Why We Still Need Ada Lovelace Day

Posted on October 11, 2022 by Athene Donald

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in science and inspire future generations. It is often said that ‘you cannot be what you cannot see’, and if young children only ever see images of men as scientists, how are they to realise that girls too can participate? This was a point I made to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee when I gave evidence to their enquiry on diversity in STEM earlier this year.

I stressed there that the absence of named women scientists in the national curriculum is a gaping hole, one that will not make it easy for a girl to imagine that she belongs. It is a point that I may well use again when I present evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee enquiry on People and Skills in UK Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics next week, although I await further details about the precise line of questioning they intend to follow.

Needing to know that people like you are able to pursue the dreams you have is clearly important to encourage individuals to stick with their aspirations. In a very different context, I was very struck at the weekend to hear Fleur East (singer-songwriter-presenter), a celebrity contestant on Strictly, commenting on seeing a trailer of the next version of the cartoon the Little Mermaid, starring a character of colour. She said something along the lines of how much it would have mattered to her as a child to have seen such a character. Ok, she wasn’t dreaming of becoming a mermaid, but clearly a starring role in anything might have seemed unachievable if all she saw were white exemplars. (Many cartoons have of course started to redress this balance).

Ada Lovelace Day is a day to stress all the women who have made a difference in the scientific sphere, in whatever guise. They may be teachers or communicators rather than Nobel Prize winners, but their contribution to the overall scientific enterprise needs to be celebrated. Highlighting their actions and lives is one way of reminding school children that, whatever they look like, whatever their background, there is a place for them in science if they want it. Increasingly, if you are a parent you can find books that tell real life or fictional stories about women making their way in STEM: for instance biographies of Marie Curie suitable for a range of ages; Katherine Johnson’s autobiography aimed at early teens (Reaching for the Moon); or books about the fictional Rosie Revere, a girl with passion for inventing things. Lots of good reading matter, if you happen to come from a family with funds and inclination to bring such women to your attention. If you come from a less advantaged or informed background, the National Curriculum should be able to inspire you, so that it is depressing that the gap is not formally plugged to allow children from whatever family circumstances to be still aware of this reality.

Ada Lovelace is perhaps an unlikely icon for all of this, being the daughter of Lord Byron, whose life was tragically short, but she was a remarkable woman who made the most of her unusual upbringing and education (her mother was so frightened that she might follow in her father’s footsteps that she focussed her education on mathematics and not poetry). She was friends with Mary Somerville, but it was her association with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine, that has led to her memory being celebrated. In 1843 she translated and extensively annotated an article written by the Italian mathematician and engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea, “Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage”, in which she set out the rudiments of a computational algorithm for the first time.

Ada Lovelace Day was initiated in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson but now seems under threat, in large part due to a lack of sponsorship. However, to think that we have reached a point where the problem about women in science is ‘fixed’ would be naïve in the extreme. One only has to think about the comments Katherine Barbalsingh made to the same Commons Select Committee I referred to above, to realise how far from the truth that is. There is still much work to be done to ensure that anyone, regardless of skin colour or chromosome distribution, is able to pursue a career in STEM if that is what they want to do. I do hope that Ada Lovelace Day will be able to continue.

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The Future of Skills and Education?

Posted on October 2, 2022 by Athene Donald

It is only six weeks since I last wrote about skills on this blog. Not, you might think, a very long time for change to happen. And yet much has. A new monarch (probably the least important for the theme of this post), a new PM, a new Chancellor, and a new direction of travel which, currently, is far from finding favour in the markets. It is also the Conference season; we wait to see quite what turmoil the Conservative Conference unleashes, following Labour’s rather successful one. (We will never know what the LibDems would have done, due to their need to cancel.)

All the signs from the Government seem to be worrying when it comes to investment in Jo Public, infrastructure and innovation. There is still no science minister and, interesting though it is that the ONS has significantly uplifted its analysis of investment in R+D (to put more weight on that done by SMEs), so that it is now much closer to HMRC’s calculations, this change in their estimate does not resolve the productivity puzzle. Productivity (output per hour) has been near to flat since the 2008 financial crash, leaving the economy in a very fragile state made worse by the consequences of Brexit and the pandemic.

Economic growth and increased productivity require (amongst other things) skilled workers, with the right skills in the right place. It requires both that school and university leavers have acquired relevant skills and that they know what career trajectories are open to them. It also requires that adults, who trained decades ago, are able to reskill or upskill to be able to take on the jobs that are available to them now, which may be very different from those accessible to them when they left school or college. In order for all these strands to be working, there needs to be investment in appropriate courses and facilities.

Briefly, it looked as if the Lifelong Learning Entitlement might offer hope to make it easier for people to drop in and out of education according to their needs and the requirements of their local job market. However, although this has been much talked about, the Treasury never signed off on it and, with all the present noises about ‘cuts’, it seems quite possible they never will. Yet the need for workers to be able to update their skills has never been more urgent.

Under the last Labour government, a variety of schemes were introduced with the intent of reducing inequality, starting from birth. Sure Start aimed at ensuring that children from disadvantaged families did not immediately fall behind their middle class peers before they’d even started school. The Education Maintenance Allowance, was a payment to poorer students to incentivise them to stay at school post GCSE. Both these schemes still operate in parts of the UK, but not in England, despite evidence being gathered to show that both were cost-effective, although in the long term rather than the short.

The UK is now in a situation where teacher training has been upended by changes in the accreditation process, and there is a 40% shortfall in recruitment of trainee teachers starting this autumn. The situation is much worse for secondary school teachers than for primary. Given that teacher retention of trained teachers is also a massive problem, there will be many schools with significant shortages of teachers in the years ahead. This has long been a problem with Physics, but it would seem it is going to become prevalent across all disciplines. Anecdote tells of language teachers being asked to teach maths, because there are few pupils wanting to study languages coupled with a dearth of maths teachers. A lack of teachers can only mean large class sizes and restriction of subject choice, neither boding well for generations of students and their future careers. Teachers having to teach outside their comfort zone and qualifications are less likely to inspire the young.

For those students who do not acquire good qualifications at Level 2 (GCSE), their future career options are limited. More opportunities for them to improve their qualifications in later years need to be on offer, and this requires investment in the colleges which will provide such courses as well as financial support for the individual, so that they can afford to take up the opportunities that are available to them. The LLE would have provided such support, but it was due to be a loan, and I always wondered how many individuals, perhaps already with families to support, would have felt able to take on the financial liability. A grant would be much more attractive (as well as expensive). But perhaps we will never find out if the LLE could have worked, if the Treasury sits on its approval.

Instead, what we’ve already learned from this government is that the extremely wealthy will get tax cuts, and the cuts the rest of the population are likely to feel seem set to be on welfare and infrastructure. As yet there has been no talk of investment into the crumbling infrastructure of hospitals, schools, FE Colleges and transport; or investment in the people who are needed to run these. The words uttered by numerous politicians that they aspire for the UK to be a global science superpower will be empty rhetoric without the investment to make this possible. Association with the EU over science seems a dream that will never come to fruition, and so-called Plan B, ill-defined though it may have been, looks a potential target for more of these cuts we are hearing about. Science will not thrive under these circumstances. We will lose scientists, engineers and technicians, we will lose innovation opportunities and productivity will not receive the fillip it needs. We are damaging our future as well as our present, by not investing in education and skills at an appropriate level. These are tough times.

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Impostors at a Conference

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Athene Donald

September has always been a busy time for conferences, and I have attended a fair few in my time. However, the one I attended this week was the first scientific one I recall having impostor syndrome publicly mentioned several times, both explicitly and implicitly. This was the conference to mark (belatedly) my retirement, and it was all of joyous, moving and weird from my perspective. No doubt there are other perspectives! You can read the report from the editor of Physics World, Matin Durrani, my former student and active participant in the meeting, to get a different view.

The conference covered many topics, because my research and scientific activities have, and a wide variety of different themes were teased out. It was organised, necessarily twice because the pandemic prevented the first manifestation coming to pass, by my long term friends and collaborators Richard Jones and Ruth Cameron. Ruth was my student; Richard technically was not, but as he put it I ‘offered a helping hand to waifs and orphans’ when his supervisor left the country. Listening to others describe my career, gave a very peculiar feeling. Who is this person whose life seems so logical and tidy, for instance, according to the narrative Richard constructed to open the meeting? I suppose the meeting fulfilled the wish Robert Burns expressed in his poem To a Louse

‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!’.

Research is full of dead ends, which if introduced would no doubt have spoilt the narrative. So Richard did not mention the thesis of a student whose every experiment came up with a null result, for instance, and glossed over the episode of the tilting cartridge I mentioned in my last blogpost, as well as other hiccoughs on the route to what I know appears to be a highly successful career.

My memories of the meeting, even only 48 hours later, are already rather a blur; there was too much emotion tied up in listening to all the talks for great clarity of recollection. I think it was Matin who described what he felt was the pecking order in the Cavendish when he arrived, with theoretical particle physicists at the top and the sort of work my group was doing in the messy world of soft matter (polymers, biopolymers, cement, food, starch granules, paint….all got a mention during the meeting) somewhere near the bottom. And also, how he felt that he was an impostor, even if he didn’t know the phrase at the time.

The idea of a pecking order is interesting: there are many versions of it in science of course, but there is absolutely no doubt that a complex system was, back in the 1990s when Matin joined me, all but beyond the collective department’s pale. I have not forgotten the comments from the (by then retired) Cavendish Professor, Sir Brian Pippard, that ‘things have come to a sad pass when people at the Cavendish study starch’. Matin wasn’t studying starch itself, but aqueous mixtures of biopolymers, relevant to many foodstuffs, during what Richard had termed ‘The Cheesy Wotsit years’ in his talk. (Yes, I worked on the vanilla version of Cheesy Wotsits, aka known as extruded starch foams, i.e. the wotsit sans flavourings and colour.) That was, and is, the kind of comment that can sap morale, and make one wonder what one is doing in a department, but I guess I’m fairly obstinate and I wasn’t going to let that derail me, whatever the angst the remark caused.

Matin was talking in a panel discussion on the difficulties of interdisciplinary working. Having my REF Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel colleague, anthropologist Veronica Strang, on the panel introduced a fascinating social science perspective on the challenges (in itself highlighting the importance of interdisciplinarity). She pointed out how the ‘other’ can invoke hostility, and I guess being interdisciplinary will always be ‘other’ to those who stick to the straight and narrow. Our current structures – departments and funding panels for instance – tend to favour monodisciplinary approaches, in part because of the teaching demands a department must handle. The panel itself was all the richer for its disciplinary diversity (the third speaker was Mark Leake, current chair of the IOP’s Biological Physics group of which I was the founding chair).

I got to say a few words after the dinner, and I returned to the impostor syndrome theme, this time explicitly. Regular readers of this blog will know that it is a topic I feel needs a good airing (e.g here) and it is a feeling that I am not ashamed to admit to. However, I still get the feeling that students and early career researchers imagine it is something one overcomes and then life is easier. I suspect most people suffer from it, whether or not they’ve got a label for their feelings, and I suspect for few of us does it dissipate, even if success attends us. Certainly, on the second day, there were several more senior scientists admitting to it, male and female. It can only be healthy for it to be acknowledged. It is good if it sneaks into a regular science session, rather than one simply aimed at confidence building or solely for women. We all bring our whole selves to our scientific endeavour, and impostor syndrome may well be part of that self.

However, it wasn’t a conference about impostor syndrome! I was touched by the way some of my former students recalled advice I had given them all those years ago. Advice such as ‘don’t be afraid to say no’, and ‘negotiate a better starting package’, were what erstwhile postdoc Aline Miller recalled (as well as ‘don’t wear jeans or they may think you’re a student’) when she went to take up a lectureship. The photo here that I took during Joe Keddie’s talk, about watching paint dry, indicates what he remembers of my advice, possibly updated overnight to bring in the imposter syndrome theme. (Joe was actually not working directly with me, but with Richard, but we wrote several papers together literally about watching paint dry. Much more interesting than you might imagine.) I would stand by all these pieces of advice and it moves me to think people took my messages to heart and still remember them so many years later.

Joe Keddie's conclusions AMD conference

I guess I really am retired now, now the conference is over (although I am of course still Master of Churchill College for another two years). It was a wonderful conference, delightful to see my former students and postdocs thriving, delightful to be able to meet in person. Thank you to all of them. I hope they continue to thrive as I melt into the background.

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Dodgy Encounters with a Fragile Piece of Equipment

Posted on August 31, 2022 by Athene Donald

Doing a PhD is hard work, stressful and uncertain. Even with the most understanding of supervisors, the clearest goals and routes to get there, there will be hiccoughs and worse en route to getting the letters after your name. And, of course, for many, things will be tougher than ideal circumstances might imply, with lack of clarity over the objectives, equipment that does not work and peers who rub you up the wrong way (or worse).

My PhD is a long, long time ago. In speeches, for instance to the College’s graduate students, I point out that mistakes and disasters during the course of research are only to be expected and certainly need not be terminal. Just because things go wrong is no indicator the student is inevitably not cut out for research.  The particular mistake I made that I recall most vividly was repeatedly breaking a delicate piece of equipment (the tilting cartridge for a Siemens 102 transmission electron microscope, aka a TEM, if you’re really interested). It could be – and was – fixed by the skilled workshop technician who, strangely, was the father of the technician in my own group 20 years later. Perfecting such technical skills was obviously something that ran in the family, along with a great desire to help the novice researcher find their feet.

Talking about breaking this piece of kit, time after time, is something that feels worth spelling out to help those setting out on their careers that failure doesn’t mean they should walk away from their PhD. I’m not afraid to admit I was completely ham-fisted, something I had always suspected. It was not by accident that my final undergraduate year was dedicated to theoretical  and not experimental physics; I thought I knew my limitations, but then decided a theoretical PhD was even more beyond me than tangling with equipment.

This all comes back to me because I have been sorting through the letters I wrote to my mother during those turbulent months in the second term of my PhD, spelling out just how difficult I was finding things (retrieved from her house after her death). They contain a level of detail I had forgotten. I knew I had left Cambridge for a couple of weeks, retiring to my mother’s house and feeling most uncertain whether I should continue with research. I came to the decision ‘I was not a quitter’, quite explicitly, and made my way back to Cambridge to try again. But, what I had forgotten was it wasn’t all plain sailing from then on. I appear to have found it really hard even to set foot in the department: the first day I popped in for just a few minutes, that being all I could face. I obviously – and this is what I’d forgotten – had to screw my courage up to breaking point to get going again. It seems I slowly built up the confidence to spend a whole day in the department, and ultimately to start doing experiments again.

Whether or when, during the course of my PhD, I ever used that particular tilting stage again I cannot be sure. I do recollect that much of my work was done on a different make of TEM, and the central point of the project was to use a brand-new microscope, a scanning transmission electron microscope (or STEM), which arrived early on in my time, being only the second such instrument in the UK. I also know that the results that formed the meat of the thesis (from the STEM experiments) were almost certainly incorrectly interpreted, and that the part of my research that has stood the test of time (still cited just a couple of months ago) was a completely accidental finding. Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

The tilting cartridge for the Siemens instrument reappeared in my life in a much more positive way during my postdoc years in the States, although again being ham-fisted was relevant. By the time I had started my second postdoc, and moved from an unsatisfactory attempt studying metals to (amorphous) polymers, I was confident enough to tackle the Siemens again, with the same sort of delicate cartridge. However…I didn’t break it, but I managed to fail to zero the angle of tilt, thereby observing the craze (a precursor to a crack in a material like polystyrene) not at normal incidence. The tip of the craze was therefore splayed out in a way that hadn’t been observed before. Eureka – it supported a theory about what the craze tip would look like, as my wonderful supervisor Ed Kramer instantly spotted. Once I’d satisfactorily proved I could reproduce the results, obtain stereoscopic pairs of images (i.e. two images with a small and controlled angle of tilt between them that allowed a 3D reconstruction under an appropriate viewer), a paper was rapidly penned. This was within about 6-8 weeks of starting working with Ed. My life was transformed. Another piece of accidental mayhem, it couldn’t even be called serendipity on my part though perhaps it was on Ed’s, but this time with a happy ending.

The rest of my career, as they say, is history. It could so easily have ended after my first encounter with that fragile tilting cartridge; I might have gone off and become a teacher or worked in industry, who knows. In which case, there would be no blog, no strings of papers or letters after my name. So much is chance, and one should never forget it. I was lucky. Far too many people get discouraged, lost or break things (like me) and move away, perhaps completely away from science. Research is full of luck and serendipity. I have always tried to tell my students that. Shortly I will have the pleasure of meeting up with many of them, and collaborators more generally, at a conference to mark my retirement, albeit two years late due to the pandemic. I’m very much looking forward to seeing once more many of the people who have made so much difference to my professional life.

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Celebrations are in Order

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Athene Donald

A Level results are out, and students are now either celebrating, or sitting in misery having had their worst fears confirmed. Cambridge colleges, such as my own, will be assessing whether or not we’ve hit our multiple targets – by subject, by the various widening participation metrics and, of course, by gender. When I arrived in the College, the gender balance was not good. As a College whose statutes require 70% of its students and fellows to be in the STEM disciplines (broadly defined), in line with Churchill’s own wishes to found a college resembling MIT, that had perhaps not seemed so surprising to some. But, to me, the figure of 28% women that the 2015 intake of students comprised, seemed frankly not good enough.  For the last couple of years and now, as I understand (things aren’t quite finalised yet) once more this year, we have managed a much healthier, near equal balance of numbers.

That is as it should be, but this academic year about to start marks a different and significant milestone in our history regarding women: the 50th anniversary of their first admission to the College. Churchill was the first of the historically all-male colleges (in either Oxford or Cambridge) to vote to admit women. 1972 (the year after my own arrival in Cambridge, at Girton) saw it and two other colleges, Clare and Kings, admit limited numbers. I believe in Churchill the number was around 30, out of an overall entering cohort of around 135.  Those women may have felt ‘special’, but they certainly also felt outnumbered (made worse by the fact the two years above them would of course have been purely male).

I met some of these pioneers a month or so back when the 1972 matriculands were back to celebrate their 50th anniversary. I didn’t get a chance to quiz them in great detail about their experiences, although I certainly hope that some will be recording their oral histories of those times for the record. Nevertheless, it was clear they had been very conscious at the time of the lack of numbers of women around them, and were delighted to hear that the College was of a very different composition now.

Anybody who has found themselves in a tiny minority in a group will be aware there is likely to be a slight associated discomfort. Be it a man in a knitting group or a slimmers’ meeting (and I have met men who’ve been in both situations) or a woman in an engineering or physics lecture, feeling ‘other’ is hard to avoid. Whether or not there is any intention to exclude, it can end up happening anyhow simply due to discussion topics that are of interest to the majority not necessarily being of interest to you. I think you need at least a third of the minority gender for this effect to cease to be obvious.

I have felt the difference an increase in the number of women in a group makes in my role as ‘head of house’ (the collective noun for college heads). When I started as Master in 2014, around a third were women, but I think we all felt slightly uncomfortable and discouraged from expressing opinions when we were gathered together by the atmosphere around, and sometimes pointed comments were made when we tried. In formal meetings none of us (male or female) was addressed by name but as ‘the Master of Churchill College’ etc, which I found unfriendly and unnecessarily stiff. For a newcomer it all felt somewhat alien. Over the years since, more women have come in. Somehow things have become much more relaxed and women’s words are now heard as much as men’s. It feels as if this is down to the increasing numbers of us – currently it’s pretty close to 50:50 ­– but there is no control experiment, so the change could simply arise from the specific individuals involved. After all, the overall balance has shifted away from their being primarily academics, and that might also be relevant.

For those first women in the College, how hard did they find it to fit in? In lecture rooms and practical classes, there had been women present for years, coming from the three all-women’s colleges, but only in tiny proportions. I remember thinking I just had to get on with it if I was the only woman in the room during my student years. With 3 colleges each admitting, say, 30 students in 1972, that represented only about a 1% increase in the total number in the University, possibly nudging it over 10% for the first time. Women were still a rarity.

The sad thing is, though, that in a subject like Physics, the numbers may have increased from a mere 10% in my day to the giddy heights of, perhaps, 25% in a good year in Cambridge now that all colleges are mixed (excluding Newnham and Murray Edwards, which remain female-only). But our schools still manage not to encourage numbers of girls in equal numbers to boys when it comes to physics A level (and the same is true in reverse for English literature, the subject which saw the biggest overall drop in numbers in this year’s A Levels). As long as teachers believe, as the headteacher Katherine Birbalsingh appears to have done as she presented to the Commons Select Committee, that girls ‘just don’t like hard maths’ (or any other outdated stereotype), ensuring a College like mine, with its heavy STEM emphasis, has gender parity will always be a challenge.

Churchill is proud of its tradition as being a college ahead of the curve on matters such as this, and aims to be as inclusive as it can be. Although probably every college by now has its eyes firmly fixed on widening participation, we have a much longer tradition of admitting large numbers of state school students, right from its foundation. I am looking forward to our celebrations this year of the first admission of women, knowing so many of them have gone on to do spectacular things in the wider world.

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