never forgotten the comment made to me many years ago by a well-meaning departmental colleague, to the effect that perhaps I should take voice-coaching lessons to lower my voice. I was utterly appalled by this, the very idea that gravitas is more readily conveyed by a low (presumably male?) voice, regardless of content stunned me. But, this was a trick Maggie Thatcher clearly believed in, even though the rumour that she went to a voice coach may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, she certainly did lower her voice and, if the article in that link is to be believed, probably damaged her vocal chords in the process since she had not apparently had any coaching.

If you’re concerned about your voice, there are those who advocate thinking yourself powerful before giving a talk apparently, not a tactic I’ve ever used. I’m usually more concerned about content than sonority. However, this specific study suggested those who imagined themselves in a ‘powerful condition’ deliberately raised the pitch of their voices, in contrast to the comments about Thatcher. I suspect, as this commentary about the publication in Forbes points out, there are gender issues at play here, that are not pursued in the original paper. However, as this comment piece spells out, and in line with what I say above, ‘In fact for me, what conveys power is the substance of what the speaker says, not the pitch or the variability of volume.’ Quite. This journalist and I are both more interested in content than auditory tricks.

But voice has other meanings, such as that of authenticity. Management gurus such as Brené Brown are great believers in authenticity as a powerful way for leaders to speak. I think it would be true that, when at the Labour Party fringe event the words were carefully chosen for that audience, and in that sense less authentic than many of my talks, since political speech is not my natural language. At the post-prandial I would have been talking about my own doings (in that particular case, also in the policy arena) and not some hypothetical wishlist for policy-makers to hear. I hope that more recent talk made me sound convincing, as well as fluent.

Psychologist Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book, In a Different Voice, which I am currently re-reading, discusses yet another sense in which ‘voice’ is used. Gilligan is talking about how adolescents, and particularly young women, develop a voice (in the sense of content, not pitch) that is what they believe to be right, even if it isn’t what they genuinely believe. They lose their authenticity in order to fit in with what they perceive to be expected of them or, as Gilligan puts it, they lose their connectedness with their inner self. She sees this as one of the ways in which women shortchange themselves, and are shortchanged, by a patriarchal society where the male voice/view is taken as the norm and any deviation as ‘less developed’, allowing women to be seen as sub-standard men rather than fully-rounded women. These are ideas she builds upon in her much more recent (2018) book Why does Patricarchy Persist?, co-written with Naomi Snider. These approaches are not ones that I utilised in my own book, Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science, but perhaps I should have done. My book is rested far more in the social sciences (such as gender and educational studies) than in psychology.

Voice is not simple, and we each develop our own tricks for survival and for communication. Sometimes what we use relates to our audiences, and sometimes – perhaps not often enough in our daily lives – to our inner selves.

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