Work Experience

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Athene Donald

Alan Milburn’s interim diagnostic report, Young People and Work, looking into the causes of the substantial increase in NEETs (18-24 year olds Not in Education, Employment or Training), makes sober reading. The causes are many, across multiple Government departments and national and local organisations, and Milburn identifies the overarching problem as a lack of system’s thinking: lots of individuals and bodies attempting to do good stuff, but insufficiently joined up with other good folk elsewhere. As he puts it

‘There is no system in Britain that takes young people from education into work as adults. There are institutions, programmes and many good intentions. But there is no actual system’.

We will have to wait a few more months to see the final report and recommendations, but the shape of what he wants to see develop is probably well articulated in those few lines.

Much has been written about what he has uncovered during his investigations and interviews. It should be a wake-up call, as many commentators have noted, if the number of NEETS – and therefore the cost both to the individual and society – is not simply to go on rising. This is not a case of a snowflake generation, or an aftermath of the pandemic, the problems sit well beyond such factors impacting at the individual level, due to the systemic vacuum.

One of the complaints often made is that young people are not ‘work-ready’. It makes me wonder how former generations ever learned those skills implied. Work experience wasn’t a ‘thing’ when I was at school, and certainly it was never suggested I had a Saturday job or a paper round, although presumably such would have been available. However, applying for jobs was undoubtedly much more straightforward, with far less formality through forms, psychological testing and/or assessment centres. When I look back to the first job I had, it was such an unremarkable affair I have no record of either applying or being offered it in my teenage diary.

My memory is that I saw an advertisement in a strange publication called The Lady (which still exists) for essentially a temporary, live-in kitchen skivvy over the summer. I can only imagine I sent in a letter and got the job, although none of this made it into my diary (although earlier in the year I did note that my family thought it unlikely I’d manage to get myself a job, so it must have been discussed). At just 16, though, I did note I ‘went and got myself an insurance card’ – who told me how to do it, I’ve no idea, (I’m not sure my mother would ever have had one by this point, as she didn’t have a job), but the local DHSS equivalent was housed in a sort of Portakabin not too far away and I must just have strolled in.

So, I got myself a job working at the Field Studies Centre at Flatford Mill (it’s still there) in Suffolk, John Constable’s old home, a fascinating building surrounded by locations that he painted and that I was able to explore. I was thrown in at the deep end, having arrived late one afternoon. The next day my diary tells me ‘Got up at 6.55 to start work at 7’ – that seems very casual, not how I might have imagined I’d deal with my first day on the job, but my bedroom was straight above the kitchen, so travel was not an issue. ‘First peeled potatoes in an electric machine.’ This was simply a tub that whizzed around with a rough surface to take the top layer off. Stop concentrating and leave them too long there and there wasn’t much potato left; that certainly occurred sometimes on my watch. I continue:

‘7.45 have breakfast and then rush through washing up students’ breakfast. Then sweep refectory [sic], polish tables, wash tea towels, sweep and wash pantry, wash up oddments etc. All very hard work right through till 1.’

I don’t record any views on all of this, but it must have been a real shock to the system. I hadn’t been particularly domestic at home, and I’m sure I’d never used a washboard, which was all I was given to wash the tea towels. And so it goes on. The last remark about that first day was ‘I expect I will enjoy myself’, although I suspect this was as much because I was looking forward to being independent, away from home for the first time, and getting out into the rather lovely surrounding countryside. Now, were such a job still to exist, no doubt there would be large numbers of applicants, people in their gap year, or indeed a NEET, almost all able to demonstrate some prior ability around domesticity. The problem of living away from home, so often a limiting factor for young people today seeking work, wasn’t an issue for me, since board and lodging were included, even if it was fairly basic.

Although the afternoons of the job were free for me, as the students were out doing their fieldwork, I did have to come back on duty late afternoon around the students’ supper, and sometimes I also had to do end-of-day ‘tea duty’. Here is another example of how unfit I was for this role. Tea duty consisted of putting on a large boiler to heat up water for the tea, and I clearly got this wrong on multiple occasions: not enough water, forgetting to turn it on, even forgetting to plug it in. I note wryly

‘if I’d been going to be here more than a month, they’d probably sack me’.

That last sentence probably highlights the problem for many people in their first job. Being overwhelmed leads to forgetfulness, leading to apparent incompetence. I didn’t get sacked – which would have left them short-staffed in the kitchen – and I hope I got more reliable by the end of the month I was there. The other thing I learned – still a key lesson and part of being ‘work ready’ – was that you were expected to turn up, regardless of circumstances. I was prone to regular migraines at this point, and they were incredibly painful and wretched (in the days before I found effective medication, which at least now ameliorates them), requiring an extended period in a darkened room. But I remember being chased out of my room to come and do my evening shift; shirking my duty was not acceptable, another lesson those who are now deemed ‘not work-ready’ may not get a second chance to learn.

Thinking back to this first foray into the workforce, I do think how lucky I was, how much easier it was for me than those too often termed ‘snowflakes’. I applied for one job, I got it, without anything more than a letter in response to an advertisement, with no real assessment of my abilities (a good slew of O Levels hardly counted, since they would have been utterly irrelevant for sweeping the floor), or even needing to produce a reference. Just as well, as a letter from my Physics teacher would hardly have helped either. Having got the job, despite being somewhat flakey, no one tried to get rid of me after a couple of weeks.

How different for those starting out today. Read the statistics in the Milburn Review, or tales from the NEETs of today, who struggle to get past the first stage in any job application, who can’t afford to travel to an interview, or there is no public transport to allow them to take on shift work….it is tough for those who have little support, financial or moral. I look forward to reading the second part of the report when suggestions for how to turn the situation around for the young are put forward. As a country, we cannot afford (morally or financially) to let so many people down.

 

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Jealousy, Bullying, Harassment and Other Bad Behaviour

Posted on May 10, 2026 by Athene Donald

Recently I sat down to dinner with two old friends, one male,one female. Our conversation turned to harassment and what emerged was pretty grim. The man referred to an incident when an older and powerful woman had groped him during an important conversation (presumably under the table), which I guess was not a story I was expecting. The woman, like me, could share many incidences of petty indignities and inappropriate behaviour occurring at different career stages. We had all survived, but were no doubt coloured by our experiences.

But harassment, and its close relation bullying, comes in many flavours. It doesn’t have to be sexual in nature, but it almost invariably involves some sort of power imbalance, real or perceived. That is why it is so particularly common directed against early career researchers, but power can take many shapes. Who controls budgets, teaching loads or signing off of grants, for instance, each of which will give a measure of power regardless of seniority. Does it count as bullying when a senior professor, I’ll call them Professor Z, refuses to teach, because it’s more important to get grants, and so leaves the work to junior faculty (Dr Y) – who of course can’t then find the time to apply for grants themselves? This is such a common problem in my experience (although not, I’m glad to say, in my own department where such behaviour was not tolerated). If that does count as bullying, who is the perpetrator? The junior faculty member is put in an impossible position since who do they complain to? Should it be the head of the teaching committee (or equivalent), the head of department or Professor Z? Each will pass the buck undoubtedly, and the complainant will gain a black mark against their name simply for complaining. Yet the reality is that the power imbalance is being used in ways that hinder the career progression of Dr Y.

That is a clear case of egotism/selfishness driving bad behaviour. There are many other motivators ranging from anxiety to jealousy, causing bullying across the faculty chain, and so often no one does anything. On one occasion, when I was on a panel appointing a new lecturer, one professor (Professor A) essentially accused me of not knowing what I was talking about, although I was the most expert member in the room on the particular sub-discipline in question, and certainly more knowledgeable than Professor A was in the area. I was so taken aback I said nothing. Nor did anyone else. At my subsequent appraisal I raised the matter, surprised both that no one had defended me nor had any follow-up apology been made. I was told the professor in question was waiting for me to apologise. For what? Again, I was too startled to defend myself. It left me feeling isolated and uncertain. The cause of the outburst was undoubtedly because I wasn’t being supportive of Professor A’s preferred candidate, and so he chose this particular weapon to neutralise my position. It’s easy to deconstruct the remark with hindsight. I’d like to think in later years I’d have been better able to defend myself.

Jealousy can play out in lots of ways, such as an attempt to knock an opponent out of the action, and can be implemented at a structural level, even – as I’m observing from afar – directed against senior and successful folk by other senior but less successful academics. A head of department can facilitate such action, by blocking funding or space to go to the successful professor (let’s call them Professor L) to allow their work to flourish. Why would they want to do this? Jealousy again, or possibly an unwise decision to back the wrong horse.   Professor L can sit there puzzled why their loyal behaviour – perhaps fulfilled by dutifully and brilliantly delivering their teaching load – and excellent grant successes are being penalised. Again, just as for a younger colleague, making a complaint can only cause the behaviour to worsen.

What head of department wants to be reminded of their misjudgements? They can feel guilty and lash out as a result. I was once greeted by one head of department, who undoubtedly had just caved in to a more senior professor to my detriment, with the completely gob-smacking but effective remark of ‘how long do you want to rant at me this time, Athene?’. Yet again, I had no response; he had successfully neutralised my would-be complaint, while making it clear I could let off steam and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Do they teach senior management useful phrases like this to derail complainants? Was that harassment or bullying? It was certainly using a power imbalance to put me in my place and, the source in this case, was undoubtedly and rather visibly that the head of department had felt his own weakness in the face of another senior professor’s no doubt tantrum.

That was but a passing annoyance, with fairly limited damage to me. But a long-running campaign against Professor L can be much more damaging, and yet can occur slowly but steadily over years. When PhD students are distributed, does Professor L get their fair share over the years? When a university sift for a big grant call is carried out, does Professor L’s undoubtedly strong case make the cut? When they are elected to their national academy, does the department celebrate or does it say – as happened to a friend of mine – that it ‘wasn’t their turn’ and therefore they wouldn’t celebrate the success? To take an extreme example, when Christiane Nűsslein-Volhard was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Director of her institute told her ‘Can you please organise the champagne yourself. I’ve no time to take that.’ As she put it ‘some colleagues couldn’t bear I got the prize.’

Our universities are as full of insecure people as anywhere else, indeed it’s probably a worse environment because competition sits at the heart of what we do, the drive to be first, to get that grant, to receive that accolade and so on. So, being flawed human beings, people will use whatever weapons they have to hand, driven by jealousy and anxiety.

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The Desolation of Success

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Athene Donald

Does this phrase strike a chord with you? Apparently, it first appeared in Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, but I came across it quoted in Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s moving memoir Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman. As she puts it, and here she is discussing the feelings of those who get elected to the National Academy of Sciences:

Success and its presumed partner, happiness, are ever-receding.

In other words, however much those who aspire to election feel unhappy each year that passes them by without the desired recognition, yet when it arrives it merely confirms that success doesn’t bring unlimited happiness.  She also recognizes it as a feeling associated with, for instance, the award of tenure (in the US system), that feeling of a loss of meaning when the outcome is actually achieved.

Why struggle onward with new scientific discoveries, when only a few people in the world really care? What do I have to work toward now?

I wonder how common that reaction to tenure – or any other measure of success – really is. I know, when I was promoted to Reader (that obscure and now defunct title in the University of Cambridge that, in my day, was the stepping stone between what was still the career grade of Lecturer and full Professor), my reaction was ‘is that it?’ A reflection of the fact that, having worked flat out to establish myself and try to convince myself that I did indeed deserve to be on the Physics faculty, I suddenly wondered if that level of commitment had really been worth it. In time I adjusted, and did not have the same reaction when, a few years later, I got further promoted to Professor. I was simply overjoyed. Nevertheless, that phrase, the desolation of success, did resonate with me when I read it in the Elkins-Tanton book.

It is just another way of referring to the old idea, that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. A long-wished-for destination may turn out to be, if not dust and ashes, at the very least less than had been hoped for when it finally turns up. It is as true in academia as anywhere else in life. And, academia being the competitive world that it is, it is also so much easier to remember the things that didn’t work out, compared with those that did. To smart from that rejection letter from the editor of Nature twenty years after the event, or to recall a position that had briefly seemed like your dream opportunity, but which went – naturally unfairly in your opinion – to your lab mate. Schadenfreude points out that in fact the project you didn’t get a chance to take on went nowhere and you were well out of it, but it’s the rejection that stings, however long ago this all took place.

Nevertheless, in terms of the opposite of the desolation of success, maybe one should also consider that there are upsides to failure. After all, would one paper in Nature from 20 years ago really transform a lifetime of research, however wounding the rejection felt at the time. Much of the impact, at least internally, will be how one copes with it. Does it spur one on to better things, to work harder or perhaps change field – or even career to somewhere better suiting your strengths? Or does it prompt an extended period of self-loathing and depression? We are all different in how we cope with such setbacks, and context really matters, so that how we cope with one rejection may bear no relation to our reaction to a different one.

As I indicated above, I certainly felt an element of the ‘desolation of success’ when I’d achieved more than I’d ever dreamt of by mid-career. But earlier, I had responded very positively to a kick in the teeth when failing to get the position I thought was in the bag. I’d been somewhat coasting while waiting (for months) for a formal decision and was stunned by my failure. However, I was so annoyed I thought ‘I’d show them’ and reapplied myself with great vigour, transforming myself from being somewhat idle in the lab to an absolutely determined researcher. Those around me must have been startled since I was too embarrassed to explain my reinvention, the cause of which would have been invisible to them. The upshot of all this was that, far from heading back to the USA as a faculty member, I stayed in the UK, working my way up through the system, starting with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship awarded from its first cohort. Staying in the UK is definitely not something I regret, but it’s curious to think what a key turning point that moment was. Rejection can be good for you – but only sometimes.

I guess the ‘moral’ of this post is to say, success – in whatever field – may not necessarily bring joy, nor failure mean disaster. If failure turns you aside into a more healthy direction (perhaps instead of following the dreams of others for you, but finally pursuing your own) it may be the best thing that ever happened. Or it may not. But do not assume anyone who is a ‘success’ is necessarily happy. They may instead be constantly chasing the next trophy and never feeling satisfied, as there is always another target to aim at.

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Women in Tech: A Call for Action

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Athene Donald

283 years! That was the figure the DSIT Secretary of State stated would be the length of time it would take, at current rates of progress, for women to make up 50% of the Tech workforce at a reception at Number 10 last week, to celebrate the work of the Women in Tech taskforce. She spoke with great passion about the need to ensure full involvement of women in this sector. As she said, it’s not just the moral case, but the imperative of making sure women’s concerns are addressed, be it in healthcare, femtech or any of the other spheres in which AI and its like are blossoming yet women are not.

Beside her stood Anne-Marie Imafidon, the taskforce’s co-chair, whose work with young girls through Stemettes has been so influential, for both the individual girls and the community. Her work is part of the effort to make sure the pipeline of female talent is healthy, that young girls are not deterred because of societal attitudes (including of their peers) but flourish in those subjects that feed into the tech arena in later years. Children are very susceptible to the views of the adults around them, or that they see on a screen. There is plenty of evidence to this effect, such as the long-running ASPIRES project, led by Louise Archer, one of the task force members. The Institute of Physics has likewise investigated the wider problems for girls in the classroom over many years, and suggested initiatives to reduce the obvious gender biases. Yet, little seems to be changing. I’m not sure where the precise figure of 283 years that Liz Kendall mentioned came from, but a glacial speed of change seems about right.

At the moment, the taskforce is focussing on women already in the workforce, making sure they thrive there and that they move into leadership roles without bias and outdated attitudes thwarting their progression. Work on the talent pipeline will come later this summer.  One hopes that work coming out of the Curriculum and Assessment Review will feed into that, making Computing GCSE, for instance, more appealing. That is one of the subjects set for a major refresh, so there should be lots of scope to make the content both relevant to the world of today (and not the world of ten plus years ago) and not just designed for the type of kid who sees building kit as the be all and end all of computing, or have Steve Jobs or Bill Gates as their heroes. The world of tech has changed and the sorts of people moving into it need to change too. Diversity of thought and approach will only become increasingly important; they are also badly needed, if we are to create AI systems, for instance, which are representative of all of society.

Liz KendallSecretary of State, Liz Kendall, at the reception

But it isn’t just the content of the curriculum that needs a refresh, but also the way the gender stereotypes are handled, both in course materials and in the language (and actions) in the classroom. If teachers, or peers, imply girls don’t belong in the world of tech, in maths, physics of engineering, many girls will take that to heart. To give a couple of recent examples that have come my way, a female primary class teacher who admits she struggles with maths may lead the girls to assume they are likely to struggle too, and the boys to internalise the idea that girls/women are just useless at the subject. Both may carry those ideas forward into later life, neither of which will be healthy views to hold.

And in a different, but parallel example, showing how early on girls internalise messages I could cite a 6 year old family member who wanted to play football. The first club she joined was allegedly mixed, but she was the only girl and consequently miserable. A girls only club was located; a definite improvement until a girl in her class stated baldly that ‘girls don’t play football’, after which she gave up. Replace football with computing or coding and it is all too easy to see why the current pipeline of girls is so poor. Even when surrounded by other girls at the club, a single negative view can be enough to act as a deterrent. One would hope in a classroom that a teacher might quash such statements, but that requires both that a teacher heard the remark and that they felt it was inappropriate. It is that latter requirement that I fear may not always be fulfilled, and why I would like to see more attention paid to the topic of gender stereotyping across every school, as well as in teacher training.

outside no 10 for women in tech reception Outside the famous door of No 10.

In the room at No 10 last week, there was a palpable buzz. Many like-minded women (and almost entirely women, perhaps not surprisingly although that does trouble me a little), all of us committed to the ‘cause’ and active in one way or another. It was a stimulating day – quite apart from the interest that I, for one, felt in stepping through that famous black door – and much food for thought, as well as a metaphorical call for further action from everyone in the room.

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